'Arabs are secretly rejoicing,' exiled Egyptian geopolitical expert tells 'Post' - interview
"I'm sure after everything, Egypt will try to restore relations," she said. "But Israel is not the same Israel, Israel is now much stronger, a key player in the region."
“Egypt has a history of standing against Iran,” Dalia Ziada, a senior fellow in Middle Eastern geopolitics at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told The Jerusalem Post.
This is why it’s all the more ironic that the nation is now standing with its previous adversary, she added.
Ziada spoke to the Post from her home in Washington, where she now lives after being forced to flee her native Egypt due to her post-October 7 condemnation of Hamas. She is unable to return to her home country, as individuals have attempted to kill her, and the Egyptian government is seeking to imprison her.
She told the Post that she can “easily claim, after having researched it, that Egypt’s whitewashing of the Iranian regime is due to Qatari influence.”
“Qatar has been kind of bribing Egypt for a while,” she continued. “You can see the influences of Qatar on Egyptian policymaking. It started building gradually in 2022, but after October 7, they became closer, especially given the economic crisis in Egypt."
This Qatari economic investment in Egypt has manifested in animosity toward Israel, as well as support for Hamas and, now, Iran, Ziada continued.
She added that Qatar is currently being careful not to play its normal game of narrative twisting via media such as Al Jazeera to avoid provoking Israel. Instead, it is assigning Egypt its dirty work and has given it the task of whitewashing the Iranian regime and spreading this to Arab and Muslim communities.
Ziada explained that Egypt does this via social media, national media, and institutions such as Al-Azhar University – one of the world’s most prestigious Islamic scholarly institutions – based in Cairo.
The university’s imam, Ahmed Al-Tayeb, has given speeches over the last few days saying, “We stand with our Shia brothers,” despite his own institution being strongly Sunni.
“Egypt is going to pay a very heavy price for standing with Iran,” she continued, explaining that anti-Iran Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will not be happy with Cairo’s stance.
Egypt's support for the Palestinian cause without helping Gazans
THE POST asked Ziada why Egypt has stood so strongly with the Palestinian cause while simultaneously not implementing actual strategies to help the people of Gaza, and whether this is about Jew- and Israel-hatred or if it stems from a fear of standing against another Arab group.“Jew-hatred is [popular] throughout the statements of the general public, and the governments play on this to achieve their goals,” she answered.
“Egypt’s goal is to keep its relationship with Hamas because Egypt benefits from the relationship with Hamas.”
She pointed out that while Egypt has designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, it has never done so for Hamas despite the Gazan group being a subset of the Brotherhood. Why? Because Hamas doesn’t represent a direct threat to Egypt, Ziada explained.
“Fueling hatred for Israel helps Egypt distract from its domestic issues and keeps Egypt attractive to regional and international parties as the only one that has direct contact with Hamas.”
“In 2022, Egypt was the only one able to mediate a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas because it’s the only country in the world that has that kind of leverage over Hamas and also an okay relationship with Israel.”
Ziada refers to this as “political schizophrenia”: “Egyptian TV will be singing its love for the Palestinians, the Egyptian president makes conferences with the Palestinian flag behind him and says long live Palestinians, but when it comes to really providing help to the people of Gaza, they do nothing.
“When the war started, Egypt could have saved millions of lives by opening the Rafah corridor, but instead of opening that door, Egypt doubled up the wall so Gazans didn’t come out.”
She added that Egyptian intelligence was also involved in supporting tribes in the Sinai that would ask Gazans who wanted to come out to pay huge amounts of money.
“Hamas was such cowards that it hid in the tunnels, left people above the ground naked to the war, so as many people as possible would die, and Hamas used this to give it legitimacy for why it needs to keep killing Israelis,” said Ziada.And even worse, “The Western communities and Arab communities fell victim to this big lie.”
She compared the situation to Turkey, where she said Erdogan has to put on this show of support for the Palestinians because he presents himself as a leader of Muslims and the Islamic caliphate, so he has to perform this way. “But he doesn’t actually care,” she said.
“Egypt really doesn’t care about the Palestinians or what happens to them,” she continued. “But it uses this story of the war in Gaza to serve its regime.”
Why Egypt is so unwilling to let Palestinians in
WHEN ASKED why Egypt is so unwilling to let Palestinians in, she explained that the official position is fear for its citizens’ safety, as Cairo says it cannot afford to look after this number of refugees.However, Ziada disputed this, saying Egypt currently houses about 9 million migrants and refugees. With a population of around 115 million, absorbing 1.5 million Gazans would be a “drop in the ocean.”
So what’s the real reason?
“It all has to do with the history of this so-called Palestinian cause,” Ziada said. “Their identity is all based on violent resistance, and this makes them troublemakers wherever they go, even in Western countries, not only in the region itself.
“It’s not about statehood or anything. The Palestinian cause is not about building a Palestinian state; it’s about destroying an Israeli one.”
“If they come to Egypt, they will be troublemakers in Egypt,” she added.
A moment of divergence from this historical norm was seen in the recent protests against Hamas from inside the enclave.
“This was the first time we have seen Gazans doing something non-violent,” she said. “Perhaps the first time in history. Perhaps, if this movement receives enough support, it could be successful not only in breaking down Hamas but in transitioning Palestinians from violence to non-violence.”
Why many Muslims see themselves as enemies to Jews
The Post asked Ziada why many Muslims see themselves as enemies of the Jews.“It has to do with the process of indoctrination, radical Islamist groups, and propaganda machines, such as Qatar, that have convinced Muslims over the years that their mission in life is to annihilate the Jewish people and to commit jihad against Israel,” she replied.
