It is difficult to perceive the Egyptian foreign minister's recent visit to Israel as routine or conventional. It was anything but. A major indication of this is the outpouring of anger among the public and broad segments of political elites in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. This was the first official visit at this senior level after an iciness that lasted nearly a full decade. The last visit of this kind took place at the outset of 2007. The Israeli policies and attitudes that initially caused the frigidness in Egyptian-Israeli reactions remain unchanged. In fact, they have grown increasingly intransigent and extremist. Meanwhile, the arguments that Egyptian officials cited in justification of this visit, or to explain the potential advantages it could bring to Egypt, the Arab world and Palestine, were not convincing. Worse, the visit was to the wrong place, Jerusalem, the eastern portion of which is occupied by Israel, which Israel persists in claiming as “the eternal and indivisible capital of the Jewish state”, and at the wrong time, just after the cabinet reshuffle that brought in Lieberman — the man who once advocated bombing the Aswan High Dam — as Israeli defence minister of the government that Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri set off to negotiate with. The UN and most countries in the world do not recognise the current illegal status of Jerusalem. There is every reason to fear that Israel will exploit this visit, market it as proof that Egypt recognises the de facto realities that Israel has imposed and use it to persuade other countries to undertake similar visits that would only encourage Israel to persist in its offences. The visit was staged go convey the impression that it was not just amicable but chummy. Netanyahu “invited the Egyptian foreign minister to his home in Jerusalem, where they had dinner and then watched the European football cup finals,” said the official Israeli government spokesman. But as though a mere statement were not sufficient, he posted pictorial evidence on his social networking pages, triggering even greater furore among Egyptian and Arab publics. It is important to note that the foreign minister's visit to Israel, which sought to “give a boost to the Palestinian-Israeli peace process”, according to an Egyptian Foreign Ministry statement, came less than two months after President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi launched an initiative that he said “sought to transform the cold peace between Egypt and Israel into a warm peace”. It also occurred a few weeks after the foreign minister undertook a visit for the same purpose to Ramallah to meet with the Palestinian Authority president and several days after the Israeli prime minister returned to his country following his African tour to upper riparian Nile Basin states. Accordingly, it is widely believed that Shoukri's recent visit was meant to inaugurate a new and qualitatively different phase in Egypt's relationship with Israel and, perhaps, mark a turning point in Egyptian strategic thinking about the form and substance of this relationship in the near future. Numerous regional and international developments and factors contributed to paving the way to this point. Foremost among them are: 1. The collapse of the Arab regional order after a decade of being caught between the wall of corrupt and dictatorial regimes and the hard place of extremist social and political forces that decided to use armed force to bring them down, while various regional powers — Turkey, Iran and Israel — jockeyed to position themselves so as to inherit the legacy of the moribund Arab order. 2. The schism and disarray in the Islamic world and the dissipation of its strength as the result of the exchange of blows between two hostile camps, each claiming to represent, speak in the name of and striving to unify the ranks of the Islamic nation. One side parades beneath the banner of “guardianship of the Islamist jurist” and claims to champion the struggle against “the forces of global arrogance”. The other side parades beneath the banner of the so-called “Islamic caliphate” and claims to champion the struggle against “the coalition of crusaders and Jews”. 3. Russia's return as an influential actor in interplays in the Middle East, taking advantage of the vacuum that arose from the Obama administration's reluctance to play the role of regional policeman and from the US's preoccupation with its presidential elections. 4. Europe's preoccupation, which will probably last for some time to come, with repairing the cracks that shot through the EU following the quake triggered by the results of the UK's Brexit referendum. 5. The sharp about-faces in Turkish foreign policy epitomised by Erdogan's moves to normalise relations with Russia and with Israel. These changes, which seem to have been inspired in part by conviction in the Bashar Al-Assad regime's resilience, are likely to usher in more in the near future, especially in view of the aborted military coup that nearly toppled the entire Turkish political order. It appears that some analyses of the potential impacts of the foregoing factors on the future and the balances of powers in the region have reached the conclusion that the Middle East is headed for new quakes and collapses and that Israel is the sole available lifeboat for some ruling regimes in a number of Arab countries. Therefore, the reasoning goes, if these regimes are to salvage themselves and their interests, their only alternative is to revise the current mode of relations between the Arabs and Israel and to gradually shift from an antagonistic or even neutral footing to a cooperative framework, perhaps one that might lead to an energetic coalition in the face of the common threats posed by Iran and terrorist groups. Regardless of how accurate these analyses or their conclusions are, they are ultimately informed by an approach to strategic thought, one of the outputs of which is the Egyptian foreign minister's recent visit to Israel. I, personally, strongly disagree with that approach which is reminiscent of that followed by Sadat in the wake of the 1973 war. Just as Sadat, at the time, built his calculations around the premise that the US possessed 99 per cent of the cards regarding a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, some decision-makers in the Arab world today are evidently building their calculations on the assumption that Israel (which they see as the number one regional power) holds 99 per cent of the cards to a solution of all the problems of the Arab world! Clearly, the Arab world has yet to learn the lessons of history and insists on behaving like the mouse that falls for the cheese in the same trap. There is no such thing as an American or Israeli solution to Arab crises. These crises will never be resolved unless the solutions are 100 per cent Arab. The crises plaguing the Arab world are many and diverse, but they can all be traced to two root sources: one relates to the Palestinian cause, the other to religion. None of our crises can be solved until we dig down to the very roots of the problem rather than just tending to the branches and remedying the symptoms. A just solution to the Palestinian cause will never emerge if we leave the question to the will of Israel or that of any of the other non-Arab countries rivalling for regional leadership. A solution to the Palestinian cause must start with the reordering of the Palestinian house from within and the establishment of a new and united Palestinian national movement, backed by the Arabs and capable of interacting dynamically with international civil society organisations. The solution to the religious problem is not to let every self-proclaimed pundit issue fatwas as the mood moves him, but rather to create an authoritative body with the appropriate qualifications to speak in the name of the faith. Islam is a single faith even if it has different schools of jurisprudence. The single religious authority should be made up of ulema (religious scholars) representing each of these schools. However, such a project will be impossible to implement unless it is preceded by a serious dialogue between Shia and Sunna and, hence, between Iran and the Arab world. Until the groundwork is created to permit the emergence of a new Palestinian national movement with Arab support and until Arab-Iranian dialogue is set into motion with the support of the Islamic world, there can be no hope of stability in the region in the foreseeable future. The visit that Egypt's foreign minister undertook to Israel recently may mark the beginning of an extensive drive. Unfortunately, I fear it is a drive in the wrong direction. It would be wise to stop and reset the compass.
The writer is professor of political science at Cairo University.
