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I mean, if Israel gets fewer precision munitions from America, that just means they'll have to use things that have a higher error ratio/cause more collateral damage. And if the Iron Dome and other missile defense systems get depleted, they'll be forced into greater offensive action. I think Israel will still come out alright, but everyone in the region including Israel will have a worse time of it than otherwise.
They've already been bombing Gaza intensively, that's not what a precision air campaign looks like.
Israel just isn't a big country. They don't have the resources to engage in constant wars with a much larger bloc without US subsidies and support. Cut the military aid and they'll have to come to the negotiating table for the first time, as opposed to the old status quo of 'US proposes a treaty where Israel gets everything they want and calls it a balanced, fair deal'.
What is Israel supposed to do against the Houthis? Israel doesn't have any navy worth caring about. The US navy, bigger and better in every way, has proven totally unsuccessful at beating the Houthis or bombing them into submission. They can just fire off missile after missile at Israeli airports and airlines won't fly there for insurance reasons. Israel's high-tech economy will shrivel up and die.
At the end of the day, they're a fundamentally small power with a foreign policy that presupposes access to vast resources that don't actually belong to them. Pakistan has nukes too, Iran probably does. They're hugely outnumbered. Israel needs to get more realistic in their aspirations. They can't escalate out of this.
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Particularly since one of the obvious- immoral, but obvious- ways to mitigate the need / use for bombs in Gaza is to push the Gazans into the Sinai.
Would this be ethnic cleansing? Yes. Would it result in fewer Gazan deaths than continued war? Also yes, if you believe the claims from the last years that the war itself was genocidal in terms of casualties.
Would the Egyptians or anyone else go to war to shove the gazans back into Gaza? Almost certainly not.
Very disruptive, very destabilizing, very, very immoral and amoral both. But also far more likely than any sort of 'Americans and Europeans cutting ties to the Israelis leads to the Israel succumbing to the intifada.'
Almost certainly yes. Egypt's government and citizenry already detest the appearance of being pushed around. There isn't really a better casus belli then preventing having your countries territorial integrity flagrantly violated by an external state, and also preventing an ethnic cleansing.
Palestinians have proven themselves as a destabilizing population (just see Palestinian behavior in Jordan, Kuwait and Lebanon). Egypt is already over-populated and financially drowning trying to ensure an adequate quality of life for its citizens. If Palestinians are moved into the Sinai, the cost-benefit analysis would skew heavily towards open warfare, since such a population displacement would literally cause a life or death crisis in Egypt itself. At that point, its either war or state collapse.
Egypt can lodge a strongly worded note, push the Gazans into a hard desert to die(minus the ones they want to keep, of course), and quietly accept a bribe.
That deal would work out very well for President Al-Sisi, at least for the 45 minutes he had before his own people hung him from a bridge. He already has very low popularity in Egypt and is seen as cuck to American-Israeli interests. That would put him over the edge. Which is why he was resisting the idea of taking Gaza’s refugees so hard. He’s not trying to be an obstinate jerk, he has to for his survival.
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The cost case and not wanting responsibility of the Palestinians is a strong reason against war. War against Israel ruins the Camp David accord security assistance/entitlement from the US, all-but-certainly disrupts the Suez Canal revenue stream, and various other issues. These cost issues occur win or lose, and even in victory the Egyptians would need to either completely overthrow the state of Israel to provide a place for the gazans- thus risking the nuclear issue- or establish some sort of Egyptian civil control of 'just' Gaza, which renders the war premise of war moot.
Rather than a war against Israel, the far cheaper option is to push the Palestinians on to other areas. Whether it's further west to Libya, to Europe, to other muslim states, or otherwise. Egypt has more options for not-absorbing the Palestinians other than war with Israel.
IIRC Israel has tried to offload Gaza to Egypt at least a few times before, and Egypt isn't interested (nor is Jordan in the West Bank, despite both having held those territories in the last century). My read on this is that nobody likes the Palestinians, even those trying to use them as moral bargaining chips. That said, the three-state solution with those annexations is one of the few outcomes I can imagine achieving long-term stability on the region.
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Right. Because Egypt has so much leverage with Libya, Europe and other Muslim states. It is not realistic to expect Egypt to be able to pass along the Palestinians to other areas. Other Muslim areas wouldn't accept them, and Libya quiet literally doesn't have the ability to keep Palestinians inside it.
I reiterate that war with Israel in the event of a Palestinian expulsion becomes the only viable choice, regardless of its downsides. It does not matter how much Egypt loses out in terms of money from the US or from the Suez canal; money is infinitely cheaper than wholesale civil breakdown. Plus, in the event of Palestinian expulsion, in terms of international law, there is nothing stopping rich Gulf states from funding Egypt themselves; that war would be both legal and justified.
If Egypt completely overthrows the state of Israel and risks the nuclear issue, that would still be preferable to keeping them in Egypt. Nukes can only do so much damage; over-population could feasibly destroy the entire country.
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What does "push" mean here, concretely? Generally, in cases of ethnic cleansing, it means "threaten people with lethal violence unless they move", which is why the term is often just taken to be mostly equivalent to genocide. If the Gazans say "hell no, we won't go", what happens to them?
They continue to be crossfire. But people who don't have such strong views are encouraged/facilitated to leave.
The policy of everyone in the region- regardless of of nominal sympathies- may have been for the Gazans to be stuck in Gaza rather than let into their own country, but that hasn't really a demonstrated desire by the Gazans when border restrictions to Egypt get relaxed. Where the Gazans can buy their way out, non-trivial fractions of the population have, with around 5% of the estimated gazan population- 100,000 of about 2 million- doing so in the war so far. And that has been against Egyptian efforts.
Historically- and in previous iterations earlier in the war- the Gazans saying 'hell no, we won't go, we'd rather fight to the death' are also the ones shooting the gazans who would rather leave. And the Egyptians up-to-literally push back Palestinians caught breaking into the Sinai, occasionally even handing them back to Israelis if the Israelis seize the border checkpoints to mitigate overland smuggling. Israel normally accepts this because of geopolitical preferences that were dominant before October 7.
In the grimmer alternative (for everyone but the Palestinians who don't want to be there), the Israelis shoot the 'hell no' Gazans keeping the would-be refugees in, but don't accept Egyptian push-backs, and then variously open the border crossing gates / ferry willing departees to the gates / even facilitate ways around the gates if the Egyptians are particularly adamant. Short of shooting the Israelis, there's not much the Egyptians can do if the literal gates are closed behind the refugees, and the nature of that firefight is that it probably ends with the Egyptians pushed back to a point where they can no longer push back Gazans who walk through.
This is also partly why Egypt has been categorically denying reports of any consideration of 'temporary' relocation of Gazans into the Sinai as of earlier this year. One of the numbers mooted- half a million- would be about a quarter (25%) of the estimated gazan strip population. If 25% were able to leave- not even 'willing,' but 'able'- then it is very, very hard to prevent the next X% from doing so if they want to.
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