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The Mubarak government practiced an inconsistent combination of tacit tolerance for some smuggling combined with capricious half measures to cut it off, including the occasional prosecution

In the past, smugglers said, the relatively few smuggled cars were surreptitiously imported to the Egyptian city of Port Said, where officials accepted bribes of about $600 to issue false papers so a car could be driven to Rafah. But since the revolt broke out in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, it is cheaper to get cars from Libya. Each Libyan is allowed to drive one across the border, so Egyptian smugglers say they pay about $200 to a Libyan for driving a car into Egypt. The smugglers insist that most cars are bought legally in Libya. But the boom in business has also been a mixed blessing. Gaza car prices have come down since Egypt loosened its border restrictions to allow more people to cross over, because Palestinians can now more easily see what cars cost in Egypt. One smuggler said he now found himself with one compact car and four Toyota minivans he had been unable to sell because Hamas had cut down on imports.

As law enforcement returns elsewhere in Egypt six months after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, there is still almost no sign of the police in Bedouin-dominated North Sinai, the region along the border with Israel that has long been a center of criminal activity. Mr. Mubarak treated it as virtual enemy territory and flooded it with police officers as he sought to help enforce an Israeli blockade of Gaza. And now the withdrawal of his security forces has unleashed not only a smuggling bonanza but also a more violent backlash against his Israel policy. Six unexplained bombing attacks (the first one failed to go off) have repeatedly shut down a pipeline that delivers natural gas to Israel under a Mubarak-era contract that is wildly unpopular because of its association with both Israel and corruption.

Vicious Saudi autocrat Mohamed bin Salman has a new vision for Neom, his plan for a massive, $500 billion, AI-powered, nominally legally independent city-state of the future on the border with Egypt and Jordan. When we last left the crown prince, he had reportedly commissioned 2,300-pages’ worth of proposals from Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co. and Oliver Wyman boasting of possible amenities like holographic schoolteachers, cloud seeding to create rain, flying taxis, glow-in-the-dark beaches, a giant NASA-built artificial moon, and lots of robots: maids, cage fighters, and dinosaurs.

Now Salman has a bold new idea: One of the cities in Neom is a line. A line roughly 105-miles (170-kilometers) long and a five-minute walk wide, to be exact. No, really, it’s a line. The proposed city is a line that stretches across all of Saudi Arabia. That’s the plan.

“With zero cars, zero streets, and zero carbon emissions, you can fulfill all your daily requirements within a five minute walk,” the crown prince continued. “And you can travel from end to end within 20 minutes.”AdvertisementThe end-to-end in 20 minutes boast likely refers to some form of mass transit that doesn’t yet exist. That works out to a transit system running at about 317 mph (510 kph). That would be much faster than Japan’s famous Shinkansen train network, which is capped at 200 mph (321 kph). Some Japanese rail companies have tested maglev trains that have gone up to 373 mph (600 kph), though it’s nowhere near ready for primetime.

The video opens with bearded men traveling in a pickup truck, flying the black IS flag with its distinctive white calligraphy. The driver of the truck pulls up beside another car and honks for the other driver’s attention. The IS guy in the passenger seat leans out the window and asks him, in Hebrew with a comically exaggerated Arabic accent, “Hey bro, how do you get to Jerusalem?” The driver of the car shouts back (in Israeli Hebrew), “Take a left!” Then there’s the slogan, in red Hebrew letters emblazoned on a gray, bullet-marked background: “THE LEFT WILL SURRENDER TO TERROR.” One of the IS guys fires celebratory bullets skyward and the driver peels off, ostensibly in the direction of Jerusalem, as they all shout exultantly in Arabic, “Shukran, ya ward!” (“Thanks, bro!”). The camera pans briefly to the rear of the truck to focus on a popular Israeli bumper sticker that reads, “Anyone but Bibi.” The tagline: “It’s us, or them. Only the Likud. Only Netanyahu.” The snatch of Arabic rap lyrics is excerpted from a song by an Amman-based Palestinian group called Torabyeh: “I want to be buried in the same cemetery that my grandfather was buried in. And since my childhood I’ve been dreaming to be a soldier and as time passed I discovered who I want to belong to: Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah, Hamas or…Jabha …”

Netanyahu has for years been promoting his message about the threat to Israeli security posed by Islamic extremism, never missing an opportunity to list Hamas along with the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and even Fatah, mixing them all up so that the average Israeli Jew reflexively associates Arabs and Islam with terror. Like all accomplished populists, he understands the power of repeating a mendacious slogan, and he is an expert at exploiting popular fears and racism.

