EGYPT/ISRAEL: The Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty Dying Out on the Borderline

Israeli emergency personnel stand near a bus after it was ambushed north of the Red Sea resort of Eilat August 18, 2011

“The toppling and the trial of Mubarak has altered scenarios that were already underway and hindered plans for the Middle East that were in the making under the auspices of ardent Zionists in Washington, Cairo and Tel Aviv.”

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat

 

The shooting attack on the Israeli bus, which could have conveniently been another school bus hadn’t it been for the school summer vacation, made its way up the list of world’s news headlines dwarfing the Tel Aviv’s demonstrations that have been swelling for the past weeks with hardly any tangible concern on the part of Netanyahu’s government, for those Tahrir square copycat rallies have confirmed Bibi as the new poster child for a prime minister leading a nation with troubling challenges of demographic changes exactly as he had already lectured Obama in the oval office last May.

Breaking news

Live coverage 
of the ambushed bus by the israeli channel

 The key tag/word in this top news is not the old mellow jazz of yet another Israeli bus hit by only god- or Mossad- knows who and followed by immediate and totally indiscriminate Israeli retaliation raids on Gaza but rather the brand-new mention of attackers and suicide bombers sneaking into Israel territories from Egypt Sinai desert where five Egyptian policemen were killed caught in the fire by an Israeli helicopter at the Egyptian Israeli border.

This piece of breaking news, if anything, is pointing the finger at a new kind of alleged terrorist attacks launched against the Jewish state of Israel from Egyptian land, namely Sinai which the Israeli media machine has been raving about the decline in its security situation and how this peninsula has recently become a safe haven for al-Qaeda members and a base for their training camps and terrorist attacks since the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was toppled in February.

The downfall of Mubarak has been a blow to the political corruption mafia not only in Egypt but the whole Middle East and Israel included. The toppling and trial of Mubarak has altered scenarios that were already underway and hindered plans for the Middle East that were in the making under the auspices of ardent Zionists in Washington, Cairo and Tel Aviv.

 Mubarak’s trial proceedings and fallouts.   

Mubarak 

inside  the defendant's cage in his trial session.

The trial of the ousted president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, happened to take place in the holy month of Ramadan, and for you who don’t know much about Ramadan; it is a month of fasting and abstinence from all sensual pleasures starting from dawn till sunset, but the only pleasure fasting Muslims are entitled to, or rather could get away with, during the whole month is oversleeping till late afternoons especially with this year’s Ramadan arriving in August, hottest month of the year.

Most of Egyptians woke up late, as usual, last Monday and by the time they shook a leg and turned on their TV sets they hardly caught the end of Mubarak’s trial session with the honorable judge adjourning the proceedings till September 5^th and also declaring that the coming sessions will not be televised again.

In other words, the show is over, the people’s vengeance, according to the ruling Egyptian military council’s understanding, has been satisfied and they had their fun of watching the ousted Mubarak and his two sons in the cage … who could ask for more, except, may be … for Mubarak.

The dictator who subjugated the Egyptians for more than 3 decades was gently wheeled out of the back door of the court escorted by his two sons and heavily guarded by a crew of seemingly relentless special forces who looked with their blackish outfits and sunglasses more like some balckwater agents.

Meanwhile, the pro democracy rebels of Egyptian youths, who courageously started this whole saga of the Egyptian uprising, were being cordoned by the military police forces in front of the court under the blazing sun and subjected to ruthless showers of stones and dirty words by the thugs of the still very much functioning Mubarak corporation.

It goes without saying that this whole trial is a farcical show that is going to drag out for a relatively long period of time, draining out the tide of revolution, dividing the public opinion on trivialities and rumors till it will have finally secured a legal trick to get Mubarak off the hook and help him flee the country and may be accept the Israeli generous offer for political asylum.

While some Egyptians are following the Mubarak trial to avenge the killing of their loved ones and others to see justice served after decades of political corruption Israel is one party that is closely watching this historical trial for a totally different reason.

For Tel Aviv the downfall of Mubarak is a turning point, not only in the modern history of Egypt, but in the overall Arab-Israeli conflict.  The toppling of Mubarak, the Zionists’ most strategic and strongest friend in the Middle East, has certainly been a game changer on part of the Israeli side. Watching that valuable Zionist pawn removed from the Arab-Israeli game has prompted Israel, while contemplating this so called Arab spring, to reconsider a lot of scenarios and contingency plans for how to deal with the volatile post- Mubarak Egypt.

