When will the President call Israel by its name?

“The Middle East is passing through a critical and fateful phase, witnessing orchestrated efforts to redraw its map under extremist ideological claims.”

— President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on Sinai Liberation Day, 2026

---

This expression was seemingly calculated to fall seamlessly in the middle of the president’s ten-minute address. It mimicked classical literary design, with its dramatic ebbs and flows. Yet, it proved to be a “false climax,” devoid of any actual tension or narrative build-up. The phrase was thus reduced to a crude pivot, shifting us from parables of grand historical triumphs to vague generalities about our immediate present.

Following this pivot, the president addressed two main issues. The first concerned Egypt’s full support for Gulf security—a boilerplate reassurance endlessly recycled in prior speeches.

But viewed in light of subsequent disclosures—the presence of Egyptian fighter jets and crews in the UAE, coupled with images of the president alongside the Emirati ruler and Egyptian officers—this reiterated commitment reveals itself as a prelude to what would soon be unveiled.

The second issue was equally unoriginal: a rehearsed liturgy on Gaza, ceasefire compliance, aid delivery, and reconstruction. All of this was uttered without a single mention of Israel, its blatant violations of the agreement, or its ongoing genocide and siege of the Palestinians.

This dovetails with the president’s framing in the first half of his speech, where he referred to the “Gaza war”: a sanitized euphemism that even certain Western leaders abandoned months ago in favor of the term “genocide.” Furthermore, he relegated what is happening in Gaza, whatever its name, to a list of generic “severe challenges” confronting the country, alongside the COVID-19 pandemic six years ago, the Iranian war, and the influx of refugees.

At its core, the phrase “Gaza war” is a denial of historical reality. It presumes a conventional conflict between two symmetric forces rather than a systematic campaign of genocide waged by Israel in the occupied territories since 1967 against a virtually defenseless population.

The president’s rhetoric, his broader content, and occasional stray remarks reveal that he, like his people, knows the nation is in peril. Yet, a gulf divides them: while citizens explicitly name the adversary in streets, cafes, workplaces, and universities, the president, as usual, avoids identifying the threat.

He speaks to his people in riddles, symbols, and codes, refusing to clearly define the source, nature, and scale of the danger. By withholding this clarity, he deprives them of the ability to defend an entity that has itself become, over time, dangerously abstract: the homeland.

When the docile Egyptian press reports on the president’s speeches or covers his discussions with heads of state, it faithfully mimics this strategic ambiguity. A prime example is the lead report in Al-Shorouk on May 10 of this year, covering his Alexandria summit with French President Macron. The newspaper noted that El-Sisi and Macron discussed—quoting literally—”Middle East crises,” “regional tensions,” and “regional conditions.”

This vernacular conforms perfectly to the “linguistic labyrinths” of presidential rhetoric. It harmonizes with the obfuscations surrounding the threats to our homeland, the “Gaza war,” and the calculated anonymity granted to those trying to redraw our map—the nameless “extremists” we are supposedly blind to. Or perhaps we know them all too well, but the president, for some reason, refuses to utter their names. Consequently, politics is drowned in a sea of illusion, ambiguity, and abstraction at the very moment that demands absolute clarity.

The glaring paradox is that this is not the Trump- or Netanyahu-style register adopted by so many modern autocrats. Their style is crude, direct, and unabashedly brazen. Instead, we see shadows of the conspiratorial vocabulary of former President Mohamed Morsi, who famously refused to speak Israel’s name, preferring to lecture on “hidden hands” and “forces of evil.” The paradox deepens when we realize that this very language was later co-opted by Kais Saied in Tunisia—though it remains unclear whether his muse was Morsi or El-Sisi.

Labyrinths of language and politics

Evil: that wretched, amorphous category blamed for regional crises, shifting borders, and conspiracies against the state. I suspect this “evil” is also the source of those extremist ideologies. Indeed, I would venture that it is, God only knows, the prime driver of the crises and wars of the Middle East.

But speculation is not enough. To rescue this piece from linguistic labyrinths that breed political paralysis and cognitive fog, let us speak plainly: this “evil” is Israel. Or is it merely Israel? Is it Israel and its regional accomplices? Is it the US–Israeli axis? Israel and the UAE? You will find no answers to these questions in the sterile theater of official diplomacy.

With the disclosure of Egyptian fighter jets in the Emirates, a profound, collective confusion took hold. This disorientation cannot be blamed on linguistic failures alone, though the Egyptian Foreign Ministry’s statement on the photographs was predictably evasive. We must remember that a labyrinth of language inevitably maps out a labyrinth of positions and policies.

We had assumed that Cairo’s official posture was clear from the outset of this “crisis” (as the labyrinth calls it) or “war of aggression against Iran” (to speak clearly). We believed it mirrored the sentiments of most Egyptians: absolute non-entanglement in this joint Netanyahu–Trump war. This is to say nothing of the quiet relief felt by many Egyptians at Iran’s resilience up to the moment of writing.

But the linguistic labyrinth is born of a structural deficit in transparency—a deliberate withholding of information from a public that would otherwise rally to defend a threatened nation. Because official rhetoric refuses to identify who compromises our national security, and refuses to utter the word “Israel,” we can no longer pretend the state’s stance was ever as clear as we once hoped.

This lack of clarity turns into alarm in the face of sudden, dramatic shifts. Avoiding entanglement in a foreign war is logical; shifting alliances to back the UAE is not. Abu Dhabi holds extreme positions on two fronts: first, its active desire for a decisive Israeli–American victory over Iran; second, its unprecedented drive—in the midst of a Palestinian genocide—to institutionalize military cooperation with Tel Aviv.

All of this transpires while we know that Israel is the very force bent on redrawing regional borders, directly threatening Egyptian national security to the east, while the UAE actively compromises it to the south and west.

Before these photographic disclosures, we assumed that any shift in Cairo’s stance would bring us closer to Riyadh’s desire to end the war. Such a position would align with the diplomatic role Egypt was believed to be playing, alongside Pakistan, to mediate a ceasefire. Securing peace is, after all, the only logical policy for protecting an Egyptian national security that the president himself warns is in jeopardy.

If national security is indeed in jeopardy, logic demands that we explicitly name our adversaries and design policies of containment and deterrence, rather than forming defensive alliances with their Gulf proxies. But the bitter truth is that Egypt’s national security is not only being undermined at its eastern, southern, and western frontiers: it is being compromised from within.

History, economics, and political science all demonstrate a basic truth: selling strategic assets and land to foreign entities dismantles sovereign decision-making, and with it, national security. This requires no linguistic gymnastics, no strategic ambiguity, and no convoluted euphemisms to understand.

It is a reality as stark as another: the allied capitals of Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi will never safeguard Egyptian national interests. If we surrender our independence to one, we forfeit it to both.