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      Trump’s plan for Gaza leaves Arab nations facing an impossible choice | Nesrine Malik

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      Arab states are in a bind. King Abdullah of Jordan squirmed in the Oval Office last week, as the press asked him and Donald Trump about the latter’s Gaza plan. He is in a tight spot, wanting to keep Trump onside while at the same time not agreeing to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Immediately after, anonymous Egyptian “security sources” – not parties prone to leaking without strategic direction from President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – said that Sisi would not accept an invitation to visit Washington as long as the Gaza displacement plan was on the agenda. Now, this was probably more for the Egyptian public’s consumption than for Trump’s benefit – Egypt is in no position to make an enemy of the new administration – but it nonetheless shows how hard it is for Trump to secure the acquiescence of even the US’s closest allies.Saudi Arabia also postponed a visit to the US once Trump announced his intentions for Gaza. And in a remarkable change of tune, Saudi, which before 7 October 2023 was en route to normalisation with Israel and is not usually a country to make heated statements, lost its patience. When Benjamin Netanyahu quipped that maybe it would like to take Palestinians from Gaza (“they have a lot of territory”, he said), Saudi state media unleashed a storm of invective against him. When Trump announced his plan, Saudi Arabian authorities immediately put out a statement rejecting it. So keen was the government to signal that rejection that it released the statement at 4am local time.Leaders are scrambling to calibrate their responses at an emergency summit on Thursday hastily convened in Saudi Arabia. But they will struggle to do so without landing themselves in hot water with Trump, members of the Arab public or global opinion on the illegality of the plan. “The current approach is going to be difficult,” the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ambassador to the US said when asked if his government could find “common ground” with Trump on Gaza. He might have got away with that. But perhaps feeling that it was a little too strong, he went on to say that “we are all in the solution-seeking business” and he doesn’t really “see an alternative to what’s being proposed”. The clip immediately started doing the rounds on social media as evidence of the UAE’s endorsement of ethnic cleansing. There is clearly no consensus on Trump’s Gaza approach, or even how to respond to it, between countries that make up a political bloc but have divergent interests.Time is running out. On Sunday, Marco Rubio kicked off a trip to Israel and the Middle East. Conversations that some have been avoiding on Trump’s home turf will have to happen there. A need to come up with a common line and strategy on behalf of Arab countries is now pressing. The task is to thread a needle: flattery of Trump and rejection of his Gaza plan are irreconcilable, and each time even a single head of state engages with Trump or is asked about Gaza, there is the risk of a comment that inflames feelings or infuriates the US emperor. The Arab summit seems a very long way away when every day brings another Trump gambit or threats to the end of the ceasefire in Gaza.The scramble is part of a bigger problem. Arab states are unable to settle on a position on Palestine. Before 7 October, normalisation agreements with Israel had been secured by some Arab nations and were under way with others, with Palestinian statehood a nominally plausible prospect subject to technical questions, even though in reality everyone knew it was more remote than ever. The war killed that plausibility, and Trump buried it.With the stakes so raised, it is impossible for Arab nations to engage with Israel and the US on Gaza and Palestine one way or the other without undoing something big. The political landscape is finely balanced. Egypt and Jordan are the most important parties when it comes to any displacement of Palestinians from Gaza due to their proximity, and would be most affected by any resettlement campaign. They are also big US foreign assistance recipients with weak economies and governments with shaky mandates. These payments and military aid are in part remuneration for these states being “stabilising” parties in the region, serving as buffers between Israel, Iran, Hamas and all proxies, absorbing refugees and facilitating the movement of US military assets through the region. Losing US aid weakens not only their economies, but also their militaries, security agencies and ability to maintain the patronages and oppressions needed to stabilise politics.But there are other calculations. Agreeing to a plan that involves the expulsion of Palestinians in essence turns all receiving and facilitating countries into parties to what will simply be a wider, differently configured Israel-Palestine conflict. Instead of the removal of Palestinians from Gaza being an end to something, it would be the beginning of something else, with the horror of mass displacement on top. It is unfathomable not only in cruelty and criminality, but also in terms of practicality: already, 35% of Jordan’s population are refugees. Also – and Trump can be forgiven for not getting his head around this, considering how invisible they are – people live in these countries, millions of them. They might not have a say in how their politics is run, but they have an opinion. That opinion has historically been managed but by no means erased. It’s not a safe bet to assume that the mass removal of Palestinians won’t set off something explosive, either in terms of popular discord, or its exploitation by competing political or even extremist players.In short, Arab governments are being forced to confront and settle a question that goes to the very soul of the contemporary region – what does Arab identity even mean any more? Is it just a group of countries that speak the same language and share borders, but with regimes and elites that have become too enmeshed with the west to be viable on their own terms? Or is there still some residual sense of agency in those regimes, some echo of political integrity and duty towards other Arabs?Beyond the existential, though, here is what Arab leaders should learn from Trump giving them orders about their territories and people: the price of their US-stabilised status quo is now so high that it makes less and less sense on a practical basis. To submit to Trump would be to accept full vassal status and summon new domestic challenges, and all for an unreliable benefactor. To defy him would entail a full-blown reconfiguration of politics in the region that might seem too colossal to contemplate. Arab political elites find themselves in this mortifying position because of their historic feebleness on Palestine: it is a concentrated expression of their own weakness, capture and shortsighted self-interest. The future of Gaza is no longer an issue that can be finessed while saving face indefinitely. Trump’s plan is a gateway to the final erosion of the integrity and sovereignty of the wider Middle East.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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      Egypt Feuds With Travel Blogger, Issuing 1,100-Word Response to Complaints

