For the past seventeen years, the world has condemned the containment of Gaza that followed the rise of Hamas to power in that territory. In just a few days, the world finally learned why containment was necessary for Israel’s security. Hamas’ orgy of annihilation of defenseless civilians, widespread rape of Israeli women (and others caught in their invasion), and hostage-seizing perfectly demonstrated why Gazans needed to be isolated.

And not just by Israel.

For some reason, few bother to acknowledge that Egypt has partnered with Israel on that containment strategy, and for the same reasons. Those reasons are so vital to Cairo that even with an Israeli ground invasion perhaps just hours away, Egypt refuses to open the Rafah gate and let Gazans pass into Egypt, even temporarily, to escape the carnage they started:

Egypt has discussed plans with the United States and others to provide humanitarian aid through its border with Gaza Strip but rejects any move to set up safe corridors for refugees fleeing the enclave, Egyptian security sources said on Wednesday.

Gaza, a tiny coastal strip of land wedged between Israel in the north and east and Egypt to the southwest, is home to some 2.3 million people who have been living under a blockade since Palestinian Islamist group Hamas took control there in 2007.

Egypt has long restricted the flow of Gazans on to its territory, even during the fiercest conflicts.

Cairo, a frequent mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, always insists the two sides resolve conflicts within their borders, saying this the only way Palestinians can secure their right to statehood.

If that sounds like a flimsy excuse, it only means you’re paying attention. It’s even flimsier now that Hamas launched a war of annihilation on Israeli communities and Israel makes clear that it has no intention of accommodating Hamas any longer. There is zero hope of ‘statehood’ in Gaza while Hamas remains now — and not only does Egypt know it, they want Hamas destroyed as much as the Israelis, especially after this.

In fact, it was ridiculous to expect Egypt to open corridors for a Gazan retreat in the first place. Perhaps Western diplomats forget the circumstances in which Egypt’s leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, came to power in 2014. A popular uprising from the Muslim Brotherhood in the so-called Arab spring forced Hosni Mubarak from power and eventually led to the election of Muslim Brotherhood figure Mohammed Morsi as president in 2011. The new Muslim Brotherhood government rapidly began to radicalize Egypt, and the military conducted a coup led in part by al-Sisi in 2013, after which followed a period of violence between the interim regime and forces led by the Muslim Brotherhood attempting to restore Morsi. In 2014, al-Sisi won the elections run by the military government at the time, and he’s been a target of the Muslim Brotherhood ever since.

Why does this matter? Hamas is a spin-off and ally of the Muslim Brotherhood. To admit two million Gazan supporters of Hamas into Egypt, even if one could filter out the actual Hamas terrorists, would be a form of suicide for al-Sisi. To even ask for this from al-Sisi is an expression of historical ignorance. Mubarak and al-Sisi both kept the containment policy firmly in place for their own survival, and one of the reasons the Egyptian military took action to depose Morsi was because he was about to lift that strategy:

Palestinians in Gaza feel that Morsi repeatedly paid a price for his political and moral positions in favour of them, despite a presidency that lasted less than a year. They feel indebted to him for calling for the lifting of the unjust Israeli siege. And his words were not just words: Morsi ordered Egyptian authorities to permanently open the Rafah crossing, the gateway for Palestinians in Gaza to the outside world. …

In the 2014 war on Gaza, Egyptian interference prolonged the war, which lasted more than 50 days. Sisi, who wanted to punish Hamas – the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood – did not agree to a ceasefire until Palestinian armed groups accepted Israeli demands.

So which genius in the Biden administration and/or Sunak government thought that al-Sisi would allow Hamas-led Gazans to flow into Egypt?

And it actually runs deeper than Hamas. The main reason why no other Sunni state will accept Palestinians comes from Jordan’s experiment with sheltering the Palestinian Liberation Organization. King Hussein allowed the Palestinians to evacuate their positions from the West Bank after the 1967 Six-Day War into eastern Jordan, after which they held off the Israelis in a separate battle in 1968. That prompted an avalanche of recruitment and fundraising for the PLO, which then began to operate as its own sovereign entity within Jordan. That touched off a series of battles from 1970-71, with Hussein eventually expelling the PLO to Lebanon by military force — where the Palestinians started another civil war, which lasted from the mid-1970s to 1990. (The Palestinians call this Black September, which is why the PLO gave that name to their military wing headed for years by Mahmoud Abbas.)

Any Arab country that accepts radicalized Palestinians en masse will eventually pay for it with civil war. Anyone who proposes such a solution is a fool, and any Arab leader that accepts it is an idiot. Why do people think that these leaders insist that the Palestinians have to settle their issues in situ? Between the PLO and Hamas, the Palestinians are too radicalized to handle.

If the Gazans want to be relocated, the country that should accept them should be the country which created their misery: Iran. Let the mullahs deal with the insanity they funded and designed. If the Gazans want to remain, then they’d better learn to get along with their neighbors and to eject the radical Islamists they’ve long embraced. Those are the choices the Palestinians have left for themselves, other than reaping the consequences of the war of annihilation they were cheering just a few days ago.