A direct line to Jerusalem: Shortly after Suleiman entered the race, the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm released the first political salvo against him. The photo collage shows him gripping-and-grinning with some of Israel's most prominent leaders, and features a campaign poster touting his candidacy -- in Hebrew. It also didn't help that Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, an Israeli member of the Knesset and former defense minister, endorsed Suleiman as "good for Israel."
Indeed, it's no secret that Suleiman was long Israel's most trusted point of contact with the Mubarak regime. An Israeli official told the Washington Post that Suleiman enjoyed a good working relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that the two leaders shared a concern about Iran's growing influence. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who was Suleiman's counterpart in Israel for years, also predicted in November 2011 that Omar Suleiman would be Egypt's next president.
Whenever there was a crisis involving Hamas, Suleiman stepped in to broker a solution. As part of his attempts to negotiate ceasefires in Gaza, the spymaster worked to secure the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit -- though it was only after the Mubarak regime had been toppled that the two sides agreed to a prisoner swap. A 2007 WikiLeaked cable also suggests that the Egyptian leadership was pushing for more, not less, Israeli intervention in Gaza -- even inviting the Israelis to re-establish their presence in the Philadelphi corridor, a nine-mile buffer zone between Gaza and Egypt. "In their moments of greatest frustration, [Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein] Tantawi and Soliman each have claimed that the IDF would be ‘welcome' to re-invade Philadelphi, if the IDF thought that would stop the smuggling," the cable reported.
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