Mistaken notions about the Egyptian uprising

One of the most devious claims doing the rounds in the media is that the crisis in Egypt is about food; this is only partly true. There is another side to the picture. Egypt’s abject poverty and pervasive hunger did not spring out of a vacuum. It came about from the plunder and squandering of the country’s national wealth and its franchise to foreign interests. In addition, there are other major causes of this unprecedented popular uprising which have to do with the sense of national humiliation and indignity to which the people of Egypt have been subjected by a western-backed dictatorship masquerading as democracy.

No one expected this dramatic turn of events in Egypt. For decades the Egyptian people have been falling behind others in the region and looked increasingly like a lost case. They could not do anything about the conflicts in their neighbouring countries of Sudan, Lebanon or Palestine; they couldn’t even protect their national interests in the waters of the Nile when they were alerted that Israel was instigating some African countries to curtail Egypt’s share of the great river. In the case of the Palestinian situation, the Egyptians actually contributed to the problem in order for the government to please the Americans in return for foreign aid of around $1.5 billion per annum from Washington. Their government looked on as the West Bank was separated politically from Gaza, and dutifully supported one Palestinian faction against the other.

The Egyptian people share one of their great characteristics with the River Nile, which passes through their country in a slow moving mass; it looks lazy and harmless but when it gathers momentum nothing can stand in its way. That characteristic is apparent in the people today. It took the Egyptians decades to react to the oppression they have faced daily but now that they have the momentum, it is clear that nothing is going to stop them from regaining their rights.

Like Tunisia, Egypt has witnessed unrestrained greed by its ruling elite and their cronies as they have enriched themselves at the expense of their people. Not only did that elite help themselves, but they also shared it with Israel. While selling Egypt’s natural gas resources to Israel for one-third of the world market price, the government charged their impoverished people the going rate. It is no wonder that Israeli officials are making every effort to “protect” Hosni Mubarak or, at the very least, to ensure continuity and business as usual when the president makes his ignominious exit. It is that sort of corruption that produced the anger now raging across the country.

For decades after the Camp David peace treaty the disgraced regime threw the gates open to allow Israelis to invest in the Sinai Peninsula, sometimes openly and at other times through front companies under Egyptian names. By 1996 they had made significant in-roads into the petrol, textile, food and agricultural industries; Israeli companies even competed to buy state-owned Egyptian firms and land.

Meanwhile, the Mubarak regime remained nonchalant of the fact that Israel has never declared its borders and paid no heed to its well-known territorial ambitions. As the Israelis have paid millions of shekels to bribe Arabs to leave their homes and real estate in Jerusalem, so too they have being paying Egyptians in the Sinai to leave their homes. Ordinary Egyptians have had to watch their Sinai Peninsula   which was once occupied by Israel – being reoccupied through such nefarious activities. The Mubarak regime ignored these realities.

The natural consequence of this free for all in Egypt has been the impoverishment of its people. Forty percent of Egyptians now live below the official poverty line of less than US$2 per day. The coming weeks will reveal the full scale of the looting of Egypt’s wealth and its siphoning-off to foreign vested-interests, notably Israel. It is notable that one of the first steps taken by the authorities after the outbreak of the revolution was to try to stop the merchant class, the private investors, from leaving with their ill-gotten gains. The words stable-door, horse and bolted spring to mind.
For thirty years the Egyptian people have lived under a “state of emergency”. Many believe it was the price they had to pay for the Camp David Treaty, which they never voted for. Today, the Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu says that any agreement between his country and the Palestinians must be subject to a referendum by the Israeli electorate. Will he now agree that the Egyptian people should a have a referendum on the Camp David Treaty, which has been a pillar of Israel’s regional strategy?

For the moment, however, this matters precious little to the Egyptians; their priority is to be free in their own country, to have full control of their resources and determine their future. For the Israelis and Americans this may be too much even though Egypt is neither a state of America nor a vassal state of the Israelis. Yes, it is bread and freedom that has brought the masses onto the streets of every Egyptian city and town, but the fact remains that they were denied their bread and freedom by a ruling elite working with and on behalf of Israel. They have therefore risen up not only for themselves, but also for the millions of oppressed people across the region, foremost among them the Palestinians.