Egypt and Israel: 40 years after the assassination of Anwar el-Saddat and the Camp David accords

It is not yet a month since last September 13, Naftali Bennett, the Prime Minister of the State of Israel, traveled to meet Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on the famous beaches of Sharm el-Sheikh. , in the Sinai Peninsula. . The meeting between the two leaders was the first official invitation from the Arab Republic of Egypt after 10 years for an Israeli prime minister to meet in his country. The meeting took place a few weeks before the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the crime of Egyptian President Anwar el-Saddat on October 6, 1981.

According to the Cairo daily Al-Watan (The Homeland in Arabic), the mutually agreed agenda advanced in a general assessment of current and future bilateral relations between Israel and Egypt under the peace agreement (“even if a cold peace ”) signed by assassinated President Saddat and remains in force.

However, the temporary events that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 have not been forgotten by opposition to President Al-Sisi’s government. At that time, Egypt was the main enemy in the creation of the Jewish national home, so Israel had to fight fiercely militarily with Egypt, the Arab country, which supplied the greatest number of men and weapons in the so-called war of the independence of the State of Israel. Cairo played an important role in opposing Zionist ideology in the years leading up to Israel’s war for independence in 1948. Three years earlier, the Arab League had organized a meeting between seven Arab countries in Alexandria where a powerful military accord had been signed. In December 1945, the League announced a total economic boycott of the Jewish community under the Palestinian mandate of the British government. It was the harbinger of the inevitably approaching war.

Israel’s military victory over Egypt in 1948 was not enough to deter Egyptian leaders from further aggression, but defeat resulted in the overthrow of King Farouk and the rise of young Colonel Abdel-Gamal Nasser. , who, according to his men, had bravely fought this war, something that Nasser undertook to underline in his memoirs, while pointing out the incompetence of the Egyptian military high command, which he directly attributed to the military defeat, denouncing the poor and lukewarm Egyptian performance on the battlefield out of indifference from King Farouk. These positions of Nasser helped him create the Free Officer Movement which overthrew the monarch in 1952.

With political power in his hands and the full loyalty of the armed forces, Nasser became Egypt’s new strongman and continued to focus on attacking the nascent Jewish state, as the newspaper pointed out. Arabic commemorating those years on the same day in its editorial. arrived in Egypt, Abdel Gamal Nasser’s idea was the absolute and utter destruction of Israel.

Nasser followed the line of other Arab states and refused to recognize Israel even in defeat and all he signed was a Hudna (ceasefire or temporary armistice). However, he continued his war by other means. Thus, Nasser looked at the strategy of training and arming Palestinian fighters and fighters from other Arab countries – mostly non-Egyptian known as the fedayeen – through which he carried out numerous attacks on Israeli territory.

Nasser’s trusted officer, Army Captain Mustafa Hafez was tasked with organizing the Fedayeen. Hafez and Salah Mustafa, then Egyptian military attaché in Jordan, trained some 2,000 fedayeen in terrorist and sabotage activities, blasted railroads, blew water pipes and planted hundreds of explosives on Jewish roads and villages, and burned down killed some 900 Israeli civilians between 1952 and 1955. These actions were not carried out by recruits from a newly formed terrorist network, many of these fedayeen were from the old organization of Palestinian nationalist leader Amin al-Husseini, known as the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, who was then living in exile in Cairo.

The Israeli intelligence of those years considered these terrorist cells to be very dangerous. The government ordered the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to carry out retaliatory counterattacks which were repeatedly unsuccessful. Thus, in the mid-1950s, Captain Hafez, Nasser’s henchman, was winning the standoff. Therefore, then Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion pushed for the creation of a command unit called Unit 101, which he ordered to conduct operations that send a harsh message of deterrence. Israeli military intelligence agents successfully attacked the men in Hafez’s inner circle with letter bombs using the postal service. Terrorist attacks against Israel were reduced rapidly. However, Cairo continued to be the main and most dangerous enemy of the Jewish state.

