The shallow Egypt-Israel peace

One of the shining examples of peacemaking in the Middle East always comes back to the 1978 Camp David Accords. Peace between Israel and Egypt is held up as the prize package, even though no other Arab country has waged war on Israel in the intervening years, in spite of not having a signed peace treaty.

But the peace between Egypt and Israel is full of stories like these reported by Commentary’s Eric Trager:

For the most part, tourism between Israel and Egypt has long been a one-way affair. In this vein, Israeli tourism to Egypt peaked in 1999 at 415,000 visitors, whereas Egyptian tourism to Israeli reached a high of merely 28,000 visitors in 1995.

[…] But even for those Egyptians who are financially able to visit Israel and ideologically undeterred, the Egyptian government has done its fair share to build additional barriers to Egyptian-Israeli contact. According to an Egyptian evangelical pastor who asked that his name be withheld, Egyptians who wish to travel to Israel must apply for special single-use passports – a process that automatically places them on an official government register. Upon returning to Egypt, they are frequently questioned by state security officials and closely monitored. Egyptian friends who have expressed their desire to visit Israel have confirmed this account.

Moreover, even when Egyptians seek to interact with Israelis without visiting the Jewish state, Egyptian security services may intervene. One Egyptian academic, who asked that his name be withheld, shared the following story. Recently, he had been invited to an event sponsored by the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, and intended to attend. Shortly before the event, however, Egyptian security services contacted him, “advising” him not to attend – the implication being that there would be retribution if he did otherwise. Apparently, Egyptian security had learned of his intention to attend the event by monitoring his mail.

If there were truly peace between Egypt and Israel, the Egyptian government wouldn’t be preventing its people from so much as attending an event at the Israeli Embassy.

And it is stories like these that are completely ignored by Jimmy Carter and the rest of the Camp David cheerleaders.

I might point out that there has also been this sort of peace between most other Arab nations and Israel since Camp David. And we’re not paying the other countries the $2 billion a year we pay Egypt in aid.