Jewish, Zionist and Israeli connections to Egypt

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The Egyptian Jewish community and its exodus, the Lavon affair, the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, Ashraf Marwan, Camp David and the 1979 peace treaty, the QIZ trade scheme, Israeli gas exports (EMG and Leviathan), Israeli strikes in Sinai, and the Rafah crossing and the Gaza war


Jewish, Zionist and Israeli connections to Egypt run from a Jewish community of more than 60,000 in the 1930s, now almost gone, through four wars to the first peace treaty between "Israel" and an Arab state.[1] Under the 1979 treaty "Israel" withdrew from Sinai, and the two states established diplomatic and economic relations.[2] Since then the relationship has rested on security cooperation, a US-backed trade scheme and, more recently, large Israeli gas exports.[3] The Gaza war and the Israeli seizure of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing in 2024 put the relationship under strain.[4]

Jewish community and religious life

History

The World Jewish Congress (WJC) traces Jewish life in Egypt to biblical times. The Jewish population grew from 25,200 in 1897 to 63,550 in 1937, mainly in Cairo and Alexandria. In anti-Jewish riots in 1945, 10 Jews were killed. After the creation of the state of "Israel" in 1948, 2,000 Jews were arrested and the state began confiscating Jewish property. More riots and arrests followed the 1956 war, and by 1957 only 15,000 Jews remained. After further persecution during the 1967 war, the number fell to 2,500.[1]

The community today

The WJC says about 100 Jews remain, nearly all elderly. There is no representative body, though the community is affiliated with the WJC. Magda Shehata Haroun is president of the Jewish community, and Youssef Gaon leads the Jews of Alexandria. The two active synagogues are Sha'ar Hashamayim in Cairo and Eliyahu Hanavi in Alexandria.[1] A local Jewish NGO told the US State Department there were only six to ten Jews in the country, and that there is also a resident community of Jewish expatriates. Restoration of Jewish sites is funded by government ministries, private donors and Drop of Milk, a historical Jewish organisation. On 15 September 2023 the Cairo community celebrated Rosh Hashanah publicly for the first time in 70 years. Community leaders protested that no Jews were invited when Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly reopened the restored Ben Ezra synagogue in August 2023.[5] In January 2020 the Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue reopened after restoration. Haroun told Al-Monitor it would be open to all visitors and "mark the history of Alexandria's Jews".[6]

How far is it Zionist? No source reviewed links the Jewish Community of Cairo or Drop of Milk to Zionist advocacy; their reported work is the care of synagogues, cemeteries and records.[5] The WJC says Egyptian Jews were allowed to establish ties with "Israel" and with world Jewry only after the 1979 treaty.[1]

Chabad

Main article: Chabad-Lubavitch movement

There is no Chabad Bot page for Egypt. The Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States lists Rabbi Avraham Dayan as "Formerly Rabbi of Jewish community in Alexandria".[7] The WJC says there is no official rabbi in Egypt and that a rabbi is brought in for services.[1]

Zionist movement and advocacy

The Lavon affair, 1954

In the summer of 1954 Israeli military intelligence recruited a group of Egyptian Jews to plant bombs at Egyptian, American and British civilian targets, including cinemas and libraries, in a false-flag operation codenamed Operation Susannah. The attacks were to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood, communists or nationalists, in order to damage Egypt's relations with the West while it was negotiating the British evacuation of the Suez Canal zone. After the operation failed, 11 Egyptian Jews were tried. Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azar were hanged, and six others were given long prison sentences. The defence minister, Pinhas Lavon, denied giving the order, but the head of military intelligence, Benjamin Gibli, said Lavon had instructed him verbally. Lavon resigned in February 1955, and the affair later led to the resignation of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.[8]

No Zionist organisation operating openly in Egypt today was found.

Israeli state and commercial ties

Wars, 1948–73

Egypt was one of the Arab states whose armies entered the former Palestine Mandate after "Israel" declared independence on 14 May 1948, and it kept control of the Gaza Strip under the armistice agreements.[9] After Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company in 1956, Britain and France secretly planned with "Israel" to invade Egypt and overthrow him. Israeli forces attacked across Sinai on 29 October 1956.[10] Between 5 and 10 June 1967 "Israel" defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria and occupied Sinai and the Gaza Strip, among other territories.[11] On 6 October 1973 Egypt and Syria attacked Israeli forces in Sinai and the Golan Heights. With a US airlift under way, the fighting turned, and on 16 October Israeli units crossed the Suez Canal.[12]

