By Jeffrey Heller
JERUSALEM, Aug 19 (Reuters) - Israel is urging
the West to stick by Egypt's army in its confrontation with the Muslim
Brotherhood, quietly echoing warnings by U.S. regional ally Saudi Arabia
against putting pressure on the military-backed government.
"Israel shares
its views with the U.S. and some EU (European Union) countries, and those views
are to give priority to restoring stability," a senior Israeli official said on
Monday.
"And like it or not, the army is the only player that can restore
law and order (in Egypt)."
With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's
cabinet instructed by him to avoid public comment about turmoil in Egypt, where
about 850 people, including 70 police and soldiers, have been killed in nearly
a week of violence, government officials have been speaking, anonymously, about
Israel's concerns.
Among them is any sign of weakened support for an
Egyptian military that maintained close security ties with Israel even during
the year-long rule of President Mohamed Mursi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader
deposed by the army on July 3 after huge protests against him.
Responding
to the mounting death toll on Egypt, the United States has postponed delivery of
four F-16 fighters and scrapped a joint military exercise with the Egyptian
armed forces, but has not withheld $1.55 billion in annual aid.
That
decision, one Israeli official said, "raised eyebrows" in Israel, which signed a
peace treaty with Egypt in 1979 that has been underpinned by a working
relationship between the armed forces of both countries.
But other
officials insisted there was no formal Israeli lobbying drive in Washington to
dissuade President Barack Obama from taking any stronger measures to try to curb
the Egyptian military crackdown.
"When we speak (to U.S. officials), we
clearly say what we think. It doesn't mean there is a campaign. We share our
views and analysis," one official said.
"With what other neighbour of
Egypt can they speak about this? We are the only nation they can speak to what's
right on the border; obviously there's a lot to exchange."
Israel, hoping
to preserve its peace treaty with Egypt, was muted in its response to Mursi's
election as president a year ago after autocrat Hosni Mubarak's ouster,
Netanyahu was vocal in the past about his fears of an Islamist takeover in
Egypt.
Such a scenario, he said in 2011, represented a "tremendous threat"
to Egyptian-Israeli cooperation.
Elsewhere in the region, Saudi Arabia has
publicly cautioned the West against measures aimed at reining in the military in
its efforts to curb the Muslim Brotherhood.
"We will not achieve anything
through threats," Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, told
reporters in Paris on Sunday ahead of an EU foreign ministers' meeting in
Brussels to review the 28-nation bloc's Egyptian policy.
Israel sees
Egypt's armed forces as critical in confronting Islamist fundamentalism on a
national level and dealing with attacks by Islamist militants in the Sinai
Peninsula, which has a long desert border with the Jewish state.
SINAI ATTACKS
Deepening Israel's worries about increasing lawlessness
on its doorstep, suspected Islamist gunmen killed at least 24 Egyptian policemen
in an ambush in Sinai on Monday.
Just last week, Israel's Red Sea resort
of Eilat, on the border with Sinai, was targeted by a rocket apparently fired by
Islamist militants. It was shot down by an Israeli missile shield.
Tzachi
Hanegbi, a legislator from Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party and a confidant of
the prime minister, said it was also in Washington's strategic interest to
maintain good relations with Egypt's leaders.
"Every year, Egypt gets 1.5
billion dollars, mainly in military aid. The U.S. military ... gets preferential
treatment for passage in the Suez Canal and in Egyptian air space. All these
things have greatly assisted the United States in its operations in the Middle
East," he told Army Radio on Sunday.
Hanegbi, a member of parliament's
Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, said that while Washington needed to
voice its displeasure over bloodshed in Egypt, "the paramount U.S. interest is
not to take steps from which there is no way back".
(Additional reporting
by Dan Williams and Allyn Fisher-Ilan, editing by Mark
Heinrich)
? 2011 Reuters
More News from Reuters
Source: http://feeds.vision.org/~r/NewsFromReuters/~3/7TxFISiVkEY/article.aspx
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About the Author: Bora Zivkovic is the Blog Editor at Scientific American, chronobiologist, biology teacher, organizer of ScienceOnline conferences and editor of Open Laboratory anthologies of best science writing on the Web. Follow on Twitter @boraz. 
