Egypt President To Peres: I’ll Work for Peace
Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood-linked president, Mohamed Morsy, has written to Israeli President Shimon Peres, the Israeli news site Mako-News 2 reports. In the letter Morsy thanks Peres for his Ramadan greetings and pledges “our best efforts to get the Middle east [sic] Peace Process back to the right track in order to achieve security and stability for all peoples of the region, including the Israeli people.” It appears to be the first direct outreach
The letter comes 12 days after Morsy met in Cairo with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, and follows weeks of speculation and contradictory Egyptian messages regarding the future of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.
The Muslim Brotherhood has a long history of virulently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric, and Hamas, its Palestinian wing, has repeatedly restated its opposition to any recognition of Israel. At the same time, Egypt’s military, the element in Egyptian society with the closest ties to Israel, has noticeably declined to give up the reins of power following the Brotherhood’s political rise, and Morsy formally resigned his membership in the Brotherhood after winning the presidency.
The full English text of the Morsy letter appears in the Hebrew-language Mako-News 2 report. This also puts to rest the confusion over Morsy’s preferred spelling of his own name in English. Most English-language media up to now have spelled it “Morsi.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO