114: Why don’t we talk about Egypt?

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:05]Moving on to the next question [music] asked by our listeners and viewers, what is the role of Egypt in the ongoing conflict historically and today?

[00:00:14]Okay, this is a big one. Um we have a video about Jordan. It was uh quite popular. People were really interested.

[00:00:21]People didn't realize that Jordan actually tried to take the West Bank and build out of it a greater Jordan and gave the Palestinian citizenship and in the Jericho conference Palestinian elites from Jordan actually agreed to become Jordanians and that that was the game plan right up until uh 1967 uh when Israel begged Jordan not to join in the war. Jordan chose to join in the war and Israel ends up taking uh taking the West Bank. The Egyptian story is in that sense antithetical to Palestinian nationalism. Egypt did not want Palestinian nationalism. It did want a Palestinian symbol to justify its own domination of the Arab world, but it didn't actually want a strong Palestinian national movement. And in fact, you see that because in the '48-'49 war, what Israel calls its independence war, um Egypt ends up in control of the Gaza Strip instead of maybe annexing it, granting citizenship to the Palestinians in Gaza, uh it actually occupies the territory and institutes a very strict, uh very repressive military administration.

[00:01:30]Gazans are under Egyptian military rule, very oppressive Egyptian military rule, from 1948 until 1967 when the Israelis pushed the Egyptians not only out of Gaza, but out of Sinai.

[00:01:45]And unlike Jordan, Egypt didn't give them citizenship. It didn't give them any kind of autonomy uh and it instituted what is what historians talk about is pretty harsh rule in Gaza. In Egypt's defense, defense in quotes, um it was a military dictatorship in Egypt proper. So, you know, why would Gazans be treated any better? But, they were also treated quite a bit worse.

[00:02:12]There was never on Egypt's side a serious push for Palestinian independence or Palestinian statehood.

[00:02:19]In 1948, Egypt very briefly uh built out something called the All-Palestine Government in Gaza, which was sort of declared under the Arab League. It was a symbolic entity. It was positioned in Gaza, but claimed to be the representative of all Palestinians throughout the land.

[00:02:37]And its actual purpose, the reason Egypt created it, was to push back on Jordan's expansionist ambitions in the West Bank.

[00:02:47]To limit King Abdullah's influence after what he did was make a serious bid for control of large parts of of every part of Palestine that had not become Israel.

[00:02:57]But, he was doing it by including the Palestinians into his new kingdom.

[00:03:02]And the Egyptians were building out a kind of fake Palestinian nationalism separate from Egypt, whose sole purpose was to push back on the Jordanians.

[00:03:13]Uh it had no power. It had no territory under its control. It was only It only really existed in Egyptian-controlled Gaza. Uh and it actually dissolved very quickly. It was an inter-Arab pressure rivalry thing. It was not Palestinian state-building.

[00:03:30]Why didn't Egypt want to create a state?

[00:03:33]But, also why didn't Egypt want to annex Gaza? If you're already not going to create a Palestinian state, if you're already not going to seriously back Palestinian nationalism, you're going to rule Gaza for 19 years, why not either annex or create a serious Palestinian polity in Gaza under Egyptian influence, but nevertheless a distinct polity that could then come to the Israelis with demands, with claims, could sit in the international arena. There was nothing preventing from '48 to '67 a Palestinian state from being established and taking a seat at the UN. Literally nothing. And it would have fundamentally changed the dynamic of '67. What if that Arab state, Palestinian state, had not joined Nasser's war of '67? That what what would the future have looked like? And the answer to why Egypt held the Palestinians both apart under oppressive military rule while also not actually creating a Palestinian state was that Nasser, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who rose to power in Egypt in 1952 and built out of Egypt a kind of centerpiece of a pan-Arab unity that would prove itself, Egyptians argued, through the unification of the Arabs and the destruction of Israel by those unified Arab states. Palestinian nationalism was a very useful rallying cry that could unify the Arabs in that way.

[00:04:57]In other words, nobody cared or wanted to create actual Palestinian nation-state. That was not the purpose, it wasn't the goal, nobody thought about it in those terms.

