Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

The longer-term political orientation of Egypt is a major concern for Israel, with the growing assertiveness of the Muslim Brotherhood.  A more immediate focus of concern, however, is the security situation in the Sinai peninsula.

There have now been five attacks in the last six months on the Sinai pipeline carrying gas to Israel.  There are two aspects of these attacks that are of particular concern.  The first is that they indicate a growing security vacuum in the peninsula.  The attacks have been on a sensitive target; they have been successful; they have been repeated; and the perpetrators have escaped.

At the same time there has been an increase in the smuggling of weapons into the Gaza Strip.  According to Israeli intelligence, Egypt is “losing control over the Sinai region”, and it is thought that as a consequence the number of rockets in the Gaza Strip has increased from 5,000 to 10,000 since the end of 2010.  There has also been an estimated sixfold increase in the amount of smuggled explosives.

The assessment that Egypt is losing control of the Sinai was reinforced by the 29 July attack by 150 masked men on a police station in the Sinai city of Arish.  The masked men, thought to be al-Qaeda operatives, raised black flags and took control of the city for six hours, during which time seven people were killed and 30 injured.

The second point about the attacks on the gas pipeline is that they have been so popular with ordinary Egyptians, reflecting the grass-roots opposition to the Mubarak regime’s relationship with Israel.  There have even been hints that Egyptian officials are not against the attacks.  In July, one senior Egyptian official was quoted as saying that the attacks will continue “unless implementation of the [gas] agreement in its present form is halted”.

Commenting on this point on Tuesday, the pan-Arab al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper said: “The repeated attacks on Egypt’s gas pipeline to Israel, the most recent of which occurred on Saturday, and the low-key reaction this elicited from public opinion, suggest that the existing gas deal with Israel is highly unpopular in Egypt.  In fact, the Egyptian government...should take steps to either amend or cancel the 1979 Camp David peace accords with Israel.”

The Catch-22 aspect of all this is that while Israel is concerned about the security vacuum, a relaxing of the provisions of the Camp David accords for the demilitarization of the Sinai, which some in Egypt are advocating as the solution, becomes less not more attractive the more uncertainty there is about Egypt’s future orientation.  Naturally, this uncertainty can only have been heightened by the mass demonstration by fundamentalists in Tahrir Square last Friday (27 July) during which many of the demonstrators were calling for the implementation of sharia law and declaring “Sovereignty belongs to God”.  The feeling of well-placed local sources is that the fundamentalists have been very effective in organizing themselves while the liberals and youths have not yet understood the fundamentals of ‘real politics’.