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Twitter and other social media sites must take action to protect journalists such as myself and ensure that its platform is no longer misused by authoritarian regimes.

these tales don’t come from fantasies like “The 1,001 Arabian Nights” but instead Middle Eastern history, especially Ottoman history. Anyone familiar with the region’s culture and storytelling will be struck by how thoughtful the film is, despite its kooky, over-the-top vaudeville

Miller’s location, cast and music celebrate rather than lampoon the Middle East, above all the wonders of Turkey. Shot on location in Istanbul, the film pans over Topkapi Palace, the Hagia Sophia and other iconic hotspots. Turkish actors fill most of the minor roles and speak Turkish throughout (Elba gives it his best college try). “Chesm-i bulbul,” or “the nightingale’s eye,” the name for the djinn’s bottle and hence of Byatt’s story, is in fact a beloved style of glasswork. The film credits roll to a Turkish love song.

“Three Thousand Years,” billed as “Aladdin for adults” and based on the 1994 short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A.S. Byatt for The Paris Review

he adds a scene that’s unjustified by the plot and which mainly serves the demands of cultural sensitivity, in deference to viewers who don’t know enough about the Middle East to see how much care Miller has taken. Back in London and close to the finale, Alithea greets two neighbor ladies who ask why Alithea wastes time with “ethnics.” She fires back that she can’t abide people — like them — with knee-jerk reactions against anyone different. “Fuckface,” one of them spits at Alithea, who ducks back into her house.

This scene’s welcome jab at xenophobia is not what annoys; it is rather the non sequitur. It’s the one and only time we meet these neighbors, though they later stand aghast while Alithea explains her enormous ebony djinn will be staying for a while. It’s the one time we hear their views. Their struggle to grasp the Middle East has not shaped us in any way, nor does the script humanize them beyond political caricature. “OK, boomer,” says the movie with a sneer. Miller could have stood on his thoughtfulness toward the Middle East without pandering, but in fairness, he’s less to blame than a culture industry that makes directors like him think that pandering is the price of keeping their skin.

Byatt’s story is nothing if not highly sexed, and Miller’s retelling can’t do it justice.

That both the djinn and Alithea are trapped by their own gigantic emotions produces one of the film’s loveliest sentiments, spoken by Alithea as part of her wish for the djinn’s affections: “I want our solitudes to be together.”

There are, no doubt, British Muslims who feel anger over the romanticisation of the Queen and the whitewashing of her reign. There are British Muslims who would like to see the monarchy abolished, not least because it is a fundamental symbol of inequality in this country. And there are British Muslims whose grief is reserved for their grandparents who lived, and died, under the boot of British colonialism.

whether or not the responses from Muslim organisations were a conscious attempt to shield these organisations, and Muslims at large, from state suspicion and criminalisation, they succeed in both depoliticising and de-historicising Muslim civil society

the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed

“The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,”

another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”

“The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” said IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari on Oct. 9.

“I remember thinking that it was like if [Palestinian militants] would bomb all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to sleep at home on the weekend,” one source, who was critical of this practice, recalled.

there are “cases in which we shell based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where the target is, killing civilians. This is often done to save time, instead of doing a little more work to get a more accurate pinpointing,”

Over 300 families have lost 10 or more family members in Israeli bombings in the past two months — a number that is 15 times higher than the figure from what was previously Israel’s deadliest war on Gaza, in 2014

“There is a feeling that senior officials in the army are aware of their failure on October 7, and are busy with the question of how to provide the Israeli public with an image [of victory] that will salvage their reputation.”

the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.

“Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so,”

at least until the current war, army protocols allowed for attacking power targets only when the buildings were empty of residents at the time of the strike. However, testimonies and videos from Gaza suggest that since October 7, some of these targets have been attacked without prior notice being given to their occupants, killing entire families as a result.

