The Jordanian Physician Who Helped the Magen David Adom Get a Seat at the Table

Founded in Tel Aviv in 1930, Magen David Adom (Red Star of David) was not admitted into the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement until 2006, due to its insistence on using a Jewish symbol. Felix Pope tells the story of the man who changed that:

When the Jordanian emergency relief worker Mohammed Al-Hadid first suggested that he could welcome Israel and Palestine to the Red Cross at the same time he was met with skepticism. “People thought: no way, it’s going to divide the movement,” he says now, reflecting on the 2006 conference at which he attempted the feat.

Al-Hadid, now seventy-two, was then at the apex of a successful career in humanitarian work and serving as the chairman of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The crunch meeting came a year after he had convinced Magen David Adom—Israel’s national medical emergency, disaster, ambulance, and blood service—and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society to meet for the first time.

But it was at the Red Cross’s 2006 [international] conference that Al-Hadid faced his greatest challenge: “Lots of people were against Israel becoming a member of the Red Cross,” he says, recalling an early attempt to remove him as chair of the organization’s standing committee. . . .

Today, Israeli medics are able to work alongside their Arab counterparts in large part thanks to Al-Hadid’s work. . . . MDA is responsible for all of Israel’s first-aid training, and provides and maintains its fleet of 1,716 ambulances, medi-cycles, lifeboats, and air ambulances. It co-operates with the Palestinian Red Crescent, shares expertise internationally on mass-casualty events, and collects and supplies 300,000 units of blood annually. Last year, it opened the world’s most secure national blood bank.

Read more at Jewish Chronicle

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel-Arab relations, Medicine

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023