Israel taking a free ride on the American speedy wagon. 

 Historically speaking, the Arab-Israeli conflict is by far an Egyptian-Israeli one. Ever since the establishment of the Jewish state and the fiercest political and military opposition to the Zionist agenda in the Middle East has been adopted by Egypt’s successive governments starting from 1948 till 1973 with its military engaged in four wars with Israel in just two decades.

With the signing of the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt the United States has been officially invited into the Middle East conflict as a major player and a so called peace broker but the truth of the matter is that Israel had been contriving ways, long before the Camp David accords, to not only drag the United States into the Middle Eastern swamp but moreover to do Tel Aviv’s dirty work and hopefully fight its wars for her in the region.

Emerging out of WWII as a world superpower the United States was apt to take the reins from the falling British Empire in the Middle East and embark on its own new imperial ambitious journey.

The newly established Jewish state needed the military and political leverage of the United States to help and secure the violent creation, perpetuation, and expansion of a state based on ethnic expulsion of the majority of indigenous inhabitants from their native home land of Palestine.

In their antiquated attempt to claim rights to a land, the founding Zionist fathers knew for a fact could only be attained through genocide rather than relying on some divine intervention or purported promise, Israel in her outdated claim, and knowing that neither history nor time is on her side, tried sometimes to take the short cut to its Middle-Eastern destination hitchhiking the free ride on the American speedy wagon.

Remembering the Lavon and USS Liberty affairs

The 1967 Israeli

Attack on the USS Liberty

The first attempts to militarily drag Uncle Sam in the Egyptian-Israeli conflict dates back to the early 1950s where the Mossad in its efforts to create enmity between Egypt and the United States hatched a plan to firebomb areas in Egypt where Americans gathered — and to make these attacks appear to be the work of Muslim extremists. The false flag operation was discovered and caused a scandal in Israel known as the “Lavon Affair” but few Americans have ever heard of it.

Some analysts suspect that the also little-known Israeli attack on the U.S. Navy ship USS Liberty may have been a similar false-flag operation.

Certainly, there is little doubt that the U.S. would have attacked Egypt if Liberty crewmembers had not succeeded, against all odds, in getting a distress signal out, causing Israel to fail in its attempt to sink the ship with all men aboard. In the end, 34 sailors were killed in the assault and over 170 were wounded. The ship limped back to port in Malta carrying on board its surviving crew who bore witness to the blatant Israeli duplicity and impunity.

Israel might not have been lucky enough to prompt the United States into launching a military attack against Egypt in 1967 in retaliation of the deliberate attack on the USS liberty but her luck changed in the October 1973 war when the most massive airlift in American history, engineered by Henry Kissinger under pressure from the Israeli lobby, was sent to Israel, preventing the inevitable Egyptian recapturing of Sinai especially after the astonishing Egyptian military operation of crossing the Suez Canal and demolishing the impregnable Israeli Bar Lev line which was dubbed the graveyard for Egyptian troops.

Camp David treaty rewards and drawbacks

On signing the Camp David accords Israel pledged to return back to Egypt the Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian land it had illegally annexed in its 1967 war of aggression … but that came with a heavy price

1- That treaty was an arrangement in which the Egyptian leader of the time, Anwar Sadat, whose one of his personal political ambitions from the moment he took office in 1970 was to relinquish his predecessor’s alliance with the Soviet Union and instead become the United States’ closest ally, next to Israel of course.

2- Signing the peace treaty with Israel, President Sadat stopped opposing Israel’s previous ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians thus removed the most populous and politically significant country from the Arab front opposing Israel’s illegal actions and led the way for other Arab nations to “normalize” relations with the abnormal situation in Palestine.

3- In return the United States agreed to give Egypt financial aid of more US tax money than any other nation, with the exception of Israel. Since 1979, Egypt has received an annual average of close to $2 billion in economic and political aid that allowed Mubarak to stay in power for decades despite his apparent corruption and periodic attempts by Egyptians to free themselves from his ruthless and totally contradicting to all-American values of freedom and democracy rule.

4- In return of the American generosity and hypocrisy for that matter, and to prove his good will to his friends in Tel Aviv, president Mubarak has excluded Sinai from any developmental plans, except for the pipeline that supplied Israel with Egypt natural gas almost for free, and kept it throughout thirty long years of his rule as barren desert ready to be recaptured in few hours by any abrupt Israeli offensive and consequently paving the way for Israel to dump the Gaza explosive issue on Egyptian soil.

