On 18 September, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was expected in Cairo for yet another – the 10th – round of talks on the Israeli war on Gaza.
Blinken’s visit comes as the Israeli war nears its one-year mark on 7 October. It also comes against the backdrop of escalating tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, with the Israeli press speculating that the former is set to sack the latter.
Blinken’s visit to Cairo also comes at a time of increased rhetoric from Israel on a possible escalation of military hostilities against south Lebanon. On top of that, there are the tensions between Egypt and Israel over the positions that Netanyahu has been adopting with regards to his security plans for the borders that separate Egypt from Gaza, including a space that is largely demilitarised according to the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty.
“Supposedly, [Blinken] is coming to discuss a final draft for a deal that should allow for the beginning of an end to the war before 7 October. The general idea is that there would be a ceasefire, the release of hostages, the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, an emergency aid operation to Gaza, and talks on a phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, with some security arrangements that will be executed with the support of the US and the help of regional and international players,” said an informed Egyptian source.
However, according to the source, it does not seem that Blinken is coming with a deal that Hamas will find convincing. He explained that beyond the political rhetoric, Hamas is not set “after all the damage and losses of life that the Palestinians in Gaza have been enduring for almost a year” to give Israel the hostages it has been holding since 7 October when it launched its resistance operation against Israeli targets.
It will not simply allow Netanyahu to continue bombing Gaza with no clear commitment to withdraw fully, even if in phases, from it.
The same source said that Blinken has said before that Netanyahu is not willing to commit to a specific withdrawal date or indeed to the concept of a full withdrawal from Gaza. He added that while there might be a limited breakthrough with regards to the complicated security arrangements for the borders between Egypt and Gaza, which are currently occupied by Israel, there is no reason to think that he has more to offer.
According to an Egyptian diplomatic source, “the Americans want to avoid a more vocal mode of tension between Egypt and Israel over the management of the Philadelphi Corridor [between Egypt and Gaza]. It seems that for them this is a priority.” However, he added that what Cairo is saying is that the Egyptian-Israeli “disagreement” over the security measures for the Philadelphi Corridor is not unlikely to reoccur, even if a compromise is reached with US mediation.
He argued that if Netanyahu insists on keeping the Israeli military presence in Gaza, it is hard to see how the conflict there can end. In the case of protracted conflict, even if at low intensity, the borders between Egypt and Gaza will continue to be part of the bigger problem. Worse still, neither Blinken nor US President Joe Biden is willing to promise anything close to a commitment to curbing any future Israeli military attacks against Gaza.
In the analysis of several sources informed on the path of the US-Egypt-Qatar mediation between Israel and Hamas, it is not very clear whether the Americans want to end the war or just want to end it for now. These sources say that it seems clear that the outgoing US administration does not want to see a wider regional conflict in the six weeks leading up to the US presidential elections in November.
However, they add, it is not as clear that the administration is really opposed to the Israeli war on Gaza in general.
According to one retired senior Egyptian diplomat who worked on the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations before, it is standard for US administrations to say that they are working for peace and even for a Palestinian state, but then to do everything to support Israel when it is acting systematically to make it practically impossible for such a state to see the light and consequently for peace to be achieved.
He added that irrespective of the positions of the consecutive US administrations that have been involved in the management of the Arab-Israeli struggle, especially since the 1967 War, Israel does not want to see a Palestinian state. It does not want to return the Arab occupied territories, but it does want normalisation deals with the Arab states, especially those that have not been involved in the Arab-Israeli wars.
For this reason, he said, Israel has almost always had the unconditional support of the US and to a great extent also of the UN.
The profound worry that these diplomatic and other sources are sharing today is also to be found in the memoirs of four Egyptian foreign ministers who have been involved in the Arab-Israeli struggle and the negotiations for “a permanent and comprehensive Middle East Peace.”
ISRAELI PROCRASTINATION: In a memoir published in 2011, Nabil Al-Arabi, a former Egyptian foreign minister, spoke at length about an Israeli scheme that aimed to give Israel the chance to keep the Arab territories it has occupied by military force.
Taba, Camp David, and the Separation Wall: Battles of Diplomacy from the UN Security Council to the International Court of Justice is the title of the over 300-page memoir published by Al-Shorouk in Cairo. It allows this seasoned diplomat, who died last month, to share his revealing account of the extent to which Israel could go to consolidate its military engineered status quo.
Al-Arabi shares recollections of the Egyptian legal battle to retain Taba as part of the overall restoration of Sinai, which Israel occupied during its 1967 War on Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Jordan. Al-Arabi wrote that Israel tried hard, but failed, to establish that Taba was not within the sovereign Egyptian borders with Mandate Palestine.
Al-Arabi’s memoirs offer a full account of the work of a highly competent team of Egyptian diplomats, especially those with solid legal backgrounds, military officers, and professors of history, law, and geography.
