The ghost of Sadat in the Palestinian present

On Nov. 27, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty urged US President Donald Trump to get involved in Sudan’s crisis and end the humanitarian catastrophe there.

Abdelatty said he was reiterating what President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi had asked Trump at the signing of the Sharm El-Sheikh agreement on Gaza.

The meaning is blunt: As long as the American president “cares” about a crisis, he can “solve” it. Gaza today, Sudan tomorrow.

This is a recognizable method, a pillar of the Sadatist school in foreign policy; the doctrine that grew out of Anwar Sadat’s Camp David strategy: 99% of the cards in any game are in America’s hands.

From that premise comes the prescription: Pull Washington into direct negotiations. Instead of negotiating with one enemy, Israel, you end up negotiating with two enemies perfectly aligned with one another.

The Trump era is incomparably more dangerous than the Carter era of the 1970s. There is no longer an international counterweight to American power, the way the Eastern Bloc once was.

And Carter was not obsessed the way Trump is.

Trump treats politics—foreign and domestic—as a track he will walk alone, convinced it will inevitably generate profit for him, his family, and the class of businesspeople he represents.

It also enlarges his image: the man of major crises.

He negotiates alone with Russia over a solution to its “crisis” with Ukraine, promising it Ukrainian territory without consulting the Ukrainian government or the European Union. He threatens Argentina and Honduras with cutting off aid if they do not elect his preferred candidates. He uses coercive threats with Venezuela and Colombia.

The signing of the Sharm El-Sheikh agreement remains the most celebrated global image of Trump as a “one-man show”; a man who steps over international law and convention as others yield before him.

Everyone knows those pieces of paper do not end the genocide, and that the agreement can collapse at any moment.

That is precisely why Trump is trying to protect the agreement with UN Security Council Resolution 2803, linked to a “peace” project in Gaza.

The resolution is a black box. It names undefined things without explaining how they will happen: a Peace Council headed by Trump, without members. Reconstruction, without funders. Disarming factions, without a force to carry it out. 

The language, and other issues, are so vague and clumsy that everyone recognizes the vagueness is intentional.

But let’s set the resolution aside for a moment. Do we remember the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)?

Most of us have forgotten the name. Those who haven’t, remember it as a blur—associated with American mercenaries who suddenly fled Gaza after killing its people in cages built to funnel them into lines for the distribution of scant food supplies.

They vanished without trace, emptying offices and camps overnight as Trump’s Gaza plan was inked in Sharm El-Sheikh, despite US officials touting GHF as central to the so-called “day after.”

The same happened with the Yasser Abu Shabab project: Money poured into rebranding a drug dealer and warlord as a political alternative to Hamas, only for the entire thing to suddenly evaporate.

There is a pattern: announce a structure, wrap it in spectacle, leave the text vague, then discard it overnight when it stops serving the moment.

That same fate can meet Trump’s projects, his resolutions and his Peace Council. They can evaporate as if nothing was ever there.

The new Gaza

Gaza’s people remember faces.

They do not forget the strange killer who lined up their children, relatives, and neighbors inside cages to beg for food, then opened fire.

They will not forget Abu Shabab’s gang, whose members did not go hungry in Gaza for two years while everyone else starved.

But survival has its costs.

Exhaustion, the relentless pace of events, the breathless rhythm of displacement, tens of thousands of victims and blood that does not stop, all of it weakens memory.

We must keep that in mind when we speak about Palestinians. And we must keep another truth in mind: Palestinians have reached an extreme limit after two years of genocide.

The danger of forced displacement, of emptying the Strip, is still present. In fact, it is more present than ever, as long as death, hunger, and sleeping in the open remain present.

What prevents the emptying of the Gaza Strip right now is a set of intertwined obstacles: Crossings closed most of the time, no clear destination, and no ability to pay brokers and mercenaries, old and new, of various nationalities, who invest in Palestinian misery.

Most importantly, the Egyptian regime has not, up to this moment, complied with the Israeli-Trump displacement plan.

Ignoring this reality benefits no one. It is the primary danger facing the future of the Palestinian people now—before the danger of disarming the resistance, before the danger posed by a Security Council resolution sliding into a level of clumsiness and absolute degradation, and before the danger represented by the emergence of organizations like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the Gaza of Abu Shabab.

And yet we linger over such UN resolutions because they frighten us in a particular way: for what their passage, and the world’s acceptance, means.