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      When a blogger criticized Cairo’s airport, Egypt’s government fired back, citing security footage, threatening legal action and asking, “Is it reasonable for a passenger to visit two lounges before a single flight?”Authoritarian governments are not known for taking kindly to criticism. And in Egypt, official skins can be especially thin: deepening repression has muffled most dissent and sent tens of thousands of perceived political opponents to jail, including one for posting a doctored photo of the president with Mickey Mouse ears. But this month, Egypt found itself facing an opponent it could not silence so easily.“Cairo Airport: Is There a Worse Major Airport?” the travel blogger Ben Schlappig pondered in a no-holds-barred post on his website, One Mile at a Time. He cited the “actively hostile and rude” staff, the “endless requests for tips,” the “disorder” in line, the “weak” dining options and the “yuck” lounges.“My visits have varied from inconvenient and disorganized, to outright chaotic,” he wrote. “I just can’t think of a single redeeming quality about the airport.” As if salting the wound, he ended by comparing Cairo’s airport unfavorably with that of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, with which Egypt is locked in a yearslong dispute over water rights.It was a verdict almost guaranteed to enrage Egypt’s government, which is making a concerted push to double its tourism numbers, trying to reach 30 million annual visitors by 2028. Besides employing one in 12 Egyptian workers, the tourism industry delivers desperately needed foreign currency to a country reeling from a prolonged economic crisis.New luxury hotels are going up around Cairo and Egypt’s sunny beach destinations. The government has announced plans to refurbish historic attractions. And a long-awaited new museum of antiquities is opening in stages — and to positive reviews — next to the Great Pyramids of Giza.Egypt’s government is making a concerted push to reach 30 million annual visitors by 2028.Sima Diab for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Church in Egyptian Desert Reveals Early Christian Burial Practices

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      A basilica from the 4th century held a surprising number of tombs with women and children, researchers found.More than a decade ago, archaeologists began to excavate one of the world’s oldest Christian churches in the middle of a forbidding Egyptian desert. Delayed by war, political unrest and a global pandemic, the dig has turned out to be a revealing and confounding look at how early Christians buried their dead.Built on an oasis sometime in the fourth century, the church held a surprisingly large number of corpses: 11 bodies in two crypts and six in separate tombs. Typically, in that period, leaders like priests and bishops would have been buried in a church, while others would have been relegated to cemeteries. But in this desert outpost, most of the remains belonged to women and children.“The fact that there are so many tombs right inside the church is remarkable,” said David Frankfurter, an Egyptian religion scholar at Boston University who was not involved in the project.Whereas ancient Egyptian funeral practices tended to be lavish and grandiose, early Christian burials favored simplicity. The bodies in the church were wrapped in linens, and only two were inside coffins. Bundles of rosemary, myrtle and palm leaves were left with one body, and one child was buried with a bronze cup. Otherwise, the tombs were sparse.The team — led by David Ratzan, a scholar of ancient civilizations at New York University, and Nicola Aravecchia, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis — began excavations at the church in 2012. But political upheaval, as well as the accidental killing of several tourists by the Egyptian military in a nearby area of the Western Desert, kept the researchers out of Egypt for many years. Only in 2023 was the team allowed to return to Egypt and finish its work, as described in a book published in September.The remains of a female from Tomb 10, Room 3, about 50–65 years old, who lived a comparatively élite lifestyle and ate a refined diet.The NYU Amheida ExcavationsA Bronze vessel found associated with a child’s coffin in Tomb 9 in Room 2, the northern crypt in the church.The NYU Amheida ExcavationsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Despite Sinwar’s Death, Mideast Peace May Still Be Elusive

