PNN – The Camp David Accords, signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979 with American mediation, removed the most populous Arab country from the central issue of Palestine. After that, Israel had the opportunity to confront its strongest enemies in the region, especially Syria and Iraq.
This was while American intelligence agencies were busy and besieging Egypt with crises that turned the area around Umm al-Diniyah into a belt of fire. But how did this happen and where will things end?
Since the establishment of the Israeli regime on Palestinian soil in 1948, the three countries of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq have always been a source of concern for it. Egypt experienced its first war against Israel in 1956, when it stood up to the coalition of the occupying regime of Jerusalem with Britain and France during the “Trilateral Aggression”. This invasion followed the announcement of the nationalization of the Suez Canal by the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Egypt then launched its second war in 1967, alongside an alliance with Syria and with the military participation of Iraq. The same coalition then fought its last war against Israel in 1973. But ultimately, Egypt withdrew from the Arab-Israeli conflict by signing the Camp David Accords in 1979.
At the same time, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was trying to bring his country into the club of nuclear-weapon states. The Iraqis built the Tamuz nuclear facility, but Israel saw it as a strategic threat to its security and its air force destroyed the facility in several airstrikes in 1981.
After that, Saddam Hussein entered an eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988 without any practical victory for either side, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein’s government was declared an aggressor by the head of the United Nations. This war eroded Iraq’s military and economic power and increased the country’s debt to more than $200 billion.
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Meanwhile, OPEC exacerbated the country’s economic crisis by dramatically lowering the price of oil, Iraq’s main source of income. In such circumstances, Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait. In response, then-US President George Bush formed an international military coalition to expel the Iraqi army from Kuwait, and the military operation known as Desert Storm began. This was despite the fact that before the attack, Saddam Hussein had informed the US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, of his intention to attack Kuwait, in a meeting with her, and she had responded that this was an internal matter and that the US would not interfere in it. This response led the ambitious Saddam Hussein to believe that he had received the American “green light” to invade and occupy Kuwait.
Operation Desert Storm led to the US imposing a no-fly zone over southern and northern Iraq, and subsequently pressured the country with severe economic, food, and financial sanctions. These sanctions were imposed under the pretext of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and international inspectors even searched Saddam Hussein’s palaces to find these alleged weapons, but in the end, no evidence of the existence of such weapons was found in Iraq.
However, the US persisted in its accusations and used the September 11 attacks as an excuse to convince the UN Security Council to authorize an attack on Iraq. However, the council rejected the request with 9 out of 15 votes against. Despite this position of the UN Security Council, Washington, along with Britain, launched a massive military attack on Iraq in March 2003. More than 200,000 troops participated in the attack, which ultimately led to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the entry of Iraq into a period of chaos that continues to suffer from its consequences in the security and military spheres.
From Iraq to Damascus and Beirut!
About fifty days after the invasion of Iraq, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell landed at Damascus airport. He brought a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that included a set of American demands and demanded “painful concessions.” These demands included non-interference in Iraqi affairs, expulsion of Palestinian groups, and cessation of support for Hezbollah and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon, and so on.
Pressure mounted on the Syrian leadership to withdraw its forces from Lebanon. On February 14, 2005, the late former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated, and Syria was immediately blamed for the assassination. In Beirut, the largest public demonstration against the presence of the Syrian army took place. The Syrian army finally left Lebanon in late April of that year.
Gas, the “Arab Spring” and the Game of Nations
With the beginning of what is called the “Arab Spring” in 2011, Arab regimes began to fall like dominoes; from Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia to Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and then Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. The “Arab Spring” also spread to Syria, initially with peaceful demonstrations that turned into armed clashes, paving the way for the largest international intervention in Syrian affairs.
Some analysts believe that Qatar’s main motivation for overthrowing Assad was Syria’s rejection of a plan to build a gas pipeline from Qatar to Turkey and then to Europe. This rejection was due to Bashar al-Assad’s reservations about his main ally, Russia, which was the largest gas exporter to Europe at the time.
Between 2011 and 2015, despite the deployment of hundreds of Iranian military experts and thousands of Hezbollah fighters to Syria to support Assad, the situation became more critical for him. As a result, Russia intervened in 2015, in full coordination with Iran, to save him, and on September 30 of that year, it sent its air force to Syria to support the Syrian army and its allies, which shifted the balance of power in Assad’s favor. However, more than a third of Syria remained under the control of his opposition forces, including American, Turkish, and armed groups, some supported by Turkey and others by the United States. In the meantime, the United States deployed about 2,000 soldiers and officers on Syrian soil.
