While much of the Arab world has been looking ever more favorably on Israel, with four states having joined the Abraham Accords which have led to the normalization of ties with the Jewish state, and multi-billion-dollar business deals involving trade, tourism, technology, agriculture, and defense, in Egypt at least one establishment figure takes the opposite tack: he has just published a piece on why Egypt should end its 1979 Peace Treaty with Israel. A report on his article is here: “Former Egyptian official calls on Egypt to abrogate peace with Israel,” Elder of Ziyon, August 18, 2022:
Arabi21, a pan-Arab news channel, published an unusual op-ed by Abdullah Al-Ashaal, a former Egyptian presidential candidate and former assistant to the Egyptian Foreign Minister. He is described as an ambassador, but I cannot find to where.
Abdullah Al-Ashaal is not some low-ranked retiree nursing his grievances, nor a street-preaching level of geopolitical looney; he’s a member of the ruling elite, a former presidential candidate and an adviser to the Foreign Minister. Attention must be paid.
Al-Ashaal argues that Egypt should abrogate is peace treaty with Israel – and that Sadat was under Zionist influence when he decided not to destroy Israel completely in the Yom Kippur War.
Sadat did not “decide not to destroy Israel completely in the Yom Kippur War.” He did his best to do so, beginning with the element of surprise, unleashing an attack that put the insufficiently wary IDF on its back foot, and he came closer than any Arab leader before him or since to “destroying Israel.” But in the end, with its superior training, weaponry, and morale, the IDF turned the tide. It was Ariel Sharon who surrounded the Egyptian Third Army during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and, defying orders, led 200 tanks and 5,000 men across the Suez Canal — roughly 100 miles from Cairo. He could have destroyed the Third Army, but was finally stopped by his own government, which did not want to completely humiliate the Egyptians, for it hoped instead to work toward a peace treaty, which came six years later.
His delusions are apparent throughout the article:
“Israel is not an ordinary country, but rather the spearhead of the Zionist project and was planted in this particular region to destroy Egypt.”
No one “planted” Israel in the neighborhood to “destroy Egypt.” The Zionist project was simply to resurrect the commonwealth of the Jews, the state that would be their refuge and their home, in their ancestral homeland – Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel — that Jews had lived in for the last 3,000 years, under many different conquerors. There was no Zionist claim to Egyptian territory; the Zionists were too busy draining swamps, making the desert bloom, building kibbutzim, villages, and cities, fighting off Arab marauders, to take much notice of Egypt. It was Egypt that assumed the role of the most powerful enemy of Israel, during the three wars that Israel was forced to fight for its very existence, in 1948, 1967, and 1973. Israel was indeed in danger of being destroyed by Egypt; Egypt’s existence was never threatened by Israel. Al-Ashaal has everything backwards. He thinks of what he calls the “Zionist project” as intended not to build a nation — the Jewish one – but to destroy another, his own country of Egypt. He never explains why the raison d’être of the Zionist project, in his view, was to destroy Egypt rather than, say, other countries in the neighborhood, such as Saudi Arabia or Iraq.
“Israel insisted on forcing Egypt to violate the principles of international law in many of its provisions” of the peace agreement.
What principles were those that Israel “forced Egypt” to violate? Egypt was the big winner from the Camp David Accords. It received back, in three tranches, from 1979 to 1982, the entire Sinai – 95% of the territory Israel had won in the Six-Day War – together with the oilfields Israel had discovered and the airports that it had built, as well as the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh that Israel had constructed after 1967. Sadat ran circles around Begin at Camp David, where he had the help of Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski, both of them treating Sadat as a veritable prince of peace while undermining Begin’s negotiating position at every step.
“If Sadat had better planned the October War with the best of the Egyptian military,…. the end of Israel would have been the October War, but there is a contradiction between the management of the war in the first week and the setback [in following weeks.]”
Abdullah Al-Ashaal apparently believes that Sadat deliberately lost the war that his generals had almost won in the first week of the 1973 war. Like all of his statements, it is absurd. Sadat wanted desperately to win the war and win back the entire Sinai, that had been lost in the Six-Day War. In the first week of the Yom Kippur (October) war, Egypt and Syria benefited greatly from the element of surprise. The Israelis had been observing their most solemn religious holiday. Some troops had gone home to celebrate. Once the war started, it took time for the IDF to recover its balance, and for the regular troops to return to full strength. It took time, too, to call up the reservists who in wartime make up most of the IDF’s fighters. It was during that period — the first few weeks of the war — when Israel was still scrambling to assemble its forces to repel the surprise attack that Egypt, and its ally Syria, had successfully launched, that the prospect of Israeli defeat seemed no longer impossible. And unprepared as it was to bring the IDF up to full strength, Israel also found itself needing resupplies of weapons and ammunition from the U.S., which did not come immediately. At no time did Sadat’s war aims — recovery of the Sinai — change: he was not, pace al-Ashaal, a Zionist tool, but a determined foe of Jerusalem, who at Camp David used his guile to win concession after concession from Menachem Begin. At Camp David, it was the winner of the war, Israel, that was forced to sue for peace from the war’s loser, Egypt.
