Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Sinai is not part of Egypt!

So first we have MPs in the Egyptian Parliament claiming Eilat is part of Egypt.
And now this article is claiming that the whole of Sinai was never part of Egypt anyway:

The Egyptians who raise the matter of Eilat are skating on thin ice. For the Sinai, which Egypt has convinced the world is historically part of its domain, was always a corpus separatum.

How many of you have ever seen the map, reproduced in the Diaries of Colonel Meinertzhagen, that show how much of the Sinai became Egyptian only in the 1920s? Egypt had no historic or legal title to the Sinai except that provided by Great Britain. Britain was perfectly willing to diminish unilaterally the territory intended for the Mandate for Palestine by lopping off all of historic Palestine east of the river Jordan. It was also perfectly willing to curry favor with Egypt, at the very moment when the British who had come under Lord Cromer to improve the civil service were leaving, by handing over the Sinai to an Egypt that had never before been thought entitled to it.

So why did the Israelis hand back Sinai after the camp David treaty? ahh well they were so helpless and Naive and could not resist the immense pressure put by Jimmy Carter (who by the way turned out to be antisemitic!!)

This was not an argument that was made by the Israelis at Camp David. They were beaten about by Jimmy Carter, who was the same Carter then as he his now. At the time, however, all kinds of Jewish leaders were falling all over themselves praising the antisemitic Carter as a veritable prince of peace.

So who should claim Sinai then? Well either I'm a bit slow or the author doesn't really say it out loud but rather implies that it should be to Israel!!
OK this is just bogus, so what if Sinai was never part of Egypt and was handed by the Britts in 1920, wasn't the same story for the state of Israel in 1948?
And if that was the case why the hell did the Egyptians claimed Taba, a part of Sinai that was still under Israeli control until 1989 through an international panel of arbitrators?
Give us a break.

Waldorf

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