It is time that Israel and America were tougher on Egypt’s blind eye

Palestinians walk along the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow buffer zone along the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt through which Israel believes weapons and building materials for tunnels have been shipped. Photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP

Antony Blinken visited Cairo again this month. The US Secretary of State met Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi 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 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. 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 its corruption and anti-Israeli bias.

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.

Israeli military actions in Gaza have not 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 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.

Through such agreements, Arab rulers have taken more from the US than they’ve given to Israel. 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.

Neither the US nor Israel has been willing to put Sisi’s feet to the fire over lax surveillance of border crossings and tunnels into Egypt. 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.

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.

US and Israeli planning for what might happen in Gaza “the day after” has remained vague because all options are unrealistic, unappealing or both. Neither the Americans nor the Europeans, whom the Israelis might trust to monitor the Egypt-Gaza border, are going to volunteer for what likely would be combat duty. Egypt, Jordan and the Arab nations of the Abraham Accords are not going to volunteer to kill Palestinians. Neither will the Palestinian Authority, which seems to have become even less popular in the West Bank since the Gaza war started. And there’s no way Israelis will trust Fatah, the Palestinian Authority’s military muscle, which hasn’t confronted Hamas since October 7, to monitor the Egyptian border.

No matter what the Israelis end up doing in Gaza, Washington should get serious about Cairo’s behaviour. Through decades of greed and central planning, the Egyptian army has impoverished Egypt and continually turns to other countries for bailouts.

Neither Russia nor China will give Egypt something in exchange for nothing. Neither Saudi Arabia nor the United Arab Emirates, off whom the Egyptians try to leech, has the means or desire to save Cairo from dysfunction. By contrast, Washington has the means and the will to help Cairo, and it should use that leverage to do a lot more arm-twisting of the Egyptian military. The US and Israel have nothing to lose and more than a little to gain.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies and a member of the bipartisan Egypt Working Group.