Egypt – Page 4 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

One further note about Egypt

I want to clarify regarding this sentence in the IPS piece about Egypt that I filed yesterday… “The arguments the state media made that Egypt should put its own interests first and do nothing that might drag it into a new war with Israel fell on many receptive ears”… I made a deliberate choice to insert that modifier, “many”.
Without any modifier, the impression conveyed would be that the state’s arguments had fallen on ears that were, in general, receptive. The same impression would have been conveyed if I’d used the modifier “most”. I saw no reason to reach that conclusion.
I toyed with the idea of writing “some”, or “a few”; but I think either of those might have under-stated the effect the state’s arguments had. Hence my eventual choice of “many”.
If it sounds very indeterminate, well that’s how it has to be. We honestly cannot know how many Egyptians were swayed by the regime’s arguments, or how many had general predispositions in this direction that were confirmed and/or strengthened by the state’s arguments. Opinion polling and social attitudes research in general are tightly state-controlled, and rarely undertaken, in Egypt…
So let’s leave it at “many”. I certainly don’t want to say “most.” But the effectiveness the state’s arguments achieved during and since the war clearly reached the level of being politically significant.
… Of course, attitudes can also change rapidly in the face of new developments.

My IPS piece on Egypt’s role, and related observations

My latest IPS analysis, ” Egypt’s Star Rising in Regional Politics”, is here.
The key judgment I made there was this one:

If, as all the polls indicate, U.S. ally Fatah was weakened politically by the Gaza war, by contrast Mubarak’s Egypt seems to have emerged from the war with its political position in the region stronger than before.

This was my considered judgment, reached in light of the discussions I held with a small but high-quality and politically broad sample of Egyptian analysts, and the general observations I made as I moved around the city. Including, in the latter category, the fact that the general level of security-forces presence in and around downtown Cairo seemed notably lower than it was when I was last in Cairo, in February 2007.
Those I talked with included Dr. Esam el-Erian, the spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood, a couple of retired high-level officials, Fahmy Howeidy (who’s a veteran, well-informed commentatorial icon of, broadly, the left Nasserists), etc etc. However, the judgment I reached about Egypt having emerged from the war “stronger than before” is not one I heard expressed in those terms by any of the people I talked to. It is my judgment, only; and one to which I gave much careful consideration before I reached it.
To me the clinching piece of evidence was that– for all the harsh criticisms that Hamas’s allies launched against the Mubarak regime during and even before the war– at the end of the day, when the Hamas leaders decided they wanted/needed a ceasefire, it was to Egypt that they turned. And now, as I noted in the IPS piece, Egypt has emerged as the crucial intermediary in the many complex negotiations being conducted in the post-war period: between Hamas and Israel over consolidating the ceasefire; between Hamas and Israel over the possible prisoner exchange; and between Hamas and Fateh over finding their own long over-due rapprochement.
One other key little piece of evidence that I didn’t have room to mention in the IPS piece was the series of large posters I saw plastered on the walls of a couple of the large military encampments that are strategically placed to buffer Cairo International Airport from any oppositional mobs that might gather in the extremely densely populated downtown: Some of them said, quite explicitly, in large white letters “Al-Misr Awalan”– “Egypt First.” This is a sentiment I have never seen so publicly flaunted in Egypt, a country that under Gamal Abdel-Nasser prided itself on being the beating heart of Arab nationalism, third-worldism, pan-African liberation, you name it…
That sentiment of “Egypt First” was certainly broadly promulgated by Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, in the late 1970s as he broke with the Arab consensus and launched his own very personal (and Egypt-first-ish) peace diplomacy with Israel. Then, it was used– though never, I think as explicitly and in-your-face-ishly as today– to shuck off all the criticism that Sadat engendered from the Palestinians and many or most other Arab parties. Later, Sadat– and even more so Mubarak, after he came to power following Sadat’s assassination in 1981– worked to rebuild the country’s ties with the other Arab nations. But now, an explicit version of Egypt-first-ism is back with a vengeance; and Hamas, like everyone else, seems to have little alternative but to carry on working with Egypt.
However, as it pursues its new calling of “regional fulcrum”, the Mubarak regime still faces numerous stiff challenges. One is that Mubarak and his advisers have evidently decided that, to have any chance of success (or perhaps, even just to survive) they need to carve out, and maintain in public, a position that is notably distinct from the one that was Washington’s orthodoxy– at least until last January 20th. Hence, for example, the statement that Egyptian FM Aboul-Gheit made about his hosts in the US State Department yesterday, that I quoted in the IPS piece:

