THE prospect of losing an ally in President Hosni Mubarak has disturbed Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hugely. On Jan 27, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a former defence minister, said: “Egypt is not only our closest friend in the region; the cooperation between us goes beyond the strategic.”

The United States has rushed to warn against denunciation by a future government in Egypt of its separate peace treaty with Israel. But it was part of the Camp David agreement on Palestine which has fallen by the wayside.

Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister, recorded in his memoirs Personal Witness, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assertion that “the heart of the Middle Eastern problem was the relationship between Israel and Egypt”.

Eban took issue with him. “It was, of course, true that the decisions on behalf of the Arab world to make war, to cease fire, and to sign armistice and disengagement agreements had all been initiated by Egypt, which is the natural centre of Arab culture and politics. Yet, I had always believed and still believe that the core of the dispute lies in the unresolved conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. Egypt and Syria entered the arena, not through any concern for their national interests, but in obedience to Arab solidarity focused on the Palestine people.”

Anwar Sadat’s only interest in the Camp David accords was the return of Sinai to Egypt. Aban notes that his “devotion to the Palestinian cause was perfunctory and unconvincing. …Egypt showed little interest in the West Bank and Gaza”.

Israel gained enormously. “The unpleasant truth is that the Egyptian-Israeli treaty undoubtedly facilitated the Israeli war in Lebanon and facilitated the capacity of Likud to do exactly what they liked with the Palestinian population in the occupied territories. Even the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in June 1981 … would not have been possible if the threat to Israel from Egypt had not been neutralised.”

With the threat from Israel’s south removed, Israel’s forces were “automatically doubled and trebled in the overall regional balance”.

The revolt in Egypt puts all those gains at serious risk. It will not do to lecture to Egypt on the sanctity of treaties. The United States has no standing in this realm anyway. One prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, publicly declared that he was not committed to “all the provisions” of the Camp David agreement of which the peace treaty was but an offshoot. Speaking of agreements, whatever happened to the Oslo Agreement of 1993?

The documents publicised by Al Jazeera last month do the Palestinian negotiators little credit. After a gap of two years, talks with Israel began on Sept 2 in Washington D.C. between Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan attended the opening dinner. The talks have made no headway. Early this month Moshe Arens, who was defence minister three times, remarked: “The ugly facts are that the two peace treaties that Israel concluded so far — the one with Egypt and the other with Jordan — were both signed with dictators, Anwar Sadat and King Hussein.”

The freeze on settlements in the occupied territories ended on Sept 26. Israel has gone ahead with its plans for settlements even in the highly sensitive sector of East Jerusalem. The Shepherd Hotel, a landmark there, has been demolished.

Last month, heads of 25 European missions based in Jerusalem and Ramallah warned that the “continued expansion of settlements, restrictive zoning and planning [and] ongoing demolitions and evictions … have not only serious humanitarian consequences, they undermine the Palestinian presence in East Jerusalem”.

Netanyahu is playing for time. President Barack Obama is due for re-election next year in which he cannot risk antagonising the powerful Israeli lobby led by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is known to be close. Obama paid a call on the AIPAC after winning the nomination.

Unless the US withholds the subsidies which Israel uses to pay for the confiscation and settlement of Palestinian land, Israel’s settlement programme will not end. That is something the Israeli lobby will not permit the administration to do. The 10-month freeze declared on Nov 26, 2009 excluded Jerusalem and 3,000 under-construction units. In December 2010, the US gave up its efforts to press Israel for a freeze of a mere 90 days.On Sept 12, 2010 Netanyahu added one more stipulation — Palestinians must recognise Israel as a Jewish state. This would doom its Arab minority, which is 20 per cent of its population, as well as its Christian minority to an inferior status. Palestinians have nowhere to turn to — unless Arab democracy bestirs itself and the wrath of the Arab street begins to hurt American interests.

The writer is an author and a lawyer.