While the Biden-Harris administration just approved $1.3 billion in aid to Egypt, a legacy of the Egypt-Israel peace agreement from 1979, Egypt continues to broadcast hatred against the Jewish state. Rather than finding ways to support Egypt-Israel peace and the Abraham Accords more broadly, Egyptian political figures and state-run media carry water for Hamas in defaming Israel, supporting jihad and genocide against the Jewish state, and opposing normalization with Israel.
State-Run Media Spews Hate
Egypt’s media continues to defame Israel. In the government-sponsored Al-Ahram, Egyptian journalist Sa’id Shalash criticized the “slaughter” of Gazans by the “the barbaric Zionist-American-Western aggression,” and claimed that the reason that ISIS or similar organizations did not fight back against Israel is because those groups are created by the U.S. and Israel.
“Israel’s continued existence will be a constant threat, so either the Arabs survive or Israel does — there is no other option.”
Egyptian journalist Muhammad Hassan Al-Banna from the government-run daily Akhbar Al-Yawm similarly wrote that “[v]iolence and terrorism are an American-Israeli product,” and accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “bloodshed that kills women, children, and elders, destroys homes over people’s heads, banishes over two million Palestinians from their lands to the desert and kills them with starvation and American weapons, ammunition, and bombs.”
Praise for Terrorism
Egypt’s media also continues to glorify terrorism. Dr. Ibrahim Al-Baha, a columnist for the Egyptian state daily Al-Ahram, wrote warmly of “the heroic Palestinian warrior, who is not afraid of death and fights with determination, thinking only of victory or martyrdom,” while calling the Israeli soldier a “coward” and the Israeli army the “laughingstock of the entire world.” On state-run Al Qahera News TV, Assistant Secretary-General of the Arab League Hossam Zaki stated that the Arab League no longer considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
And such praise for terrorism naturally leads into praise for Palestinian statehood and the subsequent genocide of the Jews. Journalist Atef Zaidan of the state-run daily Akhbar Al-Yawm stated that
the Al-Aqsa Flood [i.e., the October 7 attack on Israel] will be the most important and influential juncture in the history of the Palestinian struggle.… [for] it has turned the dream of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital into something much more attainable than it was in the past…As for the Zionist occupation state, its fate is to disintegrate and cease to exist.
Egyptian media also continues to oppose normalization of relations with Israel. Egyptian author and former MP Youssef Al-Qa’id stated on the Egyptian TV show Ten TV that,
In my view, any dealings with Israelis constitute treason … I disdain any cultural or ideological heritage coming from the [Israeli] entity.… They [i.e., Israelis] are the enemies of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and we should raise our children on this. I believe that the Israeli enemy comes before any other enemy and confronting it should be the primary mission of this generation our generation. This will only be completed with the annihilation of the state of Israel.
Farouk Gouida, a columnist for the state-run Al-Ahram daily, similarly opposed normalization with Israel, and that “Israel’s continued existence will be a constant threat, so either the Arabs survive or Israel does — there is no other option.” On state-run CBC TV, host Qaswaa Al-Khalali said: “We should teach all the future generations, all our children, to hate Israel, to hate the Zionist entity, to hate the occupying authority, to hate this enemy, to hate these gangs who turned themselves into a state, into an entity.”
Calls to End Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty
And Egyptian public figures and media also explicitly call for the ending of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Tarek El Khouly, the Deputy Chairman of the Egyptian House of Representatives’ Foreign Relations Committee, in an interview on BBC Arabic, called the Egypt-Israel peace treaty “a strategic choice, as part of its political maneuver to regain Egyptian lands at the time,” and that “[a] downgrading of the level of diplomatic relations is plausible.”
Given the evidence, it is more than reasonable to question Egypt’s commitment to peace in the Middle East. At the very least, the Biden-Harris administration must lean hard on Egypt — including with the threat of withholding aid — to reduce or eliminate Egypt’s hateful rhetoric towards Israel.
READ MORE from Steve Postal:
