Sisi’s Son Is Said to Profit from Gaza-Egypt Smuggling

Plus, country club Democrats, Harvard’s chalk policies, Harris tax plan, and more

President Sisi as pictured on an Egyptian government website.

A key issue in the negotiations among Israel, America, Qatar, Egypt, and Hamas over a ceasefire and hostage-for-prisoner release deal is the fate of the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt, which Israel now controls. I explained some of the issues involved back on August 20 in the item “What the Wall Street Journal News Section Won’t Tell You About the Philadelphi Corridor,” and Dan Senor, toward the end of his most recent “Call Me Back” podcast episode, has the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur give a lucid explanation of the issues involved: “You cannot defeat a guerrilla force that can escape the battlefield at will and can resupply freely.”

There’s an additional and unappreciated dimension, though, to the Philadelphi Corridor issue. Not only does Hamas want Israel out of that border area; Egypt badly wants Israel out of that border area. How come?

The reserve Brigadier General, Amir Avivi, who is chairman and founder of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum, explained in a video briefing today: “They make billions off this smuggling.” 

“Inside the Sinai peninsula there are tens of thousands of rockets and other capabilities and thousands of nukhbas, terrorists, waiting to go into Gaza and rebuild Hamas and reinforce it,” Avivi said. “The moment that we go out…we are not going to be able to stop it.”

Avivi also said Hamas that if Israel withdraws from the border with Egypt, Hamas is planning to take Israeli hostages to the Sinai peninsula, and from there to Iran.

In another IDSF briefing earlier this week, a former Israeli diplomat, Eli Yerushalmi, said that Egypt is “making a lot of money out of all this smuggling and what goes on overland and underland between Egypt and Gaza, and one of the people who’s making a lot of money is actually President Sisi’s son, who some say he makes tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars from these smuggling operations.”

An April 2024 dispatch in an online news outlet called Watan reports that Mahmoud al-Sisi, a son of President El-Sisi of Egypt, is accumulating power as an Egyptian intelligence official. And numerous press outlets have described a strong “friendship” between Mahmoud al-Sisi and Ibrahim Al-Organi, a tribal leader in the northern Sinai with its own armed militia and a network of companies that charges money to get people and truckloads in or out of Gaza. In June, Egypt declined to comment to a New York Times inquiry about ties between Al-Organi’s companies and the Egyptian government, and Organi “insisted that he was being slandered by news outlets linked to the Muslim Brotherhood,” the Times reported.

Whatever you can say about The Editors or Israel’s Defense and Security Forum, “linked to the Muslim Brotherhood” is not an accurate description.

I’m not here taking a side in Israel’s internal political debate over whether a temporary pullback from parts of the border is worth trading for returning some of the hostages. But given the American press’s appetite for stories involving potential or imagined conflicts and presidential sons or son-in-laws—Hunter Biden, Jared Kushner—you’d think there’d be more attention to Mahmoud al-Sisi. And as international pressure mounts on Israel to allow the re-opening of the Egypt-Gaza tunnels and trade routes through which Hamas acquired the arms used in the October 7, 2023 attack, it’s worth asking and trying to understand about the role not only of Israel and Hamas, but also Egypt.

Country-Club Democrats: Vice President Harris’s time in Los Angeles includes regular “dinners at the Hillcrest Country Club,” the Wall Street Journal reports. In 2011 the Hollywood Reporter, in a piece headlined “Where the Hollywood Elite Play,” put the Hillcrest initiation fee at $185,000. While in LA, she stays in a 3,500-square-foot house in Brentwood that her husband purchased for $2.7 million, the Journal says.

It all makes the Democratic National Convention talk about how Harris is for and from and of the “middle class” while Trump is for his “rich friends” seems a little artificial.

Harris’s Tax Tweak: Vice President Harris, speaking today in New Hampshire, offered a minor tweak of her tax policy, earning her a New York Times subheadline that described it as “a capital-gains tax rate of 28 percent for some wealthy Americans, lower than what President Biden has proposed.” 

