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While no one knows the exact composition or origins of the different militant groups based in Sinai, many believe past state crackdowns on the area might have fueled their growth. While visiting his cousin in Cairo’s Tora prison in 2005, Fathy met Kamal Allam, who would later become a key militant in the Tawheed and Jihad group in Sinai. At the time, police had randomly arrested hundreds of men from the peninsula after several tourist sites were bombed in South Sinai. Allam was in custody on drug charges, and was limping due to injuries sustained from torture. He told Fathy, “I wouldn't wish what I'm going through even on an apostate.” After spending his time in prison among Islamist detainees, Allam escaped from his cell during the 2011 revolution when the police retreated from their posts. He was among the first to attack police stations in North Sinai between January 25 and January 28 of that year. In January 2014, the Ministry of Interior announced Allam had been killed in a military campaign south of Rafah.

Fathy explains that the expansion of terrorist networks in Sinai is mainly stimulated by the desire to retaliate against police brutality, and less by a deep-rooted jihadist doctrine

many of those who suffered during the ongoing security crackdown were easy to recruit. Many people — especially those from the most impoverished areas in the peninsula’s center and eastern edge — are also joining the militias to make money after losing work in the stymied smuggling trade

Madiha, a middle-aged widow from Muqataa, sits in the small shed she relocated to three months ago. She now lives in the Masaeed neighborhood in southern Arish, one of the few places that residents still consider relatively safe. Muqataa was the target of some of the military’s most vicious operations. In the first raid in mid-2013, military forces stormed her house. The troops shot between the legs of her 12-year-old daughter to force her to report on the area’s militants. They then used Madiha and her three children as human shields, she claims, forcing them to walk in front of the soldiers as they ventured into the fields.

Civilian deaths have become recurrent in these attacks, though widely unreported by the media.

Reports of civilian deaths have been corroborated by human rights groups conducting research in the area, though no reports have been published yet. These deaths are the brutal, immediate cost of the state’s war on terrorists. But there is also a more prolonged, quotidian cost that North Sinai residents must pay. Rafah had been under curfew since the summer of 2013, but in October 2014, the government announced a three-month curfew that stretched to Arish. On January 25, 2015, area residents gathered to celebrate the curfew’s end — only to find out it would be extended. The streets of Arish are now lined with cafes and restaurants shuttered by the slump in business, and many workers lost their jobs when the curfew eliminated evening shifts.

Instead of bolstering a sense of security, the war on terror and increased militarization have fostered an extended state of fear in North Sinai

Almost daily attacks by al Qaeda-inspired militants in the Sinai have killed more than 100 members of the security forces since early July, the army spokesman said on September 15

Militant violence elsewhere in Egypt has raised fears that an Islamist insurgency, like one eventually crushed in the 1990s by then president Hosni Mubarak, could take hold beyond Sinai

The death toll from clashes in Egypt rose to 53 on Monday, state media said

In addition to the dead, state media said 271 people had been wounded in the clashes. Most of the casualties were Mursi supporters, security sources said

Authorities had warned that anyone protesting against the army during Sunday's 1973 war anniversary would be regarded as an agent of foreign powers, not an activist - a hardening of language that suggests authorities may crack down harder

even if Suez Canal traffic were miraculously to increase, the benefits of a major logistical hub on its flanks are less than certain. Neither Egypt nor any other Middle Eastern or North African country is a major manufacturing centre. Intra-industry trade, which is that essentially conducted within multinational corporations as they integrate production of goods in many countries, is abysmally low in the Middle East and North Africa, whereas it is booming in East Asia. So the question of what purpose a logistical hub would serve is highly pertinent.

the Red Sea is not exactly a hospitable political environment. The ongoing war in Yemen, increasing instability in Eritrea and Ethiopia, persisting violence in Somalia and Egypt, protracted conflict in Sudan and South Sudan, piracy, and growing competition for port access between the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, China, the US and others contain the seeds for turmoil that could negatively impact tourism in the region

What benefits then might Egypt anticipate from the reported $10 billion investment? The principal one seems to be contracts for military owned or associated construction companies, just as was the case with the digging of the parallel channel to the Suez Canal.