“It was in December 1981, [just a few months] before the scheduled Israeli withdrawal from Sinai [in line with the Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel] that was due in April 1982, when the Israelis decided to start a squabble about demarcation points,” Al-Arabi wrote. For four consecutive years, under his supervision, the Egyptian team had to work on collecting sufficiently compelling evidence to get Egypt to win arbitration over Taba.
For Al-Arabi, the issue was more layered. Israel, he argued in his memoir, was typically stalling and trying to get something it was not entitled to, with considerable complacency meeting its attempts from many other countries and organisations, especially the US.
The history of this stalling, he wrote, goes back to the summer of 1967 when the UN Security Council issued its Resolution 242 that called for a ceasefire in the war without calling for Israel to immediately withdraw from the Arab territories it had occupied using military force and in violation of international law.
Al-Arabi argued that there was nothing coincidental in this, as Israel was trying to pull Egypt into a military confrontation when it started an attack on a Jordanian village in November 1966, forcing then Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser to take retaliatory action a few months later by announcing a plan to block the Straits of Tiran to all shipping both to and from Israel.
Nasser’s decision was announced on 21 May, just a few days before the 5 June 1967 War broke out that led to Israel occupying all of Sinai, Gaza, which had previously been under Egyptian administrative authority, the West Bank, parts of Jordanian territories, and the Syrian Golan Heights.
Clearly, Al-Arabi wrote, Israel wanted to create a crisis that would lead to a war. Prior to the launch of the war, he added, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, without any consultations with his government, had declined a request from the then UN secretary-general for Israel to take measures that could have helped to reduce the tension on the ground.
The UN Security Council, he added, had also failed to address such a clearly pressing issue.
THE US KNEW: According to talks on the issue that Al-Arabi had several years down the road with senior US officials in office in 1967, Washington knew that Israel was planning “something”, but it did not have the details.
In the words of several Egyptian diplomats who were on the Arab-Israeli desk at the Foreign Ministry in Egypt, this was not an unusual line for the Americans to take. According to one diplomat who served in Washington, this line is not exactly a disclaimer, because it would be hard for Washington to argue that they are in the dark about what their best Middle East ally is planning, especially when the US mission to “the UN acts to enable Israeli objectives and when many in Washington act to provide Israel with intelligence information to serve its plans.”
This, the diplomat said, is not to say that the US always has a say, “at least today”, in what Israel does and does not do, even if things were different in previous decades. “The Americans always know, and more often than not they are informed by the Israelis, or they have intelligence information that the Israelis do not deny,” he added.
In his memoirs, Al-Arabi argued that in 1967, whether or not they were in the full picture about what Israel was up to, the Americans did not mind Israel launching its war, if only to contain Egypt. Neither Israel nor the US was willing to tolerate the influence that Egypt was gaining at the time.
The level of US support for Israeli schemes may or may not vary according to who is in the Oval Office at the time, but it is certainly a factor, Al-Arabi said. At times, he argued, some US officials would be particularly useful for Israeli purposes, and of those Henry Kissinger, a former US National Security advisor and former US secretary of state, was the most biased towards Israel.
This, he said, was very clear in the obvious attempt of Kissinger to impose de facto American influence at the Middle East Peace Conference that convened in Geneva after the 6 October 1973 War and to marginalise any significant role for the former Soviet Union, despite the fact that technically speaking the conference was under the auspices of the UN.
Al-Arabi’s memoirs show that it was never just Kissinger who was there for Israel. It was also not just about the Jewish identity of Kissinger or for that matter Madeline Albright, US secretary of state in the 1990s. Instead, it was a choice of US foreign policy to try to give Israel leeway. This, he wrote, was the case in the 1980s when Egypt and Israel were pursuing legal arbitration over Taba. At the time, he recalled, the US proposed for Egypt and Israel to pursue a bilateral compromise instead of the arbitration process.
Al-Arabi’s memoirs remind readers that it was Kissinger who coined the “step-by-step” approach to peace, with the launch of the Arab-Israeli Peace Talks after the Geneva Conference that opened on 18 January 1974, only to give Israel the chance to stall on doing what it takes to honour international law and peace commitments.
In 1978, while a member of the Egyptian delegation that joined former President Anwar Al-Sadat at the Jimmy Carter-hosted Camp David talks with then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, Al-Arabi decided to share with Sadat his concern over Israel’s intentions.
“This step-by-step scheme has been used over the years to waste time while Israel has continued to expand its settlements on the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967,” said a Palestinian diplomatic source at the end of the 2007 US-hosted Palestinian-Israeli talks in Annapolis. This was effectively the last round of settlement talks between the Palestinian Authority (PA), that came to life in 1993 after the Oslo Accords, whose concept was designed on the step-by-step approach.
