When was the last time you saw a picture of an Egyptian President roaring with laughter in a meeting with an Israeli Prime Minister?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one reveals a great deal about the state of peace between Israel and Egypt.
On the sidelines of the opening session of the U.N. General Assembly in Manhattan today, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu held their first-ever publicly announced meeting. And it went better than both men had hoped.
While the two leaders speak frequently by phone, they have met in person only twice before. The first time was in the Red Sea resort city of Aqaba, Jordan in February 2016, hosted by Jordanian King Abdullah II. The second time was in Cairo in April 2016. But both of those meetings were tightly held secrets at the time. No photos were released.
By contrast, today’s meeting was announced by both sides even before it took place. Afterwards, official photographs were released. What’s more, the photos showed the two men not simply shaking hands but sincerely enjoying each other’s company.
Clearly, they have cultivated a relationship they now believe is healthy and enduring enough to make public. Senior Israeli and Egyptian officials tell me security cooperation between the two countries is unprecedentedly close. This is good.
But I believe there is something bigger going on.
Is el-Sisi going to invite Netanyahu to come on an official, formal, public state visit to Cairo? Is el-Sisi going to introduce Netanyahu to other Arab heads of state? Will he offer to host historic peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians?
Is Netanyahu about to invite el-Sisi to come to Jerusalem for an official state visit? Will he invite el-Sisi to address the Knesset, the first time an Egyptian leader would have done so since 1977 when Anwar el-Sadat stunned the world and melted the hearts of the Israeli people? Could an el-Sisi trip to Jerusalem lay the groundwork for an historic visit by the King of Saudi Arabia, or another major Arab country?
Significantly, today’s meeting came on the 39th anniversary of the Camp David peace talks. From September 5 through 17, 1978, Sadat met with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin — under the auspices of U.S. President Jimmy Carter — at the presidential retreat center near Thurmont, Maryland. Together, they hammered out the first-ever peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country.
Could another breakthrough be coming?
One thing is certain: el-Sisi believes his relationship with the Israelis can stand up against the harshest criticism by Radical Islamists, from the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda and ISIS, to the ayatollahs of Iran. That is a positive and significant development.
As I wrote about earlier this year when I met President el-Sisi in Washington, “What has intrigued me as I have studied Sisi is how much he admires the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, even though Sadat was assassinated for visiting Jerusalem and agreeing to the 1979 Camp David Accords.”
Indeed, “as the leader of the first Arab nation ever to sign a peace treaty with Israel, President Sisi believes Egypt offers a model that can help lead the region to peace with the Jewish state.”
Will the Saudis follow Egypt’s lead? Will the Gulf States? Will Morocco and the rest of North Africa? And ultimately, will the Palestinians?
At the same time, is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to follow the path of his mentor, Menachem Begin, in forging sweeping peace agreements with the broader Arab community, as well as with the Palestinians?
Only time will tell, but this was a good and encouraging day.
NOTE: Earlier today, U.S. President Donald Trump met for two hours with Netanyahu. The two men publicly affirmed that the U.S.-Israel alliance is stronger than ever. They discussed how to forge a broad regional peace, including a deal with the Palestinians, but also how to counter the real and growing threat posed by Iran. This, too, is positive. The closer the U.S. and Israel are — and the more unified they are in confronting Iran and ISIS — the easier it may be for Israel and the Arab world to find a way to make peace.
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>> To pre-order a copy of The Kremlin Conspiracy (which releases March 6th), please click here.
(Jerusalem, Israel) — This morning, FoxNews.com published a new column of mine on the massive Russian war games underway near the borders of three NATO countries and Ukraine. The column includes findings from an exclusive poll I commissioned about American attitudes towards Russia and Putin earlier this year.
Earlier this week, I was interviewed by a reporter for Breitbart News about the Putin threat and my forthcoming novel, The Kremlin Conspiracy. That article was also published today.
Here are excerpts from that article:
To read the full article, please click here.
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>> To pre-order a copy of The Kremlin Conspiracy (which releases March 6th), please click here.