“They understand very well the situation. They know they will have to exert pressure on all sides to achieve the objective of peace…They say that they understand the problem of settlement activities and it has to come to an end.”

Now frankly, who knows if that was exactly what Hillary Clinton and the others who hosted Aboul-Gheit there had told him? But whether it was or not, for Aboul-Gheit to say that– and thereby publicly put the Obama administration somewhat on the spot on the settlements issue– showed a degree of Egyptian boldness in the public pursuit of the pan-Arab peace agenda that I haven’t seen for quite some time.
So if Egypt is to continue to be successful in playing an active, calming, and pro-peace diplomatic role in the region, it is going to require increasing amounts of solid, substantive US support for that role. Most importantly, in terms of some real US activism in “exerting pressure on all parties”, and not just on one party, and in taking substantive steps to end Israel’s continued pursuit of its settlement-construction project in the West Bank (and Golan.)
If such much-needed support for the pro-peace agenda is not forthcoming from Washington, or if– heaven forbid– the Obama people should just continue on diplomatic auto-pilot and not make “a clean break” with the divisive, exclusionary, and blatantly anti-Arab policies of President Bush, then Mubarak’s Egypt could yet, very easily, crash and burn in its new, notably out-front role in regional diplomacy.
Will the Obama administration be up to doing this? Let’s see.
A second challenge the Mubarak regime faces– which I also didn’t have time to delve into in the IPS piece– is the simple, one might even say “age-old”, problem of anno domini. Mubarak is now 80 (not 81 yet, as I’d written in the piece: that doesn’t happen till May.) His current six-year term as President runs through 2011. He has remained in power ever since, as Sadat’s existing vice-president, he easily and constitutionally stepped into Sadat’s shoes after Sadat was brutally assassinated by an Islamist extremist faction in October 1981.
Mubarak himself has never named a vice-president. Since 2000 there has been much speculation the President has been grooming his younger son, Gamal, now 44, to succeed him. In 2002, the Prez named Gamal the General Secretary of the Policy Committee in the ruling National Democratic Party. It’s a pretty safe bet that several figures in the country’s still very powerful and well-funded military– from which Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak all emerged into politics– are fairly strongly opposed to any such “dyanstic” concept of political succession in a country that is, after all, supposed to be a republic. (Bush family dynasty in the US, anyone?)
We can note, though, that almost exactly the same dynamics were at work in republican Syria in 2000, when Hafez al-Asad died and his son Bashar was named his successor within hours of his death. In the Syrian case, many analysts at first saw Bashar as only a compromise or transitional figure, and speculated that behind the scenes the powerful generals would soon determine which among them would politely (or otherwise) elbow him aside. But that never happened. Instead, Bashar has not only survived as president for nearly nine years, but has also weathered numerous perilous political storms and built himself a significant nationwide political base… So who knows about Gamal Mubarak?
But anyway– as Fahmy Howeidi and others noted while I was in Cairo– the senescence/succession question is currently an inescapable fact of political life both in Egypt and in another key US ally in the region, Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi monarch, King Abdullah ibn Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, will be 85 this year. And though he seems to spend just about as much as Hosni Mubarak on hair-coloring products, no amount of boot-blacking on his follicles can hide the fact of his gathering senescence; and there, the succession issue is possibly even harder to predict, and therefore, a cause for even greater uncertainty. Saudi succession story in short: unlike Hosni Mubarak, Abdullah does have a designated successor, in his case Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz etc. But Sultan is only two years younger than the king; and once he goes it seems very likely there will be huge pressure from the next generation of Saudi princes– many of whom are in their 60s and 70s already– for the crown to pass to one of them. (That, though there would probably still be a few more sons of Abdul-Aziz to consider… remember that these Saudi princes, by taking massive numbers of wives in rapdi succession, have a reproductive life that can span 50 or 60 years.)
Of course, you could always say that it would be good thing if all or most of the literally thousands of people who now consider themselves to be “Saudi princes” got a proper job and started contributing productively to human betterment. Yes, you could say that. But for now it seems that most Saudi citizens have not (yet) rallied behind that point of view.
You could also perhaps predict that the advances made in high-end, and very well-funded geriatric care could keep both Abdullah and Sultan ticking over, in a condition that is semi-presentable in public, for another 15 or 20 years. Yes, their health-care system has indeed been very heavily invested in… mainly, one supposes, as a way to try to postpone as long as possible the tsunami of succession conflicts that is almost bound to arrive when these two doughty old survivors exit the scene.
But this does not, I submit, look anything like a stable system of governance in the modern world…
Bottom line, therefore, on the memo to Barack Obama and George Mitchell: Nail down the final portions of this Israeli-Arab peace business before these two weighty pro-US countries enter the shoals of real succession crises. That is, do it as fast as you can!