The popular Israeli narrative is so reactionary and confused these days, that if one were to walk the streets asking average citizens if there was a difference between Fatah and Al Qaeda, most people would be hard-pressed to answer coherently. Go ahead and try to explain to an Israeli audience that Hamas is a small offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, that it is basically a technocratic political party, that it is extremely unpopular in Gaza and that it has nothing to do with expansionist jihadism. Try telling people that if Israel would lift the siege on Gaza, disgruntled Palestinians in Gaza would probably kick Hamas out of power immediately. Just try. The best you can hope for is that you’d be told that you’re a traitor who should go live in Gaza.

In search of my story, I got in my car and drove east in mid-May 2015 from Cairo to Suez. Nine months earlier, Sisi had announced the revival of a decades-old “mega-project” to expand the 150-year-old Suez Canal. He pledged that the project would be finished in exactly twelve months, and that every Egyptian would see “immediate returns.” I was skeptical about the promised date of completion and drove through the desert to see for myself. Celebratory billboards lined the route leading out of the city, as if the project was already complete. At the site of construction, I was told that the army had been working round the clock.The new canal was in fact inaugurated on August 6, 2015, twelve months to the day from when the project was first announced, and thousands of Egyptians took to the streets in celebration. Downtown Cairo was awash in flags and fireworks, music, flashing strobe-light shows, and animal-themed blow-up dolls as tall as townhouses whose only visible relationship to the canal might have been symbolic, in their exaggerated size. It brought back memories of the day in February 2011 when President Hosni Mubarak stepped down

The financing of the project under Sisi was shrewd—a tax-free public bond with certificates in denominations as low as ten Egyptian pounds (marketed to students), and a 12 percent interest rate with the option of quarterly payouts. The necessary $8 billion was raised in a week. People everywhere spoke of having put their savings into Suez Canal bonds. Lives felt quantifiably changed—I heard references to “free money.”

the illusion of safety

Gunmen killed five Egyptian soldiers near the Suez Canal city of Ismailia

an explosion near a state security building in South Sinai killed two people and injured 48, medical sources said. A witness said the explosion was caused by a car bomb

assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a state-owned satellite station in the Maadi suburb of Cairo on Monday, wounding two people

Even though the 2011 revolution was motivated in large part by socio-economic concerns, the governments that have held office since then have been unable to improve the situation. Growth has remained low, and unemployment is high: 15 percent of the population is without work, and the rate for those with a university degree is over 30 percent. Inequality between the more prosperous coastal region and the deprived interior of the country remains striking. Around half of all workers are employed in the informal economy. Many young Tunisians lack any prospect of being able to afford a home or a car, or of being secure enough to start a family.

Faced with increasing debt and deficit levels and shrinking foreign currency reserves, Tunisia agreed a loan of $2.9 billion with the International Monetary Fund in 2016. The IMF called on Tunisia to cut public spending, overhaul its collection of taxes to raise government revenue, and allow the currency to depreciate. The IMF argues that it has been fairly flexible so far in enforcing public spending cuts, but it is now stepping up its pressure on the Tunisian authorities.

Wages in the public sector account for 15 percent of GDP (up from 10 percent in 2010), so it is hardly surprising that the government is now trying to limit spending in this area. Yet it is doing this at a time when inflation (worsened by the deflation of the Tunisian dinar that the IMF has promoted) and subsidy cuts have already had a severe impact on people’s purchasing power.

For three weeks Sisi’s image has been trashed by an insider turned whistleblower whose videos from self-exile in Spain have gripped and paralysed Egypt in turn. 

Mohamed Ali is, by his own admission, no hero. One of only 10 contractors the army uses, he is corrupt. He also only left Egypt with his family and fortune because his bills had not been paid. Ali is no human rights campaigner. 

Egypt’s new folk hero likes fast cars, acting, film producing, real estate developing.

