Around 6,000 Egyptians, almost all of them Coptic Christians, have entered Israel to attend the annual Holy Fire ceremony at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Saturday. There has been a sharp rise recently in pilgrimages to Jerusalem by Egyptian Copts, after the Coptic patriarch, Pope Tawadros II, in effect rolled back a ban imposed by a predecessor in 1980, in the wake of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Tawadros himself visited Israel in November for the funeral of Archbishop Anba Abraham, the Coptic Orthodox Metropolitan Archbishop of Jerusalem and the Near East.
The accession of President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi in June 2014...