Egypt’s Ongoing Jihad

P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com

The House of Representatives recently passed a bill freezing $200 million of Egypt’s approximately $1.3 billion in annual aid from the U.S.—unless Egypt can show that it is doing something about the traffic in munitions and terrorists between Sinai and Gaza.
Yuval Steinitz, a Likud Member of Knesset and chairman of a subcommittee on defense and terrorism, has written a letter to the Senate asking that it also approve the bill. Steinitz did so at the request of Senator Jon Kyl (R.-Arizona), with whom he chairs the U.S.-Israel Joint Parliamentary Committee on National Security.
The letter says, among other things:

In recent years the flow of weapons and ammunition through Egypt to terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip—mainly to Islamic groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian affiliates of Al-Qaeda—has become extremely significant.

In the last two years, the rate of smuggling enables Hamas to establish a fundamentalist terror army in Gaza, based on the Hizbullah model in Lebanon. According to Israeli intelligence Gaza is absorbing, on an annual basis, approximately: 20,000 rifles, 6,000 anti-tank missiles (mainly RPGs), 100 tons of explosives, and several dozens of Katyusha rockets as well as shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles. . . .

A new development…in the last three months is the organized departure of large groups of operatives from Gaza for military training in Iran. Egypt permits their transit to Tehran…. In late September, a group of 100 operatives who completed their exercises in Iran was permitted to cross the border back into Gaza, despite strong Israeli protests….

Egypt’s claim that it is doing its best to end this situation by uncovering smuggling tunnels into Gaza is simply an insult to the intelligence…. All [the Egyptians] have to do for this purpose is to erect a number of roadblocks along the very few roads that run from mainland Egypt to the Gaza region, in order to intercept heavily loaded trucks carrying hundreds of rifles and missiles from reaching the border. Alternatively, they can declare the border area a closed military zone, with a depth of 2-3 miles into the interior of Sinai, and prevent any movement in it. Since the entire length of the Egyptian-Gaza border is less than 9 miles, the area affected will be equivalent in size to a military airbase….

It is hard to deny that this Egyptian behavior constitutes a gross violation of the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty….

In essence, this strategy of turning a blind eye to the smuggling is quite similar to the policies of Syria and Iran regarding arms smuggling into Iraq. The only difference is that in contrast to those countries, Egypt is still considered an ally of the west, and is heavily supported by the United States.

When Steinitz referred to the violation of the Egyptian-Israeli treaty, he could have had in mind its Article III-2: “Each Party undertakes to ensure that acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, or violence do not originate from and are not committed from within its territory, or by any forces subject to its control or by any other forces stationed on its territory, against the population, citizens or property of the other Party….”

That raises another question: beyond even the gathering in Annapolis with Palestinian and other leaders that is supposed to take place in about two weeks, why does the United States keep pushing Israel along a path of formal treaties with Arab parties when the record so far of Arab compliance with such treaties is something less than encouraging?

After all, the Egyptian-Israeli treaty also stipulated “full recognition, diplomatic, economic and cultural relations” and that “The Parties shall seek to foster mutual understanding and tolerance and will, accordingly, abstain from hostile propaganda against each other....”

It is a radical understatement to say that, over twenty-eight years later, Egypt has not upheld these obligations. It prohibits almost all relations with Israel and forbids its citizens to travel to it. Hosni Mubarak, in his twenty-six years as president, has come to Israel only once—for Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral—and has never paid a state visit even though Israeli leaders often go to Cairo.

And rather than “abstaining from hostile propaganda,” Egypt’s media, publishing houses, and mosque sermons put out a steady stream of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic hatred and incitement.

Indeed, the experience with the Palestinians themselves is no better. The original 1993 Declaration of Principles said Israel and the PLO “agree that it is time to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict….” But by the time of the Gaza-Jericho agreement in May 1994, the Palestinian bus bombings had already begun and it was felt necessary for the parties to “REAFFIRM . . . their determination to live in peaceful coexistence, mutual dignity and security. . . .”

Israel succeeded in introducing some language about what that meant: “Except for the arms, ammunition and equipment of the Palestinian Police . . . and those of the Israeli military forces, no organization or individual in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area shall manufacture, sell, acquire, possess, import or otherwise introduce . . . any firearms, ammunition, weapons, explosives, gunpowder....”

These words, catastrophically, exploded in the faces of the Israeli populace as the bombings only escalated.

Israel tried again in the Wye River Memorandum of October 1998, which stated: “Both sides recognize...that the struggle against terror and violence must be comprehensive in that it deals with terrorists, the terror support structure, and the environment conducive to the support of terror. It must be continuous and constant over a long-term . . . there can be no pauses in the work against terrorists and their structure. . . .”

Words that, of course, did not inhibit the outbreak of the “Second Intifada” or full-scale Oslo Terror War just two years later.

Brave souls might ask: if this is the record so far with Egypt and the Palestinians, the two Arab parties with which Israel has signed agreements involving significant concessions of land or control over land, might there be something in the Arab-Muslim culture that does not respect formal obligations to the Jewish state?

And if that is so, why—with Sinai serving as a jihad highway and Gaza and the West Bank infested with terror—push Israel even further toward granting full Palestinian sovereignty over land overlooking its population centers?
Why not, instead, encourage Israel to stand firm, project strength, and protect and fortify the land it has left? That way Israel could still have value as a strong ally instead of a magnet for jihad and ever-increasing instability.

P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.