Why is Sisi Expanding the Suez Canal?

Grand plans by modern-day Egyptian ruler motivated in great part by the same reasons as his predecessor 150 years ago.

Arutz Sheva Staff,

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi

An insecure Egyptian ruler, bullied as a child for his weight, was persuaded that a canal connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea would bring him glory - a monument rivaling those of his more illustrious predecessors.  


A century and a half later, another Egyptian leader seeking to make his mark on history, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, decided to expand the Suez Canal.

Like Said Pasha before him, Sisi sees in the canal a symbol of Egypt's glory and prosperity, and of independence since its nationalisation in 1956.



Spaghetti and the Suez

Said Pasha was an obese child to the severe dismay of his demanding father, the great Mohamed Ali Pasha, who subjected the boy to arduous exercises.


"Though Said did become famous it was more for his gullibility in signing an unfavorable concession" that saddled the country, then nominally under Ottoman control, with foreign debt, Marsot has written.  

The canal, completed by de Lesseps's Suez Canal Company, opened on November 17, 1869. Thousands of Egyptian workers died digging it.  

In 1882, partly worried that the nationalist rebel leader Colonel Ahmed Urabi would seize power, defaulting on the country's debt and taking over the canal, Britain invaded.




But the pan-Arabist firebrand could get no foreign funding on his own terms. He increasingly rattled Britain, France and Israel with his support for Algerian rebels and his bellicosity towards the Jewish state.

Consul codeword

Suez canal revenues were meanwhile filling other countries' coffers.



"I started looking at Mr Black, as he sat before me on a chair, and I imagined that I was sitting in front of Ferdinand de Lesseps," Nasser said.



The fledgling State of Israel was also alarmed at the move, for more existential reasons. In seizing the canal Nasser ordered his troops to shut the Straits of Tiran - blocking it to Israeli shipping at a time when most foreign trade was conduct by sea. The move was seen by Jerusalem as a clear casus belli.

Together with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, Eden and Mollet gathered in a villa outside Paris and hatched a plan.

Israel would invade Egypt, and France and Britain would drop troops in a show of intervening, conveniently seizing the Suez Canal in the process. The meeting was detailed in a study by Oxford University historian Avi Shlaim.


On Thursday, Sisi will inaugurate the new 72-kilometre (45-mile) extension to the canal in a ceremony where he will arrive aboard a refurbished yacht once owned by the former royal family and which carried French Empress Eugenie de Montijo across the canal in the 1869 inauguration.

Sisi ordered the extension to the canal shortly after his election last year, following the 2013 military overthrow of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, setting off a deadly police crackdown on Islamists and a militant insurgency.

The field marshal-turned-president has intimated that it was nothing less than a divine hand that brought him to power at this point, to restore order and glory to Egypt.  

And -- though French President Francois Hollande is the guest of honour at Thursday's ceremony -- Sisi has left no doubt that now Egypt's hand is on the tiller when it comes to Suez. This time Cairo raised the funds for the canal project domestically.