As military men they are interested in generating business for that sector of the economy they have come to control. From their perspective the $10 billion is not an investment in Egypt's future so much as it is a payment to the Egyptian military for being supportive of Mohammad bin Salman and his ambitions

costs of what appears to be a large scale, military dominated construction project are economic, environmental and political

Turning military owned and associated construction companies loose in the southern Sinai and along the foreshores of the Gulfs of Aqaba and Suez is a recipe for environmental disaster, as the current situations on the Mediterranean North Coast and western shore of the Gulf of Suez attest. The fragile marine environment has already sustained enormous damage to reef and other aquatic life.

buying Egyptian political insurance for his $10 billion, a price that Egypt may ultimately find to be very high

Long committed to a free media, Mustafa Amin was imprisoned for six months in 1939 for an article in Akher sa‘a (Last Hour) magazine deemed critical of King Faruq. An advocate of democracy and Western liberalism, he was arrested in 1965, tried secretly in 1966, and convicted of being a spy for America and smuggling funds. Sentenced to a life sentence, he spent nine years in prison before being pardoned by Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat. Ali Amin, accused by Heikal of working for British and Saudi intelligence, went into exile in 1965.

Room for expression existed mainly in the literary pages of al-Ahram, where writers under Heikal’s wings, like Naguib Mahfouz, could publish works of fiction that could be read as challenges to the status quo.[5] As far as the press was concerned, censorship was directed at politically oriented news and commentary rather than the literary sections

During the conflict, as the Egyptian army, under Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer’s command, was hastily retreating from Sinai, broadcast outlets aired invented reports of fabulous victories against the Zionist foe. At no other moment did the state media prove so woefully deficient, contributing to a deep sense of public betrayal.

The speech was written for him by prominent journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal and tactfully framed a romp of Arab armies as a “setback,” displaying Heikal’s knack for being both a propagandist and political powerbroker.   It was a moment that brilliantly served to shore up Nasser’s support. Egyptians took to the streets demanding that their leader stay in power. “The People Say ‘No,’” declared Akhbar al-youm (News of the Day) in large red writing. In smaller black lettering the headline read, “The Leader Discloses the Whole Truth to the People.” It is difficult to say how populist and genuine the appeal was and how much of the public display of support for Nasser was behind-the-scenes political machinations of the regime and its media. While Nasser did stay in power, it was only later that Egyptians could comprehend the true extent of the defeat—especially in light of official propaganda—and the institutional failures that placed the whole of Sinai under Israeli control.

slogans shouted and scrawled on building walls that demanded: “Stop the Rule of the Intelligence,” “Down with the Police State,” and “Down with Heikal’s Lying Press.”

Heikal blurred the line between the role of a journalist and that of a politician. “He introduced a model in Egypt and the Arab world about what your ambitions should be as a journalist. In the West or Europe, you gain your reputation from your independence as a journalist,” explained Dawoud. “When I am the president’s consultant and I attend his close meetings and I write his speeches, there is definitely a lot of information that I would have to keep secret. That goes contrary to my job as a journalist, which is to find as much information as I can.”

“A centralized editorial secretariat, called the Desk, was founded, as well as the Center for Strategic Studies and the Information Division. To his detractors, these innovations appeared to be spying sessions of an extensive empire dedicated to intelligence gathering

Nasser appointed Heikal to the post of minister of information and national guidance, a role he assumed for six months in 1970 until Nasser’s death. Yet the self-described journalist confided his frustration of being assigned a ministerial post, perhaps intended to distance him from the publishing empire he built, to a colleague, the leftist writer Lutfi al-Khouli, at his home. The encounter was surreptitiously recorded by the secret police, leading to the arrest and brief imprisonment of al-Khouli, and Heikal’s secretary and her husband, who were also present. “Now, Nasser’s regime had two aspects: it had great achievements to its credit but also it had a repressive side. I do not myself believe that the achievements . . . could have been carried out without some degree of enforcement,” Heikal wrote in The Road to Ramadan. “But after the 1967 defeat the positive achievements came to an end, because all resources were geared to the coming battle, while repression became more obvious. When Nasser died the executants of repression took it on themselves to be the ideologues of the new regime as well. They held almost all the key posts in the country. The people resented this and came to hate what they saw as their oppressors.”