Signed at the White House on 13 September 1993 by then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and foreign minister Shimon Peres, the Oslo Accords should have brought about a Palestinian state in 1998.
Speaking prior to the Hamas operation against Israel of 7 October last year, a senior Hamas member said that all attempts to get a Palestinian state through decades of Palestinian “compromises, concessions, and security cooperation with Israel” have failed miserably. Israel, he said, “does not give anything for the love of peace; it only gives when it fears. This is why it agreed to have peace talks with the Egyptians and to return Sinai after the October War.”
Today, informed Egyptian sources say that this is precisely what Hamas leaders refer to in their conversations with the Egyptian and Qatari mediators each time they pass on a message from the US of a gradual Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. “Hamas says it will not fall into the trap and that it knows Israeli schemes too well to give in to any promises,” said one of the sources.
“They say that if Israel wants its hostages, it needs to pull out its troops from Gaza and to agree to a sustainable ceasefire,” he added.
According to the same source, there is no profound difference among the Hamas leaders on this matter. In fact, he added that some within the PA now say that in retrospect it was a mistake to go too far with the step-by-step approach that has not granted the Palestinians any significant rights.
FRANK DECEIT: In the first and second volumes of his memoirs that came out in 2017 and 2019, Amr Moussa, Egypt’s former foreign minister and former Arab League secretary-general, says that the peace process that was supposed to end the Israeli occupation of the Arab territories and to lead to a viable Palestinian state has yielded nothing or almost nothing.
“There was no real peace process; it was just a process of utter deceit,” Moussa stated in the first of the two volumes that were published by Al-Shorouk under the title of My Testimony.
Moussa, who was foreign minister in 1991 and Arab League secretary-general between 2001 and 2011, is very, perhaps more, critical in his memoirs of the role of the US. And like Al-Arabi, he makes it clear that Kissinger and Albright were particularly obvious in their exercise of bias.
Kissinger, Moussa recalls in the first volume of the memoirs, called then Egyptian foreign minister Mohamed Al-Zayat at the start of the October War to tell him that Egypt needed to stop the war and to go back to the disengagement lines of 5 October. If it did not do so, he said, Israel would end up winning.
Starting on 13 October 1973 and over subsequent weeks, with Kissinger as National Security advisor to then US President Richard Nixon, the US sent Israel 23 flights of military aid. This support, Moussa wrote, was certainly instrumental in helping Israel make the breach into Egypt almost a week after the crossing of Egyptian troops from the west to the east side of the Suez Canal and the fall of the Bar Lev Line.
This breach failed to force a total retreat of the Egyptian forces from the eastern side to the western side of the Suez Canal, and it also failed to get the Israelis to withdraw from the city of Suez. This Egyptian resilience helped to pave the way for UN Security Council Resolution 338 on 22 October 1973. According to Moussa, despite all the diplomatic and political attempts and pressure, Israel failed to get the UN Security Council resolution to demand a return to the state of affairs of 5 October.
However, in line with its policy of stalling, Moussa recalled, despite UN Security Council Resolution 338 and Resolution 339, Israel kept up its acts of belligerency in an attempt to push the line.
In both the first and second volumes of his memoirs, Moussa talks at length about how Israel is in a continuous state of doing just this in negotiations from the Cairo meetings of 1995 to the 2007 Annapolis talks. Despite the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, successive Israeli governments are always trying to play games to delay the Palestinian negotiators and to get them to agree to more concessions while it builds more illegal settlements on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, abuses Palestinian resources, and launches wars on Palestinians in Gaza.
In their memoirs, both Al-Arabi, a judge at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2004, and Moussa, Arab League secretary-general at the time, talk at length about how Israel tried to give unfounded legitimacy to the Separation Wall it built on the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the West Bank and how it pushed away any recognition of the ICJ advisory opinion that the construction of the wall and its associated regime is contrary to international law.
In press statements he has made since the start of the current Israeli war on Gaza, Moussa has reiterated positions he had made before during his years as foreign minister and Arab League secretary-general to the effect that Israel is enjoying unjustified and devastating impunity when it comes to international law, not just in terms of the occupation of Palestinian and other Arab territories but also in terms of its practices in those territories.
In the first volume of his memoirs, Moussa talks at length of the impunity Israel has been enjoying with its unchecked nuclear programme, emphasised by the US-imposed indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1995.
According to a retired diplomat who worked on the file in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, it was clear right from the beginning that the appeal of the 1995 NPT Review Conference for “the establishment of an effectively verifiable Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological, and their delivery” would end up excluding any serious talks about Israel’s nuclear capacities and allow Israel to put pressure through the US on Arab countries who have not joined the conventions that ban chemical and biological weapons and call for their destruction.
