Wedenesday night, I went to sleep with the news that Hamas and Fatah had signed a make-up-and-have-elections agreement; Thursday morning, I awoke to news that the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Nabil El Araby, is going to visit Gaza and Ramallah next week. Tectonic plates are shifting in the region.
El Araby was appointed on March 6th and has since set to work recalibrating Egypt’s relations with its neighbors. He has moved toward normalizing relations with Iran, and declared that Israel should be held to its treaty obligations. (“Why should Egypt be one of only three countries, along with Israel and America, without diplomatic relations in Tehran?” I was asked more than once.) During the revolution, nobody in Tahrir Square talked much about Israel, but in the months since the issue of relations with “them next door” has bubbled up. A couple of weeks ago, when there were several hundred thousand people in the square, a voluble phalanx of demonstrators was waving Palestinian flags and chanting: “To the Embassy! To the Embassy!” And, over the past days, demonstrations have sprouted up at the bottom of the anonymous office-tower block on an urban highway that houses, on an upper floor with no identifying national flag visible from the street, the Israeli Embassy.
Yesterday evening, I had dinner with two Jews who live in Egypt. There are two active synagogues in Cairo and a direct flight (mandated by the Camp David accords) to Tel Aviv, and while many Egyptians make a distinction between individual Jews and the state of Israel, others freely intersperse the two terms. Both my dinner companions carried North American passports, but tended to hide any Israeli connections; one of them was gay—double jeopardy.
We were eating at a Uighur restaurant that serves the small community of Uighur students who come, along with other religious scholars from all over the Muslim world, to study Islam at the venerable Al Azhar University. We sat outside at a lopsided plastic table, with excellent handmade noodles in beef broth with coriander and chili oil and a bright salad of chopped red cabbage and tomato, washed down with bottles of Pepsi. We lamented the Egyptian addiction to carbohydrates (why restrict yourself to just one in a dish, when it turns out that rice and macaroni and lentils and chickpeas all go so well together and you can call it the national dish: koshari?) and talked over the day’s news: a masked gang had blown up the gas pipeline to Israel. Apparently the fire at the blown-up pipeline was still burning; Egypt has said it won’t pay compensation for the disruption because it happened during “a state of emergency.”
The pipeline to Israel was completed in 2008 and now supplies half of Israel’s natural-gas needs. The gas is purchased by Israel at a preferential rate and this apparent discount is deeply unpopular with Egyptians and seen as part of the corrupt practices of the Mubarak regime that bent its priorities. For many Egyptians, Mubarak shamed the country by taking American money (Egypt was the second largest recipient of direct U.S. aid after Israel) in return for, as they saw it, deferring to Israel’s interests when it came to foreign policy. Earlier this week Sameh Fahmy, the former Energy Minister associated with the deal, was jailed.
Some days there is too much news. I talked to a Syrian friend of mine today—“it’s worse than the eighties,” he told me, referring to the Hama massacre in 1982 when Hafez al-Assad killed more than twenty thousand people to put down an uprising. I asked after mutual friends and he said they were O.K., but his voice sounded dreadfully worried, traumatized, and frightened.