Philip Rizk, freed

On the Facebook page for Philip Rizk, the following message was posted at 4 a.m. this morning, Cairo time:

This is great news.

Egypt: Free Philip Rizk!

I tried to call Philip Rizk in Cairo today, but he didn’t answer.
Philip is a courageous and principled young man, of joint Egyptian and German nationality, who has done some tremendous work supporting civil-society organizations in Gaza, including by working there for two years under the auspices of Church of England emissary Canon Andrew White.
For the past few years, both when he was in Egypt and when he was in Gaza (as very recently), Philip contributed to his great blog Tabula Gaza.
Two nights ago, he was picked up by the police here in Egypt while returning to Cairo after taking part in Gaza-solidarity activities in Qalyoubia, north of the city.
I met Philip and his equally dedicated sister Jeanette when I was last in Egypt two years ago, and was strongly impressed to hear about the programs he was involved in in Gaza, under Canon White’s auspices.
That Reuters report says this:

I don’t know how much aid the German government gives the Egyptian government. But I imagine it’s a lot. Egypt is the top recipient of US aid after Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Why should the governments of any democracies give aid to a government that treats nonviolent social activists like Philip or thousands of others also detained in Egypt without any hint of due process as harshly as this?
I urge all JWN readers to do what they can to help free Philip Rizk.
Also, read the recent blog-posts on Tabula Gaza in which he writes about his most recent visit(s) to Gaza, over the past couple of weeks.

Egyptian delegation to break Gaza siege

The plan, as described on Hamas’s website here, could be huge. It will almost certainly have a much bigger impact than the two-small-ship siege-busting effort undertaken from Europe last month. That latter effort did a lot to focus European (and to a lesser extent, US and other western) attention on the gross injustices of Israel’s punitive, 30-month siege of Gaza. But in terms of actually either delivering goods to Gaza or changing the policies of the source-country governments, it did very little.
The Egyptian siege-busting project is being organized by a group from “the Egyptian judges club [association], parties, and popular forces,” and will aim to cross into Gaza from Egypt on October 9. Here’s what the Hamas website says about it:

