by Natan Galula
Egypt views Israel as an “imperialist” state looking to expand its territory, Ruth Wasserman Lande tells JNS • “Antisemitism and Islamism are part of the collective identity of Egypt,” Egyptian-born Khaled Hassan stresses.
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| Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Source: Kremlin.ru. |
“Egypt is acting as though it is preparing for war with Israel,” but this needs to be put in the right context Ruth Wasserman Lande, a former Israeli deputy ambassador to Egypt, told JNS on Thursday.
Egypt has built up its military presence in the Sinai Peninsula with tunnels, storage facilities, manpower and equipment “far beyond” the terms of its 1979 peace treaty with Israel, said Wasserman Lande, a senior research fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy.
Furthermore, Cairo has recently conducted a joint naval drill with Ankara, the first such exercise after a 13-year hiatus, the Arab affairs expert added.
This latest development is “very worrying, because it doesn’t make sense for Egypt to attack Israel on its own, but it is feasible to do so with Turkey,” Wasserman Lande said.
The actions of both Muslim countries establish the conditions for casus belli, which consist of war declarations, intent and military capability, albeit Egypt is a little far behind with regard to the latter, she noted.
“The Egyptian [anti-Israel] declarations are getting worse by the day,” Wasserman Lande said.
Egypt moreover hosts senior Hamas officials in its territory, a fact that goes under the radar in the media, she continued. The two even made a pact before Oct. 7, 2023, that the terrorist group will not target Egypt or cooperate with Islamic terrorist cells inside Egyptian territory, while Cairo will overlook weapons smuggled into Gaza, she added.
However, Wasserman Lande cautioned against framing Egypt as warmongering, which could instigate further antagonism between the two peace partners.
She said that Cairo has an irrational view of Israel as a threat to its national interests; it distrusts the Jewish state, fearing its alleged “imperialist” aspirations in the region. Cairo particularly distrusts the current Israeli government, she continued. While Egypt saw other Israeli governments in a negative light, it “takes very seriously” many of the “blunt” statements made by certain members of this coalition, the expert said.
The Hamas-led invasion and massacre in Israel’s northwestern Negev on Oct. 7, 2023, has only made matters worse, Wasserman Lande added, with Cairo believing that Jerusalem seeks to move the Gazans into Egypt.
These fears are unfounded, she said. Relocating Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Egypt would simply move the problem “from one border to another,” she stressed.
In addition, Israel has no interest in destabilizing the Egyptian administration via the Palestinians, “despite the fact that it’s very far from perfect, as articulated above,” Wasserman Lande said.
Much to lose
Edy Cohen, orientalist and research fellow at the Israel Center for Grand Strategy (ICGS), believes that chances for war are low.
Speaking with JNS on Friday, he said that the circumstances in the wake of Oct. 7 have increased the pressure on Egypt to exacerbate its rhetoric against the Jewish state, but that it still has much to lose from breaking the peace deal.
He noted that the Arab world looks up to Egypt—a military power with more than a million soldiers—to lead efforts to protect the Palestinians.
“The entire Arab world was surprised that Egypt allowed the Israel Defense Forces to enter Rafah. There was an expectation that the Egyptians would prevent this from happening,” Cohen said about Israel’s military operation in May 2024, in the southern Gaza Strip bordering Sinai.
Israel’s recent $35 billion natural gas export deal with Cairo , the largest in the former’s history, is another point of contention in the Arab world, which charges Egypt with being “Israeli collaborators,” he continued.
When Israel carried out an airstrike against senior Hamas officials in Qatar last month, “the die was cast,” Cohen said.
Shortly afterward, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi delivered an address at the Arab-Islamic summit in Doha on Sep. 15 in which he referred to the Jewish state as an “enemy,” marking the first time that Egypt’s head of state used such language since 1977.
El-Sisi moreover issued a warning to the Israeli public. Israel’s actions are undermining “existing peace accords with the nations of the region,” he said.
The “consequences [will be] severe,” he continued. “This is a price we will all pay, without exception. Therefore, do not allow the peace efforts of your predecessors to be in vain, for a time will come when remorse is utterly futile.”
‘Faith and Islam’
Cohen mentioned two other factors that are driving Egypt’s escalation of the situation. With an external debt of $160 billion, Cairo is dependent on Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for bailouts, he noted.
