Nothing to commemorate?

The current political climate has made the always-controversial 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty more contentious than ever on its 25th anniversary. Gihan Shahine samples the debate

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Sadat signs the Arabs' first peace treaty with Israel 25 years ago at the White House

Egypt will probably find little to celebrate on 26 March on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its 1979 peace treaty with Israel, the first-ever between Israel and an Arab state. The most immediate damper was Monday's assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, which catalysed large-scale demonstrations on Egyptian university campuses, as well as a scathing condemnation by President Hosni Mubarak.

Slamming the Israelis for "abort[ing] all the peace process efforts", the Egyptian president scrapped an already controversial plan to send an Egyptian parliamentary delegation to Tel Aviv to attend a Knesset ceremony marking the treaty's anniversary.

The assassination has also triggered a debate about the already- controversial regional impact of the Camp David accord, which provided a framework for the peace process on the Palestinian and Egyptian track, and paved the way to the signing of the peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Analysts continue to debate whether Egypt's peace with Israel has helped bring forward what late President Anwar El-Sadat spoke of in his 1977 Knesset speech -- a comprehensive settlement based on a final solution to the Palestinian issue, rather than just a separate peace for Egypt.

Supporters of Camp David continue to be branded as Sadat propagandists, while the treaty's critics are stereotyped as Nasserists and leftists. The debate still rages over whether the deterioration on the Arab scene has been because of Egypt's peace initiative with Israel, or because of Arab refusal, at the time, to participate in the Egyptian-Israeli peace negotiations.

There is almost a general consensus that while the treaty resulted in the liberation of Sinai and helped save Egypt's floundering economy at the time, it has largely failed to catalyse comprehensive peace in the region. In fact, many would argue that it has propelled schisms among Arab countries, and that the Palestinians themselves are faring far worse today than they were before the treaty was signed.

Abdel-Raouf El-Ridi, chairman of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs and former Egyptian ambassador to Washington, argues that Arabs "missed out on a magnificent chance for a comprehensive settlement when they declined Sadat's invitation to take part in the peace negotiations with Israel, and again later, when they did not make maximum gain from the Madrid conference, which provided a framework for peace". Instead, Arab states opted for a decade- long boycott of Egypt, spearheaded by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein; El-Ridi says that particular reaction to Camp David played a major role in delaying successful regional peace efforts.

Mohamed El-Sayed Said, deputy director of Al-Ahram's Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, agrees that a unified Arab stand could have tipped the balance in the Arab's favour post Camp David; at the same time, Said blames Sadat's "despotic" and "humiliating" attitude for the disintegration on the Arab scene.

Cairo University professor Mustafa Kamel El- Sayed said Arabs refused to take part in the negotiations with Israel because they saw the treaty as a violation of commitments that had been made at a 1967 Arab conference in Khartoum, which recommended the rejection of any negotiation, reconciliation or acknowledgment of Israel.

"President Sadat should have consulted the Arabs on how to make maximum gains from the initiative on the regional level before venturing into negotiations with Israel," Said said. "It might have proved a prolonged and difficult path, but it would probably have made headway on the Palestinian side, and curbed the rift that has secluded Egypt in the region."

Many analysts think Israel signed the treaty with Egypt in order to marginalise Egypt's Arab role, and thus tip the balance of power in Israel's favour. According to Said, one of the direct results of this was the 1982 war in Lebanon.

According to Cairo University political science professor Ahmed Youssef, the director of the Institute for Arab Research and Study, "Israel was never ready to make the same sort of concessions on the Palestinian issue as it did with Sinai."

Soon after the treaty was signed, argues El- Sayed, late Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin announced that the autonomy promised to the Palestinians by the Camp David accord applied to the people, not the territory. According to El-Sayed, this meant the Israeli government's intention was "to annex parts of the West Bank, which has been a continuing Israeli policy since then. No Israeli government was willing to concede the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians."