They frighten us because they carry the stamp of international legality, even as they contradict the logic and essence of law and justice, before they frighten us for what they will produce on the ground.

The resolution’s meaning shifts into something more terrifying: haphazard and ignorant politics, marketed as “Sadatist pragmatism,” becomes a generalized method.

The world accepts what Trump will do without asking him what he will do.

And there is the attempt to exploit Palestinian exhaustion, especially if regional parties such as Egypt accept these arrangements, inviting the realtor who rules America to repeat his tricks in another “Riviera,” this time called Sudan.

The resolution inaugurates an occupation of the old, classic kind over a central part of Palestine, a return to the era of Sykes-Picot mandates.

It carves out the Strip and, for the first time in the history of the UN, separates it from the rest of Palestine through special arrangements that are open-ended and opaque.

This is Camp David redux, now shrink-wrapped as a Security Council resolution—with a novel gimmick: The United Nations issues “directives” that bind no one on the very Board of Peace it purports to birth.

On one side sits the text. On the other: the timing; at the Strip and West Bank's utter exhaustion, with no Palestinian leadership enjoying even nominal legitimacy to resist or obstruct.

The resolution sees the reality as an opportunity to profit quickly from fatigue. It does not see the fact that the Middle East cannot absorb new clownish games.

One example is enough: It does not consider the social and political impact of the Riviera project and emptying Gaza of its people on the entire region; not only on Palestine, Egypt, and Jordan.

Likewise, no one seems to consider that the rush to sign agreements, or at least understandings, between Syria and Lebanon on one side and Israel on the other—at this exact moment, after everything the region has watched over two years—is playing with a bomb that could explode at any moment.

A very old Gaza

After the Sumud flotilla was intercepted on Oct. 1 and activists were taken to an Israeli prison, women were separated from men.

The women were placed in a ward of 13 cells connected to a small shared yard.

On one wall, prison authorities fixed a huge image of Gaza completely destroyed, with a greeting for international detainees: “Welcome to the new Gaza.”

It is not a new Gaza. It is Gaza in a transitional moment after a campaign of destruction and genocide the world has not seen, at least since World War II.

And these psychological games, as a form of mistreatment, are not new either.

The image expresses an Israeli project rooted in reality—a project the occupying state has pursued without interruption since its founding: that no Palestinian house should remain standing.

Any house it cannot seize and turn into an Israeli home must be turned into rubble, whatever method is used to destroy it.

This old Israeli project intersects with Trump’s new project at one basic point: seizing the opportunity to freeze a fleeting image, then turning it into a permanent, stable reality.

At its core, Israel’s fantasy and the Trump administration’s fantasy is to return Gaza and the West Bank to something very old: two areas cleansed of refugees, as they were before 1948.

One is dressed up for tourists and businesspeople, with whoever remains of its people working as waiters and servants.

The other is dressed up with settlers who fulfill the dream of total control over a “pure” Judea and Samaria—the Israeli government’s term for the West Bank—after expelling refugees and non-refugees alike.

“Judea and Samaria” was the term Sadat accepted during the Camp David negotiations. Sadat was deluded by the impossible: that he could oversee its “self-rule” if Jordan refused. He imagined the only players were rulers. He erased the existence of peoples. He placed 99% of the cards in Carter’s hands.

That is where his death lay.

Camp David’s lesson was not that America holds the cards. It was what happens when you accept that premise.

Today, Gaza replays the script—with one crucial difference. The question now transcends mere figureheads for direct repression over Palestinians, refugees and natives alike. It hinges on who disarms the factions—and shoulders the apocalypse this scheme unleashes.

The harder question, that no one dares to answer, concerns the rupture that displacement and ethnic cleansing would cause to the survival and stability of the entire region, if it is left to Trump and Israel’s solo play.  

Egypt’s foreign minister calls on Trump to get entangled in Sudan. How? Should he back the side supported by Egypt, or the side supported by the United Arab Emirates—two warring sides?

Maybe it was a slip of the tongue.

But it is a slip that raises alarm about how aware Egypt’s administration is that our national security fundamentally clashes with Washington’s approach to Palestine, past and present—and whether it understands that Palestinian exhaustion is neither eternal nor final.

Palestinian exhaustion is not permanent. The consequences for the region won’t be, either. But instead of narrowing Trump’s arena and buying time, Cairo is inviting him to open new ones.