Ashraf Marwan

Ashraf Marwan, Nasser's son-in-law and later a member of Anwar Sadat's inner circle, was suspected of tipping off "Israel" about the start of the 1973 war. He died after falling from the balcony of his London flat in June 2007.[13] The Guardian reported in 2015 that his identity as the Mossad source "the Angel" became the subject of a libel case in "Israel" between the former military intelligence chief Eli Zeira and the former Mossad chief Zvi Zamir, who accused Zeira of leaking it. A 2010 inquest did not reach a verdict on his death, and his widow, Mona Nasser, believed he had been murdered by the Mossad.[14]

Camp David and the 1979 treaty

The Camp David Accords, signed in September 1978 by Jimmy Carter, Sadat and Menachem Begin, set out the framework for the peace treaty concluded in March 1979.[15] Under the treaty "Israel" agreed to "withdraw all its armed forces and civilians from the Sinai", and the parties agreed to "full recognition, diplomatic, economic and cultural relations" and an end to economic boycotts.[2] The WJC says security concerns have recently led to the withdrawal of the Israeli ambassador.[1]

Qualifying Industrial Zones

In December 2004 Egypt, "Israel" and the United States agreed to set up Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZs) in Greater Cairo, Alexandria and the Suez Canal zone. Goods made there could enter the United States duty-free if they contained a minimum share of Israeli and Egyptian inputs, at first at least 11.7% each.[16]

Gas

The East Mediterranean Gas company (EMG), formed by the shareholders of the Egyptian-Israeli refinery venture Midor, signed its main agreements in 2005 to pipe Egyptian gas from El-Arish to Ashkelon. Militants in Sinai repeatedly sabotaged the pipeline, and in April 2012 Egypt's state energy companies ended the supply agreement.[17] EMG's shareholders, including the Israeli company Merhav and the US-based Ampal, whose chairman was the Israeli businessman Yossi Maiman, took Egypt to international arbitration.[18]

The flow later reversed. In August 2025 NewMed Energy and its partners in the Israeli Leviathan gas field signed a deal with Egypt's Blue Ocean Energy to export about 130 billion cubic metres of gas, valued at about $35 billion, until 2040. NewMed said it built on an existing export agreement of about 60 billion cubic metres.[3] In July 2026 a new subsea pipeline linked Leviathan's reception facility at Ashdod to the EMG pipeline near Ashkelon, which was expected to raise capacity to Egypt by about 2 billion cubic metres a year.[19]

Security cooperation in Sinai

In February 2018 The New York Times reported, citing seven current or former British and American officials, that the Israeli military had carried out more than 100 airstrikes in northern Sinai over two years against Islamic State-allied groups, with the approval of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.[20]

Rafah and the Gaza war

On 7 May 2024 the Israeli military seized the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing, the main route for aid and for people able to leave Gaza for Egypt.[21] By the end of May "Israel" said it had "operational" control of the whole Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza–Egypt border. The Guardian noted that the 1979 treaty allows each side only a small number of troops in the demilitarised border zone, and that Cairo responded with "a wall of silence".[4] On 8 October 2023 an Egyptian police officer shot dead two Israelis and their Egyptian guide at a tourist site in Alexandria.[5]

Spyware

Amnesty International listed the Egyptian prime minister, Mostafa Madbouly, among the heads of government whose numbers appeared in the leaked Pegasus Project data.[22] Citizen Lab recorded suspected Pegasus infections on Egyptian networks linked to an operator it called KINGDOM, which it associated with Saudi Arabia.[23]

Trade

The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics records Israeli exports to Egypt of $126.6 million in 2022, $258.5 million in 2023, $304.5 million in 2024 and $202.6 million in 2025, and imports from Egypt of $179.5 million, $182.7 million, $274.4 million and $357.9 million.[24]

Migration and aliyah

The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics combines Egypt and Sudan. It records immigrants born in the two countries as 16,024 in 1948–51, 17,521 in 1952–60, 2,963 in 1961–71, 535 in 1972–79, 352 in 1980–89, 201 in 1990–99 and 472 in 2000–2020.[25]

Political interference

The Lavon affair was an Israeli attempt to damage Egypt's relations with Britain and the United States through bombings blamed on Egyptian groups.[8] The State Department reported in 2023 that, after the Israeli foreign ministry complained about antisemitic books at the Cairo International Book Fair, security officials removed at least one book.[5]

