By Soroor Ahmed, TwoCircles.net,
President Anwar Sadat paid the price of Camp David Accords with Israel within three years of signing them on September 17, 1978. His successor Hosni Mubarak, then his vice president, is likely to go out after three decades.
Though the Camp David factor is not being discussed much in the international media and many would dub it as over-stretched theory there is no denying the fact that the peace treaty with Israel is taking its toll on the dictatorship in Egypt.
Sadat in 1978 signed treaty with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in Camp David in the presence of the then United States President, Jimmy Carter. Both Sadat and Begin subsequently got the Nobel Peace Prize. But the Egyptian President was assassinated by junior army officers while he was attending the military parade on the occasion of the eighth anniversary of the 1973 Arab-Israel War on October 6, 1981––also known as Yom Kippur War.
A scene of the March of Millions in Egypt on 1st Feb 2011
The argument in favour of the Accords was that Egypt would get its land back from Israel, which the latter occupied in Six-Day War in 1967 and will have control over the Suez Canal. With no war against Israel the economy of the country would boom. Yes this, to some extent, happened. Egypt economy is doing relatively well as the growth rate is 6.5 per cent, yet the country is in political turmoil.
Herein lies the crux of the matter. As dictators survive on the bogey or fear of external aggression so that they could easily crush any dissent at home the Camp David Accords deprived the Egyptian rulers of their great political plank.
One thing needs to be understood carefully. When Sadat was assassinated in full public view it was the killing of a lone personality in protest against, what many Arabs in general felt, the great betrayal of the larger cause. So he perished in three years. In case of Mubarak the issue is not just one man, but the entire dictatorship. So it is taking three decades and not just three years.
The tinpot Arab dictators, monarchs and Emirs literally owe their throne initially to Great Britain and France and now to the United States of America. In pre-1990 years when Soviet Union was a power it too used to shape the destiny of some of the rulers of the region.
But now in this unipolar world the situation is slightly different. If Egypt really overthrows the American-backed puppet government what would be the response of Israel, the police outpost of the lone, but tottering Super Power? Will it act like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which on September 22, 1980, that is one and half years after the February 11, 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, attacked that country. Saddam got open support from the United States and Arab countries for this act. It is other thing that a decade later Saddam, under compulsion, turned anti-US.
In similar way the Zionists’ state at present has hawk like Benjamin Netanyahu as the Prime Minister, who last year did not wait a minute to attack the Turkish flotilla carrying relief materials for the besieged citizens of Gaza Strips. This act further antagonized Turkey, which lately abandoned its six decades long neutrality and started siding with Arabs.
With Iran and Turkey having elected Islamic government and are coming closer, notwithstanding several differences, the likely change in Egypt is certainly going to pose a huge challenge to Israel. With Soviet Union buried deep in history the situation seems very much uncertain.
The Arab rulers, be it the frontline tyrants, or the oil-rich Gulf monarchs, used to keep their armies less to fight Israel but more to crush their own people. There is no denying the fact that Israel single-handedly demolished Egypt (which had a very well armed military), Syria, Jordan and Lebanon in Six-Day War of June 1967. The Egyptian army fled from the battlefield and almost their entire air force was destroyed by the Israelis in just 185 minutes of battle. Hosni Mubarak was one of the Air Force officer of Egypt then and went to become Air Chief Marshal in 1973.
The Arab armies’ performance in the two earlier wars of 1948 and 1956 too was far from impressive. In contrast poorly-armed Hizbullah, a non-state actor in Lebanon, fought much bravely the Israeli aggression about five years back. It broke the myth of invincibility of Israel.
It was only in the fourth and the last battle in 1973 that Sadat’s Egypt and Hafez-al-Asad’s Syria jointly attacked Israel to take back some land occupied in 1967 but they later lost the earlier initiative in the 21 days of war. Needless to mention America stood solidly behind Israel then.
It needs to be recalled that Sadat’s predecessor, Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser, the villain of 1967 humiliating defeat, would only boast himself as the champion of Arab nationalism, but proved disastrous in the battlefield. When many members of Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan-ul-Muslameen, which is quite active even now, volunteered to join the battle against Israel Nasser deemed it fit to crush their power rather than utilized their help as he felt threatened by their growing influence. Many of its top leaders were executed or dumped into jail and there was no big mass movement as the fear of Israel was invoked. Nasser was more interested in sending his army to fish in the troubled water of Yemeni civil war in those days.
Today apparently there is no scope to whip up the apprehension of danger of invasion from Israel. Sadat and his deputy Mubarak never thought in their wildest imagination that the Camp David Accords would prove so disastrous for the dictatorship in Egypt. The Tunisian revolution only gave a spark to decades of anger and resentment.
Since the Arab rulers use to have army more for the purpose of crushing their own people––they even borrow from friendly countries––the other institutions could not grow at all. Pakistan is the one country, which supplies army to prolong the reign of these despots. For example, King Husain of Jordan took the help of Pakistani army, not to fight Israel, but to crush the revolt by a large Palestinian refugees living in his country in September 1970. Pakistani army serves in many Gulf countries even now too.
An aberration in the Arab world is Hamas, which came to power with the help of ballots on January 26, 2006. The election was free and fair and monitored by international observers. That was simply possible because under the agreement with Irael the Palestinian Authority cannot have its own army. Though the pact was unjustified the absence of army at least allowed the growth of a democratic Islamic movement in that part of Levant, so close to Israel. What is strange is that though Israel and the US always wanted dictators in neighbourhood they, in one way or the other, are becoming––of course by default––catalysts to change, be it in Palestine or Egypt.
The tragedy is that Hamas is being denied legitimacy and was ostracised by the world under pressure from democratic United States and Israel. The Americans and their western democratic allies did the same when Islamic Salvation Front almost won the election in Algeria in early 1990s. They backed the army to crush them. Now the time has come for them to realize that their earlier victories were perhaps short-lived ones.
(Soroor Ahmed is the author of The Jewish Obsession.)
[Photo Courtesy: theaustralian.com.au]