Since the times of former Presidents Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, Egypt has consolidated its role as head of “regional stability,” protecting the interests of the US and the security of the Israeli colonial regime.
In practice, it has taken a role, especially since 2007, when Hamas consolidated its leadership in the Gaza Strip and repelled the attempts to forcibly remove it, in pressuring Palestinian resistance groups to abandon their revolutionary actions and instead comply with normalization agreements between many reactionary Arab governments and the Zionist project.
Cairo has used a number of tools to implement such plans, including: security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority and the Zionist government; and, more directly, the management of the Rafah border crossing, the only vital artery for Gaza outside direct control of Tel Aviv.
It should be recalled that the 2008 Zionist offensive against Gaza began shortly after former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni met Mubarak in Egypt. Mubarak participated with Israel, the European Uniom and the United States in the imposition of the deadly siege on Gaza, which created a serious humanitarian crisis at the same time that Egyptian state representatives and the media systematically denounced and propagandized against Hamas and the Palestinian resistance.
Just after the 2013 military coup, Egypt intensified the siege of Gaza by closing the Rafah border crossing for long periods of time.
In the 2014 Zionist offensive against Gaza, Egypt acted as a direct accomplice of the Israeli colonial regime in its determination to “end Hamas” while imposing collective punishment on the entire Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip.
However, the Palestinian cause has long been a fundamental radicalizing factor for generations of young Egyptians, and their gateway to dissent against different governments.
At present, the government of Abdel-Fattah Al Sisi is participating in the systematic blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip. By doing so, it is abandoning its moral and legal duties under international law and humanitarian principles.
The Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, calls upon our sisters and brothers in Egypt to condemn the participation of Abdel-Fattah Al Sisi’s regime in the crimes of Zionism and the United States against the Palestinian people in the besieged Gaza Strip.
We encourage our supporters around the world to pressure Egyptian embassies and protest outside them, to demand the full opening of the Rafah crossing in both directions to allow unlimited entry of medicines, water, food, and fuel to Gaza, and to be able to treat the wounded amid the extreme crisis situation in Gaza’s health care system caused by Israel’s genocidal bombing and invasion.
We know that the Egyptian people support Palestine, and it is urgent that the Egyptian government cease its complicity in Israel’s war crimes and end the criminal blockade and siege of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.