[CAIRO] Detractors of last Saturday’s Cairo Summit for Peace, held in the New Administrative Capital, believed that it would accomplish little more than generate pressure for the passage of humanitarian aid through Gaza’s Rafah border crossing. Meanwhile, Egyptian officials believed that the forum of leaders from more than a dozen countries boosted President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s effort to recenter global attention away from the persistence of Hamas violence and toward the absence of Palestinian statehood.
“Egypt developed a formula for the conference to break the cycle of failure in dealing with the Gaza crisis and start an international movement to hold the parties accountable,” Ezzat Ibrahim, editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Weekly and board member of the Egyptian Center for Strategic Studies, told The Media Line.
European officials joined Middle East heads of state, including Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Qatar’s ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, in calling for de-escalation in the Gaza Strip.
In a notable shift from the EU’s historically pro-Palestinian stance, Western participants’ remarks emphasized condemnation of Hamas for the Oct. 7 massacre.
They underscored Israel’s right to self-defense and withheld support for the immediate cease-fire demanded by the Arab states, representatives from Africa, and non-aligned nations, including Brazil.
“We look at the Cairo Peace Summit as a turn toward restoring the Palestinian issue to the summit level for the first time in nearly two decades,” Ibrahim said.
“The presence of representatives from the Global South alongside the key European and Mediterranean states is necessary because there is a Western propaganda machine loyal to the other party,” he added, referring to Israel.
“Egypt is building a new international consensus to save the Palestinian statehood from disappearing in the face of a military machine that is taking revenge without discrimination on the exhausted Gaza Strip,” Ibrahim said.
UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly joined Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and other Western attendees in remarking first on public “revulsion at Hamas’s murderous acts of terrorism, the targeting of civilians, the murdering of children, and the desecration of dead bodies.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa avoided mentioning Hamas, instead telling attendees that his country “can relate to what is happening to Palestinians.”
“Our people waged a brave and courageous struggle to achieve their freedom and were subjected to untold suffering just like the Palestinians are going through. The nightmare of apartheid was only brought to an end by the relentless struggle of our people and the courage and foresight of leaders who put aside their differences and sought peace rather than revenge,” said Ramaphosa at the summit.
Israeli diplomats not invited to peace summit
Egypt withheld invitations from Israeli diplomats who had pulled out of their embassy in Cairo last Thursday as the el-Sisi government mobilized the country to demonstrate against the bombardment of Gaza and the Israeli military called for Gaza’s civilian population to flee south.
The United States was represented by Beth Jones, chargé d’affaires at the US Embassy in Egypt, demonstrating Cairo’s widened diplomatic distance from Washington and Jerusalem.
“This is the result of the closure of all diplomatic and security communication channels between Egypt and Israel,” Cairo Liberal Forum founder Amr Bakly told The Media Line.
“We are seeing the symptoms of the worst tensions in bilateral relations since the signing of the peace agreement between the two countries in 1979. At this crisis moment, Egypt is resorting to the classic tactic of mobilizing support against Israel through a peace conference in Cairo,” Bakly said.
Speaking in English, Jordan’s King Abdullah directly addressed Western public opinion in phrases designed to resonate with left-wing voters and supporters of social justice movements.
“The Israeli leadership must realize, once and for all, that a state can never thrive if it is built on the foundations of injustice,” Abdullah told summit attendees.
“But the message the Arab world is hearing is loud and clear: Palestinian lives matter less than Israeli ones. Our lives matter less than other lives. The application of international law is optional. And human rights have boundaries—they stop at borders, they stop at races, and they stop at religions,” Abdullah added.
Fearful that intensified violence—and the ongoing Israeli settlement drive on the West Bank—will displace more Palestinians into their kingdom, Jordanian commentators lauded the king’s uncharacteristically strident tone.
“The King spoke in human rights language about the crimes committed by Israel in its aggression against Gaza and the West Bank,” Nidal Mansour, director of the Centre for Defending Freedoms of Journalists in Amman, told The Jordan Times.
“Abdullah’s speech clearly and unambiguously named what was happening. He confronted the disinformation campaign promoted by the Israeli occupation supported by many Western countries,” Mansour added.
In interviews with The Media Line, commentators refrained from remarking directly on the speech of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who pleaded for the opening of humanitarian corridors and insisted that Palestinians would remain on their land.
Hamas’ absence said more than the Palestinian Authority leader’s presence.
“Peace Conference? It would have been more suitable to label it as a crisis management forum than a sincere endeavor to establish peace, given the absence of the three crucial parties,” Walid Darwish, a Brussels-based Egyptian analyst, told The Media Line, noting that neither Hamas nor Israel had representatives in attendance and that the United States was present only at the lowest possible diplomatic level.
“The fact that the summit was conducted without prior deliberation and substantive discussions about the intended outcomes is perplexing. No final statement was issued, resembling the typical Arab League emergency meetings where speeches are delivered, and participants depart without significant progress,” Darwish said.