Israel’s unfolding genocide in Gaza is shaking relations between states and citizens across the Middle East. In Egypt, events have pushed the political regime’s comfortably obscured cooperation with Israel into the limelight, and have jolted millions of Egyptians out of their inward focus on daily survival amid spiralling inflation and unemployment. They are now confronted with Israeli plans to recolonise Gaza using Egypt as a conduit, by forcing Palestinians south into Sinai. Both the Egyptian state and its citizens reject this vehemently, but for different reasons. These differences reflect a chasm between the regime and the population opened by the signing of the Camp David accords in 1978, which events are widening further by the day.
Egyptians have a long history of support for the Palestinian cause, in the context of a shared Arab national identity. The public first opposed the Zionist colonisation project in the 1930s, and the army fought in the 1948 Palestine war. In the 1950s, Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, offered state support to the Palestinians and secured a political victory after the attack by Israel, Britain and France in 1956, but suffered defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. His successor, Anwar Sadat, secured an early victory in the 1973 war, when Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal to liberate Sinai, and Israel was only able to regain its balance after an airlift of US arms.
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