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CAIRO – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken faced stiff resistance from the Arab world’s most powerful leaders on Sunday as he tried to persuade Egypt’s Abdel Fatah El-Sisi and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to change Washington’s view of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Conflict to assume 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 in the future,” Blinken told reporters on Sunday after his meetings with the two leaders. But disagreements immediately arose over Israel’s right to carry out a major offensive in Gaza, something both Sisi and Mohammed expressed concerns about.
The top U.S. diplomat is hitting the Middle East to persuade Arab partners to condemn Hamas’ horrific attack in Israel and not foment unrest at home in response to Israel’s devastating bombing of Gaza. The violence has resulted in the deaths of more than 1,300 Israelis and more than 2,600 Palestinians.
In Riyadh, the Saudi ruler made Blinken wait several hours for a meeting that was supposed to take place in the evening, but for which the crown prince did not appear until the next morning.
As the meeting began, Mohammed “emphasized” the need to stop military operations “that claimed the lives of innocent people” – a reference to Israel’s offensive – and to lift the “siege on Gaza” that has left the Palestinian territory without water and electricity or fuel, according to the Saudi summary of the meeting.
The crown prince also called for an end to the “current escalation” of the conflict, a direct contradiction of U.S. policies that have helped Israel pursue its maximalist goal of eradicating Hamas.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken speaks to the press in Cairo on October 15 following a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. (Video: The Washington Post)
In a leaked State Department memo, confirmed by The Washington Post and first reported by HuffPost, U.S. diplomats were warned against using the phrases “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end violence/bloodshed,” and “restore calm.” , because these words did not fit with current US policy.
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 values its role as a defender of the Palestinians, it sees Hamas as a disruptor to greater regional integration, including the crown prince’s flirtations with normalizing relations with Israel.
But attempts to persuade Riyadh to condemn Hamas have so far failed, and the Saudi Foreign Ministry has denounced Israel’s extensive bombing in the Gaza Strip, calling it an attack on “defenseless civilians.”
U.S. involvement in Egypt faced even greater hurdles.
On Saturday, U.S. officials announced that they had reached an agreement with Cairo to temporarily open the Rafah border between Gaza and Egypt to U.S. citizens fleeing violence and Israeli bombings. The announcement led to dozens of the estimated 500 to 600 Palestinian Americans in Gaza rushing to the border, but none of them were able to enter Egypt amid conflicting remarks between U.S. and Egyptian officials over why the border would not reopen .
The Rafah border crossing – the only exit that Israel does not control – also remains closed to essential shipments of food, water, fuel and medicine that aid groups and friendly nations want to send to Gaza with the coordination of Egypt. Last week, the border crossing was damaged by Israeli airstrikes and Israel was unwilling to commit not to attack aid vehicles entering the Gaza Strip, a diplomatic official told The Post on Saturday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss sensitive negotiations.
“Egypt has provided a lot of material support to the people of Gaza, and Rafah is being opened,” Blinken said of his talks with Sisi at the border. “We are setting up the mechanism with the United Nations, with Egypt, with Israel and others to get the aid and get it to the people who need it.”
President Biden on Sunday named former Ambassador David Satterfield 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 sending different messages about the conflict itself.
During Blinken’s meeting at the presidential palace in Cairo on Sunday, Sisi said Israel’s attacks had exceeded “the right to self-defense” and had become “collective punishment.”
The Egyptian president also commented on Blinken’s recent comments in Israel, in which the US diplomat invoked his own Jewish heritage to explain his understanding of Jewish oppression.
Blinken invokes Jewish ancestry in an address to the grieving Israeli public
“They 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 attack and there have never been any cases of targeted attacks on Jews in our region, either in recent or ancient history.”
Blinken responded to Sisi by saying, “I come as a human being,” appalled by Hamas’s atrocities.
Sisi, an authoritarian leader, has cracked down on Islamists in Egypt. Still, Christian churches and religious leaders have been frequently attacked by Islamist extremists – and there are only a handful of Egyptian Jews left in the country. Tens of thousands of Jews left Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s under pressure from the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser.
While Sisi condemned Hamas’ attack on Israelis, he blamed Israel for driving Palestinians into despair over the lack of progress toward a two-state solution. Earlier on Sunday, after Sisi met with his national security council, his office released a statement calling for an international summit “to examine 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 close communication with Israel, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Egypt has been an important interlocutor in past outbreaks of violence. Cairo brokered the ceasefire in May 2021, ending an 11-day outbreak of violence between Israel and Hamas in which more than 250 people died.
While other actors in the Middle East have taken a more active role in diplomacy surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent years, Egypt’s geographical location makes it an indispensable player on the issue, analysts say.
“There is no replacement for Egypt because of its border with Gaza,” said Khaled Elgindy, director of the Israeli-Palestinian Affairs Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “The Turks have played a role, the Qataris have played a role, but they are not there, right next door… nothing can be achieved without Egypt.”
This influence is a cornerstone of arguments in Cairo and Washington for the continued provision of $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt despite the Sisi government’s abysmal human rights record. When Biden first took office in 2021 promising to put human rights at the center of his foreign policy, bilateral relations took a frostier turn. But when Egypt stepped in to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in May this year, Biden called him twice in a week.
The Egyptian public strongly supports the Palestinian cause, and Egypt is pushing for a two-state solution to the long-simmering conflict. But Cairo, which cares about domestic security, has also played a role in enforcing Israel’s 16-year blockade of Gaza – particularly after Sisi seized power in a military coup in 2013. In the first years of his presidency, Sisi focused on eradication. Elgindy said that he defended the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and saw Hamas, with its Islamist orientation, as an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Israel-Gaza war in 2014 lasted weeks, in part because Cairo “moved later” to punish Hamas, he added.
The relationship between Egypt and Hamas has warmed somewhat in recent years, Elgindy said, but remains “highly ambivalent.”
As Israel continues to bomb Gaza and pro-Palestinian protests around the world express the anger of the Arab street, Egypt is trying to be a voice of calm and call on all parties to de-escalate and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Sisi and Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry have engaged through diplomatic channels, holding telephone conversations with world leaders and hosting top diplomats from countries including Turkey, Germany and Italy in Cairo to convey this message.
“Egypt is ready to use all its skills and efforts to mediate,” Sisi said in a speech to graduates of the military academy on Thursday.
“I call on all parties to raise the voice of reason and wisdom and adhere to the highest level of self-restraint, free civilians, children and women from the cycle of brutal revenge, and immediately return to the path of negotiations,” he said .
But Egyptian officials have made clear that mass relocation of Palestinians to Egypt is not an option, warning that it could spell the end of the Palestinian dream of statehood.
Israeli military leaders have publicly called that Egypt accepts Palestinian civilians into Sinai. Cairo fears that if that happens, Israel would not allow Palestinians to return to Gaza once the fighting stops, former Egyptian foreign minister Mohamed al-Orabi, who is currently chairman of the pro-government Egyptian Foreign Relations Council, told The Post on Friday.
“Perhaps we will take in the injured, of course they will be treated in Egypt,” al-Orabi said. If the border crossing reopens, “it will be humanitarian access, that’s all.” But I don’t think we will have refugees or displaced people from Gaza.”
Heba Farouk Mahfouz contributed to this report.