CAIRO — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken faced stiff resistance from the Arab world’s most powerful strongmen on Sunday, trying to convince Egypt’s Abdel Fatah El-Sisi and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to embrace Washington’s view of the Israel-Hamas conflict, despite deep public sympathies for the Palestinian cause in the respective countries.
“I heard a lot of good ideas about some of the things we need to do moving forward,” Blinken told reporters on Sunday following his meetings with the two leaders. But differences of views emerged immediately on Israel’s right to wage a massive offensive in Gaza, which both Sisi and Mohammed raised concerns about.
End of carouselThe top U.S. diplomat is hopscotching the Middle East with the goal of convincing Arab partners to condemn Hamas’s horrific assault in Israel and refrain from stoking domestic unrest in response to Israel’s devastating bombing campaign in Gaza. The violence has resulted in the death of more than 1,300 Israelis and more than 2,600 Palestinians.
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In Riyadh, the Saudi ruler kept Blinken waiting several hours for a meeting presumed to happen in the evening but which the crown prince only showed up for the next morning.
Once the meeting began, Mohammed “stressed” the need to stop the military operations “that claimed the lives of innocent people” — a reference to Israel’s offensive — and lift the “siege of Gaza” that has left the Palestinian territory without water, electricity or fuel, according to the Saudi summary of the meeting.
The crown prince also called for a halt in the “current escalation” in the conflict, a direct contradiction of U.S. policy, which has backed Israel to pursue its maximalist goal of eradicating Hamas.
A leaked State Department memo, confirmed by The Washington Post and first published by HuffPost, warned U.S. diplomats from using the phrases “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm” as the words did not comport with current U.S. policy.
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Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and home to its two holiest sites, is an influential voice in shaping Arab perceptions of the conflict. While Riyadh prizes its role as a defender of Palestinians, it views Hamas as a spoiler to greater regional integration, including the crown prince’s flirtations with normalizing relations with Israel.
But efforts to convince Riyadh to condemn Hamas have failed thus far, and the Saudi foreign ministry has denounced Israel’s extensive bombing campaign in Gaza, calling it an assault on “defenseless civilians.”
U.S. engagement with Egypt has faced even more hurdles.
On Saturday, U.S. officials announced that they had reached an agreement with Cairo for a temporary opening at the Rafah border between Gaza and Egypt for U.S. citizens seeking to flee the violence and Israeli bombardment. The announcement resulted in scores of the estimated 500- to 600 Palestinian Americans in Gaza rushing to the border, but none have been able to cross into Egypt amid contradictory remarks between U.S. and Egyptian officials about why the border won’t reopen.
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The Rafah border crossing — the only egress that Israel does not control — has also remained closed to critical supplies of food, water, fuel and medicine that aid groups and friendly nations, with Egypt’s coordination, are trying to send into Gaza. Israeli airstrikes damaged the crossing last week, and Israel was unwilling to commit to not striking aid vehicles that enter Gaza, a diplomatic official told The Post Saturday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss sensitive negotiations.
“Egypt has put in place a lot of material support for people in Gaza, and Rafah will be opened,” Blinken said about his discussions with Sisi on the border. “We’re putting in place with the United Nations, with Egypt, with Israel, with others, the mechanism by which to get the assistance in, and to get it to people who need it.”
President Biden appointed former ambassador David Satterfield on Sunday to lead the United States’ humanitarian efforts related to the conflict. Satterfield is scheduled to arrive in Egypt on Monday to help coordinate aid to Gaza, Blinken said.
The United States and Egypt are conveying different messages about the conflict itself.
During Blinken’s meeting at the presidential palace in Cairo on Sunday, Sisi said Israel’s assaults have exceeded “the right of self-defense,” and turned into “collective punishment.”
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The Egyptian president also commented on Blinken’s recent remarks in Israel in which the U.S. diplomat invoked his own Jewish heritage in explaining his understanding of Jewish oppression.
“You said that you are a Jewish person and I am an Egyptian person who grew up next to Jews in Egypt,” Sisi said. “They have never been subjected to any form of oppression or targeting and it has never happened in our region that Jews were targeted in recent or old history.”
