It’s time to take a harder look at Egypt.
Last week, the Biden administration announced plans to send Egypt the full $1.3 billion in foreign aid allotted to it by Congress in the 2024 budget. Normally, the making of an approved allocation is not particularly newsworthy. But in the case of Egypt, it is relatively big news.
That’s because for the past three years — based on legislation that imposes human rights conditions on up to $320 million of Egyptian aid — the Biden administration has withheld a significant portion of Egypt’s annual $1.3 billion allocation because of Cairo’s failure to meet conditions relating to the treatment of prisoners (withholding $85 million in 2023) and over human rights concerns (withholding $130 million in 2021 and 2022).
As far as we can tell, human rights in Egypt have not improved. The government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has a long and notorious track record of torture, extrajudicial killings, jailing of dissidents, suppression of free speech, arrests and intimidation of political opponents and other problematic practices. Those abuses continue.
What has “changed,” however, is the Biden administration’s heavy reliance on Egypt to help end the Gaza war, and appreciation by the administration of the interlocutor role played by Egypt in efforts to broker a cease-fire.
That justification was made explicit by the State Department in announcing the full funding decision and explained why Secretary of State Antony Blinken exercised a waiver on a portion of Egyptian foreign aid that was subject to human rights conditions.
In a diplomatic sleight of hand in which no claim was made that Egypt’s human rights record has improved, the secretary certified to Congress that Egypt is “making clear and consistent progress in releasing political prisoners, providing detainees with due process, and preventing the harassment and intimidation of American citizens.” That was enough to overcome the hold back even though the overall picture of human rights in Egypt hasn’t improved.
The State Department’s diplomatic word game came at a time when it is increasingly clear that Egypt has systematically violated its historic 1979 peace treaty with Israel. The evidence is clear that Egypt allowed Hamas to build dozens of tunnels stretching from Gaza deep into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — many in plain sight of Egyptian guard towers — which facilitated the free flow of military and other supply lines for Hamas and offered terror personnel and their international supporters free passage in and out of Gaza for whatever purposes they chose.
The tunnel problem is not new. When el-Sisi took control of Egypt a decade ago, Egyptian forces destroyed many of the Gaza tunnels for fear that they were linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which el-Sisi viewed as an existential threat. But several years later the tunnels started operating again, and Egypt chose not to stop them.
Now, with Israel’s seizure of the Philadelphi corridor in Gaza, it has closed the border between Gaza and Egypt, blocked Hamas from using the border crossing and begun destroying the expansive tunnel system.
If Egypt’s decades-old peace with Israel was more than a “cold peace,” and if Egypt could be relied upon to close its border and adhere to its written agreement with Israel “to ensure that acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, or violence do not originate from and are not committed from within its territory,” things might be different. But the unfortunate reality appears to be that Egypt’s concern for Israel is no deeper than its concern for
human rights.
