Egypt: Between War & Peace

By Stephen Green

In early 1977, authors R. Michael Burrell and Abbas R. Kelidar observed that in the absence of peace, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat would probably come under increasing pressure to wage war against Israel. Then, surprisingly, only a few months after this assessment was made Anwar Sadat made his dramatic trip to Jerusalem. This was followed a short time later by the Camp David meetings in 1978 and the signing of the treaty between Egypt and Israel early in 1979. The U.S., as the instigator, mediator and guarantor of the Camp David Accords, dramatically increased its economic and military aid to both Egypt and Israel. The war-versus-peace dilemma addressed by Messrs. Burrell and Kelidar had been resolved. *

Or had it? Anwar Sadat of course is gone, assassinated in 1981. But his successor, Hosni Mubarak is now faced with a similar set of problems. The treaty with Israel is still in place, observed in letter, though not in spirit, by both sides. But the expectation that the Camp David Accords would provide a "framework" for future negotiation of the fundamental issues dividing Arab and Jew in the Middle East, is very, very dead. The inescapable conclusion, based upon nearly two dozen interviews with Egyptian diplomats and military leaders, is that Egypt has come full-circle to the situation that preceded Sadat's trip to Jerusalem in 1977.

"At one time we looked forward to peace," said Mohamed Ibrahim Kamel, who resigned as Egypt's Foreign Minister during the Camp David meetings. "Now it is as it was. We have a treaty with Israel, but Egypt is, finally, tied to the Arab world." Current Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Boutros Ghali agrees with this assessment, and blames the ''collapse'' of the peace process on the failure of moderates on all sides to turn the "legal peace" of the treaty into a working consensus or entente, which might have drawn other Arab governments into the bargain.

One American diplomat in Cairo said he realized there was frustration among Egyptians over events since Camp David, but because of the high level of U.S. aid pouring in, the "threshold" of Egyptian tolerance is "very high." However, this assessment is wrong in a dangerous and perverse way, for it grossly underplays the adverse impact of the humiliating experience that Egypt, a traditional leader in the Arab world, has had since the treaty with Israel was signed.

Less than two months after the signing, the Israeli Knesset voted to establish more Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and authorized the seizure of Arab-owned land for that purpose. In June, 1981, U.S.-supplied Israeli jets attacked the Osirak nuclear reactor in Baghdad. And the following month, Israeli planes bombed a suspected PLO headquarters in Beirut, killing several hundred civilians in the process. In late 1981, then Prime Minister Begin announced the annexation of Syria's Golan Heights, and six months later, in June of 1982, Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon.

In each instance, the Israeli government claimed that such actions were necessary responses to threats to Israeli national security. But Egyptians, as well as other Arabs, knew that it was the absence of Egypt as a potential combatant that allowed Israel to deal with perceived security threats in ways and at times it chose, whatever the long-term consequences and/or constraints of international law. The "peace" imposed by the Camp David treaty had become a "pax Hebraica."

At first Egyptians were merely humiliated in the summer of 1982 as they watched on their evening TV screens the Israeli destruction of West Beirut, brick by brick. Finally, after the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, President Mubarak recalled his ambassador to Israel, Saad Mortada.

Now, over two years later, it is apparent that this was not a temporary blip in Egyptian-Israeli relations, but the harbinger of a fundamental sea-change. Boutros Ghali said that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was not only a violation of a neighboring state's borders, but also "aggression against the peace process as such." Now, he says, "you will find very few people in Egypt who believe in the peace process." In fact, during two weeks of interviews with numerous Egyptian leaders, this author found none.

It is American actions, as much as those of Israel, that have produced Egypt's post-Lebanon disillusionment with Camp David. In May, 1983, the U.S. sponsored an Israeli-Lebanese agreement that, from the perspective of the Arab states, effectively legitimized Israel's continued occupation of south Lebanon. Several months later, Egyptian military intelligence learned through the Egyptian embassy in Washington that four years earlier a staff member of the U.S. Congress had shared with Israel the design, details and performance of the U.S.-supplied air defense systems of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. (In his book, The Armageddon Network, author Michael Saba alleges that Stephen Bryen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff offered classified information to Israeli military officials in 1978. The U.S. Defense Attache in Cairo has confirmed to me that the Egyptian government is fully aware of this affair. Mr. Bryen now is a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Department of Defense.) And in late November, 1983, the U.S. and Israel signed a new bilateral military and security agreement so comprehensive as to exceed in scope any similar agreement in U.S. history. Israel, and Israel alone, had now become America's NATO-like surrogate in the Middle East.

So the question arises, "If the Camp David agreements have failed, then what?" The answer, as Egyptian officials see it, is "deterrence," through the acquisition of a weapon which would make any consideration of an air attack upon Egypt by Israel quite simply unthinkable. Specifically, Egypt has been seeking for some months accurately targetable ballistic missiles and/or equivalent airplanes capable of executing—should it be necessary—a "second strike" on Israeli population centers.

Senior American officials knowledgeable about U.S. military aid to Egypt have confirmed that:

Egypt does not now have an air defense system capable of fending off an Israeli air attack on Cairo, Alexandria, the Suez Canal, the Aswan Darn, or any other significant military target in the country;
Egyptian military officials are fully aware of this; and
Egypt has asked the U.S. for additional air defense hardware on "soft" financial terms, and has been refused.

Israel, of course, already has deployed a range of deterrent weapons, and has used them offensively in Baghdad and Beirut in 1981, and again in Beirut and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley in 1982. What Egyptians have in mind, then, is a countervailing deterrent. There is no indication, however, that Egypt is seeking a countervailing nuclear deterrent, such as Israel is known to possess.

Nevertheless, Egypt's new strategy portends a substantial heightening of tensions in the Middle East. American officials need to ask themselves what has brought Egypt to this point, and what can now be done to edge Israel and the front-line Arab states—with which Egypt will soon again be aligned—back from the brink.

The alternatives, such as negotiations via a special international commission, the U.N. Security Council, or whatever, should be examined without delay. There is at the present time no thing as a status quo in the Middle East.

Stephen Green is an author whose latest book is "Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant Israel."

*The authors' monograph was written for Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. See CSIS's "Washington Papers" series, Number 48.