(Jerusalem, Israel) — In September and October, I look forward to being in the United States on a speaking tour to discuss geopolitical and spiritual trend lines in some of the world’s most volatile regions and countries.
Details for each event are below. Please join us, if you can, and feel free to invite others via social media.
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>> To pre-order a copy of The Kremlin Conspiracy (which releases March 6th), please click here.
(Jerusalem, Israel) — Is Russia preparing to invade another European country, or simply training its forces to do so in the future?
That’s the big question as Vladimir Putin prepares to launch a massive series of war games on Thursday dangerously close to the borders of three NATO member states — the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — as well as Ukraine, which Russia has invaded and occupied portions of twice since 2014.
While it sounds eerily similar to the plot of my forthcoming political thriller, The Kremlin Conspiracy, the exercise — code-named “Zapad-2017” (Zapad in Russian means “West”) is all-too-real. It is set to begin on September 14 and conclude on September 20th, and tensions in the region are high.
Some says the concerns are overblown and that Moscow has no intention of using military force in Europe. Such skeptics need to be reminded, however, that in just the last decade, Putin has invaded Georgia (and occupies 20% of it), Ukraine (twice, and occupies Crimea and Eastern Ukraine), and has sent forces into Syria to prop up the bloodthirsty Assad regime that has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of its own people and driven nearly half the Syrian population from their homes.
The Economist calls this “Russia’s biggest war game in Europe since the Cold War.” That said, there is a dispute over just how big.
Moscow says only 12,500 troops will take part, most of which will operate in the country of Belarus, just south of the Baltics and just north of Ukraine. But “some Western analysts, and Baltic State governments…have expressed concerns that the exercise will in reality be significantly larger, involving between 60,000 and 100,000 military personnel,” notes Janes Intelligence Review.
“According to the Baltic States, the last Zapad-series exercise in 2013 involved 75,000 military personnel, six times higher than Russia disclosed,” says Janes.
Have the U.S. and other NATO commanders positioned enough forces, tanks, fighter jets and other defenses of their own to protect against a Russian blitz? I pray yes, but I’m not so certain.
According to a recent RAND Corporation analysis: “As currently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members. Across multiple games using a wide range of expert participants in and out of uniform playing both sides, the longest it has taken Russian forces to reach the outskirts of the Estonian and/or Latvian capitals of Tallinn and Riga, respectively, is 60 hours. Such a rapid defeat would leave NATO with a limited number of options, all bad: a bloody counteroffensive, fraught with escalatory risk, to liberate the Baltics; to escalate itself, as it threatened to do to avert defeat during the Cold War; or to concede at least temporary defeat, with uncertain but predictably disastrous consequences for the Alliance and, not incidentally, the people of the Baltics.”
Estonia’s Defense Minister Margus Tsahkna says NATO has intelligence suggesting Moscow may leave Russian soldiers in Belarus once the exercises are over, Reuters reports. He said Russia will use 4,000 railway carriages to transport its troops and equipment to Belarus, perhaps to establish a new Russia military base.
“For Russian troops going to Belarus, it is a one-way ticket,” Tsahkna told Reuters in an interview in Malta. “This is not my personal opinion; we are analyzing very deeply how Russia is preparing for the Zapad exercises.”
Meanwhile, “Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has described Russia’s build-up for the exercise as ‘preparations for an offensive war on a continental scale,'” reports the BBC, and Ukrainian defenses are being bolstered.
According to the BBC, Poroshenko believes Russia is “using the pretext of an exercise to mobilize and position forces to conduct offensive operations” and that “he could not rule out the possibility that the drill ‘may be used as a smokescreen to create new Russian army assault groups to invade Ukrainian territory.'”
I’ll definitely keep you posted as events unfold. In the meantime, please pray for safety and security for the people of the Baltics and Ukraine. Please also pray for wisdom for their leaders and the commanders of NATO.
>> To pre-order a copy of The Kremlin Conspiracy (which releases March 6th), please click here.
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