As documented by Al Mezan and numerous images coming out of Gaza, Israel bombed the Islamic University of Gaza, the Palestinian Bar Association, a UN building for an educational program for outstanding students, a building belonging to the Palestine Telecommunications Company, the Ministry of National Economy, the Ministry of Culture, roads, and dozens of high-rise buildings and homes — especially in Gaza’s northern neighborhoods.

there is ample evidence that, in many cases, none were military or political operatives belonging to Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

for the most part, when it comes to power targets, it is clear that the target doesn’t have military value that justifies an attack that would bring down the entire empty building in the middle of a city, with the help of six planes and bombs weighing several tons

Although it is unprecedented for the Israeli army to attack more than 1,000 power targets in five days, the idea of causing mass devastation to civilian areas for strategic purposes was formulated in previous military operations in Gaza, honed by the so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” from the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

“We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas,” said one source who took part in previous Israeli offensives in Gaza. “Sometimes it is a militant group’s spokesperson’s office, or a point where operatives meet. I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is what they told us. “If they would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it,” the source added.

Previous operations have also shown how striking these targets is meant not only to harm Palestinian morale, but also to raise the morale inside Israel. Haaretz revealed that during Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit conducted a psy-op against Israeli citizens in order to boost awareness of the IDF’s operations in Gaza and the damage they caused to Palestinians. Soldiers, who used fake social media accounts to conceal the campaign’s origin, uploaded images and clips of the army’s strikes in Gaza to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok in order to demonstrate the army’s prowess to the Israeli public.

since October 7, Israel has attacked high-rises with their residents still inside, or without having taken significant steps to evacuate them, leading to many civilian deaths.

evidence from Gaza suggests that some high-rises — which we assume to have been power targets — were toppled without prior warning. +972 and Local Call located at least two cases during the current war in which entire residential high-rises were bombed and collapsed without warning, and one case in which, according to the evidence, a high-rise building collapsed on civilians who were inside.

According to intelligence sources, Habsora generates, among other things, automatic recommendations for attacking private residences where people suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives live. Israel then carries out large-scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of these residential homes.

the Habsora system enables the army to run a “mass assassination factory,” in which the “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality.” A human eye “will go over the targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them.” Since Israel estimates that there are approximately 30,000 Hamas members in Gaza, and they are all marked for death, the number of potential targets is enormous.

A senior military official in charge of the target bank told the Jerusalem Post earlier this year that, thanks to the army’s AI systems, for the first time the military can generate new targets at a faster rate than it attacks. Another source said the drive to automatically generate large numbers of targets is a realization of the Dahiya Doctrine.

Five different sources confirmed that the number of civilians who may be killed in attacks on private residences is known in advance to Israeli intelligence, and appears clearly in the target file under the category of “collateral damage.” 

“That is a lot of houses. Hamas members who don’t really matter for anything live in homes across Gaza. So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.”

On Oct. 22, the Israeli Air Force bombed the home of the Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq in the city of Deir al-Balah. Ahmed is a close friend and colleague of mine; four years ago, we founded a Hebrew Facebook page called “Across the Wall,” with the aim of bringing Palestinian voices from Gaza to the Israeli public. The strike on Oct. 22 collapsed blocks of concrete onto Ahmed’s entire family, killing his father, brothers, sisters, and all of their children, including babies. Only his 12-year-old niece, Malak, survived and remained in a critical condition, her body covered in burns. A few days later, Malak died. Twenty-one members of Ahmed’s family were killed in total, buried under their home. None of them were militants. The youngest was 2 years old; the oldest, his father, was 75. Ahmed, who is currently living in the UK, is now alone out of his entire family.

According to former Israeli intelligence officers, in many cases in which a private residence is bombed, the goal is the “assassination of Hamas or Jihad operatives,” and such targets are attacked when the operative enters the home. Intelligence researchers know if the operative’s family members or neighbors may also die in an attack, and they know how to calculate how many of them may die. Each of the sources said that these are private homes, where in the majority of cases, no military activity is carried out.

According to the doctrine — developed by former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is now a Knesset member and part of the current war cabinet — in a war against guerrilla groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah, Israel must use disproportionate and overwhelming force while targeting civilian and government infrastructure in order to establish deterrence and force the civilian population to pressure the groups to end their attacks. The concept of “power targets” seems to have emanated from this same logic.

The bombing of family homes where Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives supposedly live likely became a more concerted IDF policy during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Back then, 606 Palestinians — about a quarter of the civilian deaths during the 51 days of fighting — were members of families whose homes were bombed. A UN report defined it in 2015 as both a potential war crime and “a new pattern” of action that “led to the death of entire families.”

according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, by Nov. 29, Israel had killed 50 Palestinian journalists in Gaza, some of them in their homes with their families

The intelligence officers interviewed for this article said that the way Hamas designed the tunnel network in Gaza knowingly exploits the civilian population and infrastructure above ground. These claims were also the basis of the media campaign that Israel conducted vis-a-vis the attacks and raids on Al-Shifa Hospital and the tunnels that were discovered under it.