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      The killing of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader whose decision to attack Israel more than a year ago set off the ever-widening war tearing up the Middle East, could be the key to ending the bloodshed. Now that Israel has decapitated Hamas in Gaza, the thinking goes, it might be ready to declare victory and move on, while a demoralized Hamas might show greater flexibility in cease-fire talks.Or, at least, that outcome would most likely be welcomed by most of the countries. Despite their pledges to keep on fighting, Hezbollah, Hamas and other Iranian proxies may also be looking for offramps, analysts say, even if Israel seems not to be displaying much appetite for taking the win.“All of them are super eager for offramps. They have been from the start,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a Middle East expert at the International Crisis Group, speaking of the Arab nations. “It’s a difficult situation for the entire region. And there are many ways in which this could get much worse.”Egypt and Jordan, just next door to the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, have called repeatedly for a cease-fire. Beyond their people’s anguish over civilian suffering in Gaza and Lebanon, they are anxious to end the instability rocking the region and halt the damage to their economies.Egypt’s prime minister, Mostafa Madbouly, recently warned that Egypt would have to transition to what he called a “war economy” if increasing regional instability threatens critical sources of Egyptian revenue, including tourism and shipping through the Suez Canal. Traffic through the canal has dropped by about half over the past year as Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia has attacked shipping in the Red Sea in what it says is retaliation for Israel’s assault on Gaza.The Gulf Arab monarchies have also pushed for calm. Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, as well as Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, all discussed working toward an end to the conflict in calls on Thursday with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. Not only is a safe environment good for business, but the Gulf States also recognize that their ambitious national development plans cannot succeed in a region embroiled in constant conflict, especially one involving their neighbor, Iran.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Egypt Replaces Its Powerful Spy Chief

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      Gen. Abbas Kamel, a longtime confidant of Egypt’s president, oversaw the country’s most important international relationships and helped maintain the president’s authoritarian grip.President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt replaced the powerful head of the country’s intelligence services on Wednesday, according to state media, switching out the Egyptian official who plays a leading role in cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas.The official, Gen. Abbas Kamel, had overseen many of Egypt’s most important domestic and foreign policy matters, becoming the face of its extensive security apparatus, which has overseen crackdowns on political opponents and kept Mr. el-Sisi firmly in control. The spy chief’s power often appeared to be second only to the president’s.The reasons for the move were unclear, and the longstanding secrecy surrounding the highest levels of Egypt’s government means that Mr. el-Sisi’s decision is likely to go unexplained. But it came as Egypt is rocked by the regional instability set off by the nearby war in Gaza, which is damaging Egypt’s already struggling economy and putting intense pressure on its peace treaty with Israel as well as on its relationships with Hamas and the United States.State media and the presidency’s statement said only that General Kamel was replaced by Maj. Gen. Hassan Mahmoud Rashad, who, according to the state-linked Extra News channel, had served as a deputy to the departing intelligence chief. General Kamel was named a special envoy and adviser to the president and general coordinator of the security services, according to the statement.It was not immediately clear whether this was a promotion or a demotion for General Kamel or whether he would continue to play a role in the talks between Israel and Hamas.Working closely with William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director; David Barnea, the head of Israel’s spy service; and Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani, General Kamel had become a key mediator in the negotiations over the past year to end the conflict. He also helped broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in May 2021.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War

