JERUSALEM – Egypt’s first round of presidential voting wrapped up on May 24th with the crop of viable candidates down to just a handful, and next door in Israel, policymakers are already scrambling to sort the bad options from the worse.
For all his faults, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak was a reliable, if remote, Israeli ally for three decades until his ouster in a popular uprising last year. Subsequent parliamentary elections over the winter brought an Islamist rout, with the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood winning half of all seats and even harder-line Salafis taking another quarter. It’s too early to tell if the next president will be an Islamist, but even if not, a new constitution could grant Egypt’s formerly rubber-stamp parliament real powers (the panel tasked with writing the charter has been suspended amid bickering over its own Islamist-heavy composition).
"The changes in Israeli-Egyptian ties will be wide and deep,” says Yoram Meital, chair of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. "Egypt is about to make a number of revisions to its security and foreign policies that many in Israel, particularly our decision makers, view with trepidation.”
Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat, signed the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978, followed a year later by a formal peace agreement — the first ever by an Arab leader. The deal has never been popular among Egyptians (Sadat paid for it with his life), and in the presidential campaigns since Mubarak’s ouster, Islamist and non-Islamist candidates alike have called for the treaty’s revision or outright annulment.
Israel officials most dread the prospect of an Islamist president. Aboul Fotouh regularly refers to Egypt’s neighbor as the "Zionist entity,” and the mainstream Brothers can themselves match any other Islamists for pure anti-Zionist and Judeophobic bombast. Morsi sat front row at a recent stadium rally as a preacher pledged the candidate would revive the Islamic caliphate, this time in Jerusalem: "Banish the sleep from the eyes of the Jews,” chanted an MC, "Come on, you lovers of martyrdom, you are all Hamas!” (In Arabic it rhymes.)
Jerusalem has legitimate cause for concern — of the five frontrunners, four have called for an overhaul of Camp David, Aboul Fotouh called it a "national security threat.”
(TO READ THIS COMPLETE ARTICLE GO TO Sleepless in Jerusalem – by Oren Kessler)
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