5-  Another little-discussed result of the 1979 Egypt-Israel Camp David treaty was the creation of an international peacekeeping force in the Sinai, known as the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) based in the Egyptian peninsula of Sinai. Its current head is Ambassador David M. Satterfield, an American diplomat who served extensively in the Middle East, was Senior Advisor on Iraq for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and held a number of other high positions in the state department, including Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. In 2005 Satterfield was named as having provided classified information to an official of the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, AIPAC. According to documents, Satterfield had discussed secret national security matters in at least two meetings with AIPAC official Steven J. Rosen, who was subsequently indicted by the U.S. Justice Department

David M. Satterfield

5   Another little-discussed result of the 1979 Egypt-Israel Camp David treaty was the creation of an international peacekeeping force in the Sinai, known as the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) based in the Egyptian peninsula of Sinai. Its current head is Ambassador David M. Satterfield, an American diplomat who served extensively in the Middle East, was Senior Advisor on Iraq for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and held a number of other high positions in the state department, including Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. In 2005 Satterfield was named as having provided classified information to an official of the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, AIPAC. According to documents, Satterfield had discussed secret national security matters in at least two meetings with AIPAC official Steven J. Rosen, who was subsequently indicted by the U.S. Justice Department
                     

The last days of a fragile peace Treaty

Israeli soldiers patrolling the border line
with Egypt near the red sea resort of Eilat

The Israelis bloody well knew what they were doing crossing the borders with Egypt hunting down some infiltrators and taking down five Egyptian soldiers whom were said caught in the crossfire.

Those Egyptians who died in the Israeli raid are not to be considered collateral damage, rather victims of a premeditated military operation meant to breach an already fragile peace treaty and more importantly to test the waters for the response of post-Mubarak Egypt.

The strong and swift response to the Israeli aggression, ranging from anti-Israeli mass rallies around the Cairo embassy, for the third day in a row now demanding the expulsion of the whole Israeli diplomatic envoy and not just only the ambassador, to the anticipated withdrawal of the Egyptian ambassador in Tel Aviv till submission of Israeli probe results and official apology and the urgent meeting of the Arab league to discuss and blast the Israeli aggression on both Gaza and the Egyptian borders area, hasn’t exactly been the see no evil hear no evil-reaction that Tel Aviv got used to throughout the last 30 years of good old Mubarak.

Egyptian reinforcements in the Sinai

peninsula and along the borders with Israel.

Egypt is now witnessing radical changes with evolving new facts on the ground and while Israel is trying to make out the whole picture and grasp all the angles and potentials of these new geopolitical realities before it plays out its next wild card it somehow missed out on a tiny little detail, namely the power of the people.

Now, with this AIPAC agent Satterfield in command of international forces in Sinai and with the highly volatile situation in Sinai that is made to look as the new Afghanistan by the Zionist Murdoch-style media and judging from the escalating tension and the unprecedented state of reinforcements and military high alert on both the Israeli and the Egyptian side of the borders,  the expected mass Egyptian rallies to head towards the borders with Israel late this week in a show of force and defiance to any Israeli future aggressions and from the looming strong possibility of the Muslim Brotherhood- intellectually and emotionally akin to Hamas- gaining the majority of seats in the coming and first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections … one wonders what are the chances for the fragile peace treaty between Egypt and Israel to survive this strong tide of Arab awakening that has undoubtedly ushered in a new era in the Arab –Israeli conflict and more importantly unleashed the power of generations that have been silent and subjugated for decades, and now their Egyptian voices are strongly resonating loud and clear echoing all the way to Tel Aviv as they roar “ Down with the dictators and down with Israel”

Israel knew very well how to deal with Arab dictators, Arab militants , Arab puppet leaders, Arab media, arab negotiators and even pro-Arab activists but not the Arab awakening … this is totally new to the IDF … this is one thing that the Israeli military is not trained to deal with or to hold back by some iron dome.

Source of Article: Dr. Ashraf Ashraf

Images Courtesy of Veterans Today

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Dr. Ashraf Ezzat works as a Medical Doctor. Apart from the medical experience, he’s always been engaged in writing activities. He writes articles about ancient Egyptian history, Ancient Near Eastern history, comparative religion and politics especially the Arab- Israeli conflict. Founder and board member of the bibliotheca Alexandrina friends society. Some of His articles have been published in Egyptian magazines and online publications

For more articles by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat visit his website

How did Americans get so utterly clueless about world events? (Hint: It was no accident.)

