So What if an Egyptian Parliamentarian Lost His Job for Meeting with the Israeli Ambassador?

In January, when a new Egyptian ambassador arrived in Israel after a three-year hiatus, observers hailed the event as a sign of warming relations between the two countries, which have been cooperating to contain Hamas and fight Islamic State infiltration in the Sinai Peninsula. Yet in Egypt itself, a parliamentarian who recently met with Israel’s ambassador faced widespread condemnation in state-owned media and was then expelled by his colleagues. Eyal Zisser attempts to make sense of these mixed messages:

[T]he improved diplomatic and security relationship between the countries still has not trickled down to the street. . . . [However, it] is hard to gauge the extent to which hostility [to Israel and Jews], which Egypt’s intellectual elite also expresses on occasion, truly represents the mood of the average Egyptian. . . .

It doesn’t take too much intelligence to realize that [Egyptian] lawmakers don’t represent much of anyone in Egypt, and it is doubtful whether they even care about the conflict with Israel. What’s interesting in this story is that an Egyptian parliamentarian dared do what many of his colleagues perhaps wished they could, were they not afraid of the backlash from fellow lawmakers.

The bottom line, however, is that both countries’ leaderships have a common view of the challenges that lie ahead. In retrospect, perhaps the understandings shared by the respective political and security echelons are more significant than the ephemeral mood on the street or among segments of the cultural and intellectual elite in the Arab world.

Read more at Israel Hayom

More about: Anti-Semitism, Egypt, ISIS, Israel & Zionism, Israel diplomacy, Sinai Peninsula

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF