Steven A. Cook
Foreign Policy, Feb. 27, 2025
“After Oct. 7, [Egypt’s deployments] should raise alarm bells. We have learned our lesson. We must monitor Egypt closely and prepare for every scenario.”
In this extended moment of history, events that were once unimaginable now regularly come to pass—and another item may soon join the list. Middle East analysts have started to ask whether the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty is durable. The last 16 months of war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip have added new tension to a relationship that has often been under public strain.
During previous dust-ups between Egypt and Israel, officials in both countries went to great lengths to ensure the integrity of the treaty. That could be changing.
On Jan. 6, Marc Zell, an American lawyer living in Israel, posted on X that the Egyptians had deployed large numbers of forces in the Sinai Peninsula, including “large numbers of troops, the construction of anti-tank obstacles, [and] the deployment of armored divisions.” There is a lot of misinformation and disinformation on X, but Zell’s tweets caught my attention because not only has the war in Gaza heightened friction between Cairo and Jerusalem, but also because Zell is likely well-connected in both Israel and the United States given that he is the chairman of Republican Overseas Israel and general counsel for Republicans Overseas. I don’t mean to cast any aspersions, but it is just that I have a fairly good idea of how Israel works, and Zell seems like the kind of individual to whom senior Israeli officials might relay sensitive information.
When I asked an Egyptian contact about the X post, he made the case that everything the Egyptian military does in the Sinai Peninsula is subject to Israel’s approval and that the activity was all fairly routine. Although he made a compelling argument, it has been hard not to notice the deterioration of the Egypt-Israel relationship over the last six weeks. Of course, social media has exacerbated this tension with fake photos of Egyptian tanks in places they are not supposed to be and old footage from the Sinai alleging new violations. There was even a deepfake video of an Israeli officer publicly thanking Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi for his cooperation with Israel. This prompted the Israel Defense Forces to issue a statement emphasizing that the video was bogus and warning that outside actors were seeking to undermine Egyptian-Israeli relations. ….SOURCE