A belated awakening on the brink of disaster

A few hours after President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi referred to Israel as “the enemy” during his speech at the Doha summit, PM Mostafa Madbouly gathered with some editors-in-chief of Egypt’s newspapers and digital platforms. He urged them to rally public awareness around the challenges confronting Egypt. “Egypt is targeted,” he warned, “and we must all understand that the strength of this nation, and their inability to harm it, begins from within.”

It is as if the state has suddenly remembered that there is, in fact, an “enemy” to the east; one that has long awaited the moment to seize land for which Egyptians paid in blood. As if only now officials have come to realize that Egypt is indeed a target, that maps are being redrawn in the region, and that we are not detached from what’s happening in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, or now, Qatar.

A peace that brought complacency

This late awakening, this official realization that the people must be reminded of the dangers lurking across the border, comes after years of neglect. The warnings about an adversary bent on building its “Greater” state at the region’s expense follow decades in which the state pursued “peace” as a substitute for confrontation. In doing so, the very possibility of returning to a pre-Camp David posture was erased from the official political vocabulary, reshaping the public consciousness.

Since late-President Anwar Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem and his signing of a separate peace with the Israeli enemy, successive governments slid into a strategic dormancy. Although Egypt’s military doctrine never ceased to define Israel as the primary threat, the political rhetoric proudly declared, “The October War was the last war.”

By “handing the United States 99% of the keys to the game,” Egypt gave way to Washington’s agenda. With Israel as the exception, the US urged its regional allies to follow the peace track and adopt the language of submission. Mobilization and readiness disappeared, as though a “tactical peace agreement” was enough to turn the page on a conflict with an enemy that founded its state on an ideology of expansionism.

An enemy that never rests

When Israel declared statehood in 1948, its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, addressed his generals with a chilling vision calling on them to prepare to go on the offensive. “Our aim is to smash Lebanon … then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.” That ambition never faded. It echoes today in Israeli political discourse, in Benjamin Netanyahu’s promises to redraw the map and establish a Greater Israel.

Tel Aviv has never abandoned its approach, and it never misses an opportunity to trample on every agreement or UN resolution. When asked why he accepted the UN partition plan, Resolution 181, Ben-Gurion replied: “There is no such thing in history as a final arrangement—not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements.” He added that “after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” For him, “the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concerns of the Jewish people.”

Across the Israeli political spectrum, the war footing remains intact, conflict is either ongoing or always imminent. Militarization saturates daily life: through textbooks, synagogues, television, and the press, the Israeli psyche is steeped in fear, hostility, and a drive for revenge. The Arab “other” must be vanquished.

And society responds in kind. The last two decades of elections have produced some of Israel’s most hardline governments. Wars of annihilation like the current onslaught on Gaza enjoy widespread popular backing, as do preemptive strikes beyond Israel's borders.

Israel’s enemies today

Israeli political, military, and intelligence leaders maintain that their state is permanently under threat and that Egypt poses the greatest danger. Recently, Israel accused Egypt of “building military infrastructure in Sinai, digging tunnels to store missiles, and extending air-base runways,” in violation of the peace treaty.

In Israel, the army is not merely one institution among others; it is the state’s backbone and national identity. “To be Israeli is to be a soldier—or at the very least, an unwavering, unconditional supporter of the military,” wrote Israeli-American analyst Shira Tamir in the Times of Israel.

Even after the shock of Oct. 7, which shattered the myth of an “invincible army,” Israel did not reconsider its militarization. Instead, the rhetoric grew more brutal and aggressive, treating the failure as temporary negligence to be corrected through harsher measures and greater readiness. Leaders aim to turn the country into a garrison state—a super Sparta, in Netanyahu’s words, or, as Ben-Gurion once put it, a military society that became a state.

A culture of conflict

Egypt, by contrast, lapsed into strategic complacency. School curricula and media discourse no longer referenced “the enemy” or the need for readiness, as if the threat had ended. In that void, voices emerged calling Israelis “cousins,” promoting normalization as acceptable, and advocating economic, technological, educational, and even security cooperation. They sought to sever collective memory from the reality that as long as Israel exists, the confrontation remains.

The tragedy is that even after Israel’s crimes have been documented in international reports, some blame the resistance, demand surrender, and insist on raising the white flag, as though the oppressed were the criminals.

This delayed reckoning and this sudden willingness to name the enemy might offer a chance to reorient public awareness. But that will require a radical shift in political, educational, and media discourse. Egypt must recognize the truth: our struggle is not over territory, it is existential. And Israel’s continued presence guarantees a permanent threat.

What Egypt needs now is national mobilization. Each citizen must see themselves as part of the rampart, a soldier in a struggle that will not end until the usurping power no longer exists.

To rule out war, to invest blind faith in paper peace, to hand the narrative over to defeatists, is to abandon national security. Worse still, it is to underestimate an enemy that prepares for confrontation on all fronts, while we sleep under the illusion of calm.