“The [peace] treaty does not prevent Egypt from supporting the resistance, nor does it prevent Arab solidarity and the restoration of the joint Arab defense treaty. Egypt can, at its own will, amend the peace agreement…A state may review or cancel some provisions of the treaty or suspend some of its provisions.”
Al-Ashaal no doubt is thinking of the great exemplar of treaty-breaking for Muslims: Muhammad himself who, after making the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya with the Meccans in 628 A.D., which as to have lasted for ten years, but instead, when he felt that his own troops had become sufficiently strong, he broke the treaty after a mere 18 months.
He must be deeply pained by the spectacle of the Abraham Accords being entered into with such enthusiasm by several Arab states, and by the prospect of still other Arab or Muslim states joining the Accords. He wants Egypt to move in the opposite direction, abrogating the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, and again supporting the “resistance” – that is, terror groups Hamas, PIJ, the PFLP, and the Al-Quds Brigade of Fatah.
Al-Ashaal fails to realize how beneficial that peace treaty has been for Egypt. Israel has for years been collaborating with Egypt on security matters in the Sinai, sharing its intelligence, and even conducting joint military operations with Egyptian forces. Their enemies – regrouped remnants of ISIS, as well as Hamas infiltrators from the Sinai — still threaten in the Sinai, where they have been attacking and killing Egyptian soldiers; Hamas, in particular, which is merely the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, is the main enemy shared by Egypt and Israel in the Sinai.
He says he is writing a book about how terrible the peace treaty is.
Were Egypt to abrogate the peace treaty with Israel, it would immediately lose the intelligence supplied to it by the Mossad, on the Hamas, PIJ, ISIS fighters attacking Egyptian soldiers in the northern Sinai. And it would no longer have the IDF to help the Egyptian army hunt them down with drones and airplanes.
Economically, Egypt would also lose if the peace treaty with Israel were to be abrogated. Just a few years ago, Egypt was exporting natural gas to Israel, but since 2020 it is Israel that is exporting natural gas to Egypt. Originally, Egypt had agreed to purchase 64 billion cubic meters of Israeli gas over a decade. Just one year later, in 2021 the signatories to the $15 billion agreement amended the deal to increase supply to 85.3 billion cubic meters over a 15-year period.
In parallel, Egypt has also been working to become a hub for the commerce of gas in the eastern Mediterranean region. But despite its considerable gas reserves, the country’s plans heavily depend on its ability to increase its gas imports for later reexport, and a key partner in this process is Israel, which has an ever greater amount of gas from the Taman and Leviathan oil fields to export through Egypt. For now, with relations between Egypt and Israel so warm that there are plans to ship Israeli natural gas not just for Egypt’s use, but also to be liquified at Egypt’s LNG facilities, and then shipped from there to the markets in Europe that have opened up because of the shutting down of gas supplies from Russia.
Both countries’ plans are currently benefiting from the European Union’s efforts to reduce its energy dependence on Russia amid the war in Ukraine, a strategy that inevitably involves seeking alternative gas suppliers. In this context, Brussels has recently resumed plans to negotiate the import of Israeli gas through Egypt, which would process the gas in its LNG facilities so that it can be more easily shipped to Europe. This is another potentially profitable undertaking that would disappear were Egypt to abrogate its peace treaty.
Finally, were Egypt to abrogate the peace treaty with Israel, that would naturally infuriate the United States, which sees itself as largely responsible for bringing about the Camp David Accords in 1979. Egypt is now the third highest recipient of American aid, after Israel and Jordan, which now amounts to about $1.4 billion annually. All that aid from Washington would almost certainly end if Cairo ended its peace treaty with Israel.
Of course, Abdullah Al-Ashaal’s curious take on things, his belief that the “Zionist project” was undertaken not so much to build a Jewish state as it was an effort to “destroy Egypt,” his conviction that Sadat was a Zionist tool who “prevented” the Egyptian military from winning the Yom Kippur War, are all examples of the bizarre mental contortions that too many Muslims exhibit. And his failure to recognize the disastrous consequences for Egypt’s geopolitical and economic wellbeing if it were to abrogate the treaty, shows a mind so hate-filled that it is no longer able to think things through.
The current president of Egypt, General El-Sisi, knows how helpful Israel has been to Egypt in the fight against jihadis of every stripe in the Sinai. Under his rule that military cooperation has greatly expanded.
El-Sisi also knows the value to Egypt’s economy of the hundreds of thousands of free-spending Israeli tourists. He has allowed direct flights from Tel Aviv to Sharm el-Sheikh, to try to entice more Israeli tourists to Egypt; there are already 700,000 of them each year. His government wants to attract still more Israeli tourists to visit Egypt, not cut them off by ending he peace treaty. He also knows perfectly well how deeply reliant his country now is on Israeli exports of natural gas, and looks forward to more Israeli natural gas being shipped to Egypt to be liquefied and then, in that liquid form, to be shipped to Europe.
Fortunately, the semi-demented Abdullah Al-Ashaal – who is not alone in his crazed Muslim understanding of the world, but is a telling example, is not President but only a “former Presidential candidate.” In Cairo, Jerusalem and Washington, that must be a source of immense relief.
