Since details of the Hamas-Israel prisoner swap emerged on Tuesday evening, Egypt’s role in negotiating the deal has received special attention in the Israeli media.
In a sign of warming relations between the two countries, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the head of Egypt's ruling military council, that Egypt's help in the deal "warms the hearts of all Israeli citizens," Israeli Army Radio reported on Thursday.
The “German mediator [Gerhard] Conrad did as much as he could,” but “the fate of the talks was in the hands of Egypt’s military rulers,” writes prominent war correspondent Rosh Ben-Yishai in Yedioth Ahronot, Israel’s most widely read daily.
In the deal, Hamas is to release Gilad Shalit, a captive Israeli soldier, in exchange for about a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including known militants, as well as women and children, currently kept in Israeli jails. Shalit has been held in Gaza by Hamas since he was captured in June 2006.
According to Israeli reports, this year’s Arab uprisings, especially Egypt’s, played a central role in getting both Hamas and Israel to accept the compromise, more or less the same one that had been on the negotiating table for years.
Israel felt that the window of opportunity for striking a deal was closing because a new Egyptian government, particularly one in which the Muslim Brotherhood plays a larger role, may be less sympathetic to Israel than the current military regime, according to Israeli reports.
Hamas, for its part, “understood that fallout between Israel and Egypt would also impact its ability to reach a deal with Israel,” according to Yaakov Katz, political commentator in the English-language Jerusalem Post. “This led Hamas to take a more pragmatic approach, moving it to change its own position on some of the names on the list of terrorists set to be released.”
Israeli commentators also credit the uprising in Syria for helping move the prisoner-exchange deal along. Yedioth Ahronot’s Ben-Yishai writes that events in Syria motivated Hamas to show flexibility. “The ground in Syria is shifting beneath the feet of the group’s political leadership in Damascus, and it seeks a new base,” he writes. “This leadership now needs an entry ticket into moderate Arab states, headed by Egypt, Jordan and Qatar.”
Ido Zelkovitz, another commentator with Yedioth Ahronoth, writes that “the same agreement was refused by Hamas in October 2009 but the political changes [this year] demanded that Hamas make a sacrifice.”
Udi Segal, a commentator from Israel’s Channel 2 News, the country’s most widely-viewed television news network, gives what he calls renewed Egypt-Israel alliance primary credit. Meetings between Hamas and Israel “were all conducted by way of Egyptian mediation,” Segal writes. “That tells us something important: It’s precisely with Egypt’s temporary and dilapidated leadership that Israel has cut a strategic alliance in recent days.”
Although many details of the deal are still unknown, the prisoner exchange is to be carried out in steps. According to media reports, Hamas will transfer the Israeli soldier to Egypt within a week. Reports on Thursday said that Shalit is already in Cairo undergoing a medical examination. At about the same time, Israel will transfer about 450 Palestinian prisoners to Egypt. Shalit will then be sent to Israel, and two months later, Israel is to release an additional 550 prisoners.
As part of the purported Israeli-Egyptian reconciliation, Segal claims additionally that negotiations to release Ilan Grapel, an alleged Israeli spy who has been held by Egypt since June, are soon to be completed, and notes that Israel officially apologized this week to Egypt for killing six Egyptian border guards on the Israel-Egyptian border in August. The deaths took place while Israeli security forces were pursuing militants across its southern border with Egypt.
That incident, and the ensuing uproar that culminated last month in the storming of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, contributed to a breakthrough in the deal for Shalit, according to Zelkovitz in Yedioth Ahronoth. “The heightened tensions along the Egyptian border with Israel after the terror attacks near Eilat in August actually enhanced the dialogue between Israel and Egypt on a series of security-related matters. This dialogue was also a factor in promoting the prisoner swap deal,” he writes.
The need for Egypt’s ruling military to maintain support among ordinary Egyptians, particular following its clashes with largely-Coptic protesters this week that resulted in at least 26 deaths and several hundred wounded, is also considered. “The Shalit deal enhances the status of Egypt's new government, even in the eyes of people in the streets,” writes Boaz Bismuth of the right-wing daily Israel Hayom, “who since the revolution have shown a renewed interest in the Palestinian cause,” a phenomenon he promptly dismisses as “one more reason to denounce Mubarak.”
“For Hamas, it was easy to do business with Egypt after it got rid of Hamas' bitter enemy, Mubarak,” he adds.
Many are also speculating that Egypt’s military rulers exerted pressure on the Palestinian Islamist movement to increase their own prestige.
“Where both German and Turkish mediators failed to conclude a deal, Egyptian intelligence officers… succeeded,” write Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel in an article in Haaretz, a left-wing daily. “Egypt's new leadership has thus proven it can still affect dramatic change in the Middle East.”
“But it's doubtful,” it observes, “that says anything about its ability to do the same inside Egypt.”