[00:05:08]In fact, when there was any kind of option of moving forward in that way, the Egyptians absolutely stood against it and thwarted it in every way they could.

[00:05:16]But the idea of a Palestinian nation was pushed to the fore as a rallying, mobilizing, unifying force behind Egyptian leadership of a unified Arab world. Nasser depicted Palestinians as both a distinct people, that's why Egypt doesn't annex Gaza, it doesn't want Gaza, but also as part of the broader Arab nation. In other words, he embedded Palestinian nationalism in the larger Arab nation that he wanted Egypt to be the leading force for. It was an Egyptian power creation tool mechanism.

[00:05:51]Now, if he had created a distinct Palestinian state, that would have contradicted the Palestinian Pan-Arabist position.

[00:05:59]It would have implicitly accepted the 1947 UN partition, which the Arab states rejected. They rejected a two-state concept.

[00:06:08]And so, what he ended up doing instead of giving Palestinians any kind of self-rule, instead of taking over Palestinians and just giving them Egyptian citizenship as the Jordani on the Jordanian model, what he ended up doing was elevating Palestinian nationalism rhetorically, talking about it, but any kind of actual Palestinian self-determination, even just self-government, he crushed. And he crushed quite harshly.

[00:06:34]It was a strategic tool. Gaza, Gaza's population, many of the refugees from the very recent war of '48-'49, was a forward operating base for a commando attacks against Israel, what they call the fedayeen attacks against Israel. It was a wedge issue that could rally the Arab world. Nasser is even reported to have told a journalist that Palestinians are useful to the Arab states as they are, as they are meaning in Gaza, controlled and dependent and not empowered with their own state.

[00:07:05]Egypt used the Palestinian excuse. Why excuse? Cuz when it controlled pieces of Palestine, it didn't create a state there. Egypt used the Palestinian excuse to justify many multiple wars against Israel in '48, '56, '67, and '73.

[00:07:21]And he partly framed it around the Palestinian question.

[00:07:24]But they were always following Egypt's own strategic interests, and they were never coordinated in a any way with the Jordanians, with the Palestinians, in a way that effectively advanced any kind of Palestinian independence.

[00:07:35]Um and so, it's really important when when he's quoted as saying they're useful to the Arab states as they are, "We will always see," he is reported to have said, that they do not become too powerful. Can you imagine yet another nation on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean?

[00:07:51]Nasser was then the driving force behind the foundation of the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 at the first Arab summit in Cairo. There was Soviet backing, there was the model of the National Liberation Front of Algeria, which had just kicked the French out of Algeria in 1962.

[00:08:09]He allowed the formation, backed the formation of the PLO in Cairo, and he hand-picked the leader, a guy named Ahmad Shukairy, uh who was an Arab diplomat, a loyalist to Nasser, as the first chairman of the PLO. Now that looked again like he was maneuvering to support the Palestinian cause. But he was doing the opposite. He was maneuvering to control and subordinate the Palestinian cause to Egyptian interests and Egyptian policy.

[00:08:35]He was worried about the growth, and especially given that the unbelievable success of the Algerians, the inspiration, that Palestinian groups that were independent of Egyptian influence, like Fatah, were gaining traction, were building out power bases in places like Jordan and and and and places like Gaza. And they were risking dragging Arab states into wars they didn't plan for or didn't want.

[00:08:58]And so the PLO was designed not as a liberation movement for Palestinians, but as an Egyptian Arab League umbrella to channel that movement, to contain it, to direct all of its energy, all of the Palestine Liberation story narrative, to pan-Arab unity under Nasser's leadership, and to to validating what would what he viewed as the coming wars against Israel. And there would be in '67, the attrition war of '69 to '71, the '73 war.

[00:09:29]So it was a way for Egypt to control Palestinian nationalism, not to set it free, set it loose, amplify it, push it out into the world.

[00:09:38]That's the story of Egypt's handling of the Palestinians literally from day one.

[00:09:44]Radical champion of the Palestinian cause rhetorically to boost your pan-Arab prestige while actually keeping decision-making out of Palestinian hands at every turn and literally in every way they could possibly come up with over the last 80 years.

