Why Israelis ignore 40th anniversary of peace with Egypt
Forty years after Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed the peace treaty, Israelis sideline this achievement and prefer to ignore that relations with an Arab nation can change.
On March 26, 1979, on the White House lawn, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and US President Jimmy Carter signed a historic peace treaty that transformed the Middle East. “No more war, no more bloodshed,” Begin declared at the ceremony.
Eighteen months prior to the signing, in November 1977, Sadat landed at Ben Gurion Airport, becoming the first Arab leader ever to pay an official visit to Israel. Barely four years after the trauma of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Israel Television broadcast history in the making. The black and white footage showed Sadat visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, addressing the Knesset in Arabic, embracing Begin and discussing with him a “peace of the brave.”
Begin, whose 1977 election was thought to be the precursor of yet another war with the Arabs, thundered from the Knesset podium, “War is avoidable; it is peace that is inevitable.”
A lot of water has passed since under the bridges of the Nile, Jordan and Tel Aviv Yarkon rivers. Sadat was assassinated in 1981, Begin became bogged down in the 1982 Lebanon War that was his eventual undoing, but the Israeli-Egyptian peace has been kept — cold, but alive. This week, on its 40th anniversary of the accord, senior Egyptian intelligence officials were busy trying to avert another war between Israel and Hamas. In fact, the Egyptians have played over the years a key role in calming the Middle East. Egypt and Israel have been conducting unique, close coordination in recent years against jihadi organizations in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as exchanging intelligence in the regional struggle against their common enemy: Iran. The heads of Egyptian intelligence are frequent guests in Israel to discuss security matters, as are the heads of Israel’s Shin Bet and Mossad agencies in the Land of the Nile.
