Addressing the Emergency Arab League-Organization for Islamic Cooperation summit in Doha on Sept. 15, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi urged that an Arab-Islamic regional collective security mechanism be established. “Unchecked Israeli recklessness and its increasingly inflated arrogance” is plunging the region into an uncontrollable spiral of escalation which is “utterly unacceptable and cannot be tolerated.… We must change how the enemy perceives us. They should see an Arab nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Gulf, united under a single umbrella that includes all Islamic states,” he argued.
Diaa Rashwan, the head of Egypt’s State Information Service (SIS), emphasized the next day the significance of the President’s use of the term “enemy.”
“This is the first time a President of Egypt has used this word since [former Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat announced he would go to Jerusalem. The choice is intentional—our national security is under threat, and only an enemy can threaten national security,” Rashwan told Extra News, Al-Ahram reported. Sadat’s Nov. 19-21, 1977 visit was the first step towards Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, signed in March 1979.
El-Sisi charged that Israel’s strike on Doha “irrefutably demonstrates that Israel’s actions have abandoned all political or military rationale and have brazenly crossed every red line,” violating international law and the UN Charter and establishing a perilous precedent. It also made clear that Israel is deliberately sabotaging all efforts to reach a ceasefire in Gaza.