[00:09:58]The PLO's early charter, if you read it, it frames the Palestine question as part of the Arab homeland, not a stand-alone national project, because it was written in Nasser's Cairo. And in Gaza, which Egypt still controls in 1964, nothing changes in the military rule after the founding of the PLO. Not no citizenship, no self-determination, repression that is pretty effective and pretty consistent. Any Palestinian movement, independent movement that raises its head gets immediately crushed.

[00:10:30]So, Nasser uses the Palestinian issue for Egyptian and pan-Arab power politics.

[00:10:35]He doesn't subjugate the Palestinians in Gaza, despite, you know, supporting the PLO. They aren't two different planks to Egyptian policy.

[00:10:44]The PLO was created to enable the subjugation of Palestinians.

[00:10:49]Fast forward to today.

[00:10:52]One of the great fears that Egypt always had about an independent Palestinian state that would also hold Gaza on the Egyptian border was that it would not be controllable by Egypt. It would be a frontier Egypt doesn't control. It might be a very weak failed state and therefore a a kind of lawless place where Islamist movements could take root. Egypt has a long experience with that in Sinai, so it's very worried about it over the decades.

[00:11:18]All of that is to say that when the 1967 war happens and the West Bank and Gaza suddenly fall under Israeli rule and Jordan can no longer realize its expansionist hopes in the West Bank and Egypt can no longer realize its control of Gaza to prevent Gaza from becoming an independent Palestinian state.

[00:11:43]Israel's takeover of those territories finally cleared the way for a a real Palestinian national movement to take root. A real Palestinian nationalist aspiration and independent decision-making.

[00:12:00]Now, no part of Palestinian politics has ever managed to extricate itself fully from Arab power politics and Arab interests around us. Uh to this day, the Hamas-Fatah divide is to a significant extent part of the the the very bright line between the Muslim Brotherhood factions and and and and parties and states and the conservative Sunni factions, parties, and states. One supports Hamas, one supports Fatah. That divide in the broader Arab Sunni world is one big reason why it's actually so much harder for Hamas and Fatah over the decades, not just today, but over the decades, to unite, for there to be a unified Palestinian polity.

[00:12:43]It It is one of the great ironies of history. It is a thing that Palestinians know in their bones. They experienced it for generations.

[00:12:51]And it is a reason Israelis struggle to take seriously Arab talk about Palestinian independence.

[00:12:58]That Palestinian independence only became a serious prospect, a serious claim, a serious argument in Arabic when the Israelis took it over.

[00:13:09]Because against the Jews, everybody can unify. And if Egyptians can't hope to set the tone and set the policy in Gaza because the Israelis now control it, they pushed them out completely, then what do you got except backing whatever the Palestinians are doing?

[00:13:24]And Palestinian hope to have an independent state in the West Bank of any kind could only become an imagined prospect when the Jordanians were pushed out by force by the IDF.

[00:13:37]And Jordan, by the way, it would take them, as we mentioned in the Jordan video, 20 years before they admitted it.

[00:13:43]Only in 1988 did the did the Jordanian monarchy actually relinquish its claim to the West Bank. Everything that has happened since seems to validate those original Egyptian fears. And that's also worth saying that Gaza would become uncontrollable, that would become a greenhouse, a breeding ground for the kinds of Islamist movements that would deeply destabilize Egypt. Egypt had a civil war back in 2013 between the Muslim Brotherhood and and an election and then a repeat and then a retaking by the army. The Muslim Brotherhood and the army had this civil war splitting Egyptian society.

[00:14:19]And during the course of that civil war Hamas in Gaza would take in Muslim Brotherhood fighters and take them to hospital if they were wounded and take care of them and hide them and support them and coordinate with the Bedouin the more radicalized Islamist Bedouin tribes of the Sinai against the state of Egypt.

[00:14:38]And so Egypt has real fears that Gaza is a real threat on its border.

[00:14:43]And also no control over the politics in Gaza.

[00:14:46]If you watched over the last 3 years how the Egyptians built this immense fence on the Gaza border to prevent any Gazan from coming in the Egyptians don't let in. They absolutely don't and they absolutely refuse to allow Palestinians to flee the war.

