Securing the Sinai

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Capsule Review

The Six-Day War: A Retrospective

William B. Quandt

Instability in Sinai has escalated to unprecedented levels in the last two months. Militants have committed attacks against government offices and infrastructure and used the territory to stage assaults against Israel. The latest incidents -- the August 18 terror attack in Eilat, in southern Israel, and the subsequent killing of Egyptian policemen on the Egyptian-Israeli border by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers -- have brought Egypt and Israel to the lowest point in relations during their 30-year peace.

The most immediate cause of the heightened tensions in the Sinai is the collapse of the Egyptian police force as a result of the February revolution that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak. As Mubarak's rule was unraveling in January and February, Bedouin protesters battled the police in Sinai towns with machine guns and grenades, forcing them to withdraw. They have not returned. The resulting security vacuum has allowed smuggling and infiltration into and out of Gaza to thrive and created space for radical extremist groups.

The Egyptian government's response to the rising instability in the Sinai has been simply to send more military forces. In August, in coordination with Israel, Egypt moved thousands of troops to Sinai as part of a campaign called Operation Eagle. 

This approach is based on the assumption, widely accepted in Cairo, that the root cause of instability in Sinai is the lack of army troops, whose numbers are limited by the provisions of the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. As many Egyptian policymakers and analysts see it, the solution is therefore to amend the treaty to allow greater military presence in the area.

But such a strategy is wrongheaded for several reasons. For starters, although Israel has agreed to allow additional Egyptian troops into Sinai (totaling about 3,500 soldiers), the Netanyahu government is unlikely to give its consent to a permanent surge when it fears the emergence of an Islamist-dominated government in Egypt.

On a deeper level, however, this approach misreads the violence in Sinai as some isolated attacks originating from Gaza and not as a grass-roots insurgency with particular and, in many cases, legitimate grievances. Ever since 1982, when Egypt restored its control over the Sinai Peninsula after 15 years of Israeli occupation, the Bedouin majority who live there have been framed by the government in Cairo as outlaws. They are culturally and ethnically apart from Egyptians of the Nile Valley and share largely nomadic and clan-based social connections that extend beyond national borders. Bedouins were also long suspected of being collaborators during the Israeli occupation, accused of taking jobs with Israeli companies and starting new businesses under Israeli control.

As a result, Sinai Bedouins have long faced state discrimination: Almost a fifth are refused Egyptian citizenship, and all are denied the right to own land for fear that they would resell it to Israelis. Bedouins are also excluded from Egypt's mandatory conscription, prohibited from joining police or military academies or from holding key positions in Sinai's two governorates.

These discriminatory policies have been compounded by economic marginalization. Only a tiny fraction of Bedouins were able to find work in Egypt's tourism industry, the country's largest economic sector. In fact, many Bedouins believe that they were better off in terms of employment, education, and medical services under Israeli administration. Traditional jobs in herding and farming could not cope with the growing and largely young Bedouin population in the arid expanse of Sinai. Egyptian government programs meant to revitalize the region's economy, such as the al-Salam Canal, a large irrigation plan proposed in 1997, never got off the ground.

In the late 1990s, facing bleak economic prospects, the Bedouins moved into the underground economy of drug cultivation, smuggling, and human trafficking. Drugs were and continue to be either transferred for local consumption in Egypt or smuggled to Israel. Later on, the Israeli blockade of Gaza led to a flourishing trade in smuggled weapons and commodities through an elaborate network of tunnels. Above ground, the Bedouins help refugees from eastern Africa to cross into Israel illegally in search of economic opportunity.

Attempts by Egyptian security forces to cut off the underground economy, such as eradicating drug crops, deploying border guard units to the Gaza border to stop smuggling, and erecting more checkpoints on the roads, were largely unsuccessful. A culture of corruption allowed smugglers to bribe police; meanwhile, many of the central characteristics of the Bedouin nomadic lifestyle -- tracking skills, tight kinship bonds, and high mobility across the desert -- helped Bedouin smugglers evade capture.

Unable to arrest and prosecute Bedouins in Sinai, Egyptian security forces turned to their infamous practices under Egypt's emergency law, which has been in place since 1981: arbitrary arrests, torture, and holding the wives and daughters of suspected militants hostage to coerce the wanted to turn themselves in.