As Tunisians prepare for back-to-back legislative and presidential elections, news first revealed by Al-Monitor has had a bombshell effect: A purported emissary of imprisoned presidential candidate Nabil Karoui signed a $1 million lobbying contract to secure a meeting with President Donald Trump, among others.

Karoui’s opponents cite laws that forbid any foreign funding or support for Tunisians running for office. “The money didn’t come from Tunisia so it came from outside Tunisia, and that is against the law,” said Leila Chettaoui, a member of parliament for Prime Minister Youssef Chahed’s pro-secular Tahya Tounes party. “If it’s proven to be the case, Karoui must be disqualified.”

complaint also mentions Ennahda party, which has retained Burson-Marsteller (now BCW) for public affairs work in the United States since 2014, as well as parliamentary candidate Olfa Terras-Rambourg, who retained Washington firm America to Africa Consulting in early September

Ayari had no ties to terrorist groups. But it soon became clear that his appearance had turned him into a suspect in his own right. He was charged with terrorism, detained for several days, and savagely beaten. “The police officer spat in my face and beat me,” the 29-year-old Ayari told me later. “My face was bruised, my mouth was bleeding. A beard and traditional clothing mean ‘terrorism’ for security forces in Tunisia. That’s the bitter reality.”

“Today there’s a sort of trivialization of torture, especially in terrorism cases,” said Amna Guellali, the Tunisia director of Human Rights Watch. “When we speak up about the torture of terror suspects, we risk being considered traitors in the holy war against terrorism — and if we denounce torture, we’re considered pro-terrorist.”

Inclusion in the terrorism list also prevents people from obtaining copies of their criminal records. Since these have to be included with job applications, this amounts to an employment blacklist as well. This procedure means that hundreds, if not thousands, of Tunisians, most of whom are already from the most vulnerable segments of society, are subject to economic discrimination.

On his way to Baghdad, Jeddou made a stop in Aden before boarding the ship that would take him to Iraq. He was stunned at what he saw in the city of Aden with its cinema and modern amenities. Because of British colonization of the city from 1937 to 1963, the level of development in Aden far exceeded that of Sanaa, leaving Jeddou with the feeling that he had stepped into a different country

When he reached Baghdad, he was, yet again, flabbergasted by the stark difference in the quality of life between Iraq and Yemen. These two trips inspired Jeddou to visit other Arab countries, such as Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. It seemed that any Arab city in the region had basic necessities that Sanaa lacked, such as asphalted roads, electricity, cars, and access to free health care

How could a country considered one of the oldest centers of civilization in the world reach this state? Yemen was home to three powerful and affluent empires: Sabaean, Minaean, and Himyarite. This was the land that was dubbed “Arabia Felix” by the Romans, with its lush greenery, fertile land, and rich profits from its trade of frankincense, spices, and agricultural products. After having seen what was possible, my grandfather was determined to spark a change and pull Yemen out of its isolation and prehistoric way of life

Long a sanctuary for Spanish and French writers, American writers began visiting Tangier in the late nineteenth century: Mark Twain on his way to Jerusalem in 1867, the painters Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1870 and Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1912, and Edith Wharton in 1917. In 1931, when Bowles first visited, the American artists living in Tangier were primarily black: Claude McKay, Anita Reynolds, Juice Wilson, Josephine Baker. These African-Americans came to Morocco from Paris, where they had formed a community after World War I, and as the Harlem Rennaissance spread to France. Upon arrival, Bowles began to socialize with both McKay and Anita Reynolds. Like the other Americans, he had also discovered North Africa through France. In high school, he had read Marcel Proust, Comte de Lautréamont, and André Gide—the latter’s accounts, in particular, of his travels and sexual trysts in Algeria and Tunisia had conjured North Africa in Bowles’s teenage imagination.

in December 1923, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom signed the Tangier Protocol in Paris, setting up a new administration and placing the city at the center of a 150-square mile International Zone overseen by a committee of nine Western powers. The city was henceforth governed by a court that included French, Spanish, and British judges, along with the mendoub, the Moroccan sultan’s representative. It is this international period, from 1923 to 1956, especially postwar, that has shaped the image of Tangier as a free port, a tax haven, and a place of international intrigue and excess.

