Embattled Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi will not invalidate the 1978 Camp David Accords and become hostile to Israel, business and political leader Ahmed Said tells Newsmax.TV.
“His only merit right now is that he has a good relationship with Hamas,” Said, chairman of the pro-Western opposition Free Egyptians Party, tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview. “But you have to consider that the public opinion in Egypt, the appearance of sympathy towards the Palestinians, has gone down because people see it as Egypt helping Hamas and not the Palestinians.
“So this is one thing that you have to look at,” Said noted. “The other thing is we are very concerned about the security of Sinai because in the Sinai Peninsula, which is Egyptian soil, there are a lot of things that are going on right now — and we don’t know exactly what is going on.”
Watch our exclusive interview. Story continues below.
The Camp David Accords, reached between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, led to the signing of a peace treaty six months later. The treaty formally ended the state of war that had begun with Israel’s founding in 1948 — and the Jewish state agreed to withdraw in stages from the Sinai Peninsula.
The treaty also called for normal diplomatic relations between the countries.
Israel, however, has not implemented the provisions calling for Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza. The issue has caused much conflict over the years — including bloodshed inspired in recent weeks by the Islamic Hamas group in Gaza.
The countries currently are under a cease-fire agreement.
“The thing about Gaza is the public opinion here in Egypt is that the United States has been very satisfied with Morsi’s performance, because the only success that Morsi has come to achieve was to quiet the conflict between Israel and Gaza,” Said tells Newsmax. “It was actually because he has an excellent relationship with Hamas.”
But he added: “It was really sad to see the United States support him — and that’s what gave the public the opinion that the United States was supporting Morsi, because he’s helping them with Hamas in order to solve the problem once and for all.”
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