Jeffrey Epstein

Reuters reported in 2026 that Justice Department documents include emails, passed on to Jeffrey Epstein in 2011 after Hosni Mubarak's fall, conveying a request for help from Khadiga El Gammal, the wife of his son Gamal Mubarak. The emails do not say what help was sought, and Reuters could not establish whether Epstein intervened. A lawyer for Gamal Mubarak said that no member of the family knew of Epstein or sought help from him. He said the emails were messages of appreciation sent to Terje Rød-Larsen and others who had contacted the family, and that Gamal Mubarak did not know why some were forwarded to Epstein.[26]

See also

External links

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 World Jewish Congress, Community in Egypt World Jewish Congress, accessed 20 October 2026.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Treaty of Peace between the Arab Republic of Egypt and the State of Israel, Washington, 26 March 1979, United Nations Treaty Series vol. 1136, no. 17813 (UN Peacemaker copy).
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 NewMed Energy, NewMed Energy and Partners Sign Largest Export Deal in Israel's History with $35 billion of Natural Gas Exports from Leviathan Reservoir to Egypt PR Newswire, 7 August 2025.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Ruth Michaelson, Egypt tight-lipped over Israeli takeover of Gaza buffer zone The Guardian, 30 May 2024.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 US Department of State, 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom: Egypt US Department of State, 2024.
  6. ↑ Rasha Mahmoud, What reopening the Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue means for Egypt Al-Monitor, 20 January 2020.
  7. ↑ Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States, The Rabbis rabbisalliance.org, accessed 20 October 2026 (Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States-side).
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 IDF and Defense Establishment Archives, The "Unfortunate" or the Lavon affair Israel Ministry of Defense, accessed 20 October 2026 (Israeli government-side).
  9. ↑ Office of the Historian, US Department of State, The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 history.state.gov, accessed 20 October 2026.
  10. ↑ Office of the Historian, US Department of State, The Suez Crisis, 1956 history.state.gov, accessed 20 October 2026.
  11. ↑ Office of the Historian, US Department of State, The 1967 Arab-Israeli War history.state.gov, accessed 20 October 2026.
  12. ↑ Office of the Historian, US Department of State, The 1973 Arab-Israeli War history.state.gov, accessed 20 October 2026 (US government-side).
  13. ↑ Matthew Weaver, Egyptian 'spy for Israel' found dead outside London flat The Guardian, 28 June 2007.
  14. ↑ The Guardian, Who killed the 20th century's greatest spy? The Guardian, 15 September 2015.
  15. ↑ Office of the Historian, US Department of State, Camp David Accords and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process history.state.gov, accessed 20 October 2026 (US government-side).
  16. ↑ Office of the United States Trade Representative, Fostering Trade in the Middle East: An Israel – Egypt Trade Partnership USTR, 14 December 2004 (US government-side).
  17. ↑ MEED, Egypt faces looming energy crisis after Israeli gas rift MEED, 1 May 2012.
  18. ↑ Egypt Independent, EMG shareholders sue Egypt over treaty violations Egypt Independent, 3 May 2012.
  19. ↑ Ctech, New pipeline clears path for Israel's biggest gas export deal with Egypt Calcalist Ctech, 9 July 2026.
  20. ↑ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Report: Israel's military has carried out more than 100 airstrikes in northern Sinai, with Egypt's blessings JTA, 4 February 2018.
  21. ↑ Al Jazeera, Israel takes control of Rafah crossing, Gaza's lifeline: What's going on? Al Jazeera, 7 May 2024.
  22. ↑ Amnesty International, Pegasus Project: Macron among world leaders selected as potential targets of NSO spyware Amnesty International, July 2021 (critical).
  23. ↑ Citizen Lab, Hide and Seek: Tracking NSO Group's Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries The Citizen Lab, 18 September 2018 (critical).
  24. ↑ Central Bureau of Statistics (Israel), Foreign Trade Statistics Monthly, Table D1: Trade Countries – Imports and Exports CBS, December 2025 issue (library copy) (Israeli government-side).
  25. ↑ Central Bureau of Statistics (Israel), Statistical Abstract of Israel 2024, Table 2.55: Immigrants, by period of immigration, country of birth and last country of residence CBS, 2024 (Israeli government-side).
  26. ↑ Jana Choukeir, Andrew Mills and Maha El Dahan, Epstein tried to build web of powerful ties across Middle East, documents show Reuters, 19 February 2026.
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