One of my many guilty pleasures is watching moderately old Egyptian TV dramas. They are a universe on their own. It is hard to describe, but they are simultaneously poignant, superficial, kitch, classy, delusional, and excessively realistic. You have to see it to believe it. So, last August, I was watching one of my favorites from the early naughts. The show centered on class warfare (as always). The upper class girl runs away from her family and joins with the working class good guys (as is tradition).
In one scene, her mom stands there saying incredulously, "Why do you hate me so much, am I Sharon?"
This hit me in the summer of 2023 as extremely dissonant. Why is this a thing a mom would say to her daughter. It sounds too political, too forced even for an Egyptian soap opera. But I remember watching this show when it was released, and I vaguely recall this sentence not sounding jarring at all back then.
Then it flooded back. My memory has a weird tendency to work through odor. Suddenly, I could smell tear gas. Since signing the camp David accord with Egypt, Israel insisted on having its embassy on a high rise building on the Nile 700 meters away from Cairo University. So, when the second Intifada happened, I also happened to be there, between an angry mob of university students and the Israeli embassy.
I could suddenly remember why the students were so angry. The images of slaughtered Palestinians were seared into all our memories at the time. Yet twenty years were enough for this brand to fade away. In the summer of 2023, I no longer remembered why anyone would insult someone by calling them Sharon.
My generation had been lost for at least a decade, but it was forgetting. The generation of my kids had no idea what Israel is. They did not care for it, but also didn't care to hate it. They had no feelings about Israel. They vaguely understood that one day they tried to take away our land and we took it back. But when my kids asked me if we are OK with them now, I stammered. I honestly did not know. I guess so.
But that was August.
After Israel started responding to Hamas' attack, I expected another generation to be lost. I could see it coming because I've been through it before. Israel will shoot up a NICU or white phosphorous a refugee camp or something. And we will go into the seasonal cycle, the normal monsoon. People will start a boycott campaign that will be partly good, but partly self destructive. Things will taper off, and it will take another decade or two before we rinse and repeat.
But this time feels different. And it's been driving me crazy why.
I thought maybe the magnitude. When people asked Israel "What kinds of atrocities will you commit in Gaza this time around?" Israel answered "Yes!" But the difference isn't quantitative. There is something fundamentally different.
So I thought it maybe because Israel came out of the gate trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza into Egypt. But no, the difference in the generation being lost goes beyond Egypt.
And then I figured it out. The difference this time around is not about Israel. It is about two things: The west, and the Arab Spring. Specifically, this has to do with the Arab Spring happening and failing, then the West trying to recycle it recently; and then the way the west responded to Israel's ethnic cleansing. And it has to be in that order.
The Arab Spring, its failure, and consistently trying to revive it have been seen in two ways in the Arab world. The first is a portion of the population who saw the west as truly principled. They stand for individual freedoms, equality, and the right to expression. Sometimes things will crop up, for example the far right in Europe, but it is easy to gloss over it as part of the process by which the west cleanses itself peacefully. The Ukraine war proved the moral superiority of the west in supporting freedom and principles, and the moral depravity of the global south in taking a more nuanced approach. This gave the west the moral standing to dictate what is and is not acceptable in the Arab world. It allowed the West to piss allover Qatar's World Cup because Qatar had to give the same rights to LGBTQ people that America didn't ten years ago. It allowed the west to dictate to us who we should let speak, what constitutes a peaceful protest, and whether the choices we make are acceptable.
The other way to see all this is that the Arab Spring, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and certain "Standards" are just cudgels. They are used to beat us over the head when and if convenient. When and if convenient you can call him bone saw Bin Salman, and when and if convenient, you can give him a Fox interview.
The West now bans some protests and allows others. It is illegal to say you oppose genocide in some countries. If you oppose apartheid and want everyone in one country to have equal rights, you are hateful. You can get your visa revoked, get sacked out of your university, lose your job, or maybe even go to jail. Europe supports summary executions in the West Bank and suffocating premies in maternity wards in Gaza. Some countries, openly so.
I have no interest in why the west, particularly Europe is doing this. This is their business. This is their guilt. The Germans killed Jews because they were not white enough. They whitened Jews and are now supporting them in ethnically cleansing a new people who are not white enough, because you can't let the holocaust happen again. I have no capacity to approach how this logic works. It requires a different culture and history to understand this.
What I care about is the shock I see in all the millennials in Egypt who saw a Messianic savior in the west. They are facing the west that us older folk always knew was there. It is a bit funny, and there is Schