Slow-building [...]]]>
Slow-building protests started out with diverse crowds, including children
From the morning on, the number of protesters was increasing by the hour. Immediately after Friday morning Prayers at Sixth of October City, a suburb of Cairo, 3,000 people were out in the streets. By afternoon prayers, the number doubled. In the crowd there were many women, some with kids in tow.
The crowd appeared to traverse social lines, from people wearing the garb of door-guards to middle-class and affluent people. Even school girls were out.
I took it as a sign that people really want change when they risk taking their children out. But when things got out of hand, a lot of people pulled their kids out of protests.
Also soon after clashes started, residents began stocking up on food, and in the main area of Cairo, shops were closing their doors. People were unable to get around in cars.
Only the protesters, the police, and the army were left on the streets.
Of course, I got hungry. I stopped at a state-run bread distribution center and I jokingly asked the woman selling bread why she wasn’t protesting. She asked how many people were out, and I said about 4,000 so far. She said she’s waiting for more people. She’s technically a government employee.
In downtown Cairo, people in their homes and apartments looking out from their balconies and windows were throwing food and water to the protesters. Protesters were even allowed to go and make landline calls and go back down to the streets (mobile service is down in many areas and for many different services). This is in downtown Cairo, some of it in affluent areas. People would just open their doors to let people in.
Protesters going after symbols of the government
Before I went to Cairo, I was near the protest from a nearby main mosque. They were marching down and singing songs like ‘down with Mubarak.’ On the way, there was a police station. Some protesters tried to get in, but didn’t initially throw stones.
These are the symbols people are focusing on now: pictures of Mubarak, police stations, and NDP offices.
I don’t think there’s sympathy for the government — though people are worried about what’s next and whether things will get out of control.
The protesters are not looking outward at all and not mentioning Israel or the U.S.
They are concerned about better lives in Egypt. There were no religious slogans except for “alluhah akbar,” which is also a general expression of celebration.
Army presence in streets, perhaps military intelligence
The branch of the Army that came to downtown Cario to protect the (state-run) TV and Radio building were from the Republican guard, which is the presidential guard.
There were reports of tanks around the U.S. and other embassies, protecting those diplomatic installations.
There were cars around the city in strategic areas with tinted windows. It’s illegal for civilians in Egypt to have tinted windows. Usually, these cars are some kind of military intelligence.
There also appeared to be a communications tower being set up downtown (for police to communicate). But this sort of activity is usually conducted by the military.
Government blames the Muslim Brotherhood
Basically, what the government was trying to do was say that it was the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) behind the unrest, but most of the leadership of the MB was arrested ahead of the protest.
Instead of having senior officials from Mubarak’s party come out and say its the Muslim Brotherhood, a parade of low-ranking governemnt officials came out and said the MB did this. They were blaming the Brotherhood for the “riots,” and for fires.
Unsubstantiated rumors flew that the government itself had set fires in order to blame the MB. People noted that it took nearly four hours for firetrucks to come and fight the fires; they guessed that the authorities could have easily called in services.
Communication breakdown
At home, people were watching satellite broadcasts like Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and even Al Hurra, the U.S. government-funded station, which all had good coverage.
Most forms of communicating out are down or suppressed. There is still no Internet service, and mobile phone services are still down. [Mekay was unable to dial the U.S. from his landline.]
People are complaining that landlines are often busy, too. People are phoning into Egypt in terror, trying to call their families.
The authorities cracking down and cutting all communications really infuriated everyone. It was a sign that they might be losing control.
Nervous excitement
When I came back here, there were some intellectuals who were blaming Mubarak for what’s happening.
Everybody’s nervous; you might hear it in my voice. I don’t know if it’s just excitement, but things are boiling. It’s scary in a way, too, because I personally don’t know what’s going to happen next.
There are reports on satellite television of two more protesters dead in Mansour, a city in the northeast Nile River Delta. Al Jazeera just reported that in the main city on the Suez, 11 people died today, on top of the three others that have died in recent days.
The government may react more violently.
]]>This week, we have another striking example of the restating of the argument that, as we’ve discussed before, ‘the road to Middle East peace runs through… anywhere but Jerusalem.’ Writing on “Hudson New York,” a blog and aggregator operated by the neoconservative Hudson Institute, Aymenn Jawad (sometimes Aymenn Jawad al-Timmi) declares that the U.S. should focus on Yemen, not Israeli-Palestinian peace.
An intern at Daniel Pipes‘ Middle East Forum, where his Yemen article is reprinted and has been promoted on the front page for several days, Jawad, an apparent friend of anti-Jihadist Islamophobe Robert Spencer, cites two Al-Arabiya polls and goes on to conclude:
These data should put to rest the notion of “linkage,” the idea that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key to dealing with the problem of Iran’s goal of becoming the dominant power in the region.
Proponents of “linkage” argue that Iran is increasing its influence because it is playing on resentment about the ongoing conflict, but how can this be so when surveys from Al-Arabiya consistently illustrate a lack of interest amongst Arabs in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the peace process?
This line of attack on linkage raises two big problems.
First, hawks have long proclaimed that a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a magic bullet that will wipe away the U.S.’s problems. At Commentary, Jennifer Rubin characterized linkage as “the unsupportable claim that Iran can be disarmed only in the aftermath of a successful peace process.” When linkage came up in Gen. David Petreus’s Congressional testimony last Spring, as well as reports of Vice President Joe Biden’s private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor told the Forward that he isn’t on board with “the notion that if somehow we address the concerns of the Arab world regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then all our problems will be solved.”
But this is a straw man — a deliberate mischaracterization of what proponents of linkage are saying. In a post picking apart the anti-linkage arguments of top Obama Mid East adviser Dennis Ross and WINEP fellow David Makovsky, blogger and foreign policy realist Steve Clemons wrote:
The ongoing and repeated failures to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict are increasingly consequential to American security and US interests. [...]
Solving the Israel-Palestine conflict will not solve all the political and identity tensions which will continue to boil in Arab and Muslim-dominant states — but the echo effect of resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will knock down many walls in these societies that have been resisting change.
Indeed, Clemons hints at the Arab Peace Initiative and other agreements to assert: “The quid pro quo of moving Palestine and Israel toward a credible two state track is normalization of relations between Israel and 57 other now hostile countries.”
This is the sort of broad and nuanced tack that opponents of linkage avoid addressing. More disturbing than failing to address the question at hand, however, is Jawad’s invocation of a “survey” by Al-Arabiya, a partially Saudi-owned and U.A.E. based Arabic-language television channel. Jawad offers a link to a page in Arabic displaying the survey results, and then trumpets the results as definitive: “71% of respondents had no interest in the upcoming Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.” Indeed, that is the result listed, but this is no scientific poll: It’s merely an online reader survey from the front page of Al-Arabiya‘s website. The “survey,” in other words, is statistically meaningless. James Zogby of the Arab American Institute harped on the same point when Efraim Karsh wrote his New York Times op-ed attacking linkage based on the same “survey.”
Furthermore, no interest in the peace process and no interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not the same thing. A friend fluent in Arabic relates to me that the question referenced by Jawad indeed deals only with the peace process. It asks about “amaliyat as-salam fii ash-sharq al-awsat,” or “the peace process in the Middle East.” Zogby hit this point, too: Arabs “no longer ‘passionate about Palestine’?” he wrote on Huffington Post, “Don’t bet on it.”
As for the 2005 poll cited by Jawad, I can’t find it online (perhaps because of my limited Arabic). Taking Jawad’s numbers at face value (despite the credulity gap on the other Al-Arabiya online viewer survey), however, does not prove his argument. Just as caring about the “peace process” is not the same as caring about the conflict, failing to link the conflict’s resolution to “Arab development” is, again, not capturing the full spectrum of the potential benefits — both for countries in the Middle East and the U.S. — heralded by supporters of linkage like Clemons.
Though Jawad calls for an end to drone strikes in Yemen, where U.S. “overt military intervention undermines its allies,” it should be noted that many of his fellow travelers in the neoconservative movement are not so level-headed. Late last year, Joe Lieberman called on the U.S. to prevent allowing Yemen to be “tomorrow’s war” by making it today’s war — ie, the famous “preemptive” aggression preferred by neocons in Iraq and, today, in Iran. All this, of course, for only a few-hundred members of Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula.
All this blustering supports the hawkish talking point that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a distraction to U.S. policymakers, and that Obama should instead pursue a road to Middle East peace that winds through nearly every Arab and Muslim capital. Look for peace anywhere but Jerusalem, they seem to say. Nothing to see here. Move along.
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