after his increasing criticism of Sadat’s handling of the October 1973 War and appeals to the United States to address the impasse, Heikal was removed from al-Ahram in 1974. He remained a prolific author. In May 1978, Heikal was one of dozens of writers accused by the state prosecutor of defaming Egypt and weakening social peace and was subject to an interrogation that extended three months

Sadat attempted to bring the dissident cacophony into line through the mass arrest in September 1981 of more than 1,500 intellectuals, writers, journalists, and opposition elements of every stripe. Among those arrested were leading members of the Journalists’ Syndicate and prominent figures like the political writer Muhammad Hassanein Heikal and novelist Nawal El Saadawi. Sadat’s crackdown against his opponents culminated in his assassination by Islamic militants on October 6, 1981 during a military parade to commemorate the start of the 1973 War. Soon after Hosni Mubarak assumed power, Heikal was released from prison

When Dream aired the lecture Heikal gave at the American University in Cairo, direct pressure was placed on the owner’s business interests, and the veteran journalist found a new forum on pan-Arab satellite broadcasting. The influential writer has made opposition to Gamal Mubarak’s succession a staple of his newspaper columns.

With the rise of satellite television, Qatar’s Al Jazeera commanded audiences not only with news but with popular discussion programmed, like Ma‘ Heikal (With Heikal), a program by Heikal that began the year after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and which was watched by the Arab public with eager interest. Seated behind a desk and looking into the camera, Heikal gave his narrative of historical events and commentary on Middle Eastern and world affairs, exposing the intrigues of regional and global powers from his perch, having privileged access to leaders, diplomats, and decision makers. He has been a critic of Saudi diplomacy, its ballooning regional influence given the power of petrodollars, and its confrontation with Iran. Saudi pundits have consistently taken potshots at Heikal.

A couple of months before Morsi’s ouster on July 3, 2013, Heikal was contacted by Morsi’s defense minister Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi for a meeting, which had led to speculation that the Heikal devised the behind-the-scenes scenarios for an elected president’s removal as the dominant political player, the Muslim Brotherhood, was sinking in popularity. After Morsi was expelled from office, Heikal suggested to the military leader that he seek a popular mandate to lead the country, mirroring Nasser-style populism. Attired in full military regalia, al-Sisi at a July 24, 2013 graduation ceremony of the naval and air defence academies, broadcast live, warned that national security was in peril and summoned nationwide rallies two days later. Heikal supported al-Sisi’s bid for the presidency viewing him as the candidate born of necessity.

The smuggler spoke on condition of anonymity because, after all, his work was illegal, though he and others said that since the revolution the authorities seemed to worry only about political activities, not criminal acts. “We have had no problems at all since the revolution — not even close calls,”

there are many stark differences between the conditions of 1977 and those of 2013

Morsi’s rush to secure political power has cost him a lot on the economic front. However, he doesn't have to save the economy to survive as president. He just has to manage its decline well enough to prevent an acute dip toward bankruptcy and default

Mubarak was arguably ousted not because thousands poured into Tahrir Square, but because most elements in society were united against him. If Morsi succeeds in managing a declining economy and securing loyalties, he can avoid the same fate. That is what autocrats in Iran and Sudan have been doing successfully for decades

Sadat promulgated Law Number 47 of 1978 in order to end Nasser's legacy and reduce military presence in the cabinet, and Mubarak used the same law to bring them back

Pensions are typically low, the equivalent of monthly salaries without the extra allowances they enjoy while in service. These salaries are only somewhere between $400 and $500. In February 2011, five days after the end of the uprisings and the dissolution of Mubarak's parliament, the SCAF used their vague authority to amend this retirement law and introduce a 15 percent raise in pensions. But this is still not enough to cover increasing cost of living expenses in Egypt. Thus, the leadership offers officers civilian jobs with considerable salaries to supplement their unsatisfying pensions.