[00:15:02]A war they themselves have thrown around the word genocide about. But you don't let them flee. It's an awfully strange genocide that you don't let anyone run away from.

[00:15:11]What does that make you?

[00:15:13]And the answer is the the Egyptians have never cared what happens to Gazans.

[00:15:17]Literally never. There was never a moment where that was front and center and in not not in Egyptian policy writ large, in Egyptian policy toward Gaza.

[00:15:27]When they actually ruled, they ruled with a with a harsh military rule. They never did anything else. There was zero desire then or now to take any kind of administrative responsibility for Gaza's people, for its economy, for for Hamas, for the Islamist networks. It's a problem the Israelis own and the Egyptians are desperate to keep it that way. The Israelis took the Gaza problem off their hands in '67 and enjoy it is the is the Egyptian view view today. The only thing they care about is that what happens in Gaza doesn't spill over into Sinai. They want the peace treaty with Israel to hold that peace treaty in 1979, which came because Egypt lost war after war after war. Israel was not going to be dislodged and it was costly and it was useless. And losing again and again and again, failing to dislodge Israel also kind of broke apart Nasser's big pan-Arabist project. And so, the whole question of the Palestinians became a question you build a giant fence between you and them and never think about again. The Jordanians have tried for decades to leverage what is actually an increasingly close, maybe increasingly dependent relationship, security relationship with Israel, but to leverage that as as um a voice for Palestinians in Israeli decision-making.

[00:16:47]The Jordanians really do come forward.

[00:16:49]They don't want a Palestinian state in the West Bank right now because they think it'll be taken over by Hamas and destabilize Jordan.

[00:16:56]What they do want Israel to answer for some of the worst policies in the West Bank. And they openly and constantly talk about it that way. And by the way, humanitarian aid to Gaza has been something you've seen from the Jordanians.

[00:17:10]The Egyptians, when the Gaza war began, did their very best to seal the Gaza war up in Gaza.

[00:17:18]To seal the Gazans up in Gaza and not to let them out.

[00:17:22]Now the excuse that's given is the Israelis want an ethnic cleansing. The Israelis want to push out the Gazans.

[00:17:29]This is something by the way that the most radical right ministers of the Israeli government conducting the war were saying openly. So they had those quotes to to draw from. And we're not going to let the Israelis remove the Palestinians from Gaza. That was the official argument. It wasn't the reason.

[00:17:44]It wasn't the a preserving the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian you know future independence and Palestinian control of Gaza. That is not something the Egyptians care about.

[00:17:54]The reason was not to let the problem that they see in the Palestinian population, they see the Palestinian population as a destabilizing problem, bleed into Sinai, come into Sinai and become their problem.

[00:18:06]And that's how the Egyptians thought and they invested vast amounts of effort and resources in building an unbelievable fence, bigger than anything the Israelis have built, and uh and making sure that that happens. And if you talk to Palestinians, you know, none of this is a secret.

[00:18:21]Arab power politics always trumped Palestinian interests.

[00:18:26]Palestinian self-determination was always a distant second for the very Arab leaders banging on tables and demanding and raging at the UN General Assembly for Palestinian statehood. The Palestinian own story of Arab support is a story of how much of that Arab support was a pretense. How much of it was a lie. And Egypt is the most egregious, the most obvious of these. There's never been a serious Arab world campaign just to push Palestinian interests themselves and not Arab interests masquerading with a thin veneer of pretending to care about the fate of Palestinians. Egypt has never sought Palestinian statehood. Uh now you know, Sadat put it into the peace talks, wanted it to be there, and then gave it all up. It has never been foundational, primary, central in its dealings with Israel. And it probably never will be.

[00:19:25]If an Arab support system or a Muslim support system for Palestinians doesn't see its own interests served, it cuts the Palestinians and it runs.

[00:19:37]Palestinians have always been in the Arab context, despite the endless rhetoric claiming otherwise, well and truly alone.

[00:19:48]And nobody represents that more than the Egyptian story in this conflict.