• Not at war, but unable to make peace - by  Ghassan Khatib

• Still stuck with the original problem - an interview with  Muhammed al Sayed Said

• Stable but flawed - by  Shimon Shamir

Whither the cold but peaceful peace?
by Samuel Lewis

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s dramatic flight to Jerusalem 26 years ago inaugurated 17 months of frenzied diplomacy, which produced the first peace treaty between Israel and any of its Arab enemies. Sadat’s unprecedented personal mission, highlighted by his standing before Israel’s Knesset and pledging “no more war!” raised Israeli hopes and expectations to unreal heights. Surely, some believed, Israel could achieve a warm relationship with its powerful neighbor to the south, perhaps akin to that between the United States and Canada!

Soon thereafter, disillusionment began to set in. Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin learned that they shared only one mutual conviction: that no more Israelis or Egyptians should be killed in battle in the Sinai. Otherwise, they viewed the peacemaking arena from wholly different historical and psychological perspectives. Bilateral negotiations deadlocked; US President Jimmy Carter and his diplomatic team became indispensable intermediaries again; and the peace treaty was hammered out, nail by nail, over many months of agonizing encounters in Jerusalem, Great Britain, Camp David, Washington DC, Cairo, and again Jerusalem.

Samuel Lewis, a diplomat for 34 years, served as director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff under Clinton and as ambassador to Israel for eight years under Carter and Reagan. First president of the United States Institute of Peace, he is now a senior policy advisor to the Israel Policy Forum.

The Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt initiated after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's extraordinary visit to Israel was one of the most controversial developments in the Arab world in the post-colonial era. In one fell swoop, that accord challenged the status quo of the Arab nation's defining political concern--the Palestinian problem.

In those days, the Egyptian-Israeli conflict was perceived as an integral component of the historic rupture that occurred when Palestinian land was taken for the establishment of Israel, turning 800,000 Palestinians into refugees and dispersing them among the surrounding Arab countries. It was important that the first peace overture came from Egypt. Sadat's predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had taken steps to loosen the vestiges of foreign colonial hold on his country, unify the Arab brethren and establish a position in defense of Palestinian rights. Egypt saw itself, and was viewed by most Arabs, as the most powerful of the young Arab states.

As such, the controversy that surrounded Camp David stemmed from the accord's implications: leader Egypt was removing itself from the Arab search for a just solution to the Palestinian problem without ensuring any outcome for the Palestinians. For that reason, many Arabs--indeed, most Arabs and nearly all Palestinians--were critical of the agreement. While Egyptians have argued that the peace agreement was a success separate from the Palestinian problem in that it ended Israel's occupation of Egyptian land, that argument is circular. Egypt would never have lost its land to Israeli control if it had not first positioned itself as a defender of Palestinian rights. By consenting at Camp David to end the state of war with Israel, Egypt simply bowed out of the Palestinian conflict. That was the price paid for getting back its occupied land.

Thus, 25 years after the signing of the Camp David accords, most of the agreement's objectives are unrealized. The peace between Egypt and Israel remains chilly, even frigid. The accord has not contributed to a full and comprehensive peace in the region, nor has it helped achieve the legitimate rights of the Palestinians. When Palestinians did follow in Egypt's footsteps and sign the 1993 Oslo agreement, what ultimately caused that pact's downfall was a single-minded unwillingness on Israel's part to relinquish the Palestinian occupied territories in the same manner that it had relinquished the Sinai. Indeed, I would say that Egypt's signing of the Camp David agreement and departure from the equation probably encouraged Israeli strategic reticence in compromising over land.

At the same time, despite Egypt's attempts to separate its relations with Israel from the Palestinian-Israeli context, it has not greatly benefited from peace with its eastern neighbor, nor has it been able to go its own way and develop after unburdening itself from the costly demands of military vigilance. While Egypt has managed to expand its economy a bit, the vast gap that persists is evidenced in one recent statistic: even though Egypt is a much richer country than Spain in resources and population, Spain has a higher GNP than all of the Arab countries put together.