However, during U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest visit to Doha, this financial channel was cut off. “This is why el-Sisi delivered a militant speech, to portray himself as Qatar’s protector,” Cohen said.
The second factor is the daily incitement in the government-controlled Egyptian media against Israel, constantly referred to as “the enemy,” the expert stressed.
In the past, the Lebanese-born Cohen accused Egypt of being “the most antisemitic country in the Arab world.” He told JNS, “The Egyptians view us as their enemies.”
Wasserman Lande raised the alarm about Egyptian incitement as well. In a Knesset deliberation about the security situation on the Egyptian border held in March, Wasserman Lande said that Egypt has been indoctrinating its citizens to hate Israel for more than four decades. “Despite not being a democracy,” she said at the time, “a population of 110 million has a [huge] impact on the country’s decision makers.”
She outlined the “Egyptian mindset,” which is heavily based on faith. “Egypt is not an Islamist state, even to the contrary, it fears radical political Islam, and actively clamps down on it; and yet faith and Islam are fundamental for every Egyptian,” Wasserman Lande remarked.
Despite outlawing the radical Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, “Islamist ideology does exist in Egypt,” Wasserman Lande told JNS on Thursday. “And there is a certain degree of infiltration of that ideology into the military and into decision-making circles in Egypt.
“The nucleus of decision-making, however, is not Islamist at all,” she said.
Collision path
Egyptian-born counter-terrorism researcher Khaled Hassan, a member of the board of Secure Canada (formerly the Canadian Coalition Against Terror) and a council member of President Herzog’s Voice of the People Initiative, is convinced that Egypt is on the path of collision with Israel.
“Antisemitism and Islamism are part of the national collective identity of Egypt and have been since the 1950s,” Hassan told JNS over the phone from his London home last week.
Israelis are wrong to infer from Egypt’s battle against Islamist terrorist groups that it itself is not motivated by an Islamic worldview, Hassan said.
“The Muslim Brotherhood threatens the military rule of Egypt and definitely threatens the people, but when it comes to Israel there is a huge [ideological] alignment,” he said.
“The Egyptian Army has a history of embracing jihad against Israel. It was the one to engineer the concept of ‘fedayeen’ [to its troops] during the [1967-1970] War of Attrition. They would carry out suicide missions against Israelis knowing that they are going to die,” he relayed.
He stressed that the bellicose rhetoric coming out of Egypt in recent months has reached levels not recorded since before the 1967 Six Day War.
“No one in Egypt now is talking about anything other than war with Israel,” he said. “You see it in the media, you see it in officials’ statements, you see it in President el-Sisi’s recent statement in Doha. … He never called any other state an enemy. He never called Ethiopia an enemy, despite the conflict over the Blue Nile. He never called Turkey an enemy, despite the conflict over Libya. He never called any other country ‘the enemy’ except for Israel.”
Everyone in Egypt, including the most senior officials, is talking about war with Israel.
— Khaled Hassan (@Khaledhzakariah) September 6, 2025
I have never seen anything like this. We now know how it felt before the 1967 war.
Hassan gave an example of Diaa Rashwan, the head of Egypt’s State Information Service (SIS), the state’s official public relations apparatus under the auspices of the presidency, who said on Sept. 4 that the distance from Egypt to Tel Aviv “does not exceed 100 kilometers”—alluding to the ease with which Egyptian forces could sweep into Israel.
“I have been worrying about this for months, actually years now,” Hassan said. “Every army, every militia, every terrorist group that said it will one day have war with Israel, and made it an essential part of their ideology, has eventually gone to war with Israel. You can see this with Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas, the Houthis; all of them have said for many years that a war between them and Israel is coming and that they will at some point, eventually, try to erase Israel.
“And sadly, this is the ideological base of the Egyptian Army. They believe that this war is coming. Whether it’s in a year, in two years, or 10, they believe that this is coming, and they’re preparing for it.”
Egypt’s regional power push
Ben Tzion Macales is a geo-analyst who offers analyses of satellite imagery on social media. Speaking with JNS on Wednesday, he said that Egypt’s armored deployment along the border with Israel amounts to two battalions composed of about 50 tanks coupled with several armored personnel carriers, with most of these stationed off Rafah.
