CAIRO — Egypt’s foreign minister, Mohammed Amr, said Monday that the plan to recall the nation’s ambassador to Israel “was never on the table,” confirming the government’s decision to disavow a threat that generated widespread popular support at home but brought the government under intense diplomatic pressure to back off.
The call to withdraw the ambassador, initially announced on state television and posted briefly on the cabinet’s Web site, was issued Saturday after three Egyptian security officers were inadvertently killed by Israeli forces chasing down militants who staged a cross-border attack and then fled into Egypt. The killings set off the most serious diplomatic crisis between Egypt and Israel since the historic Camp David peace accords three decades ago, prompting diplomats from other nations to scramble to persuade both sides to cool tensions.
By Monday, officials in both countries were trying to absorb the lessons of a political landscape reordered by a postrevolutionary Egypt. For Egypt, the response suggested the path its new government may take in an effort to balance anti-Israel public sentiment with a desire to preserve credibility with the West and peace on its border: an awkward, and in this case incoherent, effort to satisfy both interests.
For many in Israel, it underscored new constraints on Israel’s ability to maneuver and its growing regional isolation. “We see a worsening of Israel’s strategic balance, mostly as a result of what has happened in Egypt,” said Oden Eran, director of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University and a former ambassador to Jordan.
The crisis broke out on Thursday, when Israel said militants had slipped over the border from Gaza into Egypt and then attacked near the Israeli resort town of Eilat, killing eight people. Israeli security forces fired at the attackers, who had fled into Egypt, and inadvertently killed three Egyptian officers.
The deaths prompted an outpouring of anger in Egypt, while Israel complained of the deterioration of security in the northern Sinai. Egypt responded by threatening to withdraw its ambassador, but the threat was quickly withdrawn from the government Web site, leading to conflicting reports and interpretations of Egypt’s intentions.
The final word on the matter came from Mr. Amr on Monday.
“It was never on the table,” he said as he left a news conference devoted to Libya. “Look at the official statements.”
Indeed, the official statements make no mention of the recall threat.
Some Egyptians accused the government of cynically trying to win popular support by appealing to the public’s hostility to Israel, while preserving its standing with the West by not upsetting the status quo endorsed by President Hosni Mubarak for nearly 30 years.
“It’s business as usual,” said Mahmoud Salem, an Egyptian blogger who writes under the name Sandmonkey. The leadership, he said, chose to gauge, then appease, public sentiment with a few angry statements, and then let the matter slide. “That’s all they had to do.”
For its part, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, issued a rare statement of regret, signaling just how important Israel sees preserving the peace with Egypt, which has served as a cornerstone of its regional policy for decades.
Until little more than a year ago, Mr. Eran said, Israel had a strong alliance with Turkey and a stable relationship with Egypt under Mr. Mubarak, an unpopular autocrat at home who nevertheless preserved a cold peace. Another ally, the king of Jordan, stood unchallenged, and even Syria, while hostile, provided reliable stability.
Today, all of these pillars of Israel’s security have been undermined, in some cases seriously.
“Israel should make every effort in order to smooth over relations with Egypt, however difficult the situation is,” Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a former defense minister who was close to the ousted Egyptian president, told Israel Radio on Monday. “The situation with Egypt is different. This is no longer the Mubarak era.”
While Egyptian officials remained largely silent on the tensions with Israel and on the decision to back down on the diplomatic threat, the government did demonstrate a willingness to work with Israel to restore calm in the region. After the attack near Eilat on Thursday, Israel retaliated against Gaza with a fatal airstrike that killed 14 people. Militants in Gaza responded with rocket fire into Israel, ratcheting up tensions.
But Egypt put pressure on Hamas to stop the rocket fire. Then on Monday, Egyptian officials announced plans to develop the Sinai region bordering Israel, part of what is seen as a broader plan to try to restore order to an area whose lawlessness, Israeli officials said, was exploited by the terrorists.
While these efforts calmed the diplomatic crisis, they risked alienating the Egyptian public, which included many who not only endorsed the ambassador’s recall, but demanded that the authorities expel the Israeli ambassador as well.
“I think as long as the military council is in power our demands won’t be met, judging from what they are doing,” said Ahmad al-Hamzawi, 28, one of many people who joined protests outside the Israeli Embassy.
Another protester, Kareem al-Masri, a 26-year-old graphic designer, said, “Our demand is to revise Egypt’s diplomacy with Israel in a way that is in keeping with Egypt after the Jan. 25 revolution.”
But there was also the sense that while Egypt may have backed off, it still demonstrated the new regional dynamics.
“One thing is obvious,” said Fahmy Howeidy, a columnist for the independent Al Shorouk newspaper, “which is that Israel has received a message that it wasn’t used to from the angry Egyptian crowds. Israel’s speedy attempts to try to contain the situation show its keenness not to provoke the new Egyptian regime, or escalate with it.”
Other analysts pointed out that the presence of a few thousand protesters outside one embassy hardly represented irresistible pressure to rip up a 30-year-old peace treaty.
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