Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Egypt has shown more spunk in standing up to Trump than has the mostly supine US Congress. Offered the most insane rogues’ gallery of cabinet appointees in American history (and there have been some doozies), the Senate has rolled over time and again. Not so former Field Marshall Abdelfattah al-Sisi.
Congress has not stood up to Trump’s auto-coup, his brazen disregard of the law, his dictatorial attempt to abolish congressionally-mandated agencies and block congressionally-mandated spending. Congress’s power of the purse is at the foundation of parliamentary democracy. In 1362 in Britain, a law provided that Parliament must approve of all taxation. In 1689 a Bill of Rights set out “the principle that only Parliament could authorize taxation.” The US constitution gave the power of the purse and of legislation to Congress, which the president may not attempt to overrule from the executive. Even the power to set tariffs is implicitly vested in Congress, and it is in my view unconstitutional for Trump to exercise it himself, despite the 1973 congressional authorization to that effect. You can’t overrule the Constitution by statute, just as you can’t overrule it by “executive orders,” which are simply statements of interpretation of the law, not laws in themselves.
But while America’s elite political class of both parties is lying down, rolling over, and playing dead for Trump’s autocracy, al-Sisi is standing up to the Nectarine Napoleon. Of course, al-Sisi is not showing this spine because of character. He is representing the Egyptian officer corps, and they see Trump’s plans for Gaza as a dire threat to their personal security. Al-Sisi et al. are not more filled with the milk of human kindness than their counterparts in Washington, D.C.
Reuters reports that two highly placed Egyptian sources told the news agency that Egypt’s President al-Sisi will decline an invitation to the White House if displacing the 2.3 million Palestinians from gaza is on the agenda.
Egypt is offering its own plan to keep the Palestinians in their homeland for the next five years while Gaza is rebuilt.
Egyptian authorities are adamant that Gaza’s Palestinians will not be pushed into the Sinai Peninsula, as the fascist cabinet of genocidal maniac Benjamin Netanyahu desires.
The Egyptians point out that the Sinai borders Israel, and if Palestinian guerrillas attack Israel from there it will drag Egypt into confrontation with Tel Aviv.
Moreover, the thinly populated and rather neglected Sinai is already a security problem for Cairo, which does not have good relations with the Arab clansmen there, who have often gone into revolt. Sahar Aziz at Brookings explained that since 2011 wave after wave of violence has swept over the Peninsula.
I know most Americans have difficulty seeing Arabs as fellow human beings with their own lives, motives, loved ones and aspirations. But let’s think a little bit about people who live in the Sinai. There are some 550,000 of them, most residing in its north. They are mostly of Bedouin extraction, republics of cousins who stand up for one another but also feud with one another. Aziz says, “Seventy percent of Sinai residents are Bedouin comprised of 15 to 20 tribes who live throughout Sinai. Cultural and linguistic factors connect Bedouin in North Sinai with Arab residents of present-day Gaza and Israel. These tribes live on both sides of the Egypt-Israel border, making political alliances and economic interests less restrained by nationality.” You can only imagine how livid they are about the genocide of their cousins across the border.
The Bedouin can no longer make a living raising livestock and farming. They’ve been pushed onto marginalized land and out of their traditional forms of livelihood, both by the Israeli occupation and then by the restored Egyptian government rule. Many turned to smuggling, including transporting goods to Gaza. They also smuggled drugs to Egypt, and the Egyptian police grew accustomed to taking a cut.
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After the 2013 coup, when the nationalist officer corps overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood of Mohammad Morsi, Muslim fundamentalist groups in Sinai went into rebellion and engaged in regular firefights with the Egyptian police and army. The army cracked down hard, including on Bedouin who weren’t necessarily pro-Morsi, and drove many of them into revolt. Livelihoods have been disrupted and north Sinai is one of the poorest areas in Egypt. In south Sinai there are tourist resorts, but they are owned by Cairene businessmen close to the al-Sisi regime and local Bedouin are largely excluded from the profits they generate, though the resorts do generate some poorly-paid employment for locals.
So that’s the maelstrom into which the geniuses in Washington and Tel Aviv want to plop down 2.3 million refugees whose property at home has all been destroyed and who have lost perhaps 100,000 relatives and friends. The situation in Sinai has been nightmarish for over a decade, and Trump wants to turn it into sheer hell.
Palestinians are not intrinsically trouble-makers, but any group of 2.3 million brutalized people suddenly displaced to a rugged desert after having lost all their property and many lives of their loved ones would likely be radicalized and would not take their exile lying down. In short, Palestinians in Sinai would spell all kinds of trouble and instability for the ruling Egyptian officer corps. The purpose of the Egyptian government is to ensure the prosperity and stability of the veiled junta.
Some observers have expressed the conviction that al-Sisi and his fellow officers could be bribed to take this step. But the resulting instability would cost billions of dollars every year to deal with, and there isn’t a big enough bribe to make that worthwhile. Not to mention that Trump isn’t offering a bribe, he is just ordering people around.
Unlike the gutless senators on Capitol Hill, the Egyptian officer corps is signalling that it won’t kowtow to Trump on this issue.
As for Trump’s threat to cut Egypt off from American aid, the officers have seen that sort of thing before. President Obama menaced them with such a cut-off after the 2013 coup, but the money was quickly restored. The US isn’t giving the money to Egypt, it is giving it to Boeing, which manufactures Apache helicopters, which are then sent to Egypt. That is, military aid to Egypt is actually corporate welfare for US arms manufacturers, and there just isn’t a strong sentiment in Washington for cutting Boeing off.
It isn’t even clear that the Egyptian officers feel that they need American weaponry on this scale. They apparently have warehouses and warehouses of Apache helicopters that they don’t know what to do with, since they aren’t at war and haven’t been at war since 1973. The whole thing is kind of a ritual potlatch.
Moreover, US aid to Egypt is a bribe for maintaining the 1979 Camp David Peace Treaty with Israel, and AIPAC very much wants that treaty to remain in full force.
A final consideration is that Egyptians are absolutely furious about what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians of Gaza. They talk about the killing of Arab children, claiming them as their own. The ruling junta has been able to get away with its failure to stand up to Netanyahu so far. But the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza could provoke massive public anger in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt’s population centers, and not just in Sinai. One Egyptian military dictator, Hosni Mubarak, has already been overthrown by popular ire in this century. Al-Sisi and his colleagues aren’t eager to see millions in the streets again.
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