Effectively, Moussa wrote in his memoirs, Israel is a nuclear state that is exempted from the NPT inspection regime. “This is a direct threat to Egypt and its security” irrespective of the Egyptian commitment to the Palestinian cause.
“Egypt has been consumed with the Palestinian cause since 1948,” he wrote. This, he added, continued to be the case with the rule of the Free Officers after 1952. Egyptians, he further wrote, have always been very sympathetic with the plight of the Palestinian people, who were repeatedly massacred by Israel from Deir Yassin in the 1940s to Sabra and Shatila in the 1980s and Jenin in the 2000s.
Egypt has supported the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and defended the rights of Palestinian refugees and Palestinians under Israeli occupation in the UN, Moussa wrote. This, he said was a commitment that was passed from Abdel-Nasser to Sadat, who tried to get the Palestinians on board with the peace talks in the 1970s, to former president Hosni Mubarak, who allowed the PLO to set up a political branch in Cairo following the Israeli invasion of Beirut in the early 1980s.
BORDERS NOT EXISTENCE: According to Moussa, a commitment to Palestinian statehood has been an embedded objective of Egyptian foreign policy.
However, he added, it has been clear that Israel was not going to do what it takes to allow the Palestinians to have their state. In his statement before the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991, after the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli prime minister at the time, made an unequivocal statement that he could not allow a Palestinian state.
In their respective memoirs, both Ismail Fahmi and Ibrahim Kamel, successive foreign ministers on the eve of Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in November 1977 through the Camp David negotiations in 1978, recall repeated “arrogant” and “intransigent” statements from Israeli officials that excluded any possibility of allowing a Palestinian state. They both refer to the repeated statements against a Palestinian state by Begin, who signed the Peace Treaty with Sadat in the White House with US president Carter.
In his memoir Negotiating for Peace in the Middle East, published in several editions by different publishers, Fahmi argues that it was hard to assume that Israel or for that matter the US, whose policies in the second half of 1970s were mostly designed by Kissinger, had any serious intention of establishing a Palestinian state.
Equally, in his memoirs, Peace Lost in Camp David, Kamel says that it was clear that what Israel was after was a deal with Egypt, with a few lines about a vague commitment to negotiate with the Palestinians for some sort of self-rule in some parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but nothing more.
While Both Fahmi and Kamel resigned over disagreements with Sadat on the management of the negotiations with Israel, both Al-Arabi and Moussa, younger diplomats at the time, argue that despite the fact that it was shocking when it happened, Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977 was really a game-changer in that it forced the US and Israel to move towards a deal that would allow Egypt to regain Sinai.
Originally, Fahmi wrote, the October War prompted the US to intervene in support of Israel, both politically and militarily. Moreover, he added, the US wanted to end the oil embargo that the Saudis and other Arab oil-producing countries imposed on the West, including the US. He added that like the Israelis, the Americans were not committed to a fair and comprehensive settlement.
According to Moussa, however, it was Sadat’s “brave political coup” that forced a new dynamic, irrespective of the details of the negotiations and the final outcome of the Peace Treaty.
In his memoirs, Kamel quotes Sadat in an interview with October, an Egyptian weekly magazine, when he said in a moment of frustration over the path of peace talks that “it seems that Israel does not understand the significance of my visit to Jerusalem, which offered them a lot more than they could have dreamt of.”
In his memoirs, Al-Arabi argues that Sadat’s visit was a game-changer for the entire Arab-Israeli dynamic. However, he stresses that the ultimate game-changer was the June 1967 War that shifted the Arab-Israeli conflict from “a battle of existence to a battle of borders”. Prior to the June War, Israel was not sure that the Arabs would accept its existence, but after the war it knew that it was now in an extended process of negotiating the borders of this existence.
According to an Egyptian official who has served in Israel, it seems now that Netanyahu wants to use his current war on Gaza to rework the parameters that define the management of the borders between Gaza, which he effectively has fully reoccupied, and Egypt. This, the official said, is not just about the Philadelphi Corridor that Netanyahu is still not willing to quit, but also about the Rafah Crossing, whose mode of operation he wants to alter.
Equally, he added, Netanyahu seems set to rework the mode of operation of the Israeli borders with Gaza, and for that matter with Lebanon.
He argued that it would be a mistake to look at the Netanyahu’s position on the Philadelphi Corridor away from his wider scheme for the Israeli borders with Gaza and other neighbouring Arab countries, or for that matter from his plans to impose stricter control over the West Bank including Areas A, B, and C, irrespective of any contractual agreements between Israel and the PA.
Egyptian officials say that Egypt is working hard with the Qataris and Americans to secure a ceasefire for the sake of the devastated civilians in Gaza, but that there is little hope that this ceasefire, if reached, would be anything other than a temporary arrangement before Israel, under Netanyahu or another prime minister, again works to impose its parameters on borders that were never officially defined.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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