Dubai: Thirty years have passed since the groundbreaking peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed but the agreement is still far from winning popularity among the majority of Egyptians and Arabs.
While Israel is set to celebrate its first peace treaty with an Arab state its partner Egypt plans to leave the 30th anniversary almost entirely unmarked.
In fact, the peace treaty, known as the Camp David accords, has not created the anticipated "warm peace" between Egypt and Israel. Quite the opposite - many Arabs find the treaty problematic especially with the continuing suffering, occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people, and Israel's sporadic wars on Lebanon and most recently Gaza.
The same pros and cons of the treaty exist today, namely the wide gap between the two countries that existed 30 years ago is only growing, according to experts and ordinary Arabs.
"The peace treaty has negatively changed the Arab situation," Dia Rashwan, senior researcher at the Cairo-based Al Ahram Strategic Studies Centre said.
"It laid the foundation of a new reality by removing Egypt from the Arab-Israeli conflict [equation]," he told Gulf News.
Three decades later, the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has achieved nothing for Arabs, veteran Arab-American journalist Mohammad Ghuneim explained.
"On the contrary, it has achieved the opposite by neutralising the strongest Arab country in the conflict," Ghuneim, who covered the signing of Camp David and all the following Arab-Israeli agreements, told Gulf News.
The Palestinians are increasingly backing off in their demands, Ghuneim added, in reference to decreasing demands for a complete Israeli withdrawal to the lines before the 1967 war to the withdrawal of Israeli colonies that have swallowed the West Bank.
"Meanwhile, Israel is not living in peace," he pointed out.
On March 26, 1979 the late Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat and the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed in Washington the historic first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country. Both leaders won the Nobel Peace prize for their achievement.
While some describe the treaty as the "tallest achievement in a forest of scrub" of the Middle East, others say it complicates efforts to achieve a solution to the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by removing the heavyweight Arab country from the conflict.
Camp David led to similar agreements with other Arab countries involved in the decades old Arab-Israeli conflict which many believe breathed life into the "fragile" Camp David peace accords.
The treaty has mainly been realised on a formal level, analysts noted.
While ambassadors and diplomatic relations exist, tourism between the countries remains sparse. It is important to note that Egyptians rarely visit Israel for fear of returning home and facing disapproval. Moreover, very few Egyptian businessmen forge relations with their Israeli counterparts.
Those in favour of the Camp David accords say the most important achievement was the recapturing of the Sinai and subsequent peace after four wars fought between the two in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973.
However, those who oppose the accords say the importance of the withdrawal from Sinai is overshadowed by the fact that Egyptians cannot deploy its forces there without prior permission by Israel, which effectively means it does not enjoy full sovereignty over its land.
Egypt's peace treaty with Israel moved Cairo to "a state of isolation" experts noted in reference to an Arab boycott of Egypt after the Camp David accords.
Egyptian president Sadat's historic visit to occupied Jerusalem in 1977 sent shockwaves across the Arab streets. As a result of the treaty, Egypt's membership in the Arab League was suspended until the late eighties, and almost all Arab countries cut their diplomatic relations with Cairo with the exception of Oman and Sudan.
Furthermore, signing the treaty was among the reasons that lead to Sadat's assassination on October 6, 1981 by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group referred to as "Muslim radicals".
After Hosni Mubarak succeeded Sadat, the current president has only visited Israel once in 1995 to attend the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's funeral. Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Jew who opposed the peace agreements signed with the Palestinians.
"Egypt's regional influence will remain tied to what happens on the Palestinian-Israeli front, where the two-state solution - the basis of policy since Camp David, is near the end of the road," Shibley Telhami, a renowned professor at the University of Maryland, wrote in a recent article.
"What happens on that front will inevitably be central to the triangular Egyptian-Israeli-American relationship that resulted from the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty 30 years ago," he added.
