Eventually, the fate of this plan will be the same as the fate of all the other grandiose plans put forward by Sharon in his long career. One need only think of the Lebanon war and its price.63
February 12, 2005
Nobody called it the "Ophira Conference." Not even the papers of the extreme right. Who today even remembers the name Ophira, which was given to Sharm-al-Sheikh during the Israeli occupation, as a first step to its annexation?
Who wants to remember the famous saying of Moshe Dayan that "Sharm-al-Sheikh is more important than peace"? A few years later, the same Dayan took part in the peace negotiations with Egypt and gave Sharm-al-Sheikh back. But in the meantime, some 2,500 young Israelis and who knows how many thousands of Egyptians paid with their lives for that statement in the Yom Kippur war.
While the conference went on, I could not clear my head of a song that was haunting me: "Sharm-al-Sheikh, we have come back again ..." It was sung with gusto in the days of the stupid euphoria after the Six-Day war. It reminded people at the time that we had already conquered the place during the 1956 Sinai war but were compelled by the Eisenhower-Bulganin ultimatum to withdraw. So here we were again.
I was there in 1956. A beautiful gulf ("Sharm-al-Sheikh means "the bay of the old man"), a few small houses, and a distinctive mosque. Before our army withdrew, a few months later, it blew up the mosque in a fit of pique.
Now, 22 years after leaving Ophira for the last time (nobody sang then "Sharm-al-Sheikh, we have left you again ...") all of us are treating the place as an Egyptian resort, as Egyptian as Cairo and Alexandria. The past has been erased. The occupation has been wiped from our collective memory.
That is the first optimistic lesson from the conference. One can withdraw. One can put an end to occupation. One can even forget that it ever took place.
The spirits of two people who were not there hovered over the proceedings.
One of them was George W. Bush. Neither he nor any other
American sat at the large round table. But all the four who were sitting there knew that they are completely dependent on him. Husni Mubarak