Hamas leaders “understand that Israeli harm to civilians gives them legitimacy in fighting.”

while it’s hard to imagine now, the idea of dropping a one-ton bomb aimed at killing a Hamas operative yet ending up killing an entire family as “collateral damage” was not always so readily accepted by large swathes of Israeli society. In 2002, for example, the Israeli Air Force bombed the home of Salah Mustafa Muhammad Shehade, then the head of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing. The bomb killed him, his wife Eman, his 14-year-old daughter Laila, and 14 other civilians, including 11 children. The killing caused a public uproar in both Israel and the world, and Israel was accused of committing war crimes.

Fifteen years after insisting that the army was taking pains to minimize civilian harm, Gallant, now Defense Minister, has clearly changed his tune. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” he said after October 7.

President Joe Biden condemned the Islamophobic attack that led to the death of the Palestinian child earlier this weekend, as he should have: but he, and all of us, have to go after the background music that gives fuel to that kind of atrocity, and worse.

The Observer last year revealed the IRD’s major campaign in Indonesia in 1965 that helped encourage anti-communist massacres which left hundreds of thousands dead. There, the IRD prepared pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact were created by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.

“The UK did not simply invent material, as the Soviets systematically did, but they definitely intended to deceive audiences in order to get the message across.”

“reports” sent to warn other governments, selected journalists and thinktanks about “Soviet subversion” or similar threats.The reports comprised carefully selected facts and analysis often gleaned from intelligence provided by Britain’s security services, but appeared to come from ostensibly independent analysts and institutions that were in reality set up and run by the IRD. One of the first of these, set up in 1964, was the International Committee for the Investigation of Communist Front Organisations.

Between 1965 and 1972, the IRD forged at least 11 statements from Novosti, the Soviet state-run news agency. One followed Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 six-day war against Israel and underlined Soviet anger at Egypt’s “waste” of so much of the arms and materiel Moscow had supplied to the country.

The IRD also forged literature purporting to come from the Muslim Brotherhood, a mass Islamist organisation that had a significant following across the Middle East. One pamphlet accused Moscow of encouraging the 1967 war, criticised the quality of Soviet military equipment, and called the Soviets “filthy-tongued atheists” who saw the Egyptians as little more than “peasants who lived all their lives nursing reactionary Islamic superstitions”.AdvertisementThe IRD also created an entirely fictive radical Islamist organisation called the League of Believers, which attacked the Russians as non-believers and blamed Arab defeats on a lack of religious faith, a standard trope among religious conservatives at the time.

The IRD’s leaflets echoed other claims made by radical Islamists, arguing that military misdeeds should not be blamed on “the atheists or the imperialists or the Zionist Jews” but on “Egyptians who are supposed to be believers”.

Other material highlighted the poor view that Moscow took of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the limited aid offered by the Soviets to Palestinian armed nationalist groups. This was contrasted with the more supportive stance of the Chinese, in a bid to widen the split between the two communist powers.

One major initiative focused on undermining Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia, the former colony that unilaterally declared its independence from the UK in 1965 in an attempt to maintain white minority rule.The IRD set up a fake group of white Rhodesians who opposed Smith. Its leaflets attacked him for lying, creating “chaos” and crippling the economy. “The whole world is against us … We must call a halt while we can still save our country,”

In early 1963, the IRD forged a statement from the World Federation of Democratic Youth, a Soviet front organisation, which denounced Africans as uncivilised, “primitive” and morally weak. The forgery received press coverage across the continent, with many newspapers reacting intemperately.

A similar forgery in 1966 underlined the “backwardness” and “political immaturity” of Africa. Another, a statement purportedly from Novosti, blamed poor academic results at an international university in Moscow on the quality of the black African students enrolled there. The IRD sent more than 1,000 copies to addresses across the developing world.

