Reuel Marc Gerecht
WSJ, June 23, 2024
“The Egyptian army, like the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan, learned years ago that peace treaties with the Jewish state don’t require a full-faith renunciation of anti-Zionism.”
Antony Blinken has visited Cairo again. The U.S. secretary of state met with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on June 10 to talk about Israel, Hamas, hostages and the future of the Gaza Strip.
The Egyptian military, like Iran and Qatar, knows Hamas’s leadership well. This surely isn’t only because of proximity. Although neither Washington nor Jerusalem wants to say so, the Oct. 7 attack on Israel couldn’t have happened without the Egyptian army’s turning a blind eye to the shipment of arms and other materiel over and under the Egypt-Gaza border. Greed and anti-Zionist sympathies likely fed trade and ties between senior Egyptian officers and Hamas commanders.
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 the army’s corruption and anti-Israeli bias.
It would be naive to believe that 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 $5 billion from the International Monetary Fund to offset the crushing debt Mr. Sisi has incurred through a spending spree by framing it as aid to an economy under pressure by the war.
Israeli military actions in Gaza haven’t so far ignited serious opposition among Egyptians to Egypt’s military junta, which for years has maintained a cold peace with Jerusalem. But that peace doesn’t 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 don’t require a full-faith renunciation of anti-Zionism.
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