Terrorist attack reveals Egyptian hostility toward Israel
One casualty of the August 18 terrorist attack, launched from Egyptian territory, has been the Israel-Egypt relationship.
In response to the Israeli military accidentally killing five Egyptian security personnel in its pursuit of the perpetrators of the attack, a group of Egyptian politicians, including presidential hopefuls, published a statement in local newspapers saying that “Egypt after the January revolution is not like Egypt before.” They said the deposed Mubarak regime had been replaced “by a strong popular will that does not know weakness or complicity and understands how to achieve retribution for the blood of the martyrs.”
That “strong popular will” is strongly anti-Israel. A recent poll shows that 70 percent of Egyptians want to amend or cancel the peace agreement between the two countries.
The rising anti-Israel sentiment in Egypt could also be seen in the social media responses to the deaths of the Egyptian security personnel. After a 23-year-old Egyptian, Ahmad al-Shahat, climbed to the top of the building that houses the Israeli Embassy in Cairo and replaced the Israeli flag with an Egyptian one, Facebook, Twitter and Egyptian blogs were awash with praise for his exploit and anti-Israel sentiment. This, notes Courcy’s Intelligence Brief, strongly suggests “that Egypt’s revolutionary youth are as vehement on the subject of Israel as their older more conservative and Islamic compatriots.” Al-Shahat overnight became a national hero.
“There is evidence that Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are working together to refocus the energy of the Arab Spring onto Israel and the Palestinian question and away from the purely domestic issues that were the initial inspiration,” Courcy’s Intelligence Brief writes. Coordination between Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood has increased since Mubarak was deposed. On August 17, Khalid Mishal, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, visited Cairo to meet both with representatives of the Egyptian government and the Muslim Brotherhood’s controller general.
Courcy’s Intelligence Brief says that what also stands out from the August 18 raid and its aftermath “is how desperate Israel is to maintain peace with Egypt. As one senior intelligence official pointed out to us, it is one thing having fraying relations with Turkey, but losing Egypt would be on an altogether different plain of seriousness. As a consequence, Israel has been remarkably restrained in its reactions not just to the [Popular Resistance Committees] attack but also to the subsequent rocket barrage from the Gaza Strip.”
Israel has good reason to try to preserve its fragile relations with Egypt. As columnist Brad Macdonald pointed out, “The national security of the Jewish state depends largely on the entity that controls and dominates the southern Levant and eastern Mediterranean. … The Israel-Egypt peace treaty has been the backbone of the national security equation of the Jewish state for nearly 30 years! Egypt as a geographic and geopolitical entity is a deciding factor in Israel’s national security” (Dec. 20, 2007).
As Egypt moves more strongly against Israel, watch for it to also cement ties with Iran. And therein lies the danger to Israel: “The restoration of ties between Egypt and Iran will fill out the arc of Islamic hatred surrounding Israel!” (ibid).
