Egypt: Poll: Majority in Favour of Ending Peace With Israel
Jerusalem, April 27 — A recent opinion poll conducted in Egypt showed that 54% of the people who were interviewed are in favour of repealing the peace treaty with Israel, while only 36% were opposed.
The survey, conducted by an American research institute on a sample of 1,000 Egyptians (the margin of error is around 4%) indicates that 30 years after the signing of the peace treaty with Israel, it is still highly unpopular in broad segments of the Egyptian population, especially in the low income bracket.
The story was given ample space in Israeli daily Haaretz, which dedicated almost the entire third page to the issue with an alarm-raising headline: “Large-scale poll in Egypt: majority wants to repeal peace treaty with Israel”. The headlines in the other major Israeli dailies, Yedioth Aharonoth and Maariv, were basically the same.
Until now the presidential candidates in Egypt appear to be openly hostile to Israel, even though, at least for some, they are not necessarily in favour of revoking the peace treaty, mainly for economic reasons.
Notice that only their commercial interests deter the major political candidates from supporting the revocation of the peace treaty.
Will business concerns loom large enough to counterbalance the Muslim Brotherhood when its mobs take to the streets demanding the destruction of the Zionist enemy?
Hat tip: Insubria.
2 comments:
Well, okay, so what would actually change if they did repeal the treaty?
I'm thinking, maybe have my history a bit muddled, but the current treaty occurred some time after Israel gave the Egyptian army a serious shellacking in the Sinai.
I don't see Egypt trying that again any time soon given that with the treaty in question Israel gave back the Sinai to Egypt without a fight.
So it is probably the issue of Egypt having any kind of treaty with Israel (or the U.S., etc) that is the problem for the fundamentalist Islamists in Egypt.
Egypt doing away with this treaty changes nothing between Israel and Egypt. It merely serves to address the Islamsit's concerns.
This being a reflection of democracy in action in Egypt, maybe, but in the greater diplomatic sense nothing changes.
It is of course the lower income bracket which would be reduced in another war with Israel.
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