Israel traded key strategic and economic assets and vital principles for paper -- indeed, for more worthless pieces of paper than most people realize. For although the texts of the Camp David accords and the subsequent treaty were widely available, the contents of the 50 agreements fleshing out the details of "normalization" in specific areas remained unknown and inaccessible. In "The Real Lessons of Camp David" (Commentary, December 1993) this writer noted that from Israel's point of view, these agreements were the heart of the treaty -- they defined the "normal and friendly relations" for which Israel was willing to sacrifice so much.

Violated from the outset, the agreements became an embarrassment to be hidden away. Begin's party, the Likud, did not want the public to focus upon them because Camp David was its proudest achievement and the contrast between what the agreements promised and what was actually delivered revealed that the treaty with Egypt was an empty shell. As for Labor, it looked forward to signing treaties with other neighboring states and pointing to the failure of the only existing one was not likely to inspire confidence in their utility. Nonetheless, through inadvertence or early misplaced optimism, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a report, Israel's Foreign Relations: Selected Documents 1979-80, containing eight of the agreements.

They were painstakingly detailed. The agricultural agreement provided, for example, that the two countries would cooperate on "field crops, vegetables, fruit, floriculture, spices and medicinal plant production," on animal production, including "poultry, dairy, sheep and goats," on "veterinary services" including joint "development and manufacture of veterinary pharmaceuticals and vaccines." There would be coordination of "plant-quarantine inspection procedures" and of "post-harvesting and processing activities" and "joint programs and exchange of experience, methods, and know-how between their respective agricultural extension services."

Of the eight agreements published, the cultural agreement would have been the most important to Israel, for here was a means of transforming attitudes among an Egyptian public accustomed to the demonization of the Jewish state. The two countries pledged "contacts and exchange of visits of experts in the cultural, artistic, technical, scientific and medical fields," exchanges of publications, of art objects, of exhibitions, of radio and television programs, recordings and tapes. They promised to "facilitate visits of scientists, scholars and researchers of the other coutnry," to develop special equivalence "diplomas, certificates and academic degrees" and to "encourage and promote youth and sport activities between youth and sports institutions in each countries."

Together, the fifty agreements formed the substance of the new era of relations which Israel believed it was obtaining. There was, to be sure, a brief period of improvement in images of Israel in the Egyptian press, some tourism, one youth exchange, a few agricultural projects. But once Israel completed its three-year, phased withdrawal from the Sinai in April 1982, Egypt froze relations. The fundamental reason was later offered by King Hassan of Morocco. He reported in 1984 that Sadat's successor, Hosni Mubarak, had told him the treaty was empty of substance since "Cairo had obtained from it what it could."

Within short order, Egypt was massively flouting the agreements. Perhaps most important, official, semi-official and so-called opposition papers kept up a relentless barrage of hostile propaganda. To Israel, ending the "teaching of contempt" was such a central target that it had put the promise "to abstain from hostile propaganda" into the text of the treaty itself. But soon only Iran could compete with Egypt as world center for the publication and dissemination of both new and "classic" anti-Semitic literature.

At the UN, Egypt headed the unsuccessful campaign to keep the Zionism-is-racism resolution intact.

No charge was too vicious or absurd. At least two Egyptian papers (Al-Akhbar and Al-Masa'a) described the blowing up of the Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland as an Israeli plot. Israel was accused of introducing hoof-and-mouth disease into Egypt and exporting radiation-contaminated food to Egypt (both in the semi-official Al Ahram); of causing earthquakes in Egypt (Al-Wafd, Dec. 27, 1992), of bombing the World Trade Center and throwing the blame on Arabs (Al-Jumhuriyah, April 5, 1993), of introducing AIDS to Egypt (Roz Al-Yusuf, July 2, 1990), and of polluting the entire globe (Roz Al-Yusuf, June 15, 1992). In cartoons and caricatures, Egyptian media copy Nazi graphics. When a symbol for the Jew is used, it is a snake or some hideous imaginary monster. The media broadcast sermons

Outpost               - 10 -               November 2002