Will Israel Regret the Peace Treaty with Egypt?

If a hostile regime replaces Mubarak, Israel may have given up the Sinai in exchange not for permanent peace, but for a mere thirty-year truce.

If Hosni Mubarak is succeeded by a genuinely democratic government in Egypt, Israel has little reason to be worried. In history, liberal democracies have seldom gone to war with each other. Democratic governments must answer to their electorates, and their voters usually demand that they concentrate on social and economic development rather than engaging in foreign military adventures. But it is unlikely that Egypt’s next government will be democratic.

In the worst case, the Jewish State will have ended up giving up Sinai, with its airbases and oilfields, in exchange not for permanent peace, but for a thirty-year plus truce. With this wisdom of hindsight, does this deal still look good for Israel?

Elliot Jager, the editor of the online magazine Jewish Ideas Daily, who is certainly no dove when it comes to Israel’s policy in the Middle East, took a surprisingly sanguine view:

For the past 30 years Egypt has been neutralized as a confrontation state. In those years, Israel defended itself against two violent Palestinian uprisings, two Lebanon wars, Hamas’s aggression from Gaza, and Iran’s drive for the atomic bomb – without having to divert resources to its southern front. And there were diplomatic and economic advantages to the relationship as well, including the fact that 40 percent of the natural gas used by Israel is imported from Egypt.

Jager also speculated on the implications for the future of the current upheaval in Egypt.

Is the lesson, then, that Israeli leaders should abandon the possibility of reaching an accommodation with the Palestinians or Syrians? Not at all. Rather, it is that the cornerstones of any deal must take account of the possibility that the successors of the peacemakers might reject peace. For any future accord, the Egypt-Israel treaty, designed for a worst-case scenario and providing demilitarization, strategic depth, and early-warning-plus-verification procedures, remains the best template.

Jager asserts that this lesson has been learned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In his June 2009 speech at Bar Ilan University, in which he first declared his support for a two state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state, he outlined the precise parameters that were necessary for peace. In that speech, he declared that the establishment of a Palestinian state was conditional on it being demilitarized, deprived of the control of its airspace, and the establishment of effective security measures that would prevent the importation of arms into the Palestinian state.

Yet, Jager overestimates the value for Israel of the treaty with Egypt and underestimates the consequences of its renunciation by any regime that succeeds Hosni Mubarak.  In the first place, it is not clear that in the absence of a treaty there would have been another war with Egypt. Jordan only signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. But the two countries have not battled each other since 1967. The more compelling example though is Syria, the most virulent enemy with which Israel shares a frontier. The two countries have only exchanged fire once since 1967; and that was in 1982 when Israel, entering Lebanon to wipe out PLO military bases, encountered Syrian forces that were already in the country.

Nor is it clear that the peace treaty would have prevented Egypt from going to war if either Sadat or Mubarak had chosen to do so. Throughout the period when the peace treaty was in place, as Omri Ceren notes on Commentary magazine’s Contentions blog, “television programs … vilified Jews, and official government propaganda… scapegoated the Jewish State for every imaginable social ill.” Thus a domestic constituency for peace and reconciliation with a Jewish state was never created, making it easy for any Egyptian president to mobilize the population for a new war with Israel.

Of course the possibility of war would increase if a new Egyptian government would abrogate its treaty with Israel. But even in the absence of all-out war, a hostile Egypt could hurt Israelis as a staging ground for missiles or terrorist attacks.

With the Palestinians, Israel has less room to maneuver. Israel’s security fence has greatly reduced the threat of suicide bombers. Still, the territories that Israel would supposedly hand over are much more confined than the Sinai, making the creation of effective buffer zones more difficult. And, a Palestinian state would be much closer to Israel’s centers of population. If the West Bank were ever to become a base of anti-Israel violence like Gaza, most Israelis would become vulnerable to attack.

Ultimately, Israel cannot afford to make any concessions to any regime until it embraces liberal institutions and accepts the legitimate place of Israel and Jews in the Middle East.

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