I have wondered for a while now why the many popular and political forces in Egypt who are strong sympathizers of the Palestinians, and who have chafed under the knowledge that their government has gone along with Israel’s plans to maintain a tight siege around Gaza, have not done more to challenge the siege from their side of the border. It is true that Gaza is a five-hour drive from Cairo, so organizing a convoy of siege-busters in a country in which the military-security forces play such a strong role is no small matter… I guess I simply concluded that these pro-Palestinian Egyptians– okay, primarily, the leaders of Egypt’s powerful but badly repressed Muslim Brotherhood– had judged that the time was not right to challenge the regime’s power, and its intent to keep its relations with Israel good at all costs, in this very head-on way.
Now, it seems, that calculus has changed.
The fact that the convoy organizers have announced their plans so publicly and so far in advance is a key tactic of nonviolent mass organizing, a strategy to which the Egyptian MB has been committed since the mid-1980s. What can or will the Cairo government do to stop them– especially during the holy month of Ramadan– that will not itself make the situation worse? Possibly, a lot worse?
This convoy could succeed in getting huge amounts of much-needed goods into Gaza. It could succeed in opening the Rafah crossing for considerably longer than just a few hours. And most crucially, at a time when Egypt is suffering fin-de-regime jitters that could well be a lot worse than any it has suffered since 1952, this project could put the MB and its agenda into a position in Cairo that is much stronger than anyone in the fortress-like US embassy there (and their Israeli allies/overlords) can be happy with.
Savvy JWN readers will know that Hamas was originally, back in 1987, a project of the Palestinian branch of the MB. Back in January, when Hamas felled the high barrier walls between Gaza and Egypt and organized the big “bust-out” of deprived Gazans across the felled walls to buy some badly needed basic supplies, Egypt’s ageing president Hosni Mubarak made a huge and partially successful effort to portray that bust-out as an “invasion” of Egypt’s national territory by those repressed, hunger-driven– and almost completely unarmed– souls.
You can access some of the commentary I wrote about that whole series of incidents, and about the crucial role that Egypt plays in the long-range planning of the Hamas leaders, here.
But now, it looks as though what the MB and its allies are planning for next month is a “bust-in” into Gaza, instead.
Watch this story as it develops.

Serious unrest in US ally, Egypt

Ever since the Washington managed to broker the 1978 Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel, Egypt has played a huge role in American military planning in the Middle East. This is the case not just because, with 73 million citizens and a long and proud history, it is in many respects the weightiest of all the Arab countries. And not just because it sits astride the Suez Canal, a key artery in the shipping lanes that support the US war effort in Iraq. And not just because the Egyptian regime’s torture chambers have been subcontracted on numerous occasions to perform torture on demand (aka “renditioned torture”) as part of the Bushists’ “Global War on Terror.”
No, Egypt is important for all these reasons, and many more. And now, the increasingly sclerotic, 27-year-long regime of President Husni Mubarak is in deep trouble. It faces challenges on three crucial fronts:

increasingly angry

Yesterday was one test for the regime’s ability to control the streets. Many of the non-MB movements, including the liberal party Kefaya, the allied Karama Party, and some labor organizations had called a “strike” to protest price hikes. With harsh, bullying rhetoric and a massive show of force (that in at least one place left two strike supporters reportedly dead from police bullets), the regime managed to keep the lid on those protests– for a while.
Today, though,further serious confrontations were reported from the labor-activism epicenter in Mahalla el-Kubra, north of Cairo. That Reuters report says that demonstrators,

Which brings us to tomorrow, which is the date scheduled for local “elections” throughout the the country.
The MB had sought to run some 6,000 candidates in the elections slated to fill some 52,000 posts in local administration throughout the country. The regime placed many kinds of obstacles in their way– including deploying security forces to forbid entry to the places where candidates needed to register, and widespread campaigns of arrest without trial and other forms of intimidation. (As denounced by Human Rights Watch, here.) In the end, only 20 of the MB’s 6,000 chosen candidates were able to make it onto the electoral list, at all.
Today, the MB announced that it will boycott tomorrow’s elections completely, “and call on the Egyptian people to do the same.”
So let’s check back and see what happens tomorrow.
The Arabist has two excellent recent roundup and analysis posts on his blog:

