The Double-Face of Arab Protest Over Gaza

They're mostly left to seethe in Egypt because the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak won't let them protest much. It's the old fear of Arab despots: the people may be protesting Israel today. But they'd just as soon, and just as well, protest against their own government tomorrow. Either way, it's repression by truncheon--and irony: Arab governments (even, if not especially, Egypt) aren't known for silencing anti-Israeli sentiment, and more often than not they encourage it and its more bilious, anti-Semitic strain.

It was Egyptian satellite television station, after all, that, to profit from blockbuster Ramadan audiences, aired ''Horse Without a Horseman" in 2002--an endless miniseries purporting to be a history of the Middle East from 1855 to 1917, but incorporating freely from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the bogus history of alleged Jewish designs on the world that's been making the round of anti-Semites for about a century. My colleague Austin Cline also reminds us that the Egyptian government, ever vigilant about dotting its anti-Semitic i's (and eyes, of course), shelved a copy of the Protocols right next to a copy of the Torah in the new Library of Alexandria.

Yet while Egyptian textbooks continue to subtext a rich strain of anti-Semitism, the Egyptian government is pretending to suppress protests over Israel's attack on Gaza seemingly to ingratiate itself with the United States (U.S. economic aid to Egypt in 2008: $415 million; U.S. military aid: $1.2 billion), its greater interest is to clamp down on protest regardless of the motive, the legitimacy of Mubarak's regime depending so much less on what he does than on how tight he keeps a vise on people's resentments.

Resentments over Israel's attacks are a double challenge for Mubarak. He can't allow protests to proceeds for fear that they go out of control and begin free-lancing over other issues. But he can't silence the protests too much, because they're taking on an anti-Mubarak tenor anyway: as elsewhere in the Middle East, Arab protesters are as angry about Israel's assault on Gaza as they are about their governments' impotence. Look around. Besides mumbling a few words of protest themselves, Arab governments might as well be subcommittees of the Bush administration. They've been almost indifferent to Israel's war.

No one is losing sleep over Hamas militants getting clobbered. They asked for it. They revel in it. But in this war Hamas is the collateral. The horror, the unpardonable, is the resulting massacre of civilians and the further disintegration of Gaza into one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters.

No wonder Arabs are protesting. The question should be: why aren't Westerners? Why aren't Americans?

See Also:

• Cairo's Aidless
• This Day in Middle East History
• CRS Report on Egyptian-American Relations