El Al may stop flying to Cairo as Egypt ties deteriorate

Israel’s largest airliner, El Al, is considering canceling its Tel Aviv-Cairo route to cut costs, Israel Radio reported Sunday.

According to the Israel Radio report, company CEO Eliezer Shkedi recently wrote to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman informing him that the company, which is privately owned but is considered Israel’s national carrier, considers the route unprofitable, in part because of the high security guidelines that must be followed when flying in and out of an Arab capital. By law, El Al must abide by the Israel Security Agency’s directives even on foreign soil, forcing it to manage its own airport screening apparatus and baggage handling system.

A Foreign Ministry official told Israel Radio that if El Al removed Cairo from its list of destinations, the move could imperil the already fragile peace accord between Israel and the most populous Arab state, which has governed bilateral relations since 1979.

„Any time you roll back something, you deal an irreversible blow to the normalized relations between the two countries,” one diplomat told the online news portal NRG on Sunday.

Israel Radio reported that if El Al decided to stop flying to Cairo, the Transportation and Road Safety Ministry might allow other airlines to operate those flights. EL AL first started flying to Cairo’s international airport in 1980. The flight schedule — usually two flights a week — has largely remained the same despite the occasional tensions between the two countries over Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians and other regional issues.

The 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, a cornerstone of U.S. policy in the region, transformed relations between the two countries, to the point that Egypt has often served as Israel’s go-between with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. But things changed for the worse after the overthrow of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in early 2011 and the rise of President Mohammed Morsi, an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Relations were strained even further after a group of terrorists perpetrated a deadly cross-border raid from Sinai in August 2011, killing eight Israelis on a road adjacent to the border. The Sinai Peninsula, which has been demilitarized as part of the treaty and monitored by a U.S.-led contingent, has become a terrorist haven due to the weakening central regime.

Last month, when a group of jihadist terrorists raided an Egyptian army base and used the armored vehicles there to launch an attack on Israeli communities, Morsi launched an unprecedented campaign to eradicate the terrorist cells in the region.