this one

I will just close by recalling that my first visit to Egypt as a reporter was when the London Sunday Times sent me to cover the massive bread riots that broke out there in January 1977. By all accounts, the severity of the crisis revealed by those riots helped push President Anwar Sadat into the idea of doing something “dramatic” to speed along the process of integration into US regional planning that he had started in 1972-73, but that had only sputtered along in the intervening years.
That something “dramatic” turned out to be his landmark visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, an action that jumpstarted the diplomacy that led to the Camp David Accords of the following year, and thence to the conclusion of a final-status peace agreement with Israel in 1979.
It was at that point that Egypt, which in the 1960s had been a key ally of the Soviet Union in the Middle East, became firmly integrated into Washington’s strategic planning.
In 1981, Sadat paid with his life for those choices and for the extremely paranoid series of decisions he made in the middle of that year, that included clamping down very tightly indeed on– and indeed, arresting– all members of the Egyptian body politic whom he felt he had any reason at all to disagree with. An Islamist extremist (not an MB person) shot Sadat dead during a military parade in October that year; and his deputy, Husni Mubarak, immediately stepped into his shoes.
Mubarak has developed such a paranoid political style that he has never even dared to name a Vice President. In recent years, though, he has made some evident moves to groom his son, Gamal, to succeed him.
…. So now, 31 years after 1977, might we be seeing a re-eruption of bread riots in Egypt that could, over the years ahead, lead to a shift in Egypt’s strategic leanings as significant as the one sparked by the 1977 bread riots? Who knows?
I just wrote over at the Arabist’s blog that my main two recollections from 1977 are the sight of all the burned-out night-clubs along the Pyramids Road, and Mohammed Hassanein Heikal telling me– as he sat in his lovely Nile-side office there at the Al-Ahram Center, that “the Egyptian people are like the Nile: they run deep and apparently quietly– until the point where suddenly they burst their banks.”
Actually, I have a third recollection. I arrived one or two days into the riot. And already the Sadat regime had started to deploy trucks full of security people along the main arteries. Those scared country boys sat in their trucks, armed only with clubs and looking very warily about them.
Cairo still has thousands of trucks-full of those security men– probably the sons or grandsons of the ones I saw.
The regime’s dilemma is how to build a force that is large enough to intimidate or quell all possible signs of public disquiet– while preventing this force from becoming large enough and well-armed enough that its leaders might think to come and topple the regime, instead. Oh, it’s such a hard job being a dictator– especially one who has fashioned his policies so evidently to be in line with the whims of a blundering, arrogant, and unpopular external power like the United States.
Egypt. As I’ve written before: watch that story as it develops.

Human Rights Watch opposes Egypt’s political arrests

Kudos to Human Rights Watch for having issued a strong statement criticizing the Egyptian government’s continuing mass round-up of opposition activists and would-be candidates. This campaign, HRW said, “puts the legitimacy of upcoming local and municipal council elections in serious doubt.”
It is an excellent statement. Go read it.
Condi Rice is currently in the Middle East. She should be peppered with questions as to why strong US aid to Egypt continues under these circumstances.

Problems inside Egypt’s ruling party?

Egypt’s landmark local elections are coming up April 8. As noted in my ‘Delicious’ comments over recent weeks, the Mubarak regime has gone to great lengths to prevent representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition parties from registering as candidates. This Reuters report quotes MB leaders as saying that only 498 of the 5,754 candidates they had tried to register had been able to do so. You can get further details of the official obstructionism here.
Not all is wonderful for the ruling “National Democratic Party”, either. Indeed, it seems to be suffering from an advanced attack of what we might call “Fateh-style internal collapse syndrome.” Just today, Al-Masry al-Yawm reports that:

considerable turmoil within the NDP

–In Beheira and Dakahlia unrest among younger members of the NDP has erupted into a full-blown insurrection, with some recent university graduates announcing the formation of an “NDP Salvation Front.”
— There is more on the crisis of resignations within the NDP, here.
— The NDP in el-Salam suddenly realized– and this was after the deadline for registering candidacies– it had failed to register enough candidates there (!) and that two MB candidates were about to be elected unopposed there… so they quickly (and not entirely legally) threw ten more NDP candidates into that race.