Regardless of the grade one gives the 1978 Camp David agreement now, we are stuck with it. But the lesson Camp David teaches, even today, is that the ongoing disputes between Israel and individual Arab states are really only repeated manifestations of a single conflict. None of the parties involved can truly shake off the negative implications of this discord unless a comprehensive deal is reached. Peace in the normal sense between one state and another does not apply here and the only way out of the disastrous consequences of those months in 1948 when so many Palestinians were displaced is to correct the injustice done them, as required by United Nations resolutions, and allow the Palestinian people the basic rights enjoyed by their neighbors--including Israel and Egypt--which are self-determination, political independence and statehood in the territories considered occupied under international law. Otherwise, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will continue to leave its messy political and economic fingerprints on any bilateral peace agreement that is pursued.-Published 30/10/2003©bitterlemons-international.org

Ghassan Khatib is coeditor of the bitterlemons family of internet publications and director of the Government Media Center. This article represents his personal views.

BI: In 25 years of an Israel-Egypt peace, what has Egypt learned about the viability of its agreement with Israel? Is there anything Egyptians regret about this accord?

Said: The main lesson was a point that Egypt emphasized again and again: the need for a comprehensive peace. Egypt has no regrets over its bilateral peace treaty with Israel, but the design lacked the very fundamental aspect of comprehensiveness, and the failure to bring all other parties to the conflict [to the table]. Accordingly, Egypt is still stuck--alongside the rest of the Arab world and Palestinians--with this thorny issue of Palestinian self-determination and the question of the refugees.

One thing that was done right was to have a clear bargain from the very start. This was one of the merits of the Egyptian-Israeli treaty, which struck a complete deal and then accepted some graduation on the horizon for the implementation of the agreement. [On the Palestinian-Israeli track] they have determined theses and a timed horizon, but without really determining the bargain. That was the egregious mistake in the roadmap; it repeated the mistakes of Oslo, which was determined on a time schedule, involved no clear bargain, and made it very easy for the Israelis to shirk and botch their commitments, including the second and third withdrawal. For the Palestinians, that was a clear betrayal because, not only did Israel fail to implement its second and third withdrawals, but after Oslo expired in 1998, they didn't have a clear vision of the future.

BI: Was the Egyptian-Israeli peace destined to be cold?

Said: We keep asking ourselves how we got engaged in this conflict in the first place. The answer is because of the Palestinian problem, the destruction faced by the Palestinian people, the eviction of the Palestinian people from their land, the [creation of the] most dramatic refugee problem in the world--50 years plus--and the denial of the rights of the Palestinians, and [lack of] implementation of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 that should have committed all parties to the establishment of the Palestinian state. We are still stuck with the original problem. Without resolving this issue, I don't think that peace will be accomplished in the region and the possibilities of blowback remain.

BI: Even so, in your lifetime you have seen immense changes in the Israeli-Egyptian relationship. Looking back, what was the most remarkable of these?

Said: For me, it was the war of 1973. I was a soldier, a conscript, and that for me was the event of a lifetime simply because of the enormous humiliation brought upon us by the defeat of 1967. For a nation completely shocked by defeat and for the young generation of that time full of ambition and dreams (in 1967, I was 17), we were finally doing something to liberate our land.

BI: Where do you think Israeli-Egyptian relations will be 25 years from now?

Said: I hope that in 25 years, peace will be accomplished. I am hopeful that once [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon is out of the picture--perhaps [Palestinian President Yasser] Arafat as well--Palestinians and Israelis will manage to strike a deal. With that, I believe that things will change course and the emphasis will be on welfare, economic development and cultural development. I don't believe that you will push the button all of a sudden and Arabs will love Israelis, but at least we can start building confidence.

But at this point, I feel that not only Israel but its supporters are bent on destroying the Arab world, arranging inferior treatment for the Arab world, building an Israeli supremacy system. Israel is not treated as an equal partner in the international system, it is given the opportunity to act with impunity and strike as it wishes. Fanaticism in this region is the byproduct of the Arab-Israel conflict and the way that Israel is allowed to act with impunity, brutality and destructiveness. Once we see this out, I think that the region will restore its attitude towards the world system and global institutions and begin looking at itself with some confidence and a sense of obligation, not only towards international law, but towards its own future.-Published 30/10/2003©bitterlemons-international.org

Muhammed al Sayed Said is deputy director of the Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.

For speculating about the future of Egyptian-Israeli relations a logical starting point would be the present of this relationship. The problem is that there is hardly any consensus in Israel about the nature of the Egyptian-Israeli relationship in the present. In schematic terms, one may speak about two schools of thought existing in Israel regarding this issue.