El-Ridi, however, contends that a unified Arab stand was likely to, at least, "pressure for more Palestinian rights, make use of the peace camp that was established in Israel at the time, and ultimately limit the growth of US-Israeli relations into their current strength".

Some of the analysts spoken to by Al-Ahram Weekly conceded that Sadat was probably convinced that the Arabs as a whole would have failed to agree on a unified course of action, and that entering into a peace treaty was his best alternative.

Said explained that, "Egypt went for peace out of a strategic conviction that Arab states did not have the potential for a military conflict with Israel at the time, and that peace was the only solution to pull the region out of a no-war, no-peace situation that had already exhausted Arabs for more than 40 years. Egypt's infrastructure was severely deteriorating and there was no way to regain Egyptian sovereignty over Sinai except via peace," Said said.

According El-Sayed, however, Egypt had no other option but to accept Israel's demands, because it had alienated itself from any possible outside support. "Egypt actually disarmed itself as early as 1973 when it asked the US to take charge of the peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, called on Arab countries to end the Arab petroleum embargo against the US, and abrogated the friendship treaty with the Soviet Union."

Youssef said that whereas "no one can blame Sadat for having given precedence to nationalistic interests rather than Arab concerns", the initiative was actually built on a flawed concept of "breaking the psychological barrier with Israel." According to Youssef, "that psychological barrier was actually never broken, since Arabs were, in fact, engaged in a real conflict with Israel over lands and resources. Instead, the psychological barrier has been augmented over time."

A public opinion poll conducted by the Weekly 10 years ago revealed that, for the majority of Egyptians, the so-called "psychological barrier" was still very much in place, 15 years after the treaty was signed. The majority of those polled did not express much faith in the peace agreements being worked out at the time between Israel and the Palestinians. Asked whether they felt the peace process had provided the Palestinians with their rights, 58 per cent said no, and only 36 per cent said yes.

Nader Fergany, the prominent statistician and social scientist with whom the Weekly conducted the survey, said that "today, I would safely say that those figures have shot up, as prominently evident in public protests." Fergany told the Weekly that, "more people are definitely now opposed to normalisation with Israel. Anti-Israeli sentiments have significantly peaked due to the daily atrocities the Israeli government commits against the Palestinian people and the Israeli expansion of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza."

Mohamed Bassiouni, former Egyptian ambassador to Israel and a member of the delegation that was planning to visit the Knesset this week, said he would rather dwell on "the peace treaty's achievements on the national and regional levels". Bassiouni insists that, thanks to the Camp David accord and the peace treaty, Egypt regained sovereignty over Sinai, got back its oil resources, re-opened the Suez Canal and repatriated immigrants back to their homes in towns along the Suez Canal. "Instead of spending 75 per cent of our budget on military actions, we channelled [some of] those funds into social and economic development." On the regional level, Bassiouni contends that the peace treaty has been a catalyst for a peace process in the region, having paved the way for both the Madrid conference and the Oslo agreement.

El-Sayed, however, argues that Egypt cannot claim to have complete sovereignty over Sinai since "the treaty limits Egypt's military presence in Sinai, dividing it into zones with no Egyptian military presence at all in the zone adjacent to the Israeli border". According to El-Sayed, Egypt's peace treaty with Israel is "unequal" since it gives "more rights to Israel than to Egypt".

El-Sayed said, "Israeli troops are allowed to be stationed 10 kilometres away from the border, whereas Egyptian troops are not allowed... within tens of kilometres from the Egyptian-Israeli border."

Israel, according to El-Sayed, has recently violated the treaty by carrying out military operations in Rafah, which is exactly on the opposite side of the Egyptian border.

By providing for the establishment of full normal relations between Egypt and Israel, El-Sayed also argues that the treaty has actually limited Egypt's sovereignty, "since it considers suspension of this kind of relationship as amounting to a declaration of a state of war by Egypt. Egypt, meanwhile, does not have to maintain normal relations with any other nation, and that would still not be considered a declaration of war against that state," El-Sayed said.