When President Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, he spoke with moral clarity. “Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of ISIS [the Islamic State], unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world. There is no rationalizing it, no excusing it. Period,” he said. “Israel, you are not alone. The United States stands with you.”
Most Americans may stand with Israel, but Biden’s fortitude did not last. As Hamas leveraged the sympathies of Islamist communities in Michigan and Minnesota, his aides sought to play both sides. While Biden repeatedly spoke of his love for the Jewish state, White House national security aid Jon Finer expressed sympathy for Gaza to local Arab audiences. As Hamas fed the U.S. progressive base with exaggerated casualty figures and outright lies through proxies like Students for Justice in Palestine and activist reporters, the Biden administration reacted to growing pressure from its base to constrain Israeli operations in Gaza.
Biden’s demands for restraint and Senator Chuck Schumer’s calls for regime change against a democratic ally are hypocritical and risk snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Israel has been far more careful in urban warfare than was the United States during the liberation of Mosul and Raqqa from the Islamic State. Schumer’s criticism of Israel is more troubling. Not only does it stand in sharp contrast to his silence about Palestinian governance—Hamas is a designated terror group and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is in the 20th year of his four year term—but he ignores the fact that Israelis are remarkably unified on questions of defense and security policy. The only Israelis who object meaningfully to Israel’s counter-terror policies are those who engage American or European audiences to bypass the fact that they have no constituency at home.
Counter-terrorism is not easy, especially in an environment where United Nations permissiveness has allowed Hamas to build a terrorist infrastructure far more advanced than anything else the world has known, with hundreds of miles of subterranean tunnels, each with ventilation, electrical generation, and food and water stockpiles.
As the Israeli drive pushed Hamas operatives from the remainder of the Gaza Strip into Rafah, Hamas supporters panicked. Hamas leadership was in danger. Its propagandists on college campuses and the human rights community demanded an immediate ceasefire without first requiring Hamas to release its hostages. The White House joined such calls, the logical equivalent of demanding firefighters put out 80 percent of a wildfire in a region filled with kindling, but allow the remaining 20 percent to burn out of control.
White House politicking might be predictable, but Egypt’s demands that Israel also stand down from taking the counter-terror fight to Rafah is more curious. Egypt, of course, occupied the Gaza Strip from 1949 until 1967, leaving the region undeveloped and, despite its subsequent rhetoric, refusing to allow the Palestinians to achieve statehood even though they faced no obstacle to do so.
The Hamas takeover has given Cairo even greater reason to stand aloof. Hamas is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group founded in Egypt that has waged a bloody decades-long terror campaign against the very legitimacy of the Egyptian state. In 2013, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ousted Mohamed Morsi after just a year in office out of fear that the Muslim Brotherhood was consolidating control and threatening the Egyptian military’s traditional interests. In short, Hamas’s destruction should be an Egyptian dream come true.
Why then is Cairo amplifying Hamas’s ceasefire demand?
The reason may be fear that an Israeli operation to the Gaza-Egypt border would expose Egyptian duplicity. Both Hamas and Egypt profited handsomely from smuggling operations across the Gaza frontier. These peaked under Morsi. When Sisi took power, he famously flooded most of the tunnels with sewage, though most observers understood he kept a handful open for the military to control. Sisi’s opposition to tunnels may have had less to do with opposition to tunnels per se and more to do with the notion that someone else might control them.
Many Israelis and regional officials now believe there may be more tunnels than Sisi let on. An open question remains how Gaza acquired so much Iranian, Chinese, North Korean, or Russian weaponry. After all, Israel controlled most of Gaza’s borders and regularly intercepted Turkish and Iranian attempts to smuggle weapons and explosives by sea.
The question then becomes why Egypt would be so permissive? It is easy to blame Egyptian incompetence or even petty corruption on the military, but there is likely something more at play. Egypt may have crafted a quiet quid pro quo with Iran: The Egyptian military would turn a blind eye to Iranian weapons transfers and make a handsome transit profit in exchange for Tehran ceasing its efforts to make mischief in Egypt itself. This would have been incredibly shortsighted: Cutting deals with terrorists and jihadists always leads to blowback.
Now, however, there a greater crisis brewing. Cairo wants to protect its reputation, and Washington and Amman wish to spare it diplomatic embarrassment. This should not be sufficient reason to allow Hamas off the hook, however, nor should Washington and its allies seek to calibrate counter-terror policy to wishful thinking rather than reality.
The simple fact is this: Egypt violated the Camp David Accords and quite possibly helped sponsor a terror group. If Egypt violated the Camp David Accords, the United States should not push Jerusalem into a cover-up; rather, it should start a public conversation about how to hold Egyptians involved in empowering Hamas to account.