As with most such efforts, the impact of the IRD’s campaigns was often difficult to judge. On one occasion, IRD officials were able to report that a newspaper in Zanzibar printed one of their forgeries about Soviet racism, and that the publication prompted an angry response. This was seen as a major achievement. Officials were also pleased when Kenyan press used fake material about the 1967 six-day war, and when newspapers across much of the Islamic world printed a fake Novosti bulletin on the conflict. Occasionally, western newspapers unwittingly used IRD materials, too.

Though the IRD was shut down in 1977, researchers are now finding evidence that similar efforts continued for almost another decade.“The [new documents] are particularly significant as a precursor to more modern efforts of putting intelligence into the public domain.“Liz Truss has a ’government information cell’, and defence intelligence sends out daily tweets to ‘pre-but’ Russian plots and gain the upper hand in the information war, but for much of the cold war the UK used far more devious means,” Cormac said.

Like so many others I spoke to in the weeks and months following Saied’s takeover, as he dismantled Parliament, jettisoned the constitution, dismissed judges and jailed opponents, Jawedi insisted that the Tunisian people had toppled a dictator once, and would not hesitate to do so again if need be.

Saied has managed to push his political project through, albeit with record low voter participation, but has delivered on little else

a cohesive opposition that could challenge him has yet to materialize and the recent arrests undercut what weak opposition was coalescing.

members of the Tunisian press rallied outside the prime minister’s office, raising the alarm that they faced ever more restrictions on their work and demanding that Boutar, the Mosaique head, be released. The erosion of press freedoms, they said, was particularly worrying in a country with a government that no longer had internal checks and balances. If Saied succeeds in arresting or intimidating the opposition and his critics into silence, when Tunisians tire of waiting for him to deliver, there may be nothing left to see.

“We never have seen it before like this,” said Jiyar Gol, a Kurdish Iranian journalist for the BBC reporting the story from London. “They really want the world to know about what is going on. People don’t fear anymore.”

the dangerous climate makes it difficult for journalists to capture the scope of the government crackdowns, and it makes them unable to independently verify figures such as death tolls, having to rely on human rights organizations for much information

Social media has played a crucial yet complex role. The primary method for people inside Iran to get information out, it has also enabled the spread of false information.

it was the Revolutionary Guard deliberately spreading those videos

at Radio Farda — part of the U.S.-funded but independently run Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Esfandiari and her colleagues contacted prisoners and their families and could find no one with knowledge of such an escape. She traced the detail back to an Iranian government-aligned news agency known for false reports, then saw a quote in a more reputable news service from a prison official denying the incident.“You have to read between the lines” of official statements

Some phony social media accounts pose as critics of the government to promote false news. People sympathetic to the protests “start to reshare that [content] in the heat of the moment,” he said. “The end result is a chaotic situation, with all the disinformation and misinformation mixed together, and it could be very dangerous, because some people inside Iran risk their lives based off of this.”

there are also “honest mistakes and rumors” that get circulated, said Radio Farda director Kambiz Fattahi. Newsweek erroneously reported earlier this month that 15,000 protesters had been sentenced to death. Fact-checkers later traced the number to an activist news agency’s estimate of the number of protest arrests, conflated with the news that Iranian lawmakers were pushing a “no leniency” policy toward those detained that could include the death penalty. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted the false information, then later deleted it, which in turn became fodder for Iranian state media to accuse Canada of spreading lies

Iranian journalists working outside the country have been subject to hacking and phishing attempts. In Britain, police have warned of “credible” threats of kidnapping or killing, and the BBC has filed a complaint with the United Nations, saying Iran has been harassing its journalists and their families

Meta’s independent Oversight Board last year recommended a review of how Facebook and Instagram have been used to spread content that heightens the risk of violence in Ethiopia.

echoes of accusations the company has faced for years of atrocities being stoked on its platforms, including in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Cambodia.

climate change is a systemic challenge, but most news organizations are still treating it only as a topic

It is always a good start to build a climate desk, and news organizations need climate specialists. But they are no substitute for increasing the climate literacy, or climate fluency, of all desks.

many editors think of climate journalism as crisis reporting.  And while it is important to cover extreme weather events, they are still only the breaking news surface of something much more profound and systemic

There are so many important and interesting stories just on climate adaptation alone that you would overlook as an editor when you reduce climate journalism only to breaking news and crisis reporting.      

