COMMENTARY
Egypt Tells Trump to Pound Sand
Seth Mandel
March 5, 2025

Despite presumably having watched the way Donald Trump has responded recently to world leaders who question or challenge him, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has decided to poke the U.S. president in the eye and see what happens. The much-ballyhooed Arab Plan for postwar Gaza has been released, and it is unimpressive even by the standards of past pan-Arab peace proposals. Perhaps even deliberately so…We can go back further and point out that the war itself didn’t have to happen and that Egypt could very well have prevented it. Cairo had stopped policing the smuggling routes between Egypt and Gaza in the area of Rafah, a town that is split between the two jurisdictions. Those smuggling routes enabled Hamas to resupply and reinforce its army…READ MORE