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Friday March 19, 1999

Just how warm are relations between Israel, Egypt?

BEN LYNFIELD
Jerusalem Post Service

JERUSALEM -- Twenty years after making peace, Egypt and Israel apparently are using different thermometers to gauge the warmth of their relations.

This became apparent during a gathering last week organized by the Israel Council on Foreign Relations. The event featured both Egyptian and Israeli speakers.

The Egyptians -- Salah Bassiouny, president of the Egyptian Peace Movement, and Abd el-Monem Said, director of Al Ahram Institute for Strategic Studies -- sought to expunge the term "cold peace" from the Egyptian-Israeli vocabulary.

But the Israelis -- President Ezer Weizman and former ambassador to Egypt Shimon Shamir -- said relations could definitely be warmer.

The differences reflect the mixed feelings on both sides about the September 1978 peace treaty. There is a satisfaction that the treaty has held its own through trials and crises. But Egypt's hopes for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace have gone unrealized, while Israel's aspirations for a broad fabric of relations with Cairo now appear beyond reach, if not conception.

Bassiouny, a former Egyptian ambassador to the Soviet Union, said the term "cold peace" is inaccurate.

"If you look deeper you will find that relations between Egypt and Israel are much more normal than the relations of Egypt with many of the countries with whom we have diplomatic relations."

In Said's view, relations during the 1980s were marred by such factors as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the intifada, but "warmed up beyond all the known standards of the Middle East" after the Madrid Conference in 1991.

From 1991 to 1996, he said, Egyptian-Israeli trade accounted for 8 to 10 percent of total Egyptian trade. In 1995, he added, about 30,000 Egyptians visited Israel -- the largest number of Egyptian visitors to any Middle East country other than for work or pilgrimage.

Shamir noted that the treaty has been very successful in keeping peace between the two countries, but said the relationship is actually "more problematic" than Bassiouny and Said indicated.

"In the area of cooperative relations, which is the essence of peace building, much more could have been done for the benefit of both sides: more joint ventures, more trade, more economic cooperation," Shamir said.

"Yes, we have learned much about each other. But after 20 years of peace there is still too much hostile speech and loud voices that speak in Egypt about Israel in a language that is not congruent with commitment to peace," Shamir said.

Weizman, who has been involved in Egyptian-Israeli relations since Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977, blamed the "cold peace" on the absence of a resolution of the Palestinian issue.

"If there is a bit of a cold peace -- and I think it's not as warm as it should be -- it is because the Palestinian problem has not yet been solved," he said. "I'm sure it will be, and the relationship with Egypt will be back at what it should be."

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