Israel has been clear about its plans to force Palestinians from Gaza, and Egypt is now reportedly building an area to receive them. Palestinians need a respite from Israel’s brutality, but mass displacement into the Sinai would be a catastrophe.
Critics of U.S. aid to Egypt ask why ask pointedly why the Biden administration is giving $1.3 billion to a military regime that has an estimated 60,000 political prisoners, one of the highest totals in the world. The answer is that the U.S. has been bribing Egypt for the past 4 decades to maintain peace with Israel, and this year’s military aid is just the latest payoff.
Unlike the three previous wars on Gaza, the May war, albeit shorter – eliminated many of my childhood and teenage years’ memories. It was more personal than the others. This time, Israel stepped up its aggressiveness by attacking the heart of Gaza City, a place that often escaped the intense bombing. And in the two weeks I stayed there in June, I don’t think there was a single day without the drone noise in the background.
As I traveled back to Gaza through Egypt for the first visit in 15 years, and complained about the endless humiliations, other Palestinians insinuated that I had lost my Palestinian stamina! As if you qualify as a true Palestinian only if you’re crushed at every corner. But it didn’t take me long after the Suez canal to switch back to the Palestinian mindset: a high level of fight-or-flight that I thought no longer existed. Disturbingly, it was comforting to know ‘you still had it.’
The Israel-UAE deal stems from the colossal failure of Trump-Netanyahu’s “Peace plan.” They could not get annexation off the ground. Annexation actually brought on the possibility of sanctions from Europe, and global isolation, and Israel found an exit ramp from the failed plan by dragging a quiet Arab partner into the light, Sam Bahour says.
National Security Advisor John Bolton recently dubbed Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua a “troika of tyranny,” but Danny Sjursen says the Middle East is where the genuine all-American troika of tyranny resides. “The kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the military junta in Egypt, and the colonizing state of Israel — all countries that eschew real democracy and are working together to rain chaos on an already unstable region,” Sjursen writes.