When Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak came to Washington last month, he defended the continued absence of Egypt’s Ambassador from Israel with the same argument he has used consistently over two-and-a-half years — public opinion at home.
Even a farmer in the smallest village owns a transistor radio- Mubarak said in an appearance at the National Press Club here, and knows perfectly well what Israel is doing in Lebanon, the West Bank and Taba. Taba, in particular, has been turned into a national issue in Egypt by Israel’s refusal to return the disputed 800-square meter strip of land, or at least to send the issue to an arbitration panel, he argued.
“If you ask an Egyptian where Taba is, he won’t know,” Mubarak told the journalists. “But he will tell you it’s very important.”
It is easy to scoff at the Egyptian leader’s claim. After all, does public opinion really matter in a country whose government is heir to a 30-year military dictatorship? And even if opposition is no longer suppressed in the same brutal fashion it once was, isn’t it the ruling regime that continues to play the largest role in shaping the very public opinion Mubarak insists he must follow?
ENVIRONMENT OF BOLDER CRITICISM
There is some truth to these observations, and to Mubarak’s as well. In Egypt’s gradual development toward a freer and more pluralistic society than it was under Mubarak’s predecessors, Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar Sadat, the country has witnessed a growing interplay between popular criticism and the tone — if not the substance — of government positions. The government — through its monopoly of the “national press” and broadcast media — shapes public opinion; but is is increasingly compelled to anticipate and respond to it as well.
Although official tolerance of opposition parties–reintroduced by Sadat and expanded under the present regime — has been prevented from having any direct impact on what the leadership does, it has created an environment in which criticism of the regime and its policies is bolder than it has been since the revolution put an end to an old and active, but always tenuous, multiparty system some 30 years ago.
Relatively innocuous and insignificant government actions often make sensational headlines in the weekly opposition newspapers, which seldom forfeit an opportunity to show up the leadership as pandering to the United States and Israel.
The main opposition parties which challenged the government in parliamentary elections last May have made reversal of the normalization of relations with Israel a leading cause. The Wafd Party — the only opposition group to earn the eight percent of the total vote required to gain seats in the People’s Assembly — is no exception.
Ridiculed by the late Sadat as a party of aristocratic pashas, the newly organized holdover from the pre-revolutionary period has struggled to present itself as a more progressive group than it appeared when the Free Officers of Nasser barred its leaders from political life and initiated single-party military rule.
GAME OF ONE UPMANSHIP
Like the leftist opposition parties, the more conservative Wafd has been involved in a constant game of one upmanship with the regime. The latter makes occasional gestures of protest when Israel does something perceived as objectionable. But in the field of propaganda, the cards are in a sense stacked in favor of the regime’s critics.
Facing none of the constraints of governing, a relatively middle-of-the-road party like the Wafd can make a much bigger fuss, take a far stronger stand, and leave the policy makers fumbling for proofs that they’re not as impotent as they appear.
TABA AS A CASE IN POINT
Taba is a case in point. Last August, the Wafd began a campaign to dramatize the issue, filling pages of its journal for several weeks with stories on alleged Israeli exploitation of its de facto administration in the area.
First, the Israelis had allowed nude bathers into the territory, the paper announced in typically splashy headlines. As if that weren’t bad enough, the journal disclosed, the Jewish State then claimed an extra stretch of land between the original contested area and a barbed wire fence constructed by the Egyptian army some 100 meters into the Sinai to shield its soldiers from the corrupting sight.
Mubarak had raised the first noises about Taba, when Israel opened a hotel in the disputed territory in late 1982. Egypt then claimed the Israeli move violated an interim agreement concluded just before Israel withdrew from the Sinai in April of that year. Settlement of the dispute was subsequently included among Egypt’s conditions for the return of its Ambassador to Israel.
After other opposition parties joined the Wafd in turning the alleged Taba incident of last summer into something of a national scandal, the government printed a denial of the entire affair in one of the leading newspapers. But by this time the issue of Taba in general had clearly become a national symbol and another group had taken it up more forcefully than the government could ever hope to do.
So was it official propaganda that raised the consciousness of that isolated peasant with the transistor to the point where Mubarak could make the issue a legitimate excuse for keeping relations with Israel cool? Or was it deference to popular sentiment that forced the leadership to turn it into a nationalist battlecry, even naming a recently-built ship after the disputed territory? In short, it appears to be a little of both.
But opposition wouldn’t be opposition if they didn’t criticize the government. Those parties and organizations most vocal in their objections to relations with Israel — among them the Islamic fundamentalists — have been voicing them more or less consistently since the conclusion of the Camp David accords in 1978 and the peace treaty that followed a year later. So has anything really changed?
Professor Shimon Shamir, former director of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo, which opened just a short while before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, thinks a lot has changed. Writing from Cairo in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz some two months after the September 1982 massacres of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla in Lebanon and the subsequent withdrawal of Egypt’s Ambassador from Israel, Shamir said the Egyptians have come full circle.
They had built up a foundation of rationalizations for the switch from war to peace, and then saw that foundation slip from under them. The argument that a separate peace would lead to a broad regional agreement that would satisfy the Palestinians and bring a long desired stability to the entire Middle East, seemed to have been discredited.
“The claims of the opposition and reservations about the peace were transformed during the summer (following the invasion of Lebanon) into a national consensus,” Shamir wrote.
As television news showed graphic scenes of devastating Israeli bombing raids in Lebanon, journalists and political cartoonists of the semi-official and opposition periodicals alike appeared to be regularly drawing from an old wartime reservoir of anti-Semitic rhetoric for print and circulation.
Particularly after the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, the reemergence of the political cartoon portraying the sinister hook-nosed Jew clad in black overcoat and yarmulke and gleefully preoccupied with the slaughter of the world’s innocents, brought protests from Israeli officials and others. Egypt, it seemed, was spewing out a venom more noxious than the familiar poison of Israel’s avowed enemies.
That this reservoir of rhetoric was brimming after years of belligerence with Israel in which the most vicious anti-Semitic writings were disseminated by the state-owned publishing houses, is scarcely surprising. But the rapidity with which it flowed back into daily use raised questions about the stability of the Egyptian foundation for peace with Israel. Had anything changed at all?
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