In order to keep the hierarchical structure of the Egyptian military, the institution dismisses a significant number of officers at the ranks of Colonel and Brigadier General in their early 40s. It promotes only a small number into the ranks of Major General, Lieutenant General, and Chief of Staff, who in turn usually retire in their early 50s. The relatively young age at which officers leave service provides a perfect excuse for the military to place them at civilian jobs, lest they use their professional training in activities harmful to national security

In order to keep a civilian face for the state in Cairo, only a few officers are hired as ministers, such as the minister of provincial development and the minister of information, running state-owned media. Outside the cabinet, they prefer certain spots where influence and wealth are concentrated. In the north and the south, 18 out of the 27 province governors are retired army generals. This includes key locations, such as touristic provinces in Upper Egypt, all the Suez Canal provinces, two Sinai provinces, sometimes Alexandria, and major Delta areas. Additionally, they serve as governors' chiefs-of-staff, directors of small towns, and heads of both wealthy and poor highly populated districts in Cairo.

The head of the Supreme Constitutional Court now was originally an army officer who previously served as a judge in military courts. This judge, Faruq Sultan, also currently serves as the head of the Supreme Presidential Elections Commission. Ironically, retired officers even dominate in government bodies dedicated to oversight: The head of the Organization of Administrative Monitoring is a retired general and its offices across the nation are staffed with army personnel.

There are three major military bodies engaged in civilian production: the Ministry of Military Production, running eight factories; the Arab Organization for Industrialization, running 12 factories; and the National Service Products Organization, running 15 factories, companies, and farms. They produce a wide variety of goods, including luxury jeeps, infant incubators, butane gas cylinders, plastic tubes, canned food, meat, chicken, and more. They also provide services, like domestic cleaning and gas station management. 

Civilians working under retired army personnel show continuous discontent about mismanagement, corruption, and injustice.

Labor strikes are primarily harming the military economic interests rather than the national economy.

"The military produces the best managers," Wuhiba said

Loyalty raises them into higher ranks within the army and then prestigious civilian positions afterward. Whereas under Nasser military managers adopted the socialist ideology, today they embrace neither socialist nor neo-liberal politics -- they are neutral. Their leaders in camps train them as young officers to maintain political neutrality and ensure that they uphold only one ideology: Egyptian nationalism. The majority are just individuals seeking to maximize their personal benefits later in life.

an elected president will certainly fail to demilitarize, and nothing will change.

Residents of the North Sinai say that the security forces’ reliance on air power and shoot-first tactics often lead to many civilian deaths. The Egyptian government, however, has acknowledged virtually no collateral civilian casualties. Instead, the government routinely releases only the numbers of “militants” it has killed. None of the assertions can be confirmed because the government bars independent journalists from entering the area.

Under Trump, the United States has been largely reluctant to challenge Egypt, the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, which provides the Department of Defense with overflight rights and the ability to navigate the Suez Canal.

Kassem had been on a liquid-only hunger strike and had not received proper medical treatment before dying of heart failure in January.

a State Department official said the agency would not comment on internal deliberations. “We remain deeply saddened by the needless death in custody of Moustafa Kassem and we are reviewing our options and consulting with Congress,” the official said. “In the wake of the tragic and avoidable death of Moustafa Kassem, we will continue to emphasize to Egypt our concerns regarding the treatment of detainees, including U.S. citizens.”

In his role as the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Leahy, a long-standing critic of Egypt’s human rights record, has held up $105 million in military aid to Cairo to purchase Apache helicopters and Hellfire missiles. Leahy imposed the funding freeze on Egypt two years ago in response to its detention of Kassem, its failure to fully cover the medical costs for an American citizen wounded in a botched 2015 Apache helicopter raid, and its refusal to permit adequate U.S. oversight of its use of American military assistance in its counterterrorism operations in Sinai.

The dual citizen—held without charges for much of his six-year detention—insisted he had been wrongly arrested during an August 2013 visit to his birth country that coincided with the deadly Rabaa Square massacre against demonstrators protesting the ouster of Muslim Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi. Kassem’s advocates said he was not involved in the Rabaa Square demonstrations. He was in prison for over five years before an Egyptian court, without due process, sentenced him to 15 years in prison in 2018.

There are at least three other American citizens—Reem Dessouky, Khaled Hassan, and Mohammed al-Amash—and two permanent residents—Ola Qaradawi and Hossam Khalaf—detained in Egypt on charges related to their political views, according to a bipartisan group of foreign-policy experts called the Working Group on Egypt that tracks the issue

“It is incomprehensible that Egypt, a close ally of the United States that receives some $1.5 billion annually in assistance from American taxpayers, would be less responsive than Iran, Lebanon, and other countries to repeated calls for the humanitarian release of detained Americans,”

Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham stopped a provision in the final version of the State Department’s appropriations bill last year that would have withheld nearly $14 million in military aid until Egypt paid off the medical expenses for April Corley, an American mistakenly injured in an attack by Egyptian military forces in the nation’s western desert in 2015.

