Israel’s No-Longer Cold Peace with Egypt

On Sunday, Egypt’s foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, came to Jerusalem and met with the Israeli prime minister. This was the first such high-level visit in nine years. Usually, talks have been conducted with Egyptian intelligence officials and out of the public eye, and have focused on security issues—specifically, containing jihadists in Gaza and Sinai. This very public visit, argues David Makovsky, is a sign that the two countries’ de-facto military alliance could be mutating into a diplomatic one:

Netanyahu has expressed concern that the Obama administration will consider supporting a UN Security Council resolution [about the Israel-Palestinian] conflict at year’s end. He views any such move as the equivalent of an imposed solution . . . that neither Israel nor the Palestinians could accept. Netanyahu is also concerned that a French peace initiative could gather steam and feed into a [similarly troublesome] Security Council resolution. . . .

Netanyahu is likely counting on the pressure [his meeting with Shoukry] creates for Mahmoud Abbas. While the PA president has had no problem rejecting Netanyahu’s call to resume talks, . . . bringing Egypt into the picture raises the cost of any such rejection. . . .

Beyond the Palestinian issue, . . . Shoukry was probably also curious about Netanyahu’s trip to Africa last week. Among other states, he visited Ethiopia, which is planning a Nile dam that could hurt Egypt’s access to the river’s water. Cairo seems to believe that Netanyahu’s visit could impact whether Ethiopia will agree to a water-sharing formula with Egypt.

Read more at Washington Institute for Near East Policy

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Egypt, Ethiopia, Israel & Zionism, Israel diplomacy, Peace Process

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF