MK Yuval Steinitz is arguing that the United States should cut its foreign aid to Egypt by (a symbolic) $200 million.
Egypt effectively condoned Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, and has since stood by and allowed Hamas to build an army, MK Yuval Steinitz (Likud) wrote in a letter to the US Senate on Sunday. “Egypt’s de facto behavior in the field supports Hamas,” he said. Steinitz wrote the letter at the request of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona), with whom he chairs a joint US-Israeli committee on defense and foreign policy. “As long as Egypt is not required to pay a real price for this behavior, weapons and financial aid will continue to flow into the hands of Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza,” he wrote. Steinitz asked the Senate to approve a bill recently passed by the House of Representatives to freeze $200 million of the approximate $1.3 billion in annual US aid to Egypt each year until the Egyptian government changes its policy toward smuggling near and across its 14-kilometer border with the Gaza Strip. According to the IDF, Hamas has smuggled 20,000 rifles, 6,000 antitank missiles and 100 tons of explosives into the Gaza Strip since last summer. Steinitz said efforts by the Egyptians to stop the smuggling were ineffective and half-hearted.
The New York Times, not unsurprisingly finds all the reasons that Egypt should not be judged harshly.
Over all, Egypt’s relationship with Hamas is complicated by domestic political concerns. On one hand, analysts said, it is not in Egypt’s interest to improve relations with Hamas, an offshoot of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. On the other, Egypt does not want to be seen to be helping Israel over the Palestinians. “I do not think that Egypt is re-examining its relationship with Hamas, because any legitimacy for Hamas negatively affects the legitimacy of the Egyptian regime,†said Emad Gad, an analyst at the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “Any success for Hamas is a success for the Muslim Brotherhood.†When Egypt opened its border with Gaza in September to allow Hamas militants to pass through, analysts in Egypt said that it was probably part of some deal. Newspapers in Egypt reported that Hamas turned over a wanted militant from Al Qaeda in exchange for the passage, a deal the government never confirmed. “This would be a political crisis for Egypt,†Mr. Gad said. “People will say that Egypt is cooperating with Israel against the Palestinians. And Egypt cannot do this.†Analysts added that Egypt had cultivated an unofficial relationship with Hamas partly because it was such a large force that it could not be ignored and partly in the hope of bringing greater unity between Hamas and the Fatah faction of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
The Times doesn’t explain if the greater unity between Hamas and Fatah means that both will be more or less favorably disposed to making peace with Israel. That it doesn’t address that question says something. The Jerusalem Post ends with
The Egyptian government has called the accusations against them “baseless” and harmful to Egyptian-American relations.
I think this is actually accurate. American wants Egypt to democratize. Egypt isn’t.
Egypt could support American policy in the UN. It doesn’t.
So the only active element of Egyptian-American relations is the aid the United States gives Egypt. Thus if Israel gives less to Egypt, it will harm those relations.
But because Egypt is supposedly supporting the chimera of peace the administration will fight the effort being coordinated between Steinitz and some senators to penalize Egypt for its malfeasance. That is the nature of the peace process. If an Arab country or group says that it supports peace it gets inoculated against any actions or positions it takes against real peace. The Bush administration is really no different from any administration that came before it. But because the President has stated that he wants actions to match words, it’s more disappointing that this administration fails to stick to its standards.
Crossposted at Soccer Dad.