The United States and Egypt set up a structured process of defense meetings to properly resource the nation’s military after the Obama administration suspended aid amid massacres after Morsi’s ouster, but the forum “has long devolved into a grab bag of weapons requests,”

“By sending this amount of military assistance for such a long time—when you add it up its $40 billion over decades—what the United States has ended up doing is feeding the beast that’s devouring the whole country,” she said, referring to the Egyptian military.

Nowhere is this shift in attitude more abjectly transparent than in the Gulf states’ media outlets, which hew closely to the state line and even go beyond it in an attempt to out-hawk official policy, which by comparison appears reasonable and measured.

an obvious and transparent outgrowth of the Gulf states’ normalization deals with Israel, though it is curious to me why they feel the need to amplify Israel’s narrative of the conflict if they did not think public opinion was already on the side of normalization

Jordan violently suppressed demonstrators protesting the attacks on Gaza, who apparently did not receive the memo that 27 years should have been enough time to accept Israel’s position on the conflict. In Egypt, despite its testy relationship with Hamas and its participation in the blockade of Gaza, it is still political and social suicide to publicly embrace normalization as a concept.

There was great presumption and folly in the grandiose naming of a convenient political deal between unelected monarchs and a premier accused of bribery and corruption, which was brokered by an American president who paid hush money to a porn star, after the patriarch of the prophets of Israel and Islam.

few Arab leaders have ever actually done anything for the Palestinians beyond rhetorical support for the cause, but they were happy to use the prospect of Palestine to keep their populations in check. The late former President Hafez al-Assad imposed a multi-decade state of emergency and mobilization to justify his tyrannical hold over Syria while awaiting the mother of all battles with the enemy, all without firing a single shot across the border since 1973. The leader of the beating heart of Arabism intervened in Lebanon’s civil war and had no qualms massacring pan-Arab nationalists and their Palestinian allies, or to recruit his Amal militia allies to starve Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. His son and successor, President Bashar al-Assad, negotiated with Israel via intermediaries, ready to sell out his allies in Iran and Hezbollah, even as he declared his fealty to the resistance.

The Gulf states have long had backchannels and secret dealings with the Israelis and developed a penchant for Israeli digital surveillance tools. Egypt needed Israel to destroy extremist militants in Sinai. And Morocco, Oman, and Qatar all had different levels of diplomatic ties.

We don’t know broadly whether a majority of Arabs care about Palestine or not, though every indicator points to the fact that they still do

Riyadh’s media outlets have taken on a prominent role in expressing public sympathy for Israel and its positions

In Saudi Arabia, a monumental shift is underway to neuter the power of the clerical establishment in favor of a more nationalistic vision of progress that gives primacy to Saudi identity. According to Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, in a recent interview, this identity derives from religious heritage but also from cultural and historic traditions. MBS has defanged the hated Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, introduced social reforms that dismantle some of the restrictions on women, detained numerous clerics who criticized his policies, both foreign and domestic, and has been elevated by his surrogates into an almost messianic figure sent to renew the faith and empower Saudi identity through KPI-infused economic progress initiatives like Vision 2030. He has also, of course, arrested those who sought to pursue activism and reform and those who criticized the pace and manner of his revolution.

where nationalist pride is intermingled with the quality of life and performance metrics of a technocratic capitalist state, albeit one where the reins are held by only a handful of families

should end institutional discrimination against religious minorities

should release the tens of thousands of prisoners held after grossly unfair trials, or without adequate procedural safeguards

should end its sustained crackdown on independent civil society organizations, including human rights organizations.

should stop using the pretext of combatting terrorism to justify and legitimize grave violations of human rights including disappearances, extrajudicial killing and widespread torture

must enable local and international journalists to conduct their journalistic work freely and publish freely on its counterterrorism operations in parts of the country, like Sinai, that have become information black holes

should end its restrictions on media freedoms that have resulted in the closure of independent news outlets, the jailing and prosecution of journalists, and the banning of websites