Mideast maneuvers
Israel and Egypt make war together
The Middle East is a region of strange alliances. In recent weeks, for example, America has been siding with the Kurds against NATO ally Turkey in Syria, a murky and complex equation. The latest news story is more stark: Egypt is cooperating with Israel to fight opponents of Egypt’s government on Egyptian territory in the Sinai.
On paper and in the eyes of its people, in public, the Egyptian government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who seized power there in a 2013 coup d’etat, has maintained the seven-decades-long Egyptian position of opposition to Israel. It takes this posture in solidarity with other Arab states which, at least in principle, reject Israel’s refusal to end its occupation of part of Palestine and to negotiate an independent Palestinian state.
In fact, of course, Egypt signed the Camp David accords with Israel in 1978. It cooperates closely with Israel in security terms in containing the Palestinian movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, with which Egypt as well as Israel has a border.
Mr. Sissi’s rise to power was welcomed by Israel, which did not trust the presidency of Mohamed Morsi, a former leader in the Muslim Brotherhood. In any case, Egypt has been unable to fight Israel since it fully completed the vulnerable Aswan high dam on the Nile River in 1976. (In a military doomsday scenario, strategic bombing of the dam would unleash Lake Nasser and cause a flooding catastrophe.)
Egypt’s new active military cooperation with Israel in North Sinai, dating at least to 2015, is based on Egypt’s own inability to control successfully anti-government activity there. That has included the slaying of Egyptian soldiers and police officers, and the establishment of armed checkpoints by Ansar Beit al Maqdis, the Islamist “Partisans of Jerusalem.” In 2015, militants shot down a Russian passenger aircraft over the Sinai, killing 224 and damaging Egypt’s important tourist industry.
Israel, with Egypt’s agreement, has attacked targets in Egypt with jet aircraft, drones and helicopters, carrying out more than a hundred airstrikes in recent times. The Egyptian media, barred from North Sinai as a closed military zone, have not reported on the Israeli attacks within Egyptian territory, nor the existence of the Israeli-Egyptian military alliance, no doubt to avoid negative popular reaction to it.
The United States maintains relatively close relations with both Israel and Egypt and presumably does not oppose the cooperation between the two, both in general terms and as a joint effort to contain violent Islamic activity in the sensitive Sinai peninsula, yet another Middle East hot spot. The trouble could come if Egyptian militants make Mr. Sissi’s cooperation with the Israelis the basis of concentrated opposition to his continued rule in Egypt.
Egyptian month. elections start next