I vividly recall an evening when we were in Egypt last year, when we were being hosted by an old friend who is a leading figure within the NDP; and I said to him, “You know, I would love to know what it is that the NDP stands for?” And his only answer was a dismissive, though jolly, laugh. The NDP seems, like Fateh, to have become little more than an (increasingly creaky) patronage machine… And in a time of mounting socioeconomic and political challenges in Egypt, that may no longer be sufficient.

Support democratic principles in Egypt!

Reuters is reporting from Cairo that Egypt’s biggest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood says that only 50 or 60 of the thousands of its members who have tried to register as candidates in the April 8 local elections have been allowed to do so.
Reuters reports this:

Egypt’s President Husni Mubarak receives considerable financial, military, and “security sector” support from the US and from other western democracies. Now is a time for democrats in western and other countries to stand up. Do we support democracy in other countries only when it brings to power people who agree completely with our own views? Or do we support the participation in it of all parties and movements that agree to abide by the rules of the democratic game, first and foremost among them being an agreement to settle differences through nonviolent means?
Regarding the use of violence and violent intimidation sin the prent confrontation between the Mubarak regime and the opposition political forces in Egypt, look at any of the pictures of what is happening at the candidate-registration places and read any of the accounts of what is happening, and you decide: which side is trying to use violence and intimidation?
Western governments should inform Mubarak that the aid they give him is completely conditional on him allowing these long-planned elections to proceed in a free and fair manner. Otherwise, what kind of “democracy” is it that these governments proclaim?

Progress in the Gaza ceasefire talks?

The western MSM has been fixated on Thursday’s tragic, unjustifiable killings of eight students at a West Jerusalem yeshiva (Jewish religious school), and to a lesser extent on the effect that those killings might have on the Annapolis-launched “peace process.”
But they’re missing the main story. The really serious and interesting peace (or rather ceasefire) negotiations are not the Annapolis-launched ones. Those have led nowhere. So far they’ve resulted only in: the proliferation, rather than removal, of IOF checkpoints and Israeli settlements in the West Bank; and the continuation of acts of violence against Israeli civilians. The serious and potentially much more fruitful negotiations are the ones that have apparently been gathering pace in recent weeks between the Olmert government and the leaders of Hamas, through the mediation of Egypt.
Fathia el-Dakhakhni of the independent Egyptian daily Al-Masry al-Youm has the story in today’s paper.
It seems like this negotiation is not yet poised on the brink of a breakthrough. But it does seem serious. What I found fascinating and significant in Dakhakhni’s story were two main things:
1. She had yet another reference to the fact that this negotiation is “US-backed.” She writes that Condi Rice, who was in Egypt as well as Israel and Ramallah this past week, “said she had talked to the Egyptian leaders and expressed confidence that their efforts could promote the US-backed peace talks.”
I checked the record, and here is AFP’s account of what Rice told reporters in Brussels, Thursday. That account is a little fuller than the State Department’s own version. Specifically, the AFP account spells out that Rice’s remarks were in response to a question “about reported talks between Cairo and Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”
2. Dakhakhni also gives details of the way that Hamas’s Gaza spokesman Taher al-Nono describes the movement’s negotiating position at this point. Dakhakhni wrote that a delegation representing both Hamas and Islamic Jihad met on Thursday in Egypt with Egyptian government officials, and presented their terms for a ceasefire to them. She quoted Nono as saying that the Egyptian side had given no immediate response, but had told the Palestinians to “expect a response to our suggestions soon.”
As to the content of those “suggestions”, Nono told Dakhakhni that the Haniyeh-led Palestinian “caretaker government”, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad all have a single, “clear” position regarding the ceasefire, and they established three three conditions for the ceasefire with Israel:

