Following Egypt’s victory over Australia at the FIFA World Cup, the Egyptian coach celebrated by raising a Palestinian flag and pledging solidarity with the Palestinian people. The image spread rapidly across social media. For many, it was a moving expression of compassion.
It also invites a more difficult question. What does solidarity actually require?
There is an important distinction between symbolic solidarity and material solidarity.
Symbolic solidarity asks us to express support. It is measured in flags, statements, slogans, social media posts and public gestures. Material solidarity asks something much harder. It asks whether we are prepared to bear real costs on behalf of those we claim to support — to offer refuge, extend citizenship, commit resources or assume greater risks ourselves.
The first is measured by expression. The second is measured by obligation.
The distinction matters because public expressions of solidarity are often judged by their visibility rather than by the responsibilities they entail. A gesture can be emotionally powerful while demanding almost nothing of the person making it. Modern political culture increasingly rewards visible demonstrations of compassion while asking comparatively little about the obligations that compassion should impose.
Few places illustrate that distinction more clearly than Egypt’s relationship with Gaza.
Between 1948 and 1967, Egypt administered the Gaza Strip through a military administration while maintaining the nominal All-Palestine Government — an entity that possessed little independent authority and never exercised genuine sovereignty. Egypt neither annexed Gaza nor recognised it as an independent Palestinian state. Nor did it grant Gazans Egyptian citizenship. Instead, residents travelled on Egyptian-issued travel documents that conferred neither Egyptian nationality nor the rights enjoyed by Egyptian citizens.
For almost two decades, Egypt exercised effective control over Gaza without resolving its political future.
History repeated itself in a different form after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
As war engulfed Gaza, Egypt refused to permit large-scale movement of Palestinians into the Sinai Peninsula. Security around the Rafah crossing was strengthened. Border barriers were expanded. Egyptian officials repeatedly declared that Gaza’s population would not be relocated into Egyptian territory.
There is nothing unreasonable about that decision.
Egypt has spent years combating Islamist insurgencies in Sinai. It regards Hamas as an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation Cairo considers a serious domestic threat. Egyptian leaders have also argued that a temporary humanitarian evacuation could become a permanent population transfer, fundamentally altering Gaza’s future while importing long-term security risks into Egypt.
These are legitimate concerns for any sovereign state. Governments have both the right and the responsibility to protect their borders and safeguard their citizens. The existence of humanitarian need does not eliminate the obligation to consider national security.
The inconsistency lies elsewhere.
It is not Egypt’s border policy that invites scrutiny. It is the suggestion that symbolic expressions of solidarity somehow discharge the practical responsibilities that genuine solidarity would entail.
Holding a flag is symbolic solidarity. Opening a border is material solidarity.
One expresses sympathy. The other accepts consequences.
Egypt is hardly unique in confronting this tension. Lebanon, for example, has hosted Palestinian refugee communities for generations while continuing to deny most Palestinians citizenship and maintaining significant legal restrictions on employment and property ownership. The precise policies differ from country to country, but the broader pattern is familiar: governments frequently express profound solidarity with the Palestinian cause while remaining considerably more reluctant to assume the long-term obligations that genuine integration would require.
Recognising this distinction also helps explain another inconsistency in the international conversation.
Egypt’s border policy is generally regarded as a legitimate exercise of national sovereignty. When Egypt reinforces its border with Gaza, it is understood to be protecting national security. When Egyptian officials argue that unrestricted movement from Gaza would expose their citizens to unacceptable risks, those concerns are treated as rational.
Yet when Israel builds barriers to prevent terrorist infiltration or restricts movement on security grounds, the moral vocabulary often changes completely. Policies that are accepted as prudent when adopted by Egypt are frequently characterised as uniquely oppressive when adopted by Israel.
The circumstances are not identical, nor are the policies precisely the same. No serious comparison should pretend otherwise.
But the underlying principle is remarkably similar.
States confronted with genuine security threats regulate their borders, restrict movement and weigh humanitarian considerations against their responsibility to protect their own citizens. Egypt’s conduct demonstrates that these are not uniquely Israeli responses. They are ordinary instruments of statecraft employed by governments across the world.
Recognising that fact does not require agreement with every Israeli or Egyptian policy. It requires consistency.
If Egypt’s security concerns deserve to be taken seriously, then Israel’s deserve the same presumption.
The image of the Egyptian coach holding a Palestinian flag resonated because symbols matter.
Flags express identity. They communicate memory. They embody hope.
But symbols are not substitutes for responsibility.
They do not confer citizenship. They do not absorb refugees. They do not accept security risks. They do not bear the burdens that governments ultimately ask of their own people.
That is the work of policy.
The flag raised after Egypt’s victory was made of cloth. The barrier at Rafah is made of concrete and steel.
One expresses solidarity. The other defines its limits.
One is symbolic. The other is policy.
