Episode 42: Why is Egypt so scared to open its border with Gaza? with Mariam Wahba
Ask Haviv Anything
Haviv Rettig Gur
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2025
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Events move fast in the Middle East. This episode was recorded before the Israeli strike in Qatar. We believed this episode was an important one because the world should be paying more attention to the deteriorating situation in Egypt.
The attack on Hamas leaders in Doha did indeed grab the headlines. It's a dramatic development Haviv addressed in a Free Press livestream and that we plan to address in an episode already under development.
But the original point behind this episode stands. Everyone is talking about Gaza, Qatar, Israel, Iran. Meanwhile, Egypt, the most populous Arab state, the launching pad for most of the radical Islamist ideologies that have upended the Middle East in recent decades, has been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and social implosion. Emirati bailouts, growing international concern and Egyptian officials suddenly talking openly about war with Israel are all signals of this fragility.
To make sense of this vital but under-discussed powder-keg - and to find out why Egypt continues to refuse to let Gazan civilians escape the war by waiting it out in safety in Sinai - we turned to Mariam Wahba, an Egypt expert (and Egyptian Coptic Christian herself) at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington.
This episode is sponsored by Jason and Lauriel Klinghoffer who have dedicated it to the memory of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, two Israeli embassy staffers who were murdered in Washington, DC on May 21st, 2025. They were fatally shot outside the Capitol Jewish Museum by an anti-Israel terrorist after attending an event for young diplomats.
Please join us on Patreon to support this project: https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything.
If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at haviv@askhavivanything.com.
Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. Welcome to Ask Haviv Anything. |
| 0:07.9 | Apologies that the sound isn't great. I'm on the road. I'm in Toronto. |
| 0:12.5 | And we're working on improving sound while on the road. |
| 0:16.4 | This is a fascinating episode that I've been waiting for. |
| 0:19.7 | We have with us, Mariam Wahba, who, |
| 0:22.6 | well, we'll get into who she is and why she is a great resource to turn to when we want to |
| 0:30.0 | answer a question asked by a great many of our viewers, of our listeners, of our Patreon subscribers, |
| 0:36.1 | what the heck is happening to Egypt? Where is Egypt going? |
| 0:39.9 | There's some signals that, you know, the giant gas deal signed with Israel, regional integration, |
| 0:45.1 | the peace treaty is very much still in effect. At the same time, we've seen more and more Egyptian |
| 0:49.3 | officials talk about the possibility of coming war with Israel, no less. And we've seen 60,000 troops in the |
| 0:55.6 | Sinai, a buildup that is absolutely a violation of the 1979 peace treaty. And so there are many |
| 1:03.7 | different things where, of course, of course, going to talk about Gaza, which shares a border |
| 1:08.7 | with Egypt and how Egypt has handled that border. But we're also going to get into Egyptian society itself and how to read Egypt, so to speak. |
| 1:16.1 | I do understand where it's going. |
| 1:18.6 | I'm very excited to get into it. |
| 1:20.4 | This is a country with roughly 100 million population, the most populous Arab nation. |
| 1:26.1 | You cannot understand the Middle East without |
| 1:27.7 | understanding it. |
| 1:28.7 | The fact that it is not currently engaged in major wars kind of sets it to the side, and |
| 1:33.3 | people don't really focus and think about it, but then you're missing a lot of the core |
| 1:38.5 | of what's happening in the Middle East. |
... |
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