Tel-Chai Nation

Now, as David Bedein reports in The Bulletin, they want Israel to give up Eilat:

It will be remembered that the 1967 Six-Day War broke out after Egypt closed the straits of Tiran and strangled the trade from Israel's southern port city of Eliat.
Yet few are aware that Egypt has staked a claim to the city of Eilat, ever since it lost Eilat to the nascent state of Israel in the wake of the Egyptian army's defeat in the 1948 war, followed by the expulsion of the Egyptians from this southern port city on the Red Sea.

Now, in the wake of recent reports about plans to dig a canal linking the Red Sea on the Israeli side and the Dead Sea on its Jordanian side, a fiery argument broke out in Egypts parliament, with the members of parliament (MPs) speaking out against the "Israeli plot to choke the Suez Canal to death."

In the course of the debate, which has been going on in parliament for the last two days, Abed el-Aziz Sayef a-Nasser, an aide to the Egyptian foreign minister, was called as an expert witness. A-Nasser is the director of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry's legal department.

"Eilat, or by its former name Umm Rashrash, belongs to the Palestinians," he said, representing the opinion of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry.

[...]

Significantly, in the debate among the Egyptian MPs, the experts and the Foreign Ministry officials, no mention is made of possible legitimate Israeli sovereignty of Eilat. The debate in Cairo is between two camps: the Egyptian Foreign Ministry which claims that Eilat belongs to the Palestinians, and the opposition MPs who claim that Eilat belongs to Egypt.

It belongs to neither, and lest we forget that "palestinians" didn't exist until recently, as early as the late 1960s. I think this pretty much shows that Egypt is slowly on its way to returning to its hostile ways again, more clearly than in past years.

Labels: Egypt