“Under no circumstances is this sufficient for an incursion but more to spatial defense,” Macales said. This aligns with Egypt’s declared goal to prevent Gazans from entering its territory, he added.
From a broader strategic perspective, however, Egypt’s bolstering of military infrastructure in the western part of Sinai is a cause for concern, he stated.
“Part of the infrastructure includes new headquarters, larger bases spread over a wider region and the construction of a tunnel system for storing weapons, personnel, fuel, etc. for times of emergency,” Macales said.
He went on to say that a similar array of infrastructure has been built east of Cairo, along the route to the Suez Canal, with a new radar system and tunnels.
“We don’t know the strategic purpose of this military array on both sides of the Canal, but it should concern us.” Egypt has also been fortifying its borders with Libya and Sudan, he relayed.
Macales added that while Egypt has ongoing conflicts or disputes with Sudan, Libya and Ethiopia, it makes sense from a strategic perspective to model its military after the strongest military in the region—the IDF—in an attempt to become a prominent regional power.
In September, Axios reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked the Trump administration to press Egypt to “scale down” its Sinai operations, speaking during Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s most recent visit to Jerusalem.
Netanyahu presented him with a list of activities in the Sinai Peninsula that constituted “substantial violations” of the 1979 peace treaty, according to the report.
‘Just rhetoric?’
Wasserman Lande told JNS that the cessation of operations by the U.S.-led international force in the Sinai Peninsula is a great cause for concern.
According to Israel Hayom, the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), the body entrusted with overseeing the terms of the Israel-Egypt peace deal, has stopped carrying out reconnaissance flights over Sinai or inspecting the contents of the tunnels in the peninsula ever since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Wasserman Lande said that to prevent the situation from deteriorating further, the Americans, as guarantors of the peace treaty, must reinstate the mechanism of the MFO effective immediately. Moreover, Israel must insist that military presence in Sinai that exceeds the 1979 terms be dispersed, she added.
Additionally, to calm things down, the highest echelons in Israel must inform the Egyptians that Jerusalem has no interest in relocating Gazans to Egyptian territory. However, “it is an Israeli interest to have them potentially move via Egypt into third countries, with full Egyptian coordination and supervision that they don’t remain in Egypt,” the expert continued.
Lastly, “Israel must demand that the indoctrination of the Egyptian public [against Israel] ceases. This must be demanded by Israel without any concessions,” Wasserman Lande stressed.
Cohen enumerated five reasons why an Egyptian offensive is unlikely.
First, under the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, misuse of U.S.-delivered weapons can lead to suspensions and cancellations of further deliveries, which would harm systems requiring regular maintenance. Much of Egypt’s U.S.-made military equipment would be less effective if this were implemented.
Second, Egypt receives more than a billion dollars annually from the U.S. thanks to the 1979 peace deal. War would cut this revenue stream, to the detriment of debt-laden Egypt.
Third, the American role in the supervision of the peace deters Egypt from breaking it.
Fourth, war would further strain Egypt’s shattered economy.
An fifth, the Egyptian Armed Forces have not fought a real war since 1973. Despite its “propaganda videos,” Egyptian soldiers are largely inexperienced, Cohen said.
The orientalist stressed, however, that after Oct. 7, no one can be certain about the future. “Threats with words can lead to threats with guns,” he said.
Hassan noted that Israel had recently begun to take “practical steps” against the peace treaty violations. Decisionmakers in Jerusalem have brought up the topic with Washington, and the IDF has openly commented on the repeated drone incursions from Sinai into Israel, he said.
But, he warned, while “Israel is taking the threat seriously, it is not taking it seriously enough.” The defense establishment still seems to dismiss Egypt’s threats as “just rhetoric that won’t materialize.”
Israel’s top security personnel have built up an assumption that “Egypt will never go to war against Israel because it would mean that Egypt would be destroyed …, [so] they start dismissing actual threats, saying, ‘This will never happen, everything is OK,’” Hassan said—“which is very similar to the ‘conception’ Israel had before the Yom Kippur War.
Natan Galula
Source: https://www.jns.org/is-egypt-on-a-collision-path-with-israel/
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