Israel-Egypt Peace Accord - in Jeopardy?

Wonderful that there are moderates in Egypt who see the practicality, as did the regime of now-deposed President Hosni Mubarak - inheriting it from his predecessor Anwar Sadat - of maintaining a peace accord (however cold it is) with the State of Israel. Anwar Sadat paid dearly for his bold admission of peace trumping conflict. Because of his initiative Egypt was able to focus on slowly drawing itself into the modern world rather than being financially mired in prosecuting an ideological/religious war after war.

The chief of the Egyptian armed forces, and the ruling forces council, now in control of the administration of the country post-administration-collapse (as though this is particularly new; simply the figurehead is now missing) until such time as the new constitution is prepared (a type of lightning-speed immaculate conception) and elections take place, has assured Israel and the international community that the peace treaty will remain intact.

And that is a profound relief. There is more than sufficient unrest and instability, to put it mildly, in the geography at the present time without the prospect of yet another war potential heating up to once again confront the Arab/Muslim-encircled State of Israel. If, however, that assurance has more than face value. Given that the Muslim Brotherhood is now on the cusp of influence. And its fierce hatred of Israel remains undiminished.

But it isn't just the Muslim Brotherhood, after all, with its possible one-third of Egyptian supporters. It is also the moderate Egyptian politicians who have much to say of the 30-year peace treaty. "The Camp David accord is over", pronounced Dr. Ayman Nur, leader of the Tomorrow party, planning his own candidacy in the forthcoming presidential elections.

He is most certainly playing to popular opinion. Because it is fact, despite the long-standing peace agreement enforced on the population by the National Democratic Party led as president by Hosni Mubarak and his colleagues, that the agreement is an extremely unpopular one with the populace. Egyptians mostly detest Jews. If they think of Jews at all it is to revile them as enemies of Islam.

The most accursed people on the face of the Earth are the Jews that crawl upon the face of the Earth, as far as most Egyptians are concerned. They cannot see a need for a peace agreement with Israel, when it would seem far more in keeping with their sentiments to wage war against the Jewish presence unfathomably permitted to continue soiling an Islam-dedicated geography.

The late Anwar Sadat's courageous admission that it is better to live in peace with one's neighbour than constant war has no resonance with the Egyptian street. Whose hatred for Jews runs so deep that they will attack light-skinned Egyptians on the premise that they are really Jews in their midst. Who will attack a blond female American reporter to viciously sexually assault her in a mob attack, shouting all the while, "Jew, Jew!!!"

	Anwar Sadat, left, Jimmy Carter, center, and Menachem Begin on the White House lawn, after signing the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979.
	Photo by: Archive

This man, Dr. Ayman Nur, is a secular liberal, expressing the common enough opinion of the man on the street, appealing to their inherited prejudices against the Jew whose irritation-quotient is invaluable as the perennial scapegoat for all that has gone awry in the geography. Anything that occurs that is seen to be detrimental to any Arab country is the result of an accursed Zionist conspiracy.