Public broadcasters in Europe have an unrivalled responsibility to get it right, because they are comparatively well-funded. In addition, they tend to be their country's most-trusted news organization. Especially when it comes to climate journalism, an audience’s trust in a news organization is a hugely important ingredient.  Sometimes I have been struck by the timidity of public service media. Yes, they are under growing political pressure in many countries. But to preemptively capitulate is not a strategy.

All it took for the last IPCC report to be washed out of the news cycle within hours was an actor misbehaving at the Oscars. It had taken seven years to produce that report.

energy literacy is a core aspect of climate journalism and it seems the war in Ukraine has also heightened the world’s awareness for just how integral energy is to our societies and economies. A next phase in this realization may be that the much-needed shift to renewable energies will come with its own new set of geopolitical dependencies

The location of the denial has shifted. It has shifted from denying climate science, and specifically that climate change since the pre-industrial age is human-made to denying how urgent our situation is and how little time we have left to avoid a much more dramatic course of events. The willingness to embrace the time pressure we are under is part of climate literacy. 

I have never heard a young journalist say ‘I am somehow glad I won’t live long enough to see the worst effects of climate change’ while I have seen quite a few older colleagues express such sentiments. Some of them were even middle-aged, which makes me think they never looked at an IPCC report.      

I have met the CEOs of very large global companies who had deep knowledge of the climate crisis while I have yet to meet just one chief editor with a similar degree of climate knowledge

It is the nature of the climate crisis, though, to move faster than most of us think. I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see a major news organization re-organize itself around the climate crisis as their organizational axis. 

MAM’s deference to expertise and social capital was also evident in its reliance on individuals with prior NDP credentials; that is, people who had the knowledge and connections to run a political machine. While some of the cofounders of MAM fit that bill, All-MAM was in some ways an NDP reunion.

Nothing symbolized Sisi’s embrace of Mubarak’s political machine more than All-MAM’s pick for secretary general, Mohamed Heiba, the former NDP Secretary of Youth. Under the leadership of Gamal Mubarak, Heiba was once at the forefront of the NDP’s youth mobilization efforts

Besides leaning on the seasoned political organizers of the NDP, All-MAM was also relying on the former ruling party’s big business politicians who brought to the table not only experience, but also money. The most emblematic example was mogul and former NDP lawmaker Mohamed Aboul Enein, an icon of the business clique that dominated politics during Mubarak’s final decade. Up until that point, the Sisi regime kept a largely cordial orientation toward the likes of Aboul Enein. Certainly, Sisi may have worked to politically disempower such oligarchs, but he steered clear of expropriating their assets, as Amr Adly notes. Thus, high-profile business NDPers such as Aboul Enein survived, and may have even thrived to some degree, but they were not encouraged to play politics.[4] For Aboul Enein specifically, the tide began to turn in 2018 in the lead-up to the presidential election, as he became a visible figure in the marketing of the Sisi campaign. The regime was not simply tolerating the former NDPer, as was previously the case. It was awarding him a political role, while proudly showcasing his support for the president. On a deeper level, Sisi was essentially indulging the NDP’s deep pockets, hoping they could bankroll the big campaigns the regime was about to embark upon. Sisi may hold a grudge or two against the Mubarakists, but he will always hold a place for those who pay.

MAM proved to be a useful instrument for coopting NDPers and deploying their resources and expertise on behalf of Sisi. Also, it kept these Mubarakists loyal to the president and away from the likes of Shafik and other presidential hopefuls eyeing the Mubarakist networks.

by early 2021, MWP looked much less like the youth-led party of 2014 and much more like MAM, with many of the association’s founders, including Mandhour, holding senior posts inside the party. Likewise, the NDPers made themselves quite comfortable inside MWP, as exemplified by Mohamed Aboul Enein, who became vice president of the party, not to mention deputy speaker of the House of Representatives following his return to parliament after the 2020 election.

