What Sunday is to Christians, and Saturday is to Jews, Friday is to Muslims. It’s not a sabbath exactly, since there is no requirement that adherents ‘rest,’ but Friday does have a midday obligatory communal prayer and is part of the weekend in the Islamic world. If you want to get a really big protest going, Friday is probably the best day of the week to do it. That’s what we should expect to see today in Egypt. And, it appears that the Egyptian government is in full panic mode.
Protests in Egypt at the government’s rule have been building all week, and Friday was expected to see the largest demonstrations so far.
An analysis by Renesys, which provides real-time monitoring of internet access, says that “every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, internet cafe, website, school, embassy and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.”
It looks like the government has shut down 88% of the internet connections in the country, although the addresses serving the stock exchange remain active. This is probably a one day shutdown that is less painful because a lot of government agencies and businesses are closed for the day anyway, but a modern country can’t function if its banks and businesses and government agencies have no internet access.
If you are looking for a sign that the Mubarak regime may be on its last legs, now you have a strong one.
It’s quite possible that a ridiculous spike in commodity prices over the last year has served as a trigger that ignited long-simmering grievances about tyrannical behavior from Middle Eastern clients of the United States. Tunisia’s tyrant has already fled to Saudi Arabia. In Cairo, they are chanting that Mubarak’s villa in the Saudi Kingdom is ready and waiting for him. Food rights have broken out in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen, and Jordan, which are all U.S. (and/or European) clients to one degree or another. Lebanon has its own problems.
We may be entering a revolutionary phase in the Arab world. If we are, it will certainly have strong anti-Western tendencies. But the keystone is the peace agreements between Jordan and Israel (brokered by Clinton) and Egypt in Israel (brokered by Carter).
It should be remembered that Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization was formed as a direct response to the enactment of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty that was concluded on March 26, 1979. They assassinated Sadat, but Sadat was replaced by Hosni Mubarak, and the peace was maintained. Zawahiri would later merge his group with Usama bin-Laden’s al-Qaeda group and launch a series of high-casualty terrorist attacks against the U.S and U.S. interests.
We have already seen relations between Israel and Turkey founder in the wake of the Gaza flotilla fiasco. We’ve seen Lebanon’s government fall due to the increased influence of Iran-backed Hizbollah. We’ve seen the pro-western Tunisian government fall. Now we have food riots in Jordan and mass protests in Egypt.
I think we should view this as the breakdown of the status quo that has allowed Israel to operate with impunity in the Occupied Territories. Despite this, Hillary Clinton has not been backing the Mubarak regime’s censorship and has encouraged them to use the protests as an opportunity to enact reforms. There is a level of disingenuousness involved in both this, and in Obama’s praise of the revolutionaries against our long-time clients in Tunisia. But, at least our government isn’t reflexively supporting the autocrats.
We always try to avoid paying the piper. But it is going to take some real finesse to pivot away from the strategy we’ve been pursuing to protect Israel’s interests by buying off their enemies, to supporting the democratic aspirations of their deeply anti-Israeli populations.
I’d be less alarmed if I thought that the Israeli government was cognizant of the situation and prepared to act before the edifice collapses. But they seem to think that they can keep operating as they have been, with no thought to resolving the crisis that is destablilzing the whole region and causing ruptures in U.S. bilateral relations.
Things are falling apart.
