Jon Alterman: Karim Haggag, welcome to Babel.

Karim Haggag: Thank you Jon, thank you for having me. It’s great to be with you.

Jon Alterman: Egypt has had a security focus on the Israeli border since the creation of Israel in 1948. Help us understand the context. How does the current Egyptian concern over Gaza rank among the various crises that Egypt has felt on its border with Israel over the last 75 years?

Karim Haggag: This is a fundamentally different challenge than the large-scale armed conflicts that Egypt fought with Israel over the years, the last one being the 1973 October War. What we have in Gaza is a different situation. We have a resumption of serious armed conflict between a major Palestinian faction, Hamas, and Israel.

Egypt has had to deal with wars between [Israel] and Gaza since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007. We’ve had about four or five rounds of armed conflict between both parties. This time was different. This time the scale of the conflict posed real challenges for Egypt. From the beginning, we had the prospect of the forced displacement of Palestinians into Egypt. This was a declared Israeli objective from the beginning. Egypt viewed this with tremendous alarm and framed this as a red line for Egyptian security.

This podcast, featuring Cairo Review co-managing editor Karim Haggag, was originally published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Listen to the full podcast with transcripts here.