Blinken responded to Sisi saying “I come as a human being” who is appalled by Hamas atrocities.
Sisi, an authoritarian leader, has harshly cracked down on Islamists in Egypt. Still, Christian churches and religious leaders have frequently come under attack by Islamist extremists — and there are only a handful of Egyptian Jews left in the country. Tens of thousands of Jews left Egypt under pressure from the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s.
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While Sisi denounced Hamas’s assault on Israelis, he blamed Israel for driving Palestinians to desperation given the lack of progress toward a two-state solution. After Sisi met with his national security council earlier Sunday, his office put out a statement calling for an international summit “to study the future of the Palestinian cause.” Blinken told reporters he supported the idea but “we have to get through this crisis first.”
As the only country that maintains strong communications with Israel, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, Egypt has been a key interlocutor during past flare-ups of violence. Cairo brokered the cease-fire in May 2021 that ended an 11-day outbreak of violence between Israel and Hamas that left more than 250 people dead.
While other Middle Eastern actors have taken on more active roles in diplomacy around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent years, Egypt’s geographic position makes it an indispensable player on the issue, analysts said.
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“There’s no substitute for Egypt because of its border with Gaza,” Khaled Elgindy, director of the program on Israeli-Palestinian affairs at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, said. “The Turks played a role, the Qataris played a role, but they’re not there, immediately adjacent … without Egypt, there’s nothing that can be achieved.”
That influence is a cornerstone of arguments in Cairo and in Washington for the continued provision of $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid to Egypt annually, despite the Sisi government’s abysmal human rights record. When Biden first came to office in 2021, pledging to put human rights at the center of his foreign policy, the bilateral relationship took a frostier turn. But when Egypt stepped in to mediate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in May of that year, Biden phoned him twice in one week.
The Egyptian public is staunchly supportive of the Palestinian cause, and Egypt has pushed for a two-state solution to the long-simmering conflict. But Cairo, supremely concerned with internal security, has also played a role in enforcing Israel’s 16-year blockade of Gaza — particularly after Sisi took power in a military coup in 2013. In the early years of his presidency, Sisi was focused on stamping out the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and saw Hamas, with its Islamist orientation, as an ally of the Brotherhood, Elgindy said. The Israel-Gaza war in 2014 lasted for weeks in part because Cairo was “dragging its feet” to punish Hamas, he added.
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The relationship between Egypt and Hamas has warmed somewhat in recent years, Elgindy said, but it remains “highly ambivalent.”
As Israel continues to bombard Gaza, and pro-Palestinian protests around the world showcase the anger of the Arab street, Egypt has sought to be a voice of calm, calling on all parties to de-escalate and to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. Sisi and Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry have engaged in a flurry of diplomacy, phoning world leaders and hosting top diplomats from countries including Turkey, Germany and Italy in Cairo to convey this message.
“Egypt is prepared to harness all its capabilities and efforts toward mediation,” Sisi said in a speech to military academy graduates on Thursday.
“I call on all parties to raise the voice of reason and wisdom, and to adhere to the utmost degrees of self-restraint, removing civilians, children and women from the cycle of brutal revenge and return immediately to the path of negotiations,” he said.
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But Egyptian officials have been clear that relocating Palestinians to Egypt en masse is not an option, warning that doing so could spell the end of the Palestinian dream of statehood.
Israeli military leaders have publicly called for Egypt to accept Palestinian civilians into Sinai. Cairo worries that if this were to happen, once the fighting stops, Israel would not allow the Palestinians back into Gaza, former Egyptian foreign minister Mohamed al-Orabi, who currently chairs the government-affiliated Egyptian Foreign Relations Council, told The Post Friday.
“Maybe we will receive the injured, of course they’ll be treated in Egypt,” al-Orabi said. If the border crossing is reopened, “it will be humanitarian access, that’s it. But I don’t think that we will have refugees or displaced coming from Gaza.”
Heba Farouk Mahfouz contributed to this report.
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