Mubarak under pressure

Gaza's crisis is dangerously close to home for the Egyptian government

By Ian Black
The Guardian, Friday January 25, 2008

"It has been an uncomfortable few days for President Husni Mubarak, watching anxiously as the crisis in Gaza spilled over onto his territory, focusing intense and unwelcome attention - both at home and abroad - on Egypt's role in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Scenes depicting tens of thousands of people streaming across the breached border fence at Rafah, driven by desperation with the tightening Israeli blockade, graphically underlined the danger of instability and violence exploding from Gaza's pressure cooker into Egypt proper......

So Palestinian suffering in Gaza strikes a powerful chord with Egyptian public opinion and fuels opposition to an unpopular regime which is blamed for not doing enough to alleviate it, as well as anger with Israel and the US. (It is no accident that George Bush's recent brief meeting with Mubarak was at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh far from the teeming streets of Cairo...)....

"We should be ashamed of ourselves for failing to reach out to our Palestinian brethren," shouted one Nasserist MP who demanded the government expel Israel's ambassador. "Why do we have to worry about our relations with Israel more than the lives of innocent Palestinian men and women who are being killed by the Israelis?"

In Egypt, as elsewhere, all politics is ultimately local, and one serious problem for Mubarak is the link between the Brotherhood and Hamas.....

Khaled Mishal, the influential Hamas leader in Damascus, has reportedly been on the phone to Mahdi Akef, the Brotherhood leader, to coordinate protests and maintain pressure. Both know this episode has been good for Hamas, bad for Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and Fatah leader who is committed to talks with Israel, as well as for Mubarak - and that it plays well with the Arab "street."....

Mubarak may yet hark back to the years from 1967 to 2005 when the Israel military was in control of the strip, not the Islamists he fears. It's all a bitter reminder, in Egypt, across the Middle East and beyond, that Palestine remains the issue that no-one can afford to ignore - and that simply shutting off Gaza will solve nothing."