Egypt’s Peace With Israel Shows Signs of Cooling

One was a low-level mechanic at a newly opened Israeli clothing company that provided jobs to 800 women here. The other was a high-profile business executive, a former Israeli tourism spokeswoman who had adopted Egypt as her passion, bringing Japanese, European and U.S. companies to invest in what she saw as an economy on the launch pad to success.

The first is now in prison, accused of being a spy. The second is out in the cold, banned without warning for unspecified “security” reasons from returning to the Egyptian capital and to the business she had built for a decade--not to mention to her home, her clothes and her jewelry.

“They say ‘security.’ What security? If I am a spy, they should put me in prison,” says business executive Devorah Ganani. “If I brought business to Egypt, they should salute me, no matter where I was born.”

In Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, there are ominous signs that whatever normalization was achieved in the past 18 years is unraveling. Although President Hosni Mubarak still speaks of peace and sends envoys shuttling to get Israeli-Palestinian talks back on track, the arrest of Israeli citizen Azam Azam for alleged espionage and the banning of Ganani are sending a different message--that Israelis, particularly businesspeople, are less welcome in Egypt.

The latest signal came last week, when the newspaper Al Ahram quoted sources saying that Egyptian embassies and border posts have a list of 4,000 Israelis who may no longer enter Egypt under any circumstances. Israeli leaders said the report, if true, would be “extremely disconcerting.”

The paper said the list was recently assembled by the Interior and Foreign ministries and includes Israeli Cabinet ministers and the army chief of staff, as well as certain journalists. A Foreign Ministry spokesman denied to The Times that the list exists. But the report was widely disseminated in state-controlled media and never retracted.

Egyptian authorities also deny any official campaign to block Israelis from doing business in Egypt. The Azam case, they say, is about espionage; Ganani was banned as a result of her own actions, which they decline to discuss in detail. When Egyptians avoid business contacts with Israelis, they say, it is a matter of personal preference and not government edict.

But with Egyptian-Israeli relations at their lowest since the 1979 peace treaty concluded by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, there is little doubt that the diplomatic chill is spreading to other spheres.

On Nov. 6, 1996, Azam, 34, a technician, was seized by a dozen plainclothes Egyptian security officers as he returned to the hotel where he was living near Cairo International Airport. Now he stares out from a black cage in the sweltering State Security Court in Cairo’s Bab el Khalq area, a chamber whose high, plaster-leafed ceilings are caked with dust from the nearby desert.

Before judges enter the courtroom, a vendor marches up and down the aisle with a small metal tray, selling lemonade, tea, Turkish coffee and bottled water at the trial that has become a national sensation. Members of the public can attend only with special passes; guards with plastic shields and bamboo canes are stationed outside on window ledges to keep out intruders. Journalists and plainclothes police officers, whose pistol handles jut out beneath untucked shirttails, fill the benches.

Black-haired and balding, with dark eyes that follow the proceedings intently, Azam might well be pondering how he came to be locked up in an Egyptian prison, accused of being an Israeli spy. A Druze, an adherent of a secretive offshoot of Islam, Azam grew up in a village near Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. He did not finish high school, served in the Israeli army and since has been working as a mechanic. His arrest came a scant four months after he arrived in Cairo to work in an Israeli-owned garment factory where his older brother was the manager.

According to another brother, Sami, theirs is a close-knit, traditional family of six brothers. Azam, the youngest, went to Egypt partly to keep his older brother company and to earn twice what he could at home to support his wife and four children.

For Egyptians, who have followed the breathless headlines about his case, Azam is a villain--a go-between in a titillating tale of sex, lingerie and espionage that was aimed at trapping an innocent young Egyptian man into committing treason. Emotions against Azam were running so high that his defense lawyer, Farid Deeb, was punched out by another prominent member of the Cairo bar during a court session in May.

For Israelis, Azam is a victim, a luckless pawn who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and now must endure a political show trial for a farfetched spy fantasy cooked up by Egyptian security services.

“I feel that I will be acquitted, because I am an innocent man,” Azam has told reporters.

He already has been tried and convicted in the Egyptian media, where he is routinely referred to as “the spy Azam.” His prosecutor has demanded that Azam be sentenced to life in prison with hard labor.

That, Israeli officials insist, would be a travesty. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister David Levy and Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordecai have all offered personal assurances that Azam had nothing to do with Israeli intelligence.

But the Mukhabarat, Egypt’s intelligence agency, says otherwise. It has fingered Azam as part of a plot to recruit an Egyptian textile worker as an economic spy against Egypt.

The prosecution contends that Emad Ismail, a Muslim bachelor from a small village, was seduced last year by two Israeli Arab women while on job training in Israel at the same company where Azam worked. Among the accusations is that the ensnared worker received women’s undergarments soaked in invisible ink with which to send back information to Israel. Azam enters in this story because he allegedly gave the underwear to Ismail before the Egyptian returned home.

Ismail’s detailed confession and a dozen women’s bodysuits are the main evidence against Azam. A prosecution witness has testified that the garments contained invisible ink. Ismail allegedly was to soak them in water to extract the ink, then use it to jot commercial information--to count, for example, the number of factories in an industrial zone.

But Azam’s lawyer has questioned why the Israelis would need to go to such lengths as to put invisible ink in undergarments.

Ahmed Moussa, who is covering the trial for Al Ahram, Egypt’s semiofficial newspaper, believes the government case. He says he has learned from sources that Israel offered “huge sums” to get Azam back and that proves him no “ordinary person.”

“Let me tell you something: The Egyptian intelligence is one of the strongest intelligence forces in the world, and the United States and even Israel would attest to this,” Moussa insists. “This is why I can assure you this case is not silly or frivolous.”

But Azam’s family and supporters see it differently. In opening defense arguments, Deeb suggested that the true explanation for the highly public prosecution might be summed up in a story in the opposition Al Shaab newspaper, which said: “No matter what, Egypt already has gained more than it lost . . . in this trial. The exposure of this case has curtailed dealings with Israeli businesses to the highest possible extent. As for the Egyptians who used to travel to Israel for work, they now realize that such trips get them not only money but most likely troubles.”

After Azam’s arrest, the Israeli-owned factory where he worked closed. Tourism from Israel has dropped precipitously. The latest incident with Ganani now is sending shivers through the small community of Israelis who had pioneered business here.

Ganani--an Israeli who considered herself “half Egyptian already” and “spokesperson of the Egyptian economy” for her work bringing Europeans, Americans and Japanese to see the advantages of setting up tourist ventures in Egypt worth millions of dollars--was stunned when she returned from a weekend in Israel and was stopped at the airport.

There she waited an entire day for the Egyptians to rectify what she thought a simple mistake. It obviously was not: After she returned to Israel, Egyptian and Arab newspapers suddenly were filled with stories describing her as a Mossad agent and accusing her of paying bribes.

She has written to Mubarak asking to be let back into Egypt and has gone to the Egyptian ambassador in Israel to plead for help. She says she considers her situation tragic not just for herself but for the cause of peace. “I love the people of Egypt, really, and the country is growing very fast and a lot can be done in business,” she says.

Leor Ben-Dor--a Cairo-based Israeli diplomat and media spokesman who describes himself as almost completely shunned by Egyptian journalists--says he is distressed by the latest chill in relations between Egypt and Israel, especially in the fields of business and trade. “OK, we have a freezing in the peace process. But let’s keep the existing cooperation in order to be able to start up again in the future when the peace process is renewed.”