In the 1950s, Egypt became a haven for many Nazi war criminals and scientists from the defeated Third Reich, Nasser began to develop missiles capable of attacking Israel and began to receive weapon systems and the support from the former Soviet Union. In this way, the Middle East became an open battleground for the Cold War. This was followed by Nasser’s mistaken decision to nationalize the Suez Canal in 1956, which led to Israel, England, and France attacking Egypt. The Israeli military campaign was successful from the first moment, when, aided by information from its intelligence services, it managed to bring down an Egyptian Air Force plane that was flying from Amman to Cairo, carrying much of the Egyptian general staff, the operation was a high impact coup. Next, Israeli forces occupied the Sinai Peninsula, where their intelligence services found in an abandoned building in Gaza a complete file with the names of Palestinian terrorists that Hafez and his men had deployed inside Israel in the years preceding the Sinai campaign, that is to say a fatal blow to the plans of Abdel Gamal Nasser.

However, in a decision which later turned out to be wrong, the United States pressured the British, French and Israelis to withdraw; thus giving Nasser a propaganda victory against the West as declassified CIA documents show Egypt continued to plot against Israel and Washington’s allies in the region.

These declassified documents from the US agency on the activities of Mufti Amin al-Husseini indicate that he and Egyptian Minister Anwar el-Saddat planned an assassination attempt against King Saud of Saudi Arabia on April 19, 1957. At this point Finally, a hitman who was an expert in targeted assassinations of those years, a Palestinian whose CIA code name was “Shahin”, received a bomb in Saudi territory and handed it to Abdallah Faisal, a treacherous member of the royal family who placed her in the king’s chamber. However, the plan was discovered and silenced by the involvement of Faisal, who a few days later was found dead in his office. The same document indicates that Grand Mufti Husseini was involved in a botched operation to bomb the US consulate in Jerusalem on August 8, 1957. The Middle East that followed the Suez conflict exacerbated the instability and changed the situation. . canal crisis.

At the same time in Iraq there was a bloody coup, the Washington-backed Hashemite dynasty was overthrown in 1958, the year Washington was also forced to send troops to Lebanon for the first time. .

According to another declassified CIA document dated June 4, 1958. Gamal Abdel Nasser planned to assassinate the other Arab monarch in the region, King Hussein of Jordan, as well as the Christian president of Lebanon, Camile Chamoun; At the same time, another plan to assassinate Saud ran into organizational difficulties, but Nasser expected all of those plans to come to fruition in less than three months. Suspicious of these plans and not by chance, Saud plotted to assassinate Nasser in 1958, but his plan failed, so he chose to relinquish the throne.

Although he had previously succeeded in demanding money from Saud for his anti-Israel activities, Mufti Husseini sought “to form a new government in Palestine and Gaza and maintained his plan to assassinate King Saud”. In April 1957, the same declassified CIA cable noted that a Palestinian who had participated in the plot to assassinate King Abdullah of Jordan in 1951 was captured in Riyadh with a large amount of weapons and explosives. With this fact, it is understandable why King Saud conspired to assassinate Nasser in 1958, despite his plan failing and leading to his resignation.

Some time later, with the suspicious and sudden death of Nasser following a heart attack, everything would depend on his successor, Anouar el-Saddat, it would be him who would have to change course. Saddat sent many signals – those initially ignored by the Americans – that he intended to join the Soviet camp by moving away from the United States. Saddat knew that a rapprochement with the United States required a change of position vis-à-vis Israel and at that time he was not ready for such a political move.

Years later, Anwar el-Saddat himself, along with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, would win the Nobel Peace Prize for signing the Camp David Accords in 1978 and recognizing the State of Israel. Saddat’s decision brutally shattered the united Arab front against Israel and resulted in Egypt’s 10-year suspension from the Arab League, and in October 1981 Saddat was assassinated in a military parade by elements terrorists from the Muslim Brotherhood. .

Peace – albeit cold – continues between the two nations, the Camp David accords have been maintained. The murder of Anwar el-Saddat did not change things as its perpetrators had expected. The fall of his successor Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and the brief reign of the Muslim Brotherhood have also failed to change the peace agreements signed by Saddat with the State of Israel. However, it is not appropriate to think that this Camp David treatise can be eternal. The activity of Islamist groups in Egypt as well as Gaza has been on the rise since the recent failure of the Arab Spring. And the history between the two States obliges them to work unceasingly for the preservation and the validity of this agreement, the dangers which threaten them are varied and more present than ever in Israel as in Egypt.

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