On 18 September, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was expected in Cairo for yet another – the 10th – round of talks on the Israeli war on Gaza.

Blinken’s visit comes as the Israeli war nears its one-year mark on 7 October. It also comes against the backdrop of escalating tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, with the Israeli press speculating that the former is set to sack the latter.

Blinken’s visit to Cairo also comes at a time of increased rhetoric from Israel on a possible escalation of military hostilities against south Lebanon. On top of that, there are the tensions between Egypt and Israel over the positions that Netanyahu has been adopting with regards to his security plans for the borders that separate Egypt from Gaza, including a space that is largely demilitarised according to the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty.

“Supposedly, [Blinken] is coming to discuss a final draft for a deal that should allow for the beginning of an end to the war before 7 October. The general idea is that there would be a ceasefire, the release of hostages, the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, an emergency aid operation to Gaza, and talks on a phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, with some security arrangements that will be executed with the support of the US and the help of regional and international players,” said an informed Egyptian source.

However, according to the source, it does not seem that Blinken is coming with a deal that Hamas will find convincing. He explained that beyond the political rhetoric, Hamas is not set “after all the damage and losses of life that the Palestinians in Gaza have been enduring for almost a year” to give Israel the hostages it has been holding since 7 October when it launched its resistance operation against Israeli targets.

It will not simply allow Netanyahu to continue bombing Gaza with no clear commitment to withdraw fully, even if in phases, from it.

The same source said that Blinken has said before that Netanyahu is not willing to commit to a specific withdrawal date or indeed to the concept of a full withdrawal from Gaza. He added that while there might be a limited breakthrough with regards to the complicated security arrangements for the borders between Egypt and Gaza, which are currently occupied by Israel, there is no reason to think that he has more to offer.

According to an Egyptian diplomatic source, “the Americans want to avoid a more vocal mode of tension between Egypt and Israel over the management of the Philadelphi Corridor [between Egypt and Gaza]. It seems that for them this is a priority.” However, he added that what Cairo is saying is that the Egyptian-Israeli “disagreement” over the security measures for the Philadelphi Corridor is not unlikely to reoccur, even if a compromise is reached with US mediation.

He argued that if Netanyahu insists on keeping the Israeli military presence in Gaza, it is hard to see how the conflict there can end. In the case of protracted conflict, even if at low intensity, the borders between Egypt and Gaza will continue to be part of the bigger problem. Worse still, neither Blinken nor US President Joe Biden is willing to promise anything close to a commitment to curbing any future Israeli military attacks against Gaza.

In the analysis of several sources informed on the path of the US-Egypt-Qatar mediation between Israel and Hamas, it is not very clear whether the Americans want to end the war or just want to end it for now. These sources say that it seems clear that the outgoing US administration does not want to see a wider regional conflict in the six weeks leading up to the US presidential elections in November.

However, they add, it is not as clear that the administration is really opposed to the Israeli war on Gaza in general.

According to one retired senior Egyptian diplomat who worked on the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations before, it is standard for US administrations to say that they are working for peace and even for a Palestinian state, but then to do everything to support Israel when it is acting systematically to make it practically impossible for such a state to see the light and consequently for peace to be achieved.

He added that irrespective of the positions of the consecutive US administrations that have been involved in the management of the Arab-Israeli struggle, especially since the 1967 War, Israel does not want to see a Palestinian state. It does not want to return the Arab occupied territories, but it does want normalisation deals with the Arab states, especially those that have not been involved in the Arab-Israeli wars.

For this reason, he said, Israel has almost always had the unconditional support of the US and to a great extent also of the UN.

The profound worry that these diplomatic and other sources are sharing today is also to be found in the memoirs of four Egyptian foreign ministers who have been involved in the Arab-Israeli struggle and the negotiations for “a permanent and comprehensive Middle East Peace.”

ISRAELI PROCRASTINATION: In a memoir published in 2011, Nabil Al-Arabi, a former Egyptian foreign minister, spoke at length about an Israeli scheme that aimed to give Israel the chance to keep the Arab territories it has occupied by military force.

Taba, Camp David, and the Separation Wall: Battles of Diplomacy from the UN Security Council to the International Court of Justice is the title of the over 300-page memoir published by Al-Shorouk in Cairo. It allows this seasoned diplomat, who died last month, to share his revealing account of the extent to which Israel could go to consolidate its military engineered status quo.

Al-Arabi shares recollections of the Egyptian legal battle to retain Taba as part of the overall restoration of Sinai, which Israel occupied during its 1967 War on Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Jordan. Al-Arabi wrote that Israel tried hard, but failed, to establish that Taba was not within the sovereign Egyptian borders with Mandate Palestine.

Al-Arabi’s memoirs offer a full account of the work of a highly competent team of Egyptian diplomats, especially those with solid legal backgrounds, military officers, and professors of history, law, and geography.  

“It was in December 1981, [just a few months] before the scheduled Israeli withdrawal from Sinai [in line with the Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel] that was due in April 1982, when the Israelis decided to start a squabble about demarcation points,” Al-Arabi wrote. For four consecutive years, under his supervision, the Egyptian team had to work on collecting sufficiently compelling evidence to get Egypt to win arbitration over Taba.

For Al-Arabi, the issue was more layered. Israel, he argued in his memoir, was typically stalling and trying to get something it was not entitled to, with considerable complacency meeting its attempts from many other countries and organisations, especially the US.

The history of this stalling, he wrote, goes back to the summer of 1967 when the UN Security Council issued its Resolution 242 that called for a ceasefire in the war without calling for Israel to immediately withdraw from the Arab territories it had occupied using military force and in violation of international law.

Al-Arabi argued that there was nothing coincidental in this, as Israel was trying to pull Egypt into a military confrontation when it started an attack on a Jordanian village in November 1966, forcing then Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser to take retaliatory action a few months later by announcing a plan to block the Straits of Tiran to all shipping both to and from Israel.

Nasser’s decision was announced on 21 May, just a few days before the 5 June 1967 War broke out that led to Israel occupying all of Sinai, Gaza, which had previously been under Egyptian administrative authority, the West Bank, parts of Jordanian territories, and the Syrian Golan Heights.

Clearly, Al-Arabi wrote, Israel wanted to create a crisis that would lead to a war. Prior to the launch of the war, he added, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, without any consultations with his government, had declined a request from the then UN secretary-general for Israel to take measures that could have helped to reduce the tension on the ground.