Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

In 1979, Egypt broke ranks with the so-called Arab front against Israel to sign a peace agreement in return for Israel’s withdrawal from occupied Sinai, and annual financial assistance from the US. While Israel did not favor returning an inch of occupied territory, it nevertheless acquiesced in Carter’s demands, since after the ’73 war there was a growing realization that Egypt posed a formidable military challenge. The war was a near disaster for Israel, and were it not for the biggest airlift in history by which the US rushed military supplies, the picture in the Middle East would be very different today. However, the peace agreement eliminated this deterrent, and as if to affirm the new reality, Israel responded by invading Lebanon. While Carter’s threats soon secured an Israeli withdrawal, three years latter when Israel invaded Lebanon again, Egypt had a handy excuse not to intervene.

While the population in Egypt has remained generally sympathetic to Palestinians (the Kifaya movement, in fact, was inspired by the second Intifada), the government has grown too used to the luxuries bestowed on it by virtue of its peace agreement with Israel to challenge egregious US-Israeli outrages. At times, it has even set aside its own national dignity (a relic of the Nasser’s rule, who had turned Egypt into the pride of the Arab world) to serve its surrogate role. The recent controversy surrounding Benyamin Ben-Eliezer is a good example. This man was about to be hosted in Egypt as an official guest, even though his role in the massacre of Egyptian POWs is well known. It only became an embarassment after the story was confirmed in an Israeli documentary as well. Israel immediatley responded by rewriting history, to turn the POWs into “Palestinians” instead [inadvertently affirming that to both Israel and the Egyptian government, a Palesitnian is an acceptable victim]. As it turns out, Ben-Eliezer not only led the unit that committed the massacre, he personally participated in it. YNet reprorts:

An Egyptian man who was captured by Israeli troops during the 1967 Mideast war told the Gulf News website on Friday that he had witnessed Labor MK Benyamin Ben-Eliezer killing two Egyptian prisoners of war for “daring to quench their thirst without his permission”…

“It was very hot. We were thirsty. The Israelis ordered the detained Egyptian officers to gather near a water tank to drink from it. But when they did, the Israelis executed them with machine guns,” he said.

“It was a bestial trick to physically liquidate them…”

“We were held in a makeshift detention camp surrounded by a barbed wire fence around which there was a ditch. We were so thirsty that we could no longer perspire. An idea flashed through my mind. I collected shoe laces from my colleagues to make a long thread which I tied to a military boot. I used the boot to bring water from the nearby ditch. Our captors, however, took notice of this and led us to the commander of the camp who happened to be Ben-Eliezer, who spoke Arabic in an Iraqi dialect.

“He shot in front of our eyes an Egyptian army captain and a soldier for arguing with him over water. I survived miraculously.”

“The atrocities I saw are more chilling than this documentary,” said Abdul Rahman, who has filed a suit against Ben-Eliezer and former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a Cairo court.

This was not the first massacre of Egyptian POWs by Israel of course. During the ’67 war, at the same time that USS Liberty was being attacked by the Israeli Air Force, nearly a thousand Egyptian POWs were massacred and buried in mass graves.