| Dangerous times in Egypt as
Intifada swells
by David Hirst
For President Hosni Mubarak peace is still the “strategic
option.” At the last Arab summit he and other Arab rulers,
rhetorically militant but deeply moderate in substance, did not give
a passing thought to military coordination.
They know that Arab
armies are in no condition to match Israel’s overwhelming
conventional, let alone nuclear, might. But it is becoming
increasingly less important what the rulers held in growing
disdain by their peoples want, compared to what may be thrust
upon them.
And the fact is that, as the conflict in Palestine
escalates, the possibility of regional war is once again casting its
shadow over the Middle East. In no Arab country does that provoke
more anxious debate than Egypt, which, as the main Arab military
power, would bear the brunt of any conflagration.
Since the
Palestinians’ “Intifada of al-Aqsa” began, Egypt has undergone what
the veteran analyst Tahseen Bashir calls an “emotional earthquake.”
The outward manifestation of it is the demonstrations which, for
four weeks, swept the country almost daily, by worshippers after
Friday prayers, in universities, secondary, and even primary
schools. “Where is the Egyptian army?” protesters cried, amid
expressions of admiration for Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and the
resistance through which he and his Hizbullah liberated south
Lebanon.
Professional associations, unions, NGOs, and leading
personalities, have vied with one another in urging aid for the
Palestinians. Grassroots organizations have sprung up all over the
place demanding a boycott of Israeli, American, and occasionally
British goods and institutions. McDonalds reports a big drop in
business. Even Coca Coca sales are down.
Egypt, under Anwar
Sadat, was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with
Israel. The treaty holds. But the very idea that Israel could ever
win acceptance among ordinary Egyptians is now seen to be all but
dead; the activist group promoting “normalization” has virtually
disintegrated in disgrace.
There has been nothing quite like
this, says an older generation, in the more than 50 years of Egypt’s
involvement in the Arab-Israeli struggle. A key to it has been the
entirely novel phenomenon of television, above all the pan-Arab
satellite networks led by Qatar’s al-Jazeera, which, by obliging
state-controlled Egyptian stations to emulate them, have brought the
Palestinian drama into Egyptian consciousness with a vivid immediacy
never experienced before.
The entire country, down to the most
indigent peasantry, has watched it blow by blow in their homes or
village coffee shops. “Everyone feels the pain and the insult,” said
Bashir, be it General Ariel Sharon’s provocation at al-Aqsa, Islam’s
third most holy place, or the daily shooting of unarmed
stone-throwers.
“We all used to complain about the negative
effects of TV, with its endless soap operas, on our children,” said
Dia Rashwan, an expert on Islamism, “Now TV has spawned something
like a national revolt.”
Not only were the street protests
widespread and prolonged, it is the first time that Egyptians have
been so aroused on behalf of the Palestinian cause, specifically in
its Palestinian dimension, as opposed to its Egyptian dimension. The
last time students went out in such strength, in the years before
the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, they were calling for the
liberation of purely Egyptian territory.
The demonstrations have
been wholly spontaneous; political movements have got in on the act,
notably the Islamists, but the demonstrations were clearly broader,
more deep-rooted than any one political movement. They have been led
by the young; that is to say, by the so-called “generation of
peace,” those who have no memory of the wars, confrontations,
patriotic fervour, and pan-Arabism of their elders.
They were
brought up in a climate which assumed that the whole region would
eventually go Egypt’s peace-making way, one that saw the cause of
Palestine as a rather abstract, if nagging, distraction for a
country whose overriding national purpose had become material
progress, and reaping the rewards of domestic reform, regional
stability, and globalization.
The daily TV spectacle of unequal
violence in Palestine has awakened feelings that some barely knew
they possessed. Arabism, generally overshadowed since Sadat, by a
local, Egypt-first nationalism, is clearly alive and well among
Egypt’s young people. So, too, is pan-Islamism, with the Zionist
threat to the Holy Places lending an uncompromising religious edge
to the conflict.
Scenes that breed, among ordinary people,
spontaneous anger and a desire to strike back simultaneously nourish
a deepening conviction, among the intelligentsia, that the ‘just and
comprehensive’ peace to which, by and large, this generation of
Arabs and Palestinian leaderships have committed themselves to,
simply cannot be.
“The whole world knows perfectly well what
that peace would basically have consisted of,” said Muhammad Odeh,
an old-school, left-wing Nasserist, “but Israel will not take it,
and the US will not oblige it to. That is now blindingly obvious to
everyone.”
Sadat, it is being said, may have been right when he
assumed that, after his separate peace, the Arabs could not wage war
without Egypt but wrong to assume that they could make peace
too, and that Egypt would not eventually be dragged back into the
conflict.
