Forty Years after Israel Ceded the Sinai, the Territory Remains a Source of Trouble for Egypt

Last month, Egypt celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, which it had lost in the Six-Day War. Since then Cairo has not used the territory to launch attacks against the Jewish state, but it has once again become a bastion of terror—most of which has been associated with Islamic State and aimed at the Egyptian government. Jonny Essa and Ofir Winter examine the situation in the Sinai, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s recent speech on the subject, and the implications for Israel:

Over the past decade, terrorism in Sinai’s northern governorate has led to the loss of thousands of lives of Egyptian civilians and military and security forces, and prompted ongoing instability. . . . The Sinai insurgency is fueled by localized grievances as well as wider regional developments. Its upsurge was boosted partly by the 2011 and 2013 revolutions, which created a conducive environment for insurgency against the Cairo regime, and partly by the influx of Islamic State foreign elements, as some local Bedouin tribes have joined militant Salafi-jihadist groups in a “marriage of convenience.”

As President Sisi implicitly admitted, a major underlying cause of the conflict is Bedouin anger at the Egyptian state’s longstanding economic, social, and political policies that discriminate against and marginalize the Bedouin. These include insufficient political representation of the Bedouin, denial of land rights, and exclusion from the Sinai’s tourism industry. . . . Denied legitimate economic opportunities, some Bedouin elements have turned increasingly to illicit activities, notably smuggling of weapons, drugs, and goods to Gaza and Israel.

Sisi has sought to remedy the situation by investing billions of dollars in economic development and infrastructure in the peninsula, but it remains to be seen whether these efforts will bring any real improvements. In the meantime, after a few years of declining terror, the Sinai in the past several months has seen an upswing in the number of attacks.

Read more at Institute for National Security Studies

More about: Egypt, General Sisi, Islamic State, Sinai Peninsula

How Democrats Will Blame Israel for Their Defeat

Sometimes it takes a smart outside observer to see things about U.S. politics that Americans might miss. Stephen Daisley is one such observer:

Progressives in search of a scapegoat for their defeat will quickly arrive at Israel, specifically what they regard as the Biden administration and the Harris campaign’s support for Jerusalem in its fight against Hamas and Hizballah terrorists. Expect leftists to point to Harris’s loss of Michigan and especially the collapse of the Democrat vote in Dearborn, a city with significant Arab and Muslim populations. Expect them to say that a different approach, one supportive of the Palestinians rather than the Israelis, would have seen the Democrats hold on to Michigan.

It won’t matter that Michigan voted for Trump in 2020 and that his support there has much more to do with non-graduate white men than it does with Arab-American voting behavior. It won’t matter that Trump’s attitude towards Israel is far more sympathetic than Harris’s. It won’t matter that going down this path will bring resentment and hostility to bear on Arab Americans or Jews or both.

Progressives will see their chance to do something they have longed to do for decades: cleave the United States from Israel and leave the Jewish state vulnerable in a dangerous neighborhood. The surest way to do that is by adopting for the Democrat party the sort of views about Israel seen in center-left parties across the West.

Read more at Spectator

More about: 2024 Election, American Muslims, Democrats, U.S.-Israel relationship