Cairo’s Isolation Reaches a Tectonic Shift as President Sisi Legitimises Armed Struggle
Khaled Hassan | The Grand Strategy | Jul 01, 2025
In a televised, pre-recorded address marking the 12th anniversary of Egypt’s 30 June revolution against the Muslim Brotherhood rule of Egypt, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi crossed a red line he had steadfastly avoided for 11 years, since he assumed office in 2014: he formally legitimised armed “resistance” against Israel. But to grasp the seismic nature of this shift, we must first contextualise his desperation.
“The continuation of war and occupation won’t produce peace, but feeds a cycle of hatred, and violence, and opens the doors of vengeance and resistance which will not be shut. So, enough violence, and killing, and hatred, and enough occupation and forced relocation, and homelessness.”
Egypt vs. The Gulf: A Collision Course
As chronicled in my prior analyses, Egypt faces accelerating abandonment by its Gulf patrons – particularly Saudi Arabia. Just yesterday, I detailed Riyadh’s boycott ultimatum against Cairo, underscoring how the two nations barrel toward open confrontation. Tensions, as predicted, are escalating rapidly.
Sisi’s 30 June address – his most inflammatory anti-normalisation speech to date – did not emerge in a vacuum. The fuse was lit at May’s 34th Arab League Summit in Baghdad, an event so toxic that every major Arab leader boycotted it. Only Sisi and Qatar’s Emir attended at head-of-state level.
The “Iranian Summit”
Contacts in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi dubbed Baghdad 2025 the “Iranian Summit” – a pointed reference to Qassem Soleimani’s murals dominating the city’s arrival routes. To Gulf powers, Iraq remains functionally occupied by Tehran. Sisi’s insistence on attending signalled his willingness to embrace this axis. Worse, he exploited the platform to posture as Palestine’s sole defender, declaring: “Even if all Arab countries normalise relations with Israel, there can be no peace without a Palestinian state.”
The hypocrisy was not lost on Gulf observers. As one Saudi commentator acidly noted: “This from the leader whose country was the first to recognise Israel?!”
If it were not for the fact that Steve Witkoff has taken over American foreign policy, and he apparently is a Qatari agent, the U.S. could solve this Egyptian move into the Iranian camp, and increased hostility to Israel, with agenerous dose of ‘humanitarian aid” to Egypt. The Egyptian people are much, much poorer than the Gazans, who have been receiving abundant “humanitarian aid” for the past eighty years. Poverty in Egypt is appalling, and millions od Egyptians would benefit from humanitarian aid. If the U.S. would substantially increse its subsidies to the Egyptian government, as well as to private anti-jihadist organizations (there are some in Egypt), it would take pressure off sisi to make anti-Israel noises, and possibly even, God forbid, launch a military attack on Israel.