What It Means for Israel

At the annual fundraiser dinner for one Houston area Jewish day school yesterday, What It Means for Israel was the question everyone was asking.  The answer is "everything."

As a senior official told the New York Times, "For the United States, Egypt is the keystone of its Middle East policy,” a senior official said. “For Israel, it’s the whole arch.” More from the article:

For the military here, a serious change in Egypt means a strategic shift in planning. Giora Eiland, a former national security advisor and senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said even if Egypt did not cancel its peace treaty with Israel tomorrow or in five years, a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood would mean “you can’t exclude the possibility of a war with Egypt. During the last 30 years, when we had any military confrontation, whether in the first or second Lebanon wars, the intifadas, in all those events we could be confident that Egypt would not try to intervene militarily.” 

Understanding the military equation means going back a few decades to recall the balance of power before the Israel-Egypt peace treaty was signed in 1979.

A Hostile Egypt with Sinai Would Turn Back the Clock 38 Years
The last time Israel and Egypt battled it out was in 1973.  Because Israel had captured the strategic Sinai Peninsula from Egypt in 1967, the Egyptians began their attack from the west side of the Suez Canal, one of the best anti-tank barriers in the world.  Moreover, the front line at the Suez Canal was about 130 miles from the Israeli border, with transit through the desert possible through only a few mountain passes.  Egypt sent about 1,600 tanks across the canal and quickly overwhelmed the sparse Israeli forces defending the vaunted Bar Lev Line of fortifications.


The key takeaway from this history lesson is that the strategic depth of the Sinai Peninsula bought Israel enough time to mobilize its reserves and deploy them against the Egyptians before they could continue toward Israel.  But today the strategic situation is far different.  Sinai again belongs to Egypt.  Although the peace treaty limits the number of forces that Egypt can deploy there (250 tanks in the western-most zone, called Zone A in the following graphic), Egypt would enjoy a huge advantage should it ever decide to violate the treaty and advance armored forces toward the border with Israel.  It is in this context that Israel apparently scrutinized  with a wary eye today's media reports of Egyptian forces moving into Sharm el-Sheikh at the southernmost tip of Sinai.  Sharm is outside the zone in which Egypt is allowed to maintain army forces, in a zone for UN personnel and Egyptian civil police armed with light weapons only.  

Far From Combat Ready in South
Israel's disadvantaged strategic posture toward Egypt is not limited to Egyptian control of Sinai.  Its entire national security doctrine is based on the premise that Egypt is out of the fight.  It maintains very few combat-ready forces facing the Egyptian frontier, and Israel's military plans and training probably very rarely if ever deal with potential war with Egypt.  Instead, in recent years, Israel's Southern Command has devoted nearly all its attention and resources to the situation in Gaza.  Skirmishes like the June 2006 attack by Hamas gunmen on an Israeli military position that led to the (ongoing) captivity of soldier Gilad Shalit, and the persistent rocket fire launched from Gaza against Sderot and Ashkelon- which was not halted by the 3-week Israeli incursion into Gaza in 2008 - have been the focus of Southern Command in recent years.  It's in no condition to battle Egyptian tanks, even if Israel did still hold the buffer zone of the Sinai Peninsula.   

To bring it back from the history lesson to the Big Picture - the question of what does it mean for Israel goes way beyond number of tanks and distances from the border.  It's no exaggeration to say that Israel would not be the Israel we know today without the peace with Egypt.  More from the NYT article:

Dan Schueftan, director of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa, said thanks to its treaty with Egypt, Israel had reduced its defense expenditure from 23 percent of its gross national product in the 1970s to 9 percent today and made serious cuts in its army. The relationship with Egypt also allowed Israel to withdraw from Gaza in 2005 since Egypt covered Gaza from the south. 

Bottom line:  if Israel's security and prosperity are dependent on keeping 80 million Egyptians under dictatorship, and if this dictatorship (like others before it and others currently existing in the Arab world) is destined to fall, then Israel has a big problem.