The Washington Diplomat

Cover Profile: Ambassador Sameh Shoukry

As Gazans Look for Way Into Egypt,
Cairo Looks for Way Out of Crisis

by Larry Luxner

On Jan. 9, at the very moment Egyptian Ambassador Sameh Shoukry was sharing his vision of the Middle East with The Washington Diplomat, thousands of anti-Egyptian protesters were taking to the streets of Muslim capitals from Abu Dhabi to Jakarta.

The subject of their rage: Egypt’s refusal to throw open its Rafah border crossing to Palestinians trying to flee the besieged Gaza Strip amid accusations that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has somehow aligned himself with Israel in its war to dislodge the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) from power in Gaza.

“People have been aggrieved. Emotions run high,” said Shoukry, in one of his few media interviews since taking on the job of ambassador four months ago, after the departure of his longtime predecessor, Nabil Fahmy, who was in Washington for nearly nine years.

“There’s been a lot of disinformation from certain quarters to extract political advantage, and to unfairly lay blame at our door,” Shoukry told The Diplomat without naming names. “They’ve taken advantage of the inflamed sensitivities of ordinary people. We are all outraged with what we have seen, but people are unaware of the truth. We recognize this is not necessarily a fundamental opposition to Egypt” — which, along with Israel, controls the only access to Gaza.

As such, Egypt has been the third actor in the Gaza saga, mediating — and often caught in the crossfire — between Israel and Hamas long before this latest round of fighting broke out.

“We’re of course very much involved with the crisis,” Shoukry says. “From the outset, we had extensive consultations with Hamas in efforts to maintain the ceasefire, and to extend the six-month ceasefire so that the environment in the region would be conducive to the peace process. We were restricted by political transition in the U.S. and by elections in Israel, and we wanted to build on Annapolis. Unfortunately, those efforts were not successful.”

That previous truce expired Dec. 19, with each side blaming the other for the collapse — Hamas accused Israel of breaking the terms first by blocking almost all aid from entering Gaza and its policy of targeted killings, while Israel cites the repeated barrage of Qassam rockets fired from within Gaza at Israeli civilians. The homemade rockets have killed relatively few people, but they have traumatized entire communities for the past eight years.

On Dec. 27, Israel launched its massive air and ground offensive against Hamas in the densely populated strip. As of press time, the fierce fighting between Israeli soldiers and Hamas militants had taken the lives of at least 1,300 Gazans, more than half of them civilians, including more than 400 children, and wounded some 5,000 Palestinians. A total of 13 Israelis died, most of them soldiers. Despite the heavy losses inflicted on Hamas, Israeli officials acknowledged that the movement could quickly rebuild its political and military wings and that it still posed a long-term threat to Jewish state.

In the meantime, the disproportionately high Palestinian death toll — especially among women, children and other noncombatants — has triggered international condemnation of Israel, which was amplified after several high-profile humanitarian incidents involving the Red Cross, CARE and the shelling of U.N. facilities.

But Gaza’s other neighbor — Egypt — hasn’t escaped criticism either. In addition to worldwide calls for Israel to allow humanitarian access into the strip, the majority of which is surrounded by the Jewish state, aid groups have urged Egypt to open up the seven-mile portion it controls at Gaza’s southern end — an area Israel says is also commonly used to smuggle weapons.

On Jan. 8, Human Rights Watch issued a report saying that “Egypt is also preventing timely evacuations of severely wounded from Gaza, despite pledges from Turkey and Qatar, among others, to receive the wounded at Egypt’s Rafah border crossings and evacuate them to hospitals in third countries,” the group charged. “For Israel and Egypt to continue blocking the evacuation of severely wounded people is not only unlawful but heartless.”

Yet Shoukry characterized the issue of the border crossing as one of logistics rather than loyalty. “Much ado is unjustifiably made of the Rafah crossing,” says Cairo’s man in Washington. “Many people do not recognize the logistical difficulties associated with it. The Rafah crossing has always been open to receive Palestinians and those with emergencies have never been denied access. But this is not a commercial crossing with loading docks or the necessary equipment to handle large shipments of assistance.”

Still, the issue has clearly riled emotions throughout the Muslim world, even as Egypt — the most populous Arab country, with 80 million inhabitants — worked feverishly to reach a ceasefire compromise between Israel and Hamas. In the end though, the 22-day war ended without surrender shortly before U.S. President Barack Obama’s Inauguration, with neither Israel nor Hamas making any concessions, except to suspend fighting temporarily — making it clear that a permanent end to the violence was unlikely.

European leaders have pledged to help rebuild Gaza and said they were willing to help patrol the strip’s borders to deter smugglers. But Egyptian President Mubarak, who hosted the summit, said he would not permit foreign forces on Egypt’s side of the border, calling it “a red line that I will never allow to be crossed.”

Israel has accused Egypt of turning a blind eye to smugglers who funnel weapons to Hamas, yet at the same time, it has been reluctant to allow Mubarak to install more Egyptian forces along the border.

Either way, it’s clear Egypt will continue to play a crucial role in Gaza’s fate. Shoukry says Egypt is doing all it can, but Israel isn’t making it easy. “Our role is to protect the civilians and those vulnerable to the Israeli onslaught,” says the ambassador. “We cannot in any form or manner justify or find any political rationale behind Israel’s activities. We hope both sides will immediately … bring an end to this crisis.”

Shoukry, 56, is an articulate and polished career diplomat with an excellent command of English. Originally from Cairo, his family roots are from both Upper Egypt and the Delta region — “not a very common mixture,” he says. Before coming to Washington, Shoukry was Egypt’s permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva. He’s also served as Mubarak’s secretary of information and has held a variety of diplomatic posts in London, Vienna, New York and Buenos Aires.

Despite his extensive world travels, Shoukry has never set foot in the Gaza Strip, though he did visit Israel three years ago. He insists nothing — not even Israel’s war in Gaza and repeated calls to sever ties with the Jewish state — can endanger the Camp David peace treaty that has now endured for three decades.

“The Egyptian people are very savvy and understand the complexities of the [Arab-Israeli] situation. We’ve been living with it for 60 years,” he says. “Egyptians are committed to the strategic objective of peace. There’s no inclination in any way that this will affect the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel.”

But he adds that “we have gone through previous cycles of optimism, when we had greater openness. Unfortunately, those have been short lived because of the consistent emotional attachment of Egyptians to the plight of the Palestinian people.”

And nowhere is that plight more evident than in the densely populated, impoverished and isolated Gaza Strip. Barely a third the size of Montgomery County, Md., it is home to 1.5 million people, 99 percent of them Sunni Muslims. Israel captured Gaza from Egypt during the Six-Day War of 1967 and occupied it for the next 38 years.

In September 2005, facing increasing unrest, Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops from Gaza. For the next two years, the Rafah crossing — the only entry-exit point along Gaza’s border with Egypt — was jointly controlled by Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, with the European Union monitoring Palestinian compliance on the Gaza side.

But fighting soon erupted between the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas of the Fatah party, and Hamas, which won parliamentary elections in January 2006 but is listed as a terrorist group by the United States, Canada, the European Union, Israel and Japan. After Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007, the EU pulled out, and Egypt agreed with Israel to shut down the crossing — effectively sealing off the Gaza Strip on all sides.

“Hamas arrived at its current status by virtue of the elections,” says Shoukry. “In Egypt, we recognize the Palestinian Authority as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. Abbas was duly elected as president, and for the sake of the Palestinian people, we’ve been working to bridge this rupture of relations between the two parties.”

Next Page