Are Egypt and Israel Stumbling Toward War?

The Gaza drama is putting Egypt’s peace with Israel under new strain. This is not the result of only events in the past weeks but is rather the culmination of much longer-term dynamics that cannot easily be mastered and reversed at this stage. The conflagration that Hamas began on October 7, 2023, may have triggered a chain of events that exposes these long-term trends and failures and brings them to a head — perhaps even including a broader war.

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and material to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability. Egypt tried to bury the legacy of its failure by focusing on Israel’s taking control of the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border. The Egyptians claim, inaccurately, that Israel’s presence violated the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

The Philadelphi diversion did not solve the basic problem, which was that, for Israel, October 7 had rendered obsolete the reemergence of a Gazan population under the control of either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. After October 7, for Israel to allow Palestinian agency so close to its heart became too dangerous, a threat to Israel’s existence. Resurrecting the status quo, even dressed in some modification, was no longer feasible. But this meant Cairo could no longer contain the Gazan problem across the border at arm’s length. So it began to reinforce its border — not to stop smuggling, but to stop the potential outflow of Palestinians. This, however, solved nothing, and again dumped the entire Gaza problem — a problem that Egypt had inflated by failing to control the border — on to Israel. Further complicating the situation, Cairo recently began to deploy armor and troops nearby, in violation of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The demilitarization of the Sinai is the alpha and omega of the treaty. Its violation is itself a gravely serious affair.

What has unfolded since October 7, and is accelerating now, is no doubt a failure of immediate policy in the Biden presidency, as well as Obama’s. But it is a far greater failure that is indigenous to the region and dates back for most to the last century. Egypt’s policy on Gaza was just one manifestation of the typical regional pattern of dealing with problems emanating from ideological danger: indulge and reconcile with the problem by exporting it to others who will deal with it.

Read more HERE.