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      The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers.Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure.Stop-and-start negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza, pushed by the United States, have repeatedly been described by the Biden administration as on the verge of a breakthrough, only to fail. The current Western-led attempt to avert a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amounts to a scramble to avert disaster. Its chances of success seem deeply uncertain after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah on Friday.“There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.”The killing of Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world, leaves a vacuum that Hezbollah will most likely take a long time to fill. It is a major blow to Iran, the chief backer of Hezbollah, that may even destabilize the Islamic Republic. Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear.“Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East and the author of a book on the world’s upheaval since Oct. 7. “Now the Islamic Republic is weakened, perhaps mortally, and one wonders who can even give an order for Hezbollah today.”For many years, the United States was the only country that could bring constructive pressure to bear on both Israel and Arab states. It engineered the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Just over three decades ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, shook hands on the White House lawn in the name of peace, only for the fragile hope of that embrace to erode steadily.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Citing Gaza Help, Blinken Waives Human Rights Conditions on Aid to Egypt

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      Cairo will receive its full military aid allotment of $1.3 billion after the secretary of state also said it had made progress on releasing political prisoners and protecting Americans.For the first time under the Biden administration, the United States will send Egypt its full allotment of $1.3 billion in annual military aid, waiving human rights requirements on the spending mainly in recognition of Cairo’s efforts to reach a cease-fire deal in Gaza, U.S. officials said.The decision, which the State Department notified Congress of on Wednesday, marks a striking shift for the administration. President Biden came into office promising “no blank checks” that would enable Egypt’s rights abuses, and in each of the past three years, his administration had withheld at least some of the congressionally mandated aid to Cairo, a close American ally.But the decision shows how the administration’s calculus has changed as Mr. Biden prioritizes trying to halt the violence in Gaza, one of the key goals he has set for himself in his final months in office.In response to longtime concerns about human rights abuses in Egypt, U.S. law places conditions on about a quarter of the military aid to Egypt each year. To release it, the secretary of state must certify that Cairo has complied with a range of human rights requirements.A State Department spokesman said the secretary, Antony J. Blinken, had found that Egypt had only partly met the human rights requirements but had overridden them, employing a legally permitted waiver “in the U.S. national security interest.”Mr. Blinken’s decision was based on Egypt’s monthslong role as an intermediary between Hamas and Israel as the two sides try to negotiate a cease-fire deal that would free Israeli hostages in Gaza and allow more humanitarian aid into the territory, which borders Egypt’s Sinai Desert, the spokesman said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S., Egypt and Qatar Say Gaza Cease-Fire Talks Will Resume Next Week

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      Top officials from the U.S., Israel, Egypt and Qatar ended two days of talks in Doha aimed at trying to resolve remaining disagreements between Israel and Hamas.High-level talks to halt the war in Gaza ended without an immediate breakthrough on Friday, but the United States, Egypt and Qatar said the negotiations would continue next week as mediators raced to secure a truce that they hope will avert a wider regional conflagration.The announcement came after top American, Israeli, Egyptian and Qatari officials ended two days of talks in Doha, the Qatari capital, aimed at trying to resolve remaining disagreements between Israel and Hamas. U.S. and regional officials hope that movement in the negotiations will blunt or stop a widely anticipated Iranian-led retaliation for the killing of senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, militant groups backed by Iran.U.S., Iranian and Israeli officials said on Friday said that Iran had decided to delay its reprisal against Israel to allow the mediators to continue working toward a cease-fire in Gaza.After the first day of talks ended on Thursday night, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the Qatari prime minister, called the acting Iranian foreign minister, Ali Bagheri Kani, to encourage Iran to refrain from any escalation given the cease-fire talks in Doha, according to two Iranian officials and three other officials familiar with the call who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.Mr. Al Thani spoke with Mr. Bagheri Kani again on Friday, and both officials “stressed the need for calm and de-escalation in the region,” according to the Qatari Foreign Ministry. Mr. Bagheri Kani said in a statement that the Qatari prime minister had described the cease-fire negotiations on Thursday as being at a “sensitive” phase.On Friday, Egypt, Qatar and the United States said in a joint statement that the mediators had presented Israel and Hamas with “a bridging proposal” consistent with the terms laid out by President Biden on May 31 and later endorsed by the U.N. Security Council.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More