Posted: 22 Aug 2011 03:37 AM PDT

If you hear the indefensible defended enough times, confidently, by people with titles and credentials, it starts to sound like a good idea

by Cassandra for Veterans Today

 If you could just see what passes for “news” here in the USA, in both electronic and print media, you would understand American ignorance better.  It is literally a 24/7 barrage of straight-faced lies, distortions, and slick disinformation delivered on almost every front—including the so-called “liberal-leaning” newspapers and magazines, so-called “progressive” websites, and even public radio and public TV stations—not to mention the more partisan cable and commercial outlets.  We routinely see articulate and distinguished-looking university professors, think-tank scholars and Zionist-controlled public officials whose right-wing “expert opinion” on this or that issue is the ONLY view presented on a news show. 

Never a Noam Chomsky or a Naomi Klein or a Robert Fisk or a Michael Parenti, or a James Petras,  NEVER—and very rarely people like Ralph Nader or Elizabeth Warren who, if they’re included, will be forced to compete with five or six other guests for air time.

So, nothing is ever covered in-depth unless it’s a piece of propaganda somebody wants to pull over on us.  Everything else is disjointed bits and pieces, he-said she-said, with no background or fact-checking to help us sort out the truth.  Sometimes they’ll have one moderate-conservative “expert” (a government flack, basically) facing off against a Neocon or Zionist; the only difference between them is the fine points about precisely when we should invade Libya or Iran to stop terrorism—never whether this would be a sane, lawful or moral thing to do, or have any effect whatsoever on terrorism—and never any alternate paradigm for looking at world events.  This is the kind of thing we see and hear, ALL THE TIME, DAY IN AND DAY OUT.  Even well-educated people here in the USA, who keep up with current events and read the newspaper, are badly misinformed.  Many of them tacitly believe that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle between the opposing views they hear.  But since this “middle” has been absurdly skewed (with the actual truth of the matter omitted altogether), and since the “facts” they think they know are actually lies, they find themselves supporting the most outlandish things—or at least, lacking the certainty to oppose them.  (I don’t like wars, but maybe we really DO need to invade Iran to stop terrorism?)  (Maybe Hugo Chavez really IS a brutal dictator, since everyone seems to agree he is?)  And that’s the whole point of perception management: keep us confused with a blizzard of conflicting and unverifiable “information”, until we throw up our hands and conclude that the world has gotten too complicated to understand and we’d best trust our experts to decide what’s right.

And these are good people I’m talking about: people who believe in human rights and social justice, who are against racism and genocide and unnecessary wars and greedy mega-corporations; people who are willing to fight for what they believe in—-if they could only figure out what the hell the truth is and whose side to be on.  But unfortunately, they are very careful to keep away from “nutty conspiracy theories”, because they’ve been told by the experts they see and hear all the time to stay away from those!  These educated people want facts, not half-baked fairy tales!  So they discount and ignore everything that has been so described by the deceivers—-the very things that could lead them out of this labyrinth of lies.  And that’s the whole reason for all the money spent on perception management!  It works!  I believe Americans are the most lied-to and deceived people in the world, because we still cherish the idealistic myth that our leaders, our media and our highly-educated “experts” mean well and are mostly honest, if occasionally misguided—And even more importantly, the idealistic myth that powerful people would never, ever, conspire against the weak on a global scale and get away with it, decade after decade.

A lot of us are honest and really care about doing what’s right.  If Americans ever open their eyes to the truth, some things are going to change very quickly.  (But I just don’t know whether their eyes will be opened in time.)

Sigh.  How can that be changed? 

The 64-trillion dollar question.  Our enemies are so powerful; they seem to control everything.  And the indoctrinated people are very resistant to hearing dissonant messages.

I know all about ignorant but well-meaning Americans, because just ten years ago, I was one of them.  9/11 came and went, and I never dreamed for a second that someone other than “al Qaeda” did it, because that’s what everyone was saying, everywhere.  Furthermore, it never occurred to me that I was taking the unproven word of government officials as truth,  just because they’d said it so soberly while wearing nice suits.  And I knew better than to be so trusting—or should have known.  But it was a bad habit I had formed over a lifetime of being an American, immersed in the soothing background music of American exceptionalism.

