CAIRO, June 7 -- The meeting was arranged weeks in advance, but its timing said something the agenda could not quite contain. One day after joining New York City's Israel Day Parade alongside Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and 13 members of the Knesset, Elizabeth "Betsy" Berns Korn and William Daroff - chair and chief executive of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations - sat down Tuesday with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Cairo.

General Hassan Rashad, director of Egypt's General Intelligence Service, was in the room. That detail matters. When Sisi receives foreign visitors alongside his intelligence chief rather than his foreign minister, the conversation tends to run deeper than the o...