EGYPTIAN AND Israeli diplomats say relations between their two countries are possibly at their lowest point since the Camp David peace accords were signed in 1979. Gideon Ben-Ami, Israel’s ambassador to Egypt, has had no official contact with the Egyptian government since April, when the status of his mission was downgraded in protest over Operation Protective Wall–the Israeli occupation of the West Bank that followed a Passover suicide attack in Netanya. Some Egyptian intellectuals want to punish Israel further. Following a rally attended by about 200 of them, they are circulating a petition to have the ambassador expelled and the peace treaty scrapped.
That’s unlikely to happen. Egypt is under massive economic and diplomatic pressure from Washington to keep Camp David alive. Given the country’s reliance on the $2 billion aid it receives annually from the United States, the government of President Hosni Mubarak cannot easily defy American wishes.
Still, the talk on the street shows how strongly ordinary citizens here feel about the subject. In April, thousands of Egyptians defied emergency laws to stage public demonstrations in support of the Palestinian cause. Residents, bombarded with daily news footage of dead and dying Palestinian civilians, have elevated “I hate Israel” to something of a national slogan. The mantra rocketed an obscure singer into stardom last year, and at least one little Fiat puttering down Cairo’s congested streets recently had the words in English bannered across the back window. Wafaa Higazi, an Egyptian politician ideologically aligned with founding father Gamal Abdel Nasser–who pledged to push Israel into the sea–expressed a typical sentiment when he said “I don’t sympathize with the Palestinians, I am Palestinian.”
And even here, America can’t always get its way. The U.S. State Department was unable to convince Egyptian authorities to pull the plug on “A Knight without a Horse,” a series airing this Ramadan on satellite and Egyptian state television. The series is based in part on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a turn-of-the-century anti-Semitic Russian forgery that claims there is a “Jewish conspiracy” for world domination. “We don’t hate Judaism as a religion and we are not anti-Semitic, but we are against Zionism as a political movement,” said Mustafa Bakri, a newspaper editor who organized a rally in support of the show. “The Zionists want to control all of the Arab region, to create an Israeli empire from the Nile to the Euphrates. It’s written on the door of the Israeli Knesset.”
Bakri’s belief in the fiction about the Knesset reveals how distorted perceptions have become as the Israelis and Arabs continue to cut themselves off from one another. Even an inconsequential peace initiative–by a group known as the Cairo Association for Peace–that supported dialogue with Israel was outlawed this fall. “Americans cannot comprehend it at all–the level of anger here about the Palestinian-Israeli issue,” a senior Western diplomat in Cairo told NEWSWEEK. “This television series didn’t create these feelings, but it may reinforce them.”
Local media also continue to air virulently anti-Semitic tirades in spite of Egypt’s agreement in the 1979 accords to muzzle anti-Jewish “incitement.” Last year, a columnist in the most popular Cairene newspaper declared his “thanks to Hitler, blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians, revenged in advance, against the most vile criminals on the face of the earth.” Later that same year, a scholar from the revered Islamic university Al Azhar referred to the “false Holocaust” and “Zionist control over Western thinking” in his article “In Defense of Hitler.” This year a French court subpoenaed the editor of the official Al Ahram newspaper for allowing publication of an article in 2000 saying that Jews had used the blood of Christians in rituals.
Cairo is quieter since the April demonstrations, but the tensions still percolate underground–sometimes literally. Last month the Israeli Army found a tunnel running beneath the border between Egypt and Gaza. Several such tunnels have been found, and the Israelis claim they are used to traffic weapons and fighters into the Palestinian territories. One 27-year-old Egyptian used a false Palestinian identity card to join the fight in Gaza a few months after the intifada began. He was shot dead at a military checkpoint in September by Israeli troops who said he was armed.
Other signs of the deteriorating relationship are more noteworthy in their absence. Before the intifada, half a million Israelis visited Egypt each year, trekking as tourists through the Sinai mountains, shaking hands on agricultural business deals and celebrating a Jewish holy day in the Nile River Delta. Now the religious procession has been banned, the business deals have evaporated and the tourist buses are parked. The 70,000-strong Egyptian Jewish community once played a vital role in Cairene society. Today, Egypt’s 12 remaining synagogues are almost all padlocked shut; a dozen machine-gun-toting soldiers in black helmets guard the entrance at the Shaar Hashamaim synagogue in downtown Cairo.
Cairo’s fraying relations with Israel could tear even further amid fears that Washington will go to war against Iraq. Mubarak–who spends much of his time traveling around the world to advocate for the Palestinians–opened Egypt’s parliament this week with a call for Israel to disarm its “weapons of mass destruction.” Local residents are especially wary. “People here don’t like Americans and Israelis in the first place. We have enough reasons to hate them,” said a 26-year old plumber in a makeshift coffeehouse near the ancient Bassatine Jewish cemetery in Cairo. “For so long we’ve had the Palestinians to think about, and now Iraq, too.” The man, bearded and dressed in a traditional gallabeya, refused to be named.
Some Egyptians appear to be more flexible. “Our religion is like milk, it encourages forgiveness,” says one elderly man wearing a white Muslim prayer cap in a tree-shaded dirt courtyard not far from the cemetery. “And if [Israelis] end this problem with the Palestinians, everything will be fine.” Israeli Ambassador Ben-Ami, also tries to remain upbeat. “In the last two years, Egyptian-Israeli relations have been damaged,” he wrote in an article this week in Arabynet, the online Arabic version of an Israeli newspaper. “But in spite of this, political relations didn’t end.” The diplomat added that he still trusted in “the great potential for peace” in the region.
For now, though, his embassy is more like a high-security bunker in enemy territory than a diplomatic outpost. Tucked away on the top floor of an unassuming residential apartment building far from the tony downtown neighborhoods housing most Western embassies, the former apartment that was fashioned into “Fortress Israel” was a gift from the Sadat family. Egyptians, however, have a more cynical explanation for its location: they say the Israelis have deliberately surrounded themselves with Arab families because they think it will reduce their chances of a being attacked. In the face of such mistrust, those trying to resurrect the spirit of the Camp David accords may find their task ever more difficult in the months ahead.