Today, MWP controls parliament and serves as a vehicle for advancing Sisi’s political agenda. Yet, the president holds no affiliation with it and neither do most senior members of the government and the state apparatus. There has been no clear effort to encourage officials to affiliate with the party either. In other words, the president has kept MWP in this ambiguous space akin to a political “friendzone.”

the NYP (or, at least, the “wisdom” behind it) was essential in facilitating Sisi’s accommodation with NDP-tied families. Many such families capitalized on the president’s NYP discourse, prodding their own younger members to enter the political stage under the guise of youth empowerment. It may be hard to believe, but longtime political families managed to gaslight Sisi right back: “You want youth? We’ll give you youth.” This strategy was evident in MWP to the extent that it featured young affiliates of NDP families. But it was more than just MWP. By the time the 2020 elections were over, the phenomenon of relatives of former lawmakers entering parliament became more visible across parties and regions, as Amr Hashem Rabee noted. Outside legislative chambers and Mustaqbal Watan, other parties jumped on the same bandwagon, recruiting and showing off young figures from politically prominent families. In other words, every establishment party is now cutting two carrots with one knife: get on Sisi’s good graces by checking off the youth empowerment box, and, at the same time, solidify alliances with politically distinguished families

Whereas between 2014 and 2018, the regime’s principal aim was keeping civilian politics weak, fragmented, and inconducive to collective action, its approach became more interventionist beginning 2018. This is because the president now had a clearer vision for political outcomes he needed to generate, majorities he wanted to manufacture, and allies he needed to coopt and reward.

the regime’s aggression had surpassed those rejecting the post-2013 political order and that the security apparatus was just as predatory in targeting opposition actors who have accepted the political system and agreed to work from within it

as Sisi began reorganizing his own political apparatus and putting his own ducks in a row, he embarked on an effort to sabotage his competitors and wreak havoc on their organizations and networks at an unusually broad scale

In contrast to 2015 when it sought to engineer a fragmented parliament, this time around, the regime wanted a majority for its own political arm and was adamant to stack the cards in favor of that outcome. Not only that, but the regime was also keen on dictating the candidate rosters of other independent parties participating on its own list, “The National List for the Sake of Egypt.” Indeed, Sisi was that determined not to leave anything to chance.

the 2020 election marked the reintroduction of parliament’s upper chamber. As a body devoid of any meaningful legislative powers, the Senate provided Sisi with a low-cost method of rewarding political allies with “certificates of prestige.” Certainly, this was not unique to Sisi’s reign. This same tradition was prevalent under previous rulers. But that Sisi is now conforming to this same template shows that he has finally succumbed into resurrecting his predecessors’ cooptation and clientelistic practices after years of eschewing them in his dealing with civilian politics. The details might differ, but the overall story is a familiar one: the initially timid officers instinctively avoid getting their hands dirty by civilian politics, until the imperative for survival draws them into the same “swamp” they once swore to drain

their entry into MWP captures Sisi’s post-2018 rapprochement with the interests and clientelistic networks that once occupied the Mubarak regime, as distinct from the cadre of younger politicians Sisi had been trying to cultivate through the NYP

Sisi’s refusal to grant MWP (or any party for that matter) the status (and privileges) of a ruling party arguably speaks to the persistence of his populist instincts and his own belief that he is in fact capable of ruling without the mediation of any political class.

for Sisi, turning MWP into an actual ruling party would be ceding power and access to the very political forces he has been trying to contain. If the NDP (along with all its missteps) was the reason for Mubarak’s demise, why give its descendants the chance to grow and gain more influence through MWP? Therein lies the source of the paradox: Sisi needs the NDPers’ expertise and resources, but he is aware their support cannot take for granted. Thus, despite Sisi’s accommodation with the Mubarak regime’s networks and their presence in MWP, the president’s propaganda machine remains discursively hostile to NDP remnants, especially more recently with growing chatter about a Gamal Mubarak presidential bid.

The president may believe that his investment in this project will someday bear fruit, contributing to a new reality actualizing his vision for the ideal civilian politician—that is, the politician who will blindly defer to the men in the uniform, accept their supremacy, and respect their economic privileges (with all the corrupt practices they entail).

The regime’s continued inability to assert its hegemony over the formal political sphere, its dependency on political intermediaries it does not trust, and the shutting out of credible competitors from politics, have all limited Sisi’s political options for managing the ongoing economic crisis

the realm of formal politics has become so discredited that the regime itself is aware that it will not provide its international audiences a sufficiently persuasive façade of democratic politics

Sisi’s long struggle to invent the politics he dreams of through his political grooming projects, while evading the politics he actually faces by gaslighting his allies and critics, alike