Pro-Peace Intellectuals Band Together in Egypt

At a time when many in the Mideast despair over prospects for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli accord, some Egyptian intellectuals took a different tack Wednesday: They formed what may be the Arab world’s first civic association devoted to working for peace with Israel.

The Cairo Peace Society, a nongovernmental organization whose charter has been approved by the Egyptian government, will work with Peace Now and other similar-minded forces in Israel and abroad to break down barriers of mistrust and combat ignorance, its founders say.

The society claims it has 100 members and an additional 200 applicants. It also plans an academic research center to study Israeli politics and society and to organize seminars to acquaint Egyptians with developments in Israel, said Salah Bassiouni, a retired Egyptian diplomat who is chairman of the movement.

The seminars can also be a forum for Israeli and Arab academics to meet and exchange views, he said. Although its members would have to be counted as doves in the Arab political world, their founding statements indicated that the intellectuals forming the society do not want to be seen as Arab patsies.

A statement read by Bassiouni at the group’s inaugural news conference, at the Cairo Capital Club, a rarefied preserve of the city’s business elite, warned that peace “will never be achieved through the provocative, immoral and illegal attitudes of the present Israeli government.”

It also demanded that the Palestinians be allowed to attain their “national legitimate rights,” including a state with Jerusalem as its capital, and called for full withdrawal by Israeli forces from the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon.

The founders say they represent a large, important constituency that has no organizational voice: Egyptians who want peace with Israel.

Bassiouni, a former ambassador to Moscow, said the crisis in the Mideast peace process pushed concerned Eyptians like himself to form their group--to try to pressure Israel to return to the land-for-peace principle that first let Arabs and Israelis sit down and talk with one another at the 1991 Madrid Conference.

In these difficult times, he argued, Israelis lobbying for peace need active support from their counterparts in the Arab world.

Talks between the Palestinian Authority, headed by Yasser Arafat, and the Likud-led government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been stalled for a year, since Israel began building a settlement in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem and a series of suicide bombings in Israel killed dozens of people.

The Americans have not been able to break the impasse, though U.S. peace envoy Dennis B. Ross is expected to return to the region this week to prod the two sides and to try to get Israel to redeploy troops, as promised, from the West Bank.

Since Netanyahu’s election almost two years ago, the Israelis have emphasized their need for security and taken tougher negotiating positions, while at the same time planning and building more roads and Jewish settlements and confiscating more land. Unlike its Labor predecessor, Netanyahu’s government insists that Israel will retain permanent ownership of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War, and it rejects Palestinian aspirations for East Jerusalem.

Even Israel’s staunch friends, such as Jordan’s King Hussein, have expressed frustration with Netanyahu’s approach, and, in many Arab capitals, the conventional wisdom is that this Israeli government is uninterested in making a peace with which the Arabs can live.

This, in turn, has made it harder to find Arab intellectuals willing to defend relations with Israel. Although there are formal government relations between Egypt and Israel, most Egyptian organizations condemn “normalization” of relations, including cultural or professional contacts with Israeli counterparts.

Several founding members of the Cairo Peace Society came under fierce public condemnation last year for talking with Israelis--discussions that led to the signing of the “Copenhagen Declaration,” a document in which Egyptian, Palestinian, Jordanian and Israeli thinkers sketched out a blueprint for an Arab-Israeli peace.

Bassiouni alluded to that furor Wednesday, calling debate over the Copenhagen statement “healthy.” His group’s members are more than ready to engage critics, he noted, saying: “If there will be another debate, it will be healthy again. We don’t have any sensitivities in this respect, and people have to express their views.”

The group--to receive official approval under Egypt’s 1964 law on private organizations--had to persuade authorities that it does not intend to act as a political party, organizers say. Bassiouni denied that the group had a special sponsor in the Egyptian government.

But news reports have said that Osama Baz--foreign policy advisor to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and a moderate toward Israel--pushed for the group.

Lior Ben Dor, an Israeli diplomat based here, said at Wednesday’s news conference that Israel is encouraged by the Cairo group’s founding. He said he hopes it will help transform the cold, official peace between Israel and Egypt into a warm “peace between peoples.”