 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In a nutshell — and to simplify considerably — Egyptian Islamists around a group called the Gamaat Islamiya took over slums around Cairo, assassinated government officials, killed tourists, and generally thought they could terrorize their way to overthrowing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's government. How did Mubarak respond? He didn't negotiate. He didn't make a call for U.S. mediation. He didn't ask for international observers. He didn't sympathize with the "humiliation" felt by the dispossessed urban poor who sympathized with Gamaat Islamiya. As Gilles Kepel tells the story in his wonderful new book, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, "The government's response to a series of daring attacks — one of which nearly killed Mubarak himself in Addis Ababa in June 1995 — was ruthless repression." The Washington Post described the crackdown as involving "strict emergency laws, sweeping arrests, military court trials and heavy police presence," all of which were "criticized by human rights advocates but defended by the government as justified." Hundreds would die in battles and executions. And Mubarak wasn't too picky about who constituted the Islamist enemy. He gave no quarter to the Muslim Brothers, a less radical group than Gamaat Islamiya that had more support from the middle class. As Kepel reports:
In short, Mubarak had an attitude toward Islamic radicals much like the one that Giuiliani had toward the forces of disorder in New York City in the early 1990s. "In 1996, the policy of Egyptian government leaders was zero tolerance for the Islamist movement," Kepel writes. "And indeed the policy worked: by the following year the regime's crackdown had exhausted and scattered the Gamaat Islamiya." Why? Kepel again: "Many of its most battle-hardened fighters, who had come back from Afghanistan in 1992, had been arrested, killed in combat, or condemned to death and executed." Now, I would hope that Israel would avoid the excesses and brutality of the Egyptian government — the human-rights violations and the torture. It is not only imperative from a diplomatic and public-relations perspective, it is the right thing to do. Israel should be better than its brutal neighbors like Egypt, in keeping with its Western values (one thing that has been missing from the current Israeli operation is some sort of symbolic humanitarian gesture of the sort the U.S. made when it dropped food from airplanes in Afghanistan). This analogy, of course, is far from exact. Egypt was acting against a threat in its sovereign territory, instead of "occupied territories," so had much more leeway to operate and could clean out the terrorists much more easily than Israel can. Also, the terrorists clearly lost the battle for the minds of the Egyptian public. In contrast, in the West Bank and Gaza, the terrorists may be — at least temporarily — gaining politically. But there's no reason to think that Palestinians can't be convinced eventually that terrorism is a blind alley the way ordinary Egyptians were. The Egyptian public realized that massacring tourists would only bring economic disaster. In a similar way, the intifada has brought economic ruin to the West Bank, as Israel locks it down. And, whatever the other problems with this analogy, the general principle seems sound: If the Palestinian terrorists are as reliably killed and arrested as they were in Egypt, there's a chance that the movement will burn itself out. But it will only happen if the United States lets Israel see it through. After all, what's good for our "moderate" Arab allies should be good for Israel. "Evenhandedness" demands nothing less. |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
n
the years from roughly 1993 to 1997, Egypt had a terrorist and Islamic
extremist problem. Since the Bush administration and the world value so
much what this "moderate" Arab state has to say about Israel's
terrorist and Islamic extremist problem, Egypt's experience perhaps should
be considered instructive. 
