God and Democracy in the Streets of Egypt

Jo-Ann Mort: Streets of Egypt

THE FIRST and only time I visited Egypt was in June 1992. On the day that I landed in Cairo, as part of an Americans for Peace Now delegation, Yitzhak Rabin was quite unexpectedly elected as prime minister of Israel. My fellow delegates and I sat in the Semiramis Hotel on the Nile watching the returns with Palestinian Fatah leader Nabil Shaath, who was living in Cairo at the time. It was a moment of hope that the Left hadn’t anticipated. Perhaps, as Mubarak security advisor Osama El Baz told us later that week, the Egyptians and the Palestinians could finally stop “negotiating with God” (a reference to the previous Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir, which contained a number of right wingers who believed in the divine right of Jewish ownership of the West Bank) and get down to the business of making peace.

Indeed, the Rabin era led, in the short term, to more progess toward peace and even genuine friendships between Israeli and Arab leaders. The relationship between Israeli ministers and people inside Mubarak’s regime remained strong for some time, and a remnant of that relationship is still there. Members of Israel’s military and the aged leadership of Rabin’s disintegrated Labor Party, mostly represented by former defense chief Benjamin Fuad Ben-Eliezer, have been the most outspoken in demanding that Israel support Mubarak.

But even in 1992, one could feel the fragility of the Egyptian government. It was reasonable then to worry that any peace between Israel and Egypt was as fragile as the relics in the Cairo Museum, which looked vulnerable in their casings even in peacetime. A general sense of shabbiness hung over the museum and, indeed, much of central Cairo.

Three memories from that trip come to mind in light of the protests in Egypt over the last two weeks. Back then, as today, there was no political freedom to speak of, which also meant that there was no press freedom; yet an official frankly bragged to us that the government was opening the airwaves by allowing an imam to preach for half an hour each day on the national network. How he and other government officials couldn’t see that without other outlets, the mosque was becoming a political club house, was beyond me. Religion had already morphed into fundamentalism elsewhere in the region; Egypt was not unique in that regard. Perhaps its leaders and others around the world felt that its size and its military would save the country from an encroaching fundamentalism. But the strength of the Muslim Brotherhood grew, and will surely continue to grow, without democratic change; and while there is a risk of having them join in any new government, it is a risk that Egypt may have to take. (Similarly, I believe that Hamas should be included in a unity government with Fatah in Palestine.)

Which brings me to memory two. One night, we dined on a houseboat owned by a wealthy Egyptian industrialist who was aiding the Palestinians. One of the dinner guests told us about how her female friends were, to her horror, beginning to cover their heads and their bodies. They did so largely as a fashion statement, but she feared that this would yield to more conservative mores and values overall–especially with growing social and cultural pressure, which has since increased throughout the Arab world and North Africa. Compounding these conservative pressures is a terrible job market for Egyptian women. A March 2010 World Bank study noted that despite the doubling of women with a university degree from 6 to 12 percent from 1998 to 2006, the proportion of women participating in the workforce remained unchanged, “while unemployment rose among university graduates from 19 percent to 27 percent.” In 2009, the rate of unemployment among men was at 10 percent, but was more than 20 percent among women.

The poverty is so deep in Egypt that while adult women have a difficult time finding work, young girls are employed weaving rugs (their nimble fingers are useful for fast weaves). Girls from rural areas are kept out of school to work in what are euphemistically known as “technical schools,” but in fact are rug factories, many of which can be found on the Giza Road near the pyramids. We were taken to one of these where the young girls—five and six years old—were shown off to us at their looms.

But the strongest memory I have is of Omar, a security officer who was assigned to us by the Egyptian government. When he first showed up at our hotel, we wondered if he was there as a minder, to listen in on the meetings we had with anti-government intellectuals, many of whom were former Nassarite communists. In fact, he had been sent to protect us. Even then, the Egyptian government was concerned about preserving the peace agreement with Israel, imagining that an attack on a group of prominent American Jews who supported peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors would not bode well for the regime. When some of the university age children in our group wanted to visit the old parts of the city, Omar told them that it would be dangerous for him to accompany them because government officials were unwelcome in that part of town. This was a government that had written off a large segment of its own population. It called to mind Brecht’s poem “The Solution,” written after the 1953 uprising in East Berlin was crushed:

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had thrown away the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

MUBARAK HAS led a regime that exists in fear of its own people. That fear has made it unwilling to grant Egyptians even the basic democratic rights that are given to them in their own constitution. The United States and Israel have accepted this state of affairs because of their own fears and desires—legitimate fears about and desires for peace in the region. But the peace between Israel and Egypt cannot survive as a peace between governments; the Egyptian people and the Israeli people must support it, too. Nor can Egypt provide an anchor for U.S. geopolitical needs in the region without the United States winning the hearts and minds of over 80 million Egyptians.

The United States and Israel have that chance now. We mustn’t blow it. Democracy is too important. I am not naïve about the waves of history, how a crowd demanding change can go the way of Kronstadt or Tehran. But I believe that the revolution happening in Egypt today (and Tunisia too, though Tunisia has the additional benefit of strong mediating institutions like unions) is the beginning of something different for the Arab world. It offers America and Israel a young and educated constituency with which to engage—and a similar constituency exists in the West Bank and, yes, even in Gaza. They are hungry for their chance to better their own countries, and they are looking less for enemies than for their own self-fulfillment.

The Arab regimes have propped themselves up by promoting enmity with Israel. Mubarak’s regime didn’t do that, but propped itself up instead on the backs of its citizens. Israel became the fig leaf for a tyrannical regime. There is no way to sustain such tyranny in the long term, without the barrel of a gun, and so I hope and actually believe that this revolution of the young, aided by social media, can reach out across borders. Israel and the United States would be both correct and prudent—and would live up to their own professed ideals—if they reached back in support.

The Israeli peace camp and its American supporters have made mistakes through the years; I say this as a tireless supporter of this camp. One of our biggest mistakes was thinking that our allies could forgo real democracy in the name of Israel’s security or U.S. geopolitical interests. What we are seeing before us, on the streets of Egypt, is that for true peace to come, the people must be engaged, not enraged. Israel and the United States need democracy in Egypt as much as the Egyptian people need it for themselves.

Jo-Ann Mort, a Dissent editorial board member, writes often about Israel and the Arab world and is CEO of ChangeCommunications, a strategy firm that works in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. She just returned from Israel and Ramallah.