“Storm” across the Middle East
On October 7, 2023, the Hamas movement and other Palestinian resistance groups launched an unprecedented attack in the history of Arab-Israeli conflicts, dubbed “Al-Aqsa Storm.” Within hours, the IDF’s southern division, tasked with protecting the border settlements, collapsed, with scores of soldiers and settlers captured or killed. The Palestinian Islamic resistance forces then retreated to the Gaza Strip.
Israel used the attack as a pretext to launch a genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. By the time the ceasefire was established in February 2024, more than 160,000 Palestinians had been killed or wounded, more than two-thirds of whom were women and children.
On October 8, 2023, just one day after the start of the Israeli attack on Gaza, the Lebanese Hezbollah launched a war in support of the Palestinians. The war culminated in a massive Israeli attack on Lebanon on September 27, 2024. The attack resulted in the deaths of more than 5,000 people, the injury of more than 20,000 (most of whom were civilians), and widespread destruction in the villages of southern Lebanon, the Bekaa, the southern suburbs, and other areas of the country.
Israel was able to assassinate most of Hezbollah’s military commanders, including its Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and his successor Sayyed Hashem Safi al-Din. Also, many military leaders of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements in Gaza and the West Bank were martyred, including Yahya al-Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, and its military commander Muhammad al-Dif.
Egypt; the beginning and the end
With the fall of the third axis of resistance (Syria) and the widespread damage to the military capabilities of Islamic resistance groups in Palestine and Lebanon, the attention of Israeli military officials was once again drawn to Egypt. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli army chief of staff, whose term of office was coming to an end, said in a speech to the graduates of the officer course: We are very concerned about the Egyptian threat. It is not a priority for us, but Egypt has a powerful army equipped with advanced weapons, aircraft, submarines, ships and a large number of modern tanks. This is not a direct threat at the moment, but it could change at any moment, because the army may suddenly come under new command.
Egypt is well aware that since the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1979, although it has avoided direct confrontation with Israel, it has never been at peace. This agreement gave Israel a golden opportunity to destroy its enemies individually, with the support of the United States and NATO. However, Egypt, despite adhering to Camp David and avoiding any action that would damage its relations with Israel, has always been under American surveillance and has been beset by a series of crises and challenges.
To the west of Egypt, the civil war in Libya flared up after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi and shows no sign of ending. To the east, the bloody Palestinian wound in the Gaza Strip remains open, a concern for Egypt, especially with former US President Donald Trump’s proposal to transfer Gaza’s population to the Sinai Peninsula, so that Washington could take control of the region and turn it into a “Riviera of the East.”
Also, one should not ignore the severe financial crisis that Egypt has faced in recent years. This crisis has led to a collapse in the value of the national currency, such that the exchange rate for one US dollar has increased from seven pounds a few years ago to more than fifty pounds currently. In addition, the water shortage crisis has also been exacerbated by the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia.
The dam was built and commissioned without agreement with neighboring countries, particularly Sudan and Egypt, and has reduced a large part of their share of the Nile River’s water. This is a serious threat to the drying up of large parts of Egypt’s agricultural lands.
From the Nile to the Euphrates
The Torah-inspired Israeli project, which calls for the establishment of a “State of Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile,” no longer seems like an impossible idea, especially with the developments that have taken place in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. The current presidency of Donald Trump has provided a golden opportunity to realize this project, especially since he has declared: The country of Israel is very small and in the region it looks like a pen tip on my desk, and this reality must change.
The biggest Arab obstacle to this change and the realization of the Torah project is the position of Egypt, the largest Arab country with a population of over 115 million. Egyptian leaders believe that the country has been armed by the Camp David Accords and has been spared all the wars that the region has experienced since the signing of the agreement. But all the experiences of countries show that no agreement is stable, permanent, or sacred in the current circumstances. Every agreement is the result of a specific balance of power, and as this balance change, that agreement may also disappear.
On the other hand, the Arab experience with “Israel” has shown that this regime has never adhered to any agreement signed by its leaders; the latest example was the ceasefire agreements in Gaza and Lebanon, which the world witnessed blatantly being violated even before the ink on their signatures dried.
All of this confirms that “Umm al-Dunya” (Egypt’s nickname) is now at the center of the storm of the genocidal Israeli army, which is sweeping the region with American support.