The 46th anniversary of the Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel took place on 26 March this year. No one in Egypt thought of commemorating the occasion, and rightly so.
The reason is quite simple: with the death toll rising by the day in the Gaza Strip for the last 16 months, and the Israeli government determined to continue its aggression and its policy of forced displacement of the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, most Egyptians have forgotten that 46 years ago there were high hopes and great expectations of peace at last in the Middle East and with it recognition and respect for the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.
In the more than four decades since then, peace in the Middle East and the inherent right of the Palestinians to self-determination have almost disappeared under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy of permanent war on seven fronts, as he has been stressing over the past year in a way that befits his position as the leader of the most extreme-right coalition government in the history of Israel.
There are no indications at the present moment that things will change for the better in the foreseeable future. Not only has war become an instrument of policy in Israel, but also because of the unlimited, and unprecedented, US support for Israel, it has been able rain down destruction on the innocent and defenceless Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
When Israel violated the ceasefire agreement on Gaza signed on 15 January by closing all the crossings that link the Gaza Strip with the outside world, cutting off its electricity and water, and then resuming military operations, the US administration said that the United States was fully supportive of the Israeli government.
When late Egyptian president Anwar Al-Sadat signed the Peace Treaty with former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and former US president Jimmy Carter on 26 March 1979 at the White House in Washington, he could not have imagined that peace in the Middle East would become such a chimera in later decades. He genuinely believed that the treaty would open the way to a comprehensive, lasting, and just peace in the Middle East. His trust in the United States knew no bounds.
In retrospect, I would not fault those who did not share his confidence that the United States would be an indispensable partner of the Arabs and the Palestinians in the search for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East.
The Preamble of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty says that the signatories are “convinced of the urgent necessity of the establishment of a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace in the Middle East in accordance with Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338,” and that they are “convinced that the conclusion of a Treaty of Peace between Egypt and Israel is an important step in the search for comprehensive peace in the area and for the attainment of the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict in all its aspects.” It was on this basis that they signed the Peace Treaty.
The phrase “in all its aspects” is an implicit reference to the Palestinian question. In the Camp David Accords of 17 September 1978, particularly the Accord entitled “A Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” were explicitly recognised. However, these inalienable rights were not taken seriously either by the then Israeli prime minister, Begin, who put his signature to the accords, or by his successors, and particularly not by Netanyahu, who has done everything possible not only to deny the Palestinians of their legitimate rights, but also to dehumanise them and to attempt to dispossess them of their land and the land of their ancestors.
Over the past 46 years, the promise of a just and comprehensive peace has proven hard to attain, notwithstanding the Jordanian-Israeli Peace Treaty of 24 October 1994, the so-called Abraham Accords of September 2020, and the Declaration of Principles (the Oslo Accords) signed by the late Yasser Arafat in his then capacity as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in Washington on 13 September 1993.
If the forces of the extreme right in Israel, led by Netanyahu and the settler movement, had not almost scuttled the Oslo Accords, it is quite possible that the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel would never have occurred. In retaliation for those attacks, the ruling coalition in Israel has been undertaking a military campaign to implement the forced displacement of the Palestinians.
In March 1979, neither Al-Sadat nor Carter could have imagined that their goal of peace and an end to wars in the Middle East would face such insurmountable obstacles.
In this context, it should be noted that the Israeli Cabinet on 22 March approved the establishment of a body that will oversee “voluntary migration” from Gaza. According to the Israeli newspaper the Jerusalem Post, this body will be composed of representatives from various ministries and other institutions, including from the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Justice, Transportation, and Strategic Affairs, and from the Israeli Army, Shin Bet, and the Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT). According to the same source, the ongoing military operations in Gaza will facilitate the implementation of such migration.
Even more ominous was the declaration by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich that the Israeli Security Cabinet had approved a plan to grant what he called “independence,” in other words what I would argue is in fact annexation, to 13 Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Smotrich said that “we continue to lead a revolution of normalisation and regulation in the settlements… we raise the flag, build, and settle. This is another important step on the path to actual sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” the Israeli name for the West Bank.
Years hence, historians will likely argue that the above meant, for all practical purposes, the death knell of the Camp David Accords. The promise of a just, comprehensive, and durable peace in the Middle East is still far away, if not extinct.
* The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 27 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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