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.
The old guard media has also played a role. In recent weeks, some of Egypt’s talk show hosts were beating war drums. As another Egyptian friend remarked, “The media is currently behaving like their predecessors pre-1967 war.” Meanwhile, Israeli bloggers were casting aspersions on Sisi and demanding that Israel not make the same mistakes in the Sinai that it made in Lebanon with Hezbollah.
Against the background of the nonsense on X and the huffing and puffing of Egyptians and Israelis in more traditional media platforms, Israeli officials were calling out the Egyptians for violating the peace treaty. Israel’s new ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, accused Egypt of a “very serious violation” of the accord. Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, warned, “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.”
I am trying not to be an alarmist, but there are a lot of things that have happened over the last 16 months that I was previously led to believe would never happen. And the tension between Cairo and Jerusalem is quite real—these stories are not on the order of Mossad gum or Mossad sharks.
To some extent, the strain between Egypt and Israel is not surprising given the bloodshed of the last 16 months, but there is more going on here than the Egyptian government feeling outrage over Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip. No doubt there are millions of Egyptians who are deeply disturbed and concerned about the death toll and the humanitarian conditions in Gaza, but this should not obscure the fact that the Egyptian government was a full participant in the blockade of Gaza that began after Hamas took over the territory in 2007.
The more fundamental issue is that the Gaza war plays into Egypt’s long-running irritation over its separate 46-year-old peace with Israel. The treaty has benefitted Egypt, but from where many Egyptians sit, it has allowed the Israelis to pursue their interests around the region unencumbered while Washington’s embrace of Cairo—Anwar Sadat’s primary objective in seeking peace—has rendered Egypt a bystander in a region it is supposed to lead. Put in another way, many Egyptians do not like the peace treaty because it has made them weak.
The war in Gaza has repeatedly underlined this weakness. The Egyptian government has been impotent to stop the fighting, to provide humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians, and to prevent the Israelis from seizing the Philadelphi Corridor and the Rafah crossing. The Egyptians played an important role negotiating the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that began in January, but they were decidedly second fiddle to the Qataris. And the end of the fighting (for now) cannot erase the fact that the Egyptian government could do little more than take symbolic action against Israel during the war, including at least 10 Israel-critical U.N. resolutions and joining South Africa’s ICC case.
The crisis in Gaza has further diminished Sisi’s standing, who, in the last dozen years, lost whatever popular luster he had after overthrowing former President and Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi. The deployments in the Sinai are clearly a signal to Egyptians that Egypt is not so weak after all and that the fabled Egyptian armed forces will once again protect that national interest and Egyptian honor. Ramping up the tension with Israel and daring the Israelis to respond to Sinai deployments is a sound political strategy for Sisi. No matter the outcome, Sisi looks tough. Unless, of course, there is war.
As far as Israel goes, the Israeli government has sought clarification about the Sinai deployments through the established channel of the Multinational Force and Observers—but, well before that, some Israelis within the political class and the media had been spending a fair amount of time ringing alarms about Egypt’s actions. This raises the question of whether some Israelis want to highlight the issue—which Egyptians claim is not real—to make trouble for Sisi in Washington. Well before Egypt’s activities in the Sinai became an issue, there were analysts, members of Congress, and other observers who argued that the Egyptians should take in Palestinians from Gaza. U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” was just openly saying what these folks had been thinking for some time.
And herein lies the problem that makes the current tensions between Egypt and Israel so worrisome: The United States is totally absent. The 1979 peace treaty has been a pillar of U.S. policy for five decades, precluding the possibility of major war between the Arab states and Israel, thereby safeguarding regional stability. Even if you are bent on upending foreign policy as Trump seems to be, the importance of these ties should be self-evident. This is a moment when the U.S. national security advisor, secretary of state, and special Middle East envoy should be burning jet fuel to ensure that Egyptian-Israeli ties do not unravel. The fact that they are not underlines what was once imaginable but improbable: The United States is no longer an anchor of stability.
Let’s hope reason prevails in Cairo and Jerusalem.