His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, told the story of an American who flees the numbing modernity of New York and meanders through the Algerian desert, only to disintegrate psychologically. Published in the fall of 1949, it became a bestseller and made Bowles a household name. Three more novels and a handful of short stories set in Tangier followed.

on November 5, 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated in New York City, a seminal event in the annals of American and Israeli history. Years after his death, Kahane’s killing is considered the first terror attack of the group that would later coalesce into al-Qaeda.

Kahane had spent the previous 22 years calling for Israel’s parliament to be dissolved and replaced with rabbinic rule over a Jewish theocracy, based on the strictest interpretations of the Torah and Talmud. He openly incited the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and all other non-Jews who refused to accept unvarnished apartheid—from Israel and the territories it occupied. He outdid all other Israeli eliminationists with his insistence that killing those he identified as Israel’s enemies was not only a strategic necessity, but an act of worship.[1] His ideology continues to resonate: In the September 2019 elections to Israel’s parliament the explicitly Kahanist Jewish Power Party (Otzma Yehudit) got 83,609 votes, putting it in tenth place in a crowded field of over 30 parties.

The victims of JDL-linked terrorist attacks in the United States were usually innocent bystanders: the drummer in a rock band who lost a leg when a bomb blew up the Long Island home of an alleged Nazi war criminal; the Boston cop who was seriously injured during his attempt to dispose of another bomb intended for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; the elderly lady who died of smoke inhalation in her Brooklyn flat above a Lebanese restaurant torched after its owners were accused of sympathies with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); the young Jewish secretary who was asphyxiated when another fire burned through the Manhattan office of a talent agency that promoted performances of Soviet ballet troupes.

The civilian wing of the Sudanese state is bankrupt but unwilling to confront powerful generals, who control a sprawling network of companies and keep the central bank and the Ministry of Finance on life support to gain political power

Chronic shortages of basic goods and soaring inflation have come to define the life of ordinary Sudanese. In villages and towns that rely on gasoline pumps – such as Port Sudan – the taps have often run dry, forcing people to queue to buy barrels of water.

Western countries and international institutions have let the civilian wing of the government down: they failed to provide the financial and political support that would allow Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok to hold his own against the generals

The Line, which is estimated to house five million people upon completion, is the centrepiece in the Saudi Arabia 2030 initiative – a programme of political reform intended to reduce the Kingdom’s dependency on oil.  Yet, the initiative has courted controversy, as its development entails encroaching on land currently occupied by the indigenous Huwaiti tribe – an estimated 20,000 of whom will face eviction as a result of The Line’s completion. Indigenous activist Alia Hayel Aboutiyah al-Huwaiti told the Guardian that “for the Huwaitat tribe, NEOm is being built on our blood, on our bones… it’s definitely not for the people already living there! It’s for tourists, people with money. But not for the original people living there”.

a separate legal system answerable to Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and the implementation of a data-gathering regime including facial recognition technology, is reminiscent of China’s dystopian social credit system.

The Saudi state has a long and sordid history of violently suppressing indigenous settlements and homes to facilitate the development of economic and infrastructure projects.

Consumer finance is on the rise against a backdrop of price hikes in Egypt, where many households are struggling to make ends meet. Consumer finance rose by roughly 7% to 7.32 billion pounds ($374 million) in the second quarter (Q2) of 2022, against 6.84 billion pounds in 2022 Q1, according to data from the state-run Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA).

Egyptian breadwinners are buying clothes, school books, stationery and groceries on credit. Consumer finance companies are prospering with more and more customers due to high inflation rates that have made it rather hard for many households to buy in cash.

although the law has laid out clear-cut regulations to protect consumers and traders, several unauthorized companies and some individuals offer consumer credit, taking advantage of this highly prospering business.

We cannot be perpetually resilient, we cannot just be resisting all the time

after all of the car bombs and all of the wars, when friends in Lebanon ask me how I am, I tell them I am fine. When I ask them how they are, they tell me they are fine. We all know that fine is never fine, that there is no such thing as fine because we have no idea what normal even looks like. We just believe in the idea of a normal because we have ‘seen’ it in others, elsewhere, and in books or movies.

I can’t remember birthdays or anniversaries but I can recount a dozen or so yearly commemorations of horrors past. The act of remembering itself has become so difficult that I often find myself memory-less, unable to daydream anymore, unable to lose myself in the moment lest the moment overtakes me and destroys me.