AH: Israel is forced to keep the Sinai

propose Anwar Sadat never rose to power or was killed earlier.

Means no peace treaty with Israel, and Sinai still under Israeli control.

How would this affect the geopolitics of the region ?

And what does this mean to Israel ?
 
propose Anwar Sadat never rose to power or was killed earlier.

Means no peace treaty with Israel, and Sinai still under Israeli control.

How would this affect the geopolitics of the region ?

And what does this mean to Israel ?

Israel was planning on giving a third of the sinai back to Egypt, giving the central portion to the UN, and keeping the eastern third for itself.

It was a pain to administer the whole thing.
 
The Sinai is one giant desert with barely anyone living there. How is it such a pain?
Very little infrastructure, little to no resources worth investing in. It would just be one giant military camp with locals living there closer to Egypt.

Plus, it's still a lot of terrain to cover, so smugglers and infiltrators can sneak in much easier than they would along Israel's current borders, which are much shorter and easier to patrol.
 
Iirc part of the withdrawal agreement was the US build 3 new airbases in the Negev to compensate for those in the Sinai . Also the loss of training airspace had to be ameliorated.

I think that if they had to keep it they'd put it to some use.
 

Deleted member 94680

Means no peace treaty with Israel, and Sinai still under Israeli control.
Israel was planning on giving a third of the sinai back to Egypt, giving the central portion to the UN, and keeping the eastern third for itself.
Egypt would have kept trying to take it back. Keeping Sinai would have been very dangerous for Israel.

An absence of Sadat doesn’t mean Egypt (and the Egyptians themselves as a people, governments aside) wouldn’t want the Sinai back.

Every time a new Egyptian leader got in trouble, a quick “we will reclaim the Sinai!” campaign would be wheeled out to rally the masses.

Every time a Egyptian leader became unpopular with the people a “he doesn’t even want to reclaim the Sinai!” campaign would be deployed against him by political opponents and demagogues in the streets.

It just isn’t in Israel’s long-term interests to give a fillip to Egyptian irredentism and revanchist groups.
 
Were there Israeli settlements there IOTL?
Pretty sure its been done before, small scale anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_Israeli_settlements_in_Sinai

Turns out, there were a few settlements before they got abandoned. So I suppose it's feasible, at least on a small scale.

Problem is, they're still going to be expensive to hold on to. As opposed to more fertile land around the Dead Sea and the west coast, Sinai is arid or semi-arid, with little farmable land. And it's a lot harder to defend than, say, the Golan Heights.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_Israeli_settlements_in_Sinai

Turns out, there were a few settlements before they got abandoned. So I suppose it's feasible, at least on a small scale.

Problem is, they're still going to be expensive to hold on to. As opposed to more fertile land around the Dead Sea and the west coast, Sinai is arid or semi-arid, with little farmable land. And it's a lot harder to defend than, say, the Golan Heights.

If you notice, all the settlements were on the east coast of the Sinai along the Gulf of Aqaba with the exception of Yamit which was just east of El Arish. All were in the eastern third of the Sinai that Israel was planning on keeping following withdrawal from the remainder of the place.
 
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propose Anwar Sadat never rose to power or was killed earlier.

Presumably killed or dumped before he could become president following Nasser's death in September 1970.

Means no peace treaty with Israel, and Sinai still under Israeli control.

How would this affect the geopolitics of the region ?

And what does this mean to Israel ?

Had Sadat been "preempted" Moscow's favorite, Aly Sabry, could've taken over, possibly with Fawzi's help. The Russians preferred Sabry to Sadat, and even tried to get Sabry freed after a failed coup. There would've been problems though. Sabry felt that negotiations had no hope the only solution was war, as soon as possible. I thought it strange that after all the military setbacks to then, and its reluctance to arm Sadat, the USSR would've backed such a man. But maybe they would've and armed a Sabry-led Egypt better than they armed Sadat's in the OTL. I think they, and Egypt's own military men, would've counseled a suitable period of preparation for war, instead of a hasty move.
In '73 Egypt could've done better militarily, in part because Sadat wouldn't have been there to goof up everything, as he did in the OTL. An Egypt more under Soviet influence would've heeded Moscow's requests for a cease fire if/when it became necessary. Whereas Sadat, after first wrecking Egypt's army, gave Israel all the time it needed to entrap third army.
Assuming most of Sabry's army survived the war, in Sinai, his policies would've been vindicated and Egypt, eschewing American diplomacy, would've then rearmed for a new round unless Israel agreed to pull back.
 
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It's working fine as a DMZ, with both Egypt and Israel convinced they can get their military assets into it faster and in greater numbers if any conflict does occur. This is the most stable that border could be, I think.

This model could also work in some format if it's in Israeli hands and used as a DMZ, but you all have explained the potential problems with that option.

Third option is that the whole thing is under UN control, still functioning as a DMZ, but now both Israel and Egypt get to claim it and use it when they want to exploit the larger conflict for whatever reason, but with the addition of UN forces that would have to be evicted in any conflict. This third one is less stable than what we got OTL, but I'd say more stable than the place remaining in Israeli hands.
 
It's working fine as a DMZ, with both Egypt and Israel convinced they can get their military assets into it faster and in greater numbers if any conflict does occur. This is the most stable that border could be, I think.

This model could also work in some format if it's in Israeli hands and used as a DMZ, but you all have explained the potential problems with that option.

Third option is that the whole thing is under UN control, still functioning as a DMZ, but now both Israel and Egypt get to claim it and use it when they want to exploit the larger conflict for whatever reason, but with the addition of UN forces that would have to be evicted in any conflict. This third one is less stable than what we got OTL, but I'd say more stable than the place remaining in Israeli hands.


To Egypt, Sinai was its sovereign territory. It demanded all of it back and would insist on keeping some troops there, albeit in limited numbers as part of a deal.
 
To Egypt, Sinai was its sovereign territory. It demanded all of it back and would insist on keeping some troops there, albeit in limited numbers as part of a deal.

The longer the situation remained like it was, the more they'd insist on keeping troops there. If there were another war, even a short one, that could end with both sides controlling some of the Sinai, and that border could look like the DMZ in Korea.

Don't they have limits on the troops they can station there as part of their existing deal with Israel?
 
Egypt would have kept trying to take it back. Keeping Sinai would have been very dangerous for Israel.
Moshe Dyan was asked about the Sinai after 1967. His answer was that Egypt was an ancient and proud nation and it would never accept the loss of its territory.
He did not think the Sinai was defendable in the long run.
 
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