One school of thought holds that Egypt has never committed itself to peace with Israel in the full sense of this word. Egypt maintains a formidable war machine which is undergoing an intensive process of modernization. Since Egypt has no enemies that threaten its security, it is claimed, this armament can be directed only against Israel. On the diplomatic level, Egypt uses every possible international forum to intimidate Israel, and often puts pressure on Arab and other countries not to normalize relations with Israel. Domestically it places limitations on normal interactions with Israelis, verging on a violation of the normalization clauses in the peace treaty. The Egyptian media conduct a hate campaign against Israel, not refraining from the usage of antisemitic themes. This Israeli school of thought maintains that the “cold peace”, as the Egyptians themselves call it, is in fact closer to a cold war.

The second school of thought emphasizes other aspects of the relationship. While accepting the validity of the criticism voiced against Egyptian conduct, it argues that the decisive test of peace should be the level to which it substantiates the essential undertaking of the two parties: the termination of armed conflict. In the quarter of a century since the conclusion of the peace treaty there have been no wars between Egypt and Israel, no hostilities along the border and no threats of all-out conflagration. The security arrangements set up in Sinai by the peace agreement work to the satisfaction of both sides. On many occasions the Egyptians have offered their good services for advancing the peace process, particularly with the Palestinians. Channels of political communication are open both ways. True, the Egyptian ambassador is absent and the Israeli ambassador is isolated, but the embassies remain in place and fulfil many useful functions. A skeleton normalization system operates in spite of the heavy constraints: borders are open, airlines fly between Cairo and Tel Aviv, and Israeli ships use Egyptian ports and the Suez Canal. There are even some cases of positive interaction, like the Delta textile venture in Egypt, tourism to the Sinai coast and the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo.

It seems that for the purpose of assessing the prospects of the Egyptian-Israeli peace the second school of thought offers a more useful perspective. There is no reason to doubt that the decision taken by the Egyptian leadership 25 years ago to pull out from the cycle of wars was a genuine strategic choice. Egypt was interested then, and is interested now, in freeing itself from the economic, social and political burdens of a protracted state of war. The pursuit of regional stability through the peace process is a clear Egyptian interest--internal and external. Egypt’s affiliation with and reliance on the United States reinforce all these interests and strengthen Egypt’s commitment to the peace treaty with Israel. Hence, all things being equal, it is likely that these Egyptian interests will continue to affect Egypt’s position on peace with Israel in the foreseeable future.

The stress is on “all things being equal.” for the Middle East is a region where unexpected upheavals have been known to produce new situations that change the rules of the game. What makes the Egyptian-Israeli peace more vulnerable to such upheavals is the fact that despite the interests that sustain it, mostly on the strategic level, it nevertheless remains a flawed peace--a far cry from the vision of reconciliation and cooperation that at least the Israelis entertained at the dawn of peacemaking. A cold peace is inevitably a precarious peace. To overcome this vulnerability, it seems to me that three conditions must be met.

First, the Palestinian-Israeli dispute must be resolved. It is true that in his historic decision to conclude peace with Israel, Sadat gave priority to Egyptian interests, but the relationship was never meant to be a separate peace. Egypt cannot fully legitimize its peace with Israel as long as the occupation and the bloodshed continue in the holy land. While for some radical circles in Egypt the Palestinian issue may be a convenient vehicle for incitement, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the general public’s solidarity with their Arab brethren in Palestine.

Second, peace must become a people-to-people relationship. Normalization was never seen by the Israelis as an instrument for “penetration” and “domination”, as many Egyptians falsely have it. What stands behind it is the belief that a network of interactions and cooperative ventures between members of the two societies, in a wide range of fields, can create vested interests in the solidification of the peaceful relationship. It can also “humanize” inter-personal relations and eradicate prejudice and negative stereotypes. In the language of conflict resolution theory--it can transform a “negative” peace into a “positive” one, which is manifestly more stable.

And third, the Egyptian theory, upheld by certain intellectual and political circles, claiming that a zero-sum struggle is going on between Israel and Egypt over predominance in the region, must be reconsidered. This is a dangerous theory because it holds that even after the resolution of all outstanding issues and the achievement of a comprehensive peace, Egypt and Israel will remain engaged in a bitter rivalry. The theory is groundless: Israel recognizes the centrality of Egypt in the Arab world and its interests are not oriented towards regional supremacy but elsewhere.

Perhaps a more effective dialogue between Egyptians and Israelis could contribute to the removal of all three factors impeding the development of a more solid peace between the two countries.-Published 30/10/03©bitterlemons-international.org

Shimon Shamir holds the Kaplan Chair in the History of Egypt and Israel at Tel Aviv University. He served as Israel's third ambassador to Egypt.