Sure, I knew Nixon had been a dirty liar, and Reagan an idiot, and I loathed Bush.  But really, that was little more than unthinking partisanship on my part.  Hadn’t I defended Bill Clinton, another dirty liar, to the end?—just because I liked him and therefore trusted him to act in my best interests?  (And why did I like him?  Because he said nice words and seemed to mean them, and because he was a member of the Democrats, whom I also trusted.  Yes, I was an idiot.  Now I see what a self-indulgent corporate toady and opportunist he was. (Oh, and a rapist to boot.)

And likewise I wholeheartedly supported Al Gore who I now realize is a NWO-connected fat-cat in a liberal-Democrat costume, living in a great big fat-cat mansion and making hypocritical self-important speeches.  And I was all about “war hero” and “Vietnam critic” John Kerry, although by that time even I saw clearly that my candidate refused to take a stand against the Iraq war, or to speak honestly about a host of issues; but never mind, I said, he has to lie to win the election.  Well what the hell is that?—I have to accept that my candidate is a liar and a moral coward and vote for him anyway?  And then he walks away from a stolen election, with the funds he solicited from me for a recount?—forcing other groups to solicit more money from me for recounts that Kerry won’t ask for because he’s already conceded?  So I hated Kerry after that, and I hated every politician that lied to me—and that was nearly all of them, both parties.

Well anyway, once I started reading Truthout in 2004, (TO was one of the few independent Online News and Opinion sites available back then. Thankfully scores of more truthful alternative sources of information services such as Veterans Today have sprung up since then, run by fearless, candid, diligent, relentless, conscientious, concerned, stalwarts determined to challenge the falsehoods peddled by politicians and propagandists paraded daily on American Cable News Networks across the country) it opened up a whole new world for me.  It took time to break up the logjam of my misconceptions; but I began to hear about problems with the government’s version of events on 9/11—-great big problems.  And about drug running out of Mena Arkansas, including during the years my precious Bill Clinton was governor; and of course there was the Katrina debacle, where I saw government officials pretend to be incompetent so that pre-planned disaster would ensue and prove very profitable.  And I discovered the Fed was a private banking cartel, and the debt-based dollar was an instrument of enslavement, and JFK wasn’t killed by a lone assassin or even by Cubans, and there is an enormous underground child-sex-trafficking network that reaches to the highest levels of government (George HW Bush) and industry and gives the cabal control over people….   Well, once you get an American to start looking at “conspiracy theories” instead of dismissing them, there is a snowballing effect.  I have spent much of these years trying to share my discoveries with others.  One way is on blogs; but after a while we’re all just preaching to the choir.  Eventually we all know the same things pretty much—-which is a good thing.  But the tough cases are the people who either won’t read blogs at all, or will only go to CIA-connected HuffPo or DailyKos and then they think they’ve heard the full range of everything credible that’s out there.

I have to tell you, some of my best friends and family are among the toughest cases.  Smart, highly-educated, committed to social change, politically-aware (as far as anyone can be without realizing both Bush elections were stolen), these people vote, they sign petitions, they join peace marches and canvass for Democrats; they read the NYTimes and listen to tedious speakers on C-SPAN in an effort to understand the issues; but although they may be “disappointed” with Obama, or even view him as “unfortunately weak” against those mean Republican bullies, it is simply impossible to get them to consider for a moment that Obama’s “weakness” could be intentional sabotage, that he could be working for someone else—a Trojan-horse candidate.  They can believe a boxer might throw a fight, or a basketball player might throw a game; but in American politics?—heavens no, it could never happen!  And don’t even bring up the subject of 9/11 to them because they are sick to death of hearing about it.  They have never really listened; but they have heard the subject brought up ad nauseum, and dismissing it now is as easy as batting away a fly, and just as automatic—-a Pavlovian response.  They have never listened; they have never looked at the facts of the case.  This is the sheer power of perception management: it can cause people to shut their eyes and stop up their ears against certain information that conflicts with the mainstream message—information which threatens to confuse them and shake their confidence in their understanding of the world, and also to shake their self-esteem as sensible, mainstream people who do not subscribe to nutty ideas.

All I can tell you is, if you can get one of these people to listen, just once, to one case where a dissonant message that went against the official story turned out to be absolutely true, and the official story turned out to be a blatant lie—-then you can start the snowball rolling.

Veterans Today you’ve got a lot more work to do.

Source: Veterans Today

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Cassandra has a BA in psychology and also an MSW degree. She does a little writing, a lot of reading, and is an avid gardener. She works occasionally for a small publisher in her hometown, and dabbles in herbal medicine, medical issues and natural sciences.

 It is not 

written in stone