We should note that Rice’s comments, as reported above, were made before the news broke about the killings in the Jerusalem yeshiva. It is entirely possible that Olmert’s position regarding the talks with Hamas– and therefore also that of Rice, who acts primarily, though perhaps not always solely, as his emissary– has changed since then.
The Hamas leadership certainly dented its bona-fides as a negotiator with the confused response it displayed to the yeshiva killings. The Hamas-linked Palestinian Information Center website still describes the killings as a “heroic operation”, though the Hamas leaders have also been at pains not to claim the movement’s responsibility for it. The perpetrator of the killings, who may well have acted alone, was 24-year-old Ala Abu Dehaim, a resident of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. He was shot dead during the melee that accompanied his lethal rampage.
The yeshiva killings have probably made it harder, at least in the immediate future, for Olmert to justify to his people a policy of concluding a ceasefire with Hamas concerning Gaza. But if Olmert is indeed serious about going for a ceasefire with Hamas over Gaza, perhaps he should also have thought that many of his own government’s escalatory decisions of recent weeks made retaliation from enraged Palestinians, whether in East Jerusalem, in other portions of the occupied West Bank, or elsewhere, considerably more rather than less likely? If both sides are serious about pursuing this ceasefire option, then surely they both need to think rather carefully about all the many implications this approach has on other aspects of policy.
A final, very important note about Egypt’s role in all this. As I wrote here not long ago, President Mubarak seems to really hate the idea of Gaza becoming closely integrated with Egypt in any political way. This is primarily because of the long and close political ties between Hamas, which now runs Gaza, and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are his own main– and currently very threatening– opposition group.
But it is the very closeness of these ties and the current strength of the MB within Egyptian society that are also, right now, forcing Mubarak to do something to alleviate the suffering of Gaza’s 1.45 million people. However much he wants to, he cannot simply turn his back on their plight.
These twin factors are what seem to be motivating his recent decision to build a sturdy, presumably unbreachable, wall between Gaza and Egypt. In the context of the existence of such a wall it will be far more possible for him and Hamas between them to control and regulate the passage between Egypt and Gaza. I think both leaderships were quite dismayed about some of the things that happened during the 11-day period in Jan-Feb when there was no barrier and no regulation at all. Hundreds of Egypt’s own homegrown and very violent and unpredictable jihadi militants crossed from Egypt into Gaza, considerably complicating Hamas’s ability to exert its control over Gaza’s relatively lengthy border with Israel. And other unwelcome passages of people and goods– in both directions– no doubt also occurred. As I wrote here February 3,

For Gaza’s economic opening to and through Egypt to work, as [leading Hamas member Mahmoud] Zahhar and his colleagues want it to, both the Palestinians and the Egyptians need to be able to control– and keep calm– their respective borders with Israel.

Finally, regarding Egypt, everyone should stay closely attuned to the popular pressures that are continuing to mount against Mubarak’s regime. This is, certainly, a matter of great importance to the prospects of a successful Israeli-Hamas ceasefire. But it is also of far, far wider importance to the strategic balance within the whole region!
Two other reports in today’s English language AMAY give a small glimpse into the depth of this crisis. This one is about the long-continuing, economic-related unrest in the industrial region of Mahalla el-Kubra. And this one is about highly politicized sermons and associated disturbances inside the Al-Azhar mosque during yesterday’s prayer.
It is notable that in Egypt– as in Lebanon and most likely numerous other Arab countries– popular unrest is currently being mobilized around the two issues of:

The ageing Egyptian president probably feels that today he is sitting atop an increasingly explosive mix; and no doubt he tried to convey some of that sense of discomfort/threat to Condi Rice during their recent meeting.
Cairo. Watch that space.