“A 28 percent tax on investment income for wealthy individuals that is far lower than the rate proposed by President Biden,” the Times described it, quoting Harris as claiming, “If you earn a million dollars a year or more, the tax rate on your long-term capital gains will be 28 percent under my plan.” The Times noted that “Mr. Biden had proposed taxing capital gains at 39.6 percent for such Americans; the rate currently tops out at 20 percent.”

The Wall Street Journal notes that “The all-in top rate would be 33%, which would include a new 28% capital rate cited by Harris on Wednesday as well as Biden’s proposal to raise a 3.8% investment income tax to 5%, people familiar with the plan said.” In some cases state and local taxes would also apply. 

The Journal also notes that Biden would “tax unrealized gains during life for people with a net worth over $100 million. Harris’s rate change doesn’t necessarily alter her approach to those structural changes or break with Biden on those policies.”

Got that? Harris is proposing to raise the tax on unrealized gains to 33 percent from zero. The Times reports it as “far lower than the rate proposed by President Biden.” But Harris isn’t running against President Biden, she’s running against President Trump. Trump isn’t proposing any new tax on “unrealized gains.” If the Times plays along while Harris falsely portrays herself as a tax-cutter, when she’s actually proposing steep tax increases, it’s failing. That provides opportunities for publications like this one, which can provide context and cut through the Times spin.

Read more than one newspaper: Michael Mosbacher reported for us yesterday (“UK Halts Some Arms Exports to Israel as Labour Chases Muslim Votes”) on the United Kingdom’s decision to halt some arms exports to Israel. It’s illuminating to compare his dispatch to the Wall Street Journal news department’s article on the same topic. The print edition of the Journal includes no mention at all of Muslim votes. The online Journal, at least, does carry a couple of sentences at the very end of the story acknowledging, “The Labour Party also has a sizable Muslim and pro-Palestinian voter base. It lost several seats in the July election to independent candidates who essentially made Gaza their main campaign pitch.” But even the extended treatment in the online Journal makes no mention of Jeremy Corbyn, the virulently anti-Israel former Labour leader who, Mosbacher reported, joined Monday in a new alliance with the independent candidates.

Recent Work: “New York Times Brings Anti-Israel Bias to Campus Protest Preview” is the headline over my latest piece for the Algemeiner. Please check out the full column over at the Algemeiner if you are interested in that sort of thing.

Harvard’s Chalk Policy: Five Harvard professors, Steven R. Levitsky, Walter Johnson, Ryan D. Enos, Richard F. Thomas, and Hibah Osman, among the university’s most notorious anti-Israel activists, chalked the campus walks in protest of a new anti-chalking policy, The Crimson reports. The Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance notes that the Crimson photo of the professors’ chalking includes the red triangle that is a Hamas target symbol. “Is that a Hamas red triangle pointing at the John Harvard statue? Hamas & its supporters use red triangle to mark their targets 5 HARVARD PROFESSORS chalked Harvard Yard in protest of the University’s rules.” A Harvard student, Charlie Covit, posted an image of a Hamas poster featuring the symbol: “This is an actual Hamas poster distributed in the West Bank. The red triangle is an explicit call to kill Jews. Shame on each and every one of those professors.”

Mickey Segal, a Harvard graduate and a reader of The Editors, suggests that Harvard needn’t bother banning chalking, and that the pro-Israel community should simply add its own commentary to the chalk. To “Free Palestine” might be appended, “from Hamas.”  To the red triangle, students might add, “This triangle was placed by Harvard professors to denote that Harvard should be a Hamas target.”

Is a chalking ban too restrictive of free speech? Or is it a reasonable, enforceable attempt at a non-hostile campus? And how might students or professors cleverly respond to the worst of the chalked anti-Israel slogans? The comments are open below to paying subscribers. I’ll do my best to highlight and republish some in future newsletters.

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