Despite presumably having watched the way Donald Trump has responded recently to world leaders who question or challenge him, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has decided to poke the U.S. president in the eye and see what happens.
The much-ballyhooed Arab Plan for postwar Gaza has been released, and it is unimpressive even by the standards of past pan-Arab peace proposals. Perhaps even deliberately so.
Trump’s plan for Gaza—the Riviera on the Med—called for the evacuation of civilians from the enclave so it could be properly cleared and rebuilt. Trump doesn’t seem to care much whether the Palestinians come back after it’s done, though Israeli officials are careful to endorse only voluntary emigration.
Egypt is a solution to this riddle, but it would rather be a problem.
For starters, Egypt could have provided Gazan civilians with a place to go during the war, when Israel was forced to hunt Hamas monsters hiding among those civilians in designated humanitarian zones within Gaza. Sisi chose not to, because his country only wants the few Gazans who can afford to pay through the nose for their freedom.
We can go back further and point out that the war itself didn’t have to happen and that Egypt could very well have prevented it. Cairo had stopped policing the smuggling routes between Egypt and Gaza in the area of Rafah, a town that is split between the two jurisdictions. Those smuggling routes enabled Hamas to resupply and reinforce its army, as well as secure a near-monopoly on certain goods on the Gaza market. Money and manpower, in other words, care of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
We could keep going back even further—Egypt allows no path to citizenship for the original Palestinian refugees or their descendants, and has washed its hands of any stewardship over Gaza, which was once part of its territory—but the record is fairly consistent: Cairo has been, and continues to be, an impediment to a solution to the Palestinian element of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Unless Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff is able to negotiate, with the help of Israeli pressure, a continuation of the ceasefire plan, there will be another round of war in Gaza—probably more intense than anything over the previous 16 months. In that case, Egypt will once again have the chance to play a constructive role by allowing temporary Palestinian resettlement so that Israel can end Hamas once and for all. Egypt will again refuse, and then it will again complain about Israel and the lack of a two-state solution.
The very least Egypt can do, then, is give real peace a chance once the war is fully over. That was the ostensible reason Sisi convened his negotiating team and their counterparts in other Arab governments. But now that they have come up with a plan and presented it to the world, it is clear that the only thing the Egyptians take seriously is their national pastime of sabotaging Israeli-Palestinian détente.
“The issue of multiple armed Palestinian factions remains challenging,” the plan states. That sentence is not, however, a prelude to a suggested solution. What comes next is a white flag. “However, it is one that can be addressed, and even resolved permanently, only if its root causes are tackled by providing a clear political prospect and a credible process that works to establish the Palestinian State and restores the legitimate rights of the Palestinian People to their rightful owners.”
So these unnamed armed groups—meaning Hamas and its associated Iranian proxy goon squads—pose a challenge for someone else to solve. This is the crux of the 106-page proposal hammered out by Arab leaders. Nothing else in the document has any meaning or relevance whatsoever thanks to this paragraph.
Egypt is calling Trump’s bluff. Trump said, if you don’t like his plan, come up with a better one. Egypt said, no. All of which reinforces what we already know: Egypt doesn’t care what happens as long as it happens to someone else.
