THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS:

Egypt and Qatar have negotiating backchannels with Hamas, Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, told Vox in an interview.

"There are backchannels; there always were," Sachs said. "The main one is with the Egyptians -- they have open communication with Hamas. They despise Hamas, of course, and they blockade the Gaza Strip, but their intelligence has frequent communication with Hamas." This has allowed them in the past to negotiate ceasefires and exchanges between Israel and Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, he said.

The primary reason Egypt despises Hamas, as Sachs put it, is because it originated as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group which Ḥasan al-Bannā, a teacher, devout Muslim, and Egyptian nationalist, started in Egypt in 1928. [...]

And because the Palestinian liberation cause was closely aligned with Arab nationalist and international communist projects during that time, to Israel, "political Islam seemed better than Arab nationalism," Byman said. The Palestinian left was, in the 1970s and '80s in particular, the main opposition to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat. Those secular, Marxist groups were responsible for several terror operations throughout the Middle East at the height of their power.

"Hamas comes directly out of the Muslim Brotherhood" in Gaza, "not a spinoff or anything like that. It is the Muslim Brotherhood," Byman said.

For nearly 40 years, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, which became Hamas, didn't have sufficient power to be a threat to Egypt; they didn't even participate in the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, Byman said. But when Hamas gained that power during its takeover of Gaza in 2007, former Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak called the situation a "coup against legitimacy" and supported Israel's blockade against Gaza. Mubarak was deposed during the Arab Spring, and Egyptians elected Mohammed Morsi, who was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and hoped to expand relations with Gaza.

Morsi served only a year and four days before he was deposed by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt's current strongman president. Sisi has heavily suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood and has in the past vilified Hamas and its connection with the Brotherhood.

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