Gerald Honigman is a Florida educator who has done extensive doctoral work in Middle East studies, has lectured on numerous university and other platforms. He has debated many of the best Arab and pro-Arab academics in public debates and on television. Mr. Honigman is widely published in academic journals, magazines, newspapers and other publications.
Sat Dec 23, 2006 5:37 pm Egypt Will Get Eilat When...
Eilat Will Become Egyptian When...
By Gerald A. Honigman
Egyptian Arabs, who conquered Egypt in the 7th century C.E. from native Copts and Nubians (who predated Arabs by millennia) return Egypt to the native peoples whom they continue to subjugate, murder, and forcibly Arabize.
And we won't even mention anything about Egypt's ancient Jewish population--who also pre-dated the Arabs by millennia--and which is virtually non-existant today. Most of Egypt's last 100,000 Jews were forced to flee during the last century. The Egyptian Jewess, the historian Bat Ye'or, is one of the leading experts to especially consult on such matters.
One of my favorite journalists, David Bedein, had a piece in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin on December 22nd which reported that, in the course of a debate over Eilat in Egypt's parliament, among other things it was stated, "Eilat belongs formally to Egypt and administratively to the Palestinians."
Eilat, the southernmost city of Israel, is located on the north shore of the Red Sea, and is named for the Hebrew Bible's Elath, which is believed to have actually been located acoss the gulf in Aqaba in what is now Jordan. Eilat's importance to the Jews came via its connection to King Solomon: King Solomon also built a fleet of ships at Etzion-Geber near Elath on the shore of the Red Sea...(1 Kings 9:26) It was (and is) an important port located on the trade route to the East. The 1956 and 1967 wars largely started over Egypt's blockade of Eilat.
Several facts related to all of this are worth noting...
First of all, the Ottoman Turks ruled the entire area in question from 1517 until after World War I when the Sinai was awarded to Egypt. Prior to that, the Roman and Byzantine Empires ruled it from the 1st through early 7th century C.E.
There were others as well. And the Arabs only acquired Egypt via their own massive imperial conquests, after exploding in all directions out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E...the same time and way they came to acquire the land of Israel.
So, for Egypt to pretend as if the Sinai itself is its assumed birthright--let alone adjacent Eilat--is a stretch, especially since nations and empires who have waged war against their neighbors and lost territory as a result rarely get rewarded with a return to the status quo ante.
But the Jews did just that--and after developing oil fields, some of the world's most advanced air bases, etc. and so forth in the Sinai. Egypt lost Sinai in '67 because of its blockade of Israel--a casus belli--and other blatant and overt hostile actions.
In return for a very cold peace after President Sadat's assassination in which Israel gave up all of the above, it got a massive Egyptian arms build-up (largely courtesy of the United States), huge quantities of arms being smuggled into Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terror groups via the Egyptian Sinai, government-sponsored anti-Semitism which ranks with Hitler's propaganda machine, etc. and so forth.
As the PLO was created in Egypt under Nasser's watch back in 1964 (Arafat was born in Cairo) as a tool to further the latter's agenda, Egypt continues to bleed Jews via the same and other proxies today.
Eighty million Egyptians. Hundreds of millions of other Arabs--not to mention non-Arab Muslims.
Five million Israeli Jews.
Do the math...The Arabs certainly are.
Egypt, like the others, is merely biding its time...and the results in Lebanon not long ago don't help matters any. Reports have it that the Syrians are already making their moves--and not only in Lebanon.
Unfortunately, new rabbits must repeatedly be invented by Jews to be pulled out of their collective hat of survival.
The new year ahead will certainly be no exception.
Camp David Accords? Pshaw. The Americans will stand anything. "Egypt Demands Israel To Vacate Port City," by David Bedein in The Bulletin, with thanks to all who sent this in:
It will be remembered that the 1967 Six-Day War broke out after Egypt closed the straits of Tiran and strangled the trade from Israel's southern port city of Eliat.
Yet few are aware that Egypt has staked a claim to the city of Eilat, ever since it lost Eilat to the nascent state of Israel in the wake of the Egyptian army's defeat in the 1948 war, followed by the expulsion of the Egyptians from this southern port city on the Red Sea.
Now, in the wake of recent reports about plans to dig a canal linking the Red Sea on the Israeli side and the Dead Sea on its Jordanian side, a fiery argument broke out in Egypts parliament, with the members of parliament (MPs) speaking out against the "Israeli plot to choke the Suez Canal to death."
In the course of the debate, which has been going on in parliament for the last two days, Abed el-Aziz Sayef a-Nasser, an aide to the Egyptian foreign minister, was called as an expert witness. A-Nasser is the director of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry's legal department.
"Eilat, or by its former name Umm Rashrash, belongs to the Palestinians," he said, representing the opinion of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry.
His predecessor, Dr. Nabil el-Arabi, was the head of the Foreign Ministry's legal department and headed the delegation for negotiations at Taba. He also emphatically declared: "Eilat belongs to the Palestinians."
A-Nasser's response was meant to calm tempers in the rowdy debate in the Egyptian parliament, after dozens of opposition representatives demanded holding negotiations to have Eilat returned to Egyptian sovereignty. Opposition MPs recruited several legal experts, international law lecturers and experts on geography and topography who showed documents and opinions that Eilat is territory that belongs to Egypt and was captured in 1949 by Israel. They contend that the Egyptian negotiating team to Taba conceded Eilat to Israel 20 years ago "in the framework of the wish to build confidence and to display Egyptian good will in the spirit of the peace agreement."
This was not the end of the matter. An Egyptian international law expert presented an intermediate position in parliament: "Eilat belongs formally to Egypt and administratively to the Palestinians."
In the debate in parliament two days ago, an opposition MP, Mohammed el-Aadali, whipped out a document from 1906 which states, in the name of the Ottoman sultan: Umm Rashrash belongs to Egypt. In this spot - said the Egyptian experts on topography and geography - Egyptian pilgrims would stop and rest on their way to the holy cities in Saudi Arabia.
Another document brings testimony relating to 350 Egyptian police who were in Umm Rashrash just before it was captured in March 1949 and who were killed in battles with IDF soldiers.
Significantly, in the debate among the Egyptian MPs, the experts and the Foreign Ministry officials, no mention is made of possible legitimate Israeli sovereignty of Eilat. The debate in Cairo is between two camps: the Egyptian Foreign Ministry which claims that Eilat belongs to the Palestinians, and the opposition MPs who claim that Eilat belongs to Egypt.
The opposition Egyptian MPs threatened on Thursday to relay their demand for an Israeli withdrawal from Eilat to the Arab League to handle. Despite Israel's 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, the Arab League's 1948 declaration of war to liquidate the state of Israel remains in force. While Egypt was the kingpin of the Arab League from 1948 until 1977, the current dominant power in the Arab League is Saudi Arabia, which remains in a consistent state of war with the Jewish State until the present day. To that end, Saudi Arabia finances all Islamic terror groups that fight Israel, and continues to forbid any Jew from stepping on the soil of the Saudi kingdom.
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