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JPost- 30 anni di pace 28/03/2009 Editorial, Jerusalem Post, March 24, 2009

30 YEARS AT PEACE Editorial, Jerusalem Post, March 24, 2009 There was something melancholy about our story this week that Egyptian Ambassador to Israel Yasser Reda would be marking the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between our countries by not boycotting a Jerusalem conference and reception today. This wasn't the way Israelis imagined peace would look three decades after president Anwar Sadat's historic journey to Jerusalem . Egypt's Foreign Ministry marked the lead-up to the anniversary with a strong condemnation of Israel's refusal to allow the Palestinian Authority to conduct a "cultural festival" within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries-including a march on the Temple Mount, complete with PLO flags. The PA knows that Israeli law prohibits it from operating in Jerusalem , which is precisely why it organized the illegal demonstration-to hammer home its claims of sovereignty. Regrettably Egypt used this PA provocation to denounce Israel 's "continuous efforts to judaize Jerusalem ," warning that Israel won't be able to "suppress" Palestinian demands for a capital in east Jerusalem . Curiously, Cairo did not reference Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's reported plan to hand over the Arab neighborhoods of the city to a future " Palestine ," nor PA President Mahmoud Abbas's rejection of the offer as insufficient.... The good news, says [the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies' Dr. Ehud] Eilam, is that the relationship has survived a series of crises-from Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights and the preemptive attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor, through several Lebanon conflicts, two intifadas and the latest Gaza fighting. "The main  achievement of the treaty," he says, "is the survival of the treaty itself-and that our rivalry does not play out on the battlefield." Former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir put it this way in his memoirs: "That which  moved Sadat, which fired him and induced him to risk not only his life but also  Egypt's standing in the Arab world, that promise of 'no more war,' the words he  repeated so often in the brief remainder of his life-that has survived; and so his efforts were not in vain, not for Israel and certainly not for Egypt." Amen. We hesitate to speculate on where the Egypt-Israel relationship will be 30 years  from now.... The cold peace calibrated by Mubarak has been tolerable, if disappointing. But the notion that a successor regime which "knew not Sadat" might one day field Egypt 's colossal and lavishly modernized military against the Jewish state cannot be ruled out. For an enduring peace, it is imperative, therefore, that Mubarak use the remaining years of his tenure to reconceptualize and rebrand Egypt's attitude toward Israel. A first state visit would be a good starting point.