“It started in the 1970s with the rise of Islamist movements around the region. The fall of the Shah inspired Islamist movements around the region – the Salafists in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – to play a political role, using their Islamic rhetoric to mobilize people. They started to play a political role bigger than their communities; prior to that, they were only focused on their communities.”
This sparked the creation of what Ziada calls pan-Islamist movements, also known as pan-Arabist movements, with figures like Gamal Abdel Nasser seeking to export their ideology following the overthrowing of preceding rulers.
THIS HISTORICAL backdrop set the stage for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which Ziada defines in three layers.The first layer was purely a territorial conflict between Jewish people and Arab people who existed in this specific area.
This struggle in the 1920s and 1940s did not extend to any other Arab countries; it was limited to this piece of land.
However, in the 1950s, a political change happened in Egypt, as, following a military coup, it was for the first time ruled by an Egyptian (military) leader. This started to affect other Arab countries. Nasser had the egoistic dream of spreading his pan-Arabist movement to other countries.
“Arabs are not all the same, so to unify all Arabs under this common Pan-Arabism, he had to find the easiest common enemy, which was the newborn Israeli state.
“Nasser started to call all Jewish people enemies and discriminate against them to the point that they had to leave the country and never come back (see the mass expulsion of Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries.) This turned the territorial conflict into a regional conflict into a nationalistic one,” she explained. This was the second layer.
“It is at this time that Arabs began calling Israel a Western imperialistic country. Nasser began stigmatizing Israel as a slave of Western imperialism.”
Nasser wanted his movement not just to be pan-Arabist but pan-Islamist to include countries like Iran and Pakistan, which are not Arab. So came the third layer.
“These countries changed the narrative, so it was no longer let’s fight Israel just because it is Western imperialist, but because it is taking over Muslim holy sites.”
“By claiming that Israel is hurting or harming Muslim holy sites, such as al-Aqsa, pan-Islamists wanted to create an Islamic mission, uniting Muslims under a common front.” We see this in the name of the October 7 massacre in Arabic: Operation al-Aqsa Flood.
“This is why Muslims today consider themselves at war with all Jews,” she added.
Then, in the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood created a plan to sabotage America and Western civilization from within (their exact words).
“In the 1960s and 1970s, these Arabs came to Western societies and started to build a plan to destroy these Western societies and replace them with an Islamic caliphate so they can achieve what they feel is their mission. This plan is called the 100-year plan. They said they will not challenge the Western societies we are in; we will work within the system and then destroy it later on.”
“We see this in Congress and in parliaments,” Ziada added.
“The other strategy is convergence with groups that adopt similar views to them, and this happened to be the radical Left allies – the Marxists – in what is now known as the red-green alliance.”
“The real face of the radical Left is similarly working against imperialism and seeking to destroy it,” she continued, referring to this as the “sinful marriage between radical Left and radical Islamists in Western countries.”
While over the past years, this alliance has grown, it didn’t truly find a common cause until October 7 and the Israel-Hamas War, she said.
So why, then, despite some common ground with Islamists in terms of anti-Western rhetoric, do leftist progressives ally themselves with the Islamic regime, which stands against everything they supposedly represent?
“The Iranian regime kills LGBTQ people, women who are not wearing a hijab – they were literally executing gay people by hanging them in front of people like it was a party. So why is this radical leftist movement that calls itself a progressive movement now supporting this horrible Iranian regime that killed its own people?” questioned Ziada, noting that women and LGBTQ individuals are coincidentally key people within leftist movements.
It’s because Arabists and Marxists view themselves as the oppressed underdogs, whereas Israel doesn’t call itself a victim even when it is suffering.
To illustrate her point, Ziada spoke of the recent murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in Washington by a radical Marxist. Ziada had lunch with Lischinsky that very day.
“If you see the videos, the killer stayed at the scene afterward, acting as if he was a victim taking revenge, screaming ‘Free Palestine’ as if he was acting for justice.”
“Free Palestine has become synonymous with practicing violence in this realm of victimhood.”
Israel-Iran conflict
LOOKING toward the outcome of the conflict, Ziada opined, “Weakening Iran will eventually weaken Qatar, just as the weakening of Iran weakened Syria.“It will eventually make Qatar more disoriented and scared, and this will have a ripple effect on Islamists, no question.“The whole world owes Israel a huge debt: Look how they are ridding us of this radicalism that has become a plague.”
“The Iranian regime has a long history of animosity with Egypt; it even named one of its main streets after the assassin of president Anwar al-Sadat, who signed the peace treaty with Israel. Iran has threatened Saudi Arabia. It has harassed Bahrain and the Emirates, and it has harassed the entire region via the Houthis.
“Iran has always been seen as an adversary of Arabs, either for ideological or geopolitical reasons,” she added.
Ziada explained that, unlike Iran, Israel has been a good neighbor to regional nations. It has not weakened them to infiltrate their territories or threaten their security. Israel has been a very good partner even before the Abraham Accords.”
“Yes, they hate Israel, but they don’t see it as a threat. The threat has always been Iran.”
For Egypt, Ziada imagines it will have difficulty navigating its relations with Israel after all it has done to support Hamas and Iran.
“The Israel-Egypt relationship is at its worst; the bond as neighbors is broken and will have to be rebuilt, but it’s been broken because of Egypt, because of all Egypt’s policies since October 7.
“I’m sure that after everything, Egypt will try to restore relations,” she said. “But Israel is not the same Israel; it is now much stronger, a key player in the region.”
“The new Israel is different from the old Israel, and Egypt can’t use its old manipulation tactics anymore,” she said.“Israel is no longer a small country defending itself; it’s now an agenda setter.”
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-858236
