Read On the State of Egypt for Free Online

speech at the University of Chicago and found himself surrounded by students shouting in his face, “Butcher of Gaza … child-killer.” Several western judges have issued warrants against Israeli leaders to answer charges of committing war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon. This has happened in Belgium, Norway, Spain, and recently Britain, where the British police were about to arrest former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who escaped at the last minute. It is true that most of these warrants were withdrawn because of massive Zionist pressure on western governments, but they clearly demonstrate an international mood of condemnation toward Israel that never existed in the past. The Egyptian regime, by building the wall, is not only risking its popularity in Egypt and the Arab world, which is already at rock bottom, but also staining its reputation worldwide.
    Third, all the excuses the regime presents to justify building the wall would not convince a small child. It says that Egypt is free to build the wall as long as it is inside Egyptian territory, overlooking the fact that the freedom of any state, by custom, logic, and international law, is not absolute but restricted by the rights of others, and that Egypt cannot be instrumental in starving one and a half million human beings who live next door and then claim it is free to do as it likes. The regime says the tunnels are used for smuggling weapons to terrorists in Egypt. We say that weapons have been smuggled in from Libya and Sudan, so does the Egyptian government intend to build steel walls along its borders with all neighboring countries? If the Ministry of Interior, with its massive security apparatus, is unable to protect the borders, then what is it doing with the eight billion Egyptian pounds a year in budget money it receives from the Egyptian people?
    The regime is now using the slogan, “Egyptian national security is a red line.” We believe in this slogan and do not contest it, but national security in our opinion starts by defining who is Egypt’s enemy. Is it Israel or the people of Gaza? If Israel is our enemy—and that is the truth—would it not be in Egypt’s national interest to support the Palestinian resistance? Didn’t anyone wonder why the Palestinians are compelled to dig tunnels underground? It has been the only way for them to survive. Would the Palestinians be digging tunnels if Egypt opened the Rafah crossing and allowed food and medicine to reach them? When Egypt builds this wall to starve Palestinians to death, should we blame Palestinians if they use force to stop its construction or try to destroy it? Or isn’t that legitimate self-defense? The officials speak much about the Egyptian officer who was shot and killed with a bullet fired from Gaza, and we, too, greatly regret the death of that martyr, but we also remember that there is not one piece of evidence that the bullet came from the Hamas movement and we remember that Israel by its own admission has killed several Egyptian officers and troops on the border. Why wasn’t our government angry for the sake of national security then? And where was this national security when the Israelis admitted to killing hundreds of Egyptians and burying them in mass graves during war, and officials in Egypt did not take a single measure against the Israeli war criminals? Officials in Egypt say they have closed the Rafah border crossing for fear of a mass influx of Palestinians into Egypt, but this is a foolish argument because what drove the Palestinians to break through the crossing was their pressing need for food. They bought with their own money what they needed from Egyptian traders and then went back where they came from. So what do we expect from the Palestinians after we shut off, with the steel wall, their last chance to live? Would anyone blame them if they poured across by the thousands, breaking through the Rafah crossing by force to escape death by starvation? This wall, besides