When Egyptian president Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel, Islamists within the army orchestrated his assassination. This dichotomy – official co-operation with Israel, coupled with covert sympathy for anti-Semitic Islamic ideology within the military – persists in Egypt today.
The Egyptian military, like Iran and Qatar, knows Hamas’s leadership well. This surely is not only because of proximity. Although neither Washington nor Jerusalem wants to say so, the October 7 attack on Israel could not have happened without the Egyptian army turning a blind eye to the shipments of arms and other materiel over and under the Egypt-Gaza border […]
Egypt’s military junta […] has maintained a cold peace with Jerusalem. But that peace does not imply that Egypt views Israel favourably. The Egyptian army, like the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan, learned years ago that peace treaties with the Jewish state do not require a full-faith renunciation of anti-Zionism.
Egypt may despise both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinians – note that Egypt maintains a literal wall to keep them out, and long stymied refugees from the Gaza war – but many in the Egyptian military despise Jews even more. A wall is mostly for show, if it has a rat’s nest of tunnels under it.
Israeli and American officials long operated under the false assumption that the Egyptian army’s loathing of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots – including Hamas – would keep in check its corruption and anti-Israeli bias.
Yet, willful blindness persists.
Before October 7, Israeli officials knew something suspicious was happening at the border, but few grasped the magnitude of the tunnelling and armaments delivered.
Since the massacre, Israeli and American officials have played down the Egyptian military’s culpability and nefarious inclinations. Instead, they’ve reverted to past habits: treating Egypt as an economic basket case and the army as the only bulwark against state collapse or another Islamist resurgence. This approach has effectively neutralised censure in Washington and Jerusalem while indulging Egyptian dysfunction.
Keeping the fake status quo at any cost benefits far too many in power.
It would be naive to believe the Gaza war has changed Egypt’s calculations. Though the conflict has disrupted the region, Egypt stands to gain from the disruption in some respects. For one, the war and shipping troubles in the Red Sea, where Iranian-aided Houthis routinely fire on ships, made it easier for Cairo to obtain $5bn from the International Monetary Fund to offset the crushing debt Sisi has incurred through a spending spree by framing it as aid to an economy under pressure from the war […]
Since the Camp David Accords in 1978, according to the US State Department, the US has given Cairo more than $50bn in military aid and another $30bn in economic assistance. If Hamas survives the conflict – which seems likely – and controls the Egypt-Gaza border, the Egyptian military could profit through illicit trade. Egyptian public opinion will again put up with wilful blindness at the border.
On the other side of the border…
Admitting the gravity of the problem could force the White House to accept permanent Israeli control of the Philadelphi Corridor, the narrow belt of land on the border between Gaza and Egypt. Even Israeli governments that embraced the two-state solution insisted on Israeli control of the West Bank’s ports of entry and the Jordan Valley.
An Israeli admission of Egyptian culpability would allow Jerusalem to plan openly to keep control of a slice of Gaza, which would surely entail military deployments larger than Israeli politicians and generals want to accept.
The Australian
So, much as they did at Nuremberg over the matter of the Katyn Forest massacre – which everyone knew the Soviets had perpetrated but pretended the Nazis had – too many actors are prepared to turn a blind eye to Egypt’s two-faced malfeasance, because it’s just easier that way.
Or so it might seem, until the paragliders hit the kibbutzim.
