The End of the Abbas Era and Netanyahu's Pivot to the Middle East

When Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN that he believes in “two states for two peoples based on mutual recognition,” his real intended audience was the Arab states, argues Haviv Rettig Gur. And for good reason. While the Palestinian leadership remains wedded to the two equally failed strategies of terrorism (Hamas) and international isolation of Israel (Mahmoud Abbas), Arab rulers are turning elsewhere. Although still paying lip service to the longstanding mantra that peace with Israel has to wait upon Palestinian statehood, they are also showing readiness to ignore it. As Gur amplifies:

The emir of Qatar, Sheik Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who was Hamas’s key funder and patron in last summer’s conflict, told CNN last week that his country was open to reviving relations with Israel (a low-level diplomatic office was shut in 2009 during that year’s Gaza conflict)—“as long as they are serious in making peace and providing and protecting the Palestinian people.”

Indeed, the strongest rejection of the idea came from those who are already largely committed to it. “Chances for such alliance [with Israel] are nearly nonexistent,” said Sameh Seif al-Yazal, a former Egyptian intelligence official who is close to President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi—strong words for a country that has a formal peace treaty with Israel, intimate security cooperation, and eagerly aids Israel in the blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza. And the United States, too, may be shifting in light of the new reality.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Arab World, Benjamin Netanyahu, Hamas, Israel diplomacy, Mahmoud Abbas, Qatar

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