Mubarak, alarmed at the regression, is preaching
against war. “It’s not a game,” he said, and warned against those
“who want to fight to the last Egyptian.” In this he strikes a
receptive chord, particularly among the older generation, who
remember the calamitous defeat of 1967. “I know the cost,” said
Fakhri Hussein, a 50-year-old taxi driver wounded in the 1973 war,
“and I don’t want it all over again.”
Mubarak plays on
Egypt-first nationalism, which has been at least temporarily
reinforced again by the spectacle of Palestinians, angry at the
summit’s outcome, burning Egyptian flags and pictures of himself.
Nonetheless, there is clearly a resigned, even fatalistic belief
among many that war may once again become a necessity. “I know it
would cost us a lot,” countered a younger taxi driver, “but the way
they behave we have no choice, and it would cost them a lot more
than us.”
Besides, for Mubarak and other leaders, the issue is
not just Palestine as such, it is what Palestine has largely become
in the eyes of Arab peoples: a yardstick of the leaders’
incompetence, fri-volity, illegitimacy. Israel and American may have
been the prime targets of the region-wide demonstrations of the past
month, but the “Arab rulers” now almost a word of abuse in
Arab political vocabulary were a close second.
Mubarak’s
fear, an Egyptian says, is that popular outrage on Palestine’s
behalf could easily turn against his regime itself. For these
pro-Palestinian emotions tap into a reservoir of grievances against
the whole existing order. “The people,” said Odeh, “especially our
hundreds of thousands of educated, but unemployed, youth are boiling
for other reasons. Look, we even have long queues again for sugar.”
A dramatic, and very untimely surge in the price of this and
other basic foodstuffs is attributed to the monopolist practices of
regime-protected wholesalers. The promise held out by Mubarak’s
economic reform simply never seems to materialize, the poor get
steadily poorer, corruption and mismanagement is constantly exposed,
but only sporadically corrected.
An all-pervading repression
denies vast segments of Egyptian society, and all authentic
political forces, any legitimate means to influence, let alone
change, a remote, uncaring system that operates behind a misleading
facade of parliamentary democracy. Significantly, however, the
repression suddenly seems to be fraying.
The country is in the
midst of five-year parliamentary elections being held in stages over
the course of a month. Thanks to the Constitutional Court, a
genuinely independent body, and its insistence on judicial
supervision of voting booths a ruling which the government did
not have the nerve to quash they have been less flagrantly
rigged than usual.
As a result, the loyalist National Democratic
Party has so far suffered shock setbacks, numerically small but
politically very significant, which indicate a very high level of
popular animosity, if not toward Mubarak, at least toward the whole
apparatus he heads. And among the NDP’s losers have been adv-ocates
of “normalization” with Israel. Some already call this Egypt’s
“democratic inti-fada” running parallel to the Palestinian one.
Leaders like Saddam Hussein exploit the Palestinian crisis with
calls for a holy war. Mubarak mocks that for the demagogy it is. But
if he himself continues to use the impossibility of war as an excuse
for pursuing the “peace option” at any price, that won’t go down at
all well either.
The Nasserist newspaper al-Arabi said: “Enough
of this slogan, ‘peace is our strategic choice;’ it is just a
coat-hanger on which Arab rulers (it means Mubarak) hang their
underwear and their failure.” Mubarak has been strongly criticized
for refusing to break off diplomatic relations with Israel, and
other conciliatory gestures.
It is all seen as meekness that
does no good at all quite the reverse. Barak pronounced the
summit a “victory for wisdom” then proceeded to announce his
“time out,” suspending negotiations with the Palestinians, trying to
bring the superhawk Ariel Sharon into a national unity government.
“In other words,” said al-Hayat, “the Arabs spoke the language of
moderation and peace, while the Israelis replied in the language of
war and extremism.”
What happens, people ask, if the intifada
steadily expands and intensifies, with the Israeli response to it
that daily taunt, via the television screens, to Arabs
everywhere escalating accordingly, or worse, if Israel
launches some devastating punitive strike against the Palestinians,
and perhaps the Lebanese and Syrians, too?
War may not be an
option for Arab rulers, but with the Arab “street” emerging as a new
force to be reckoned with, to do nothing serious at all might prove
just as dangerous to their hold on power, and to the whole peace
process to which they though not necessarily any successor
are still committed.
Small wonder, people say, that at
their summit, they called for a Kosovo-type international force to
protect the Palestinians; by relieving them of that obligation, it
might be the only thing that can save some of them too.
David Hirst, a veteran Middle East correspondent, wrote this
commentary in Cairo for The Daily Star
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