Writes a friend: I soooooo thought this WINEP dude, Eric Trager, writing in the New Republic, was about to go down the right track when he said:
But to assume that the Egyptian protesters who attacked the Israeli Embassy in Cairo last Friday, tearing down a protective wall and ransacking the premises, were motivated by cosmopolitan, pro-Palestinian concerns is to completely ignore the sad truth that Egyptians overwhelmingly hate Israel for wholly Egyptian reasons:
But he didn’t go down that track. Here’s where he went:
Despite 32 years of peace under the Camp David Accords, Egyptian national pride remains tied to the country’s previous wars with the Jewish state. It’s therefore all too predictable that the groundswell in Egyptian nationalism that ousted Hosni Mubarak this spring has been accompanied by an equally powerful surge in anti-Israeli sentiment.
This elides any responsibility for Israel or the US, missing completely a point that even Lee Smith seemed to come to terms with early in the Egyptian revolt: That Mubarak’s Iron First over Egyptian society was funded by billions of dollars in aid from the U.S., and those billions of dollars were the result of the peace treaty with Israel. So maybe it’s not just because they got beat in a war, but because they got beat continuously by their own security forces with batons and equipment bought with US money all because we gotta keep safe the guys who keep Israel safe.
Update: headline revised to reflect wise commenters’ points.
