Steven A. Cook
Israel is not the only Middle Eastern power that has a tortured relationship with the Gaza Strip. Although it’s not a combatant in the current war, Egypt has played an important role in the immiseration of Gazans over the past 16 years, as together with Israel it has sealed the air, land, and sea borders around the strip.
Keeping Hamas out of the Sinai Peninsula has been an imperative for the Egyptian government since at least 2007, when the Islamist group defeated the security forces of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority in Gaza in a short civil war. Hamas’s success could inspire extremists in Egypt, Cairo reasoned, and so the blockade of the strip served Egypt’s interests as well as Israel’s.
The last round of violence in Gaza took place in 2014, a year after Major General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power in Egypt in a coup d’état that overthrew Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Then, Egyptian leaders reasoned that having Israel mortally damage Hamas, itself a late-1980s creation of the Palestine branch of the Brotherhood, would greatly diminish the Islamist threat to both countries. And so Egypt privately counseled Israel to destroy Hamas. But the Israelis demurred, fearing the chaos and power vacuum that would likely result.
Today, the situation is reversed. The Israeli objective is to destroy Hamas, while Egypt warns of escalation and of the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. President Sisi has amassed tons of aid for the strip’s residents in a city about an hour to the west of the Rafah crossing, and he is demanding that the Israel Defense Forces allow the trucks in. He decried Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza’s civilians during a visit with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. And yet, for all of Sisi’s indignation, he has not opened Egypt’s borders to Palestinians seeking safety from Israel’s air strikes.
Gaza and the war that is tearing it asunder present a domestic political conundrum for the Egyptian leader. To begin with, Egyptian and Palestinian nationalism are deeply intertwined. In the 1930s, Egyptians, and particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, were among the first in the Arab world to raise alarms about Jewish migration to Palestine. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s revolutionary leader and second president, from 1956 to 1970, linked Israel’s creation to the colonial depredations Egyptians had been fighting since the late 19th century. Nasser positioned himself rhetorically as the champion of not just Egyptian but also Arab causes, and among these, he and his contemporaries saw no greater cause than Palestine. For many Egyptians steeped in this worldview, President Anwar Sadat’s 1978 peace with Israel was disorienting. The agreement brought relief from the military burdens of confrontation with Israel, but the abandonment of ideals, principles, and identity overshadowed those material benefits. As a result, many Egyptians regard Sadat’s separate peace as illegitimate.
Sisi is therefore caught between history, morality, and geopolitical necessity. His two immediate predecessors were overthrown: President Hosni Mubarak, by mass protests in 2011, and Morsi by the coup that Sisi himself mounted in 2013. Sisi is watching his own back, and he must know that some of the groups that played a role in 2011 can trace their origins to the mobilization of activists in solidarity with Palestinians during the Second Intifada, in the early 2000s. Moreover, Israel is deeply unpopular with the Egyptian public, as President Sisi also seems to be. When he came to power, he promised Egyptians prosperity, security, and more effective governance. Instead he has given them an economic crisis, corruption, and coercion.
The crisis in the Gaza Strip, therefore, presents a domestic problem for Sisi as much as it does a foreign-policy one. Perhaps that’s why the Egyptian foreign ministry’s October 7 statement, which was noticeably not released in English, fails even to mention Hamas’s terrorist attacks but warns of the consequences of Israeli escalation following a “series of attacks against Palestinian cities.” Days into Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza, Sisi said that the Israelis had crossed the threshold of “collective punishment.”
The statements sought to place Sisi on the right side of Egyptian public opinion without going so far as to arouse the ire of Israel and its friends in the United States—especially in Congress, where some members have sought to punish Sisi for his deplorable human-rights record. Over the past 44 years, Israelis have grown used to Egyptian invective; they know that’s all it is, because Sisi and the Egyptian Armed Forces rely on Israel for the security of the Sinai Peninsula.
In the end, the plight of Palestinian civilians has not moved Sisi to open humanitarian corridors. Egypt’s leadership maintains on principle that Gaza is Israel’s responsibility, and it does not want a refugee problem in the Sinai Peninsula. Officials in Cairo fear that allowing tens or hundreds of thousands of Gazans to find refuge on Egyptian soil would give Israel the opportunity to dump Gaza back on Egypt, which occupied the territory for most of the time from 1949 to 1967. Responsibility for Gaza, or for an enormous influx of refugees, could destabilize Egypt at a time when the country is broke and has its own security problems.
Gaza therefore poses a dilemma for Sisi: Abandoning the Palestinian population to its fate, let alone cooperating with Israel or the United States, would run afoul of public sentiment that Sisi desperately needs to keep onside. But true humanitarianism toward Gazans would disrupt a tense and fragile political equilibrium. Solving that dilemma calls for a deft political and diplomatic touch that Sisi has never demonstrated. He’s more inclined to try to solve his problems with brute force—an approach unlikely to hold out much hope to the Palestinians of Gaza.
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