“If we don't control adequately our territory, and then rockets are fired at Eilat, killing 15-20 tourists, how should we react to that? We are responsible for our territory.” These comments made by President-elect Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in a May 22 campaign interview, in Arabic, were music to the ears of Israel’s defense establishment. Not since the 1979 peace accords were drafted has an Egyptian leader been so dedicated to safeguarding the Israeli border in both actions and now in rhetoric. Make no mistake; in Egypt, the latter is far more politically risky.

Egyptian officials I’ve spoken with confirm Sisi’s working relationship with Israel. Those ties were established after Sisi was appointed as intelligence chief, then strengthened after his appointment as defense minister under former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, and then even more so under the following transitional government.

Whether the average Egyptian knows it or not, Israel too has been fighting to preserve Egypt’s security on a region-wide scale for the past several years. On the security front, several notable events in the past year indicate how tightly intertwined Egyptian-Israeli cooperation has become. In March 2014, Reuters reported that the Klos C, a ship intercepted by Israel in the Red Sea, was carrying missiles destined for Sinai-based militants, rather than Gaza-based Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as initially alleged by Israel. The cover-up was reportedly committed by Israel to save the Egyptians from embarrassment over the security situation in the Sinai.

In the Sinai Peninsula, restrictions on militarization set by the 1979 peace treaty are practically nonexistent on the ground. Initial Israeli concerns about the gradual, yet unprecedented insertion of heavy weaponry and troops into the peninsula under then-Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and Morsi administrations have dissipated under the transitional government. Both sides openly agree that the treaty has been altered in a de facto manner to allow Egypt to conduct counterterrorism operations and secure the Israeli border. Most notably, Israel was accused by local media of carrying out a drone strike against a rocket launching squad in the northern Sinai in August 2013. The Egyptian government was largely silent on the matter, with little reaction from the Egyptian street. Consider that just two years prior, in October 2011, the Israeli Embassy in Cairo was ransacked after a hot pursuit following a deadly cross-border militant attack. Israel has reportedly revamped its intelligence efforts in North Africa, knowing that weapons and fighters flowing into Egypt ultimately pose a threat to its own borders with Sinai and Gaza. Such interest matches Israel’s particularly strong intelligence, according to foreign sources, including activity in East Africa that was established to stop Iranian weapons smuggling to Gaza through Egyptian territory, which also benefits Egyptian jihadists.