New Egyptian Government and Israel: Surprising Allies against Terror in the Middle East

Since ousting the Muslim Brotherhood government just over a year ago, Egypt’s next president, retired Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, has quietly but dramatically increased military cooperation with Israel to combat Islamist terrorism in the Sinai and stabilize Egypt, according to Egyptian officials and Israeli military experts.

As Egyptians went to the polls this week in the first presidential election since President Mohammed Morsi’s ouster last July in a popular coup, few voters seemed aware of the improvement in Egyptian-Israeli military ties under Egypt’s military-backed transitional government. Given popular Egyptian hostility to Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, neither Egyptian nor Israeli officials have publicized their growing counterterrorism partnership.

But in recent meetings in Cairo with a small group of American national security experts and journalists, senior Egyptian officials described Egyptian-Israeli cooperation as “excellent” and “never better,” and attributed the decline in terrorist attacks in the Sinai and Egypt’s mainland partly to the enhanced coordination. They also discussed recent Egyptian steps , some unilateral and others with Israeli assistance, to restore security in the Sinai, at the Libyan border and throughout the rest of Egypt.

El-Sissi told the Americans that security was crucial to achieving his top priority -- jump-starting stalled growth in Egypt, 45 percent of whose 94 million people live in poverty.

Egyptian officials and Israeli military experts predicted that the close military cooperation would likely continue now that el-Sissi appears to have won a decisive victory over his lone challenger. Unofficial polls show Sissi winning 92 percent of the vote, versus 2.9 percent for leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi, in what Sissi supporters concede is a disappointing, low turnout.

Ehud Yaari, an Israeli fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in an interview this week that the terrorist threat from Sinai and Egypt’s hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood had prompted “the closest and most intimate cooperation ever between Egypt and Israel, despite Egypt’s differences with Israel over the Palestinian issue.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.