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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 Feb. - 1 March 2000 Issue No. 470 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 Feb. - 1 March 2000 Issue No. 470
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Heritage Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Signs of strain
By Khaled DawoudHeavily armed soldiers standing behind bullet proof shields and scores of policemen in uniform and civilian clothes keep a 24-hour watch on the building in Giza whose 18th floor houses the Israeli embassy.
The building overlooks the Nile, and is only a few hundred metres away from Cairo University, an institution whose students have for decades demonstrated against Israel's regional policies. The students, tellingly, have never yet reached the building to demonstrate in front of it, such are the security measures.
Only to walk along the street where the embassy building is located involves a quick questioning by one of the many policemen standing around. If the answer is "I am going to the Israeli embassy" the policeman will ask for the visitor's identity card. Another policeman, in civilian clothes, will take the details and ask for the exact purpose of the visit.
Up on the 18th floor another set of security measures is in place, policed this time by the Israeli embassy's own security staff. No mobiles phones are allowed inside the embassy, a quick reminder, perhaps, that it was once a favourite Mossad ploy to kill opponents by placing explosives in their mobile phones -- the technique used to assassinate Hamas leader Yehia Ayash in 1996.
Smiling, the Israeli security guard will ask the visitor to kindly take off anything that beeps while walking through the metal detector, including belt and glasses.
Israeli diplomats in Cairo themselves follow a strict security procedure. Before leaving their houses, mostly in Maadi, Israeli diplomats look beneath their cars to make sure that there are no "strange bodies". They regularly change the routes they take to the office.
Israel's ambassador to Egypt, Zvi Mazel, is not particularly happy with any of this. He feels especially bitter that 20 years after the opening of the embassy, only a very few Egyptians are willing to deal with the former enemy. All the professional syndicates, universities, sports clubs, trade unions and national research centres boycott the Israeli embassy, and refuse any form of normalisation of relations.
For Mazel, the argument that there can be no normalisation before full peace, hinders any attempts to improve relations between the Arabs and Israel.
"When Egypt and Israel decided to make peace, this meant that they decided not to fight each other, but also to cooperate and work together," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. He added that linking normalisation to progress in peace talks with other Arab countries "would not change the Israeli attitude towards the Palestinians or help negotiations with Syria. When we negotiate with them, what is important for us is our security interests. These are two separate things."
Mazel is critical of the Egyptian press, both pro-government and opposition, holding journalists "and people who call themselves intellectuals" responsible for preventing any progress in relations, and "scaring away the many Egyptians who want peace and are ready to work with us."
Israel's ambassador refers to Egyptian newspapers as "my breakfast", and over the three years he spent here, he has not found it very palatable.
"You have the right to criticise, but please criticise us from the point of view of policy making, and not incite people against Israel, show prejudice against the Jewish people, deny the Holocaust. Don't tell us we are cheaters, that we ruined your agriculture and that we are responsible for the Luxor massacre and the EgyptAir flight 990 crash last October."
During his three years in Egypt, he reveals, he was interviewed only once by an Egyptian magazine, "and even they had a bad photo of me to make up for the interview."
The attitude of the Egyptian press, he thinks, has discouraged many Israelis from coming to Egypt as tourists. Were relations warmer, he estimates that Egypt would receive up to 500,000 Israeli tourists a year, injecting between $1 to 1.5 billion into the Egyptian economy. Yet according to embassy figures only 300,000 Israelis visited Egypt last year, the same number as the year before, and of these 90 per cent spent all their time in Sinai. (According to the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty Israelis can enter Egypt and travel as far as Sharm El-Sheikh without a visa.) Meanwhile, only 8,000 Egyptians visited Israel during the same period, the majority to visit Palestinian relatives. Almost no Egyptians go to Israel as tourists.
As tourism, so with trade. Israel's ambassador to Egypt finds the level of bilateral trade far from satisfying.
"We could have done much more," he says. Last year Israeli exports to Egypt, mainly agricultural products, textiles and machinery, amounted to $50 million. Egyptian non-petroleum exports to Israel were $25 million during the same year. And while the Camp David accords provide Israel with an option to buy Egyptian oil, demand has slumped, the reason cited being new environmental standards being enforced in Israel. According to Mazel, Egypt's oil exports to Israel last year totalled some $150 million.
As far as the exchange of delegations goes, it is the ministries of agriculture, in both Egypt and Israel, that are most active. According to Mazel, 300 Egyptian farmers go to Israel every year to receive training in the latest agricultural technology. A private factory producing underwear in the free zone in Nasr City, meanwhile, is the only joint industrial project between the two countries.
"The factory employs 2,000 workers and produces high-quality underwear that goes straight to the biggest stores in Europe. We could have many more of those factories," said Mazel.
Businessmen, conventional wisdom says, are always the first to overcome political differences in their endless pursuit of profit. Yet even here all is not as Mazel would like.
"Only a few dozen businessmen come to Israel every year," said Mazel. It was these "dozens" that made up the majority of Egyptian guests who took part in a reception held at the Israeli ambassador's residence in Maadi last week to mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the embassy. The bulk of the guests were foreign diplomats, while the government avoided sending any high-level representative. Mazel conceded that "events" in Lebanon had probably persuaded some invitees not to show.
Mazel argues that "if Israelis felt that peace with Egypt was a good peace, a model for peace and cooperation, they would pressure their government to be easier in negotiations with the Palestinians and Syria."
Which neatly sidesteps the fact that after the signing of the 1993 Oslo deal Egypt eased a great many restrictions on travel to Israel and agreed to host the MENA conference in November 1996. That window of opportunity, though, was quickly slammed shut with the election of Binyamin Netanyahu, and by the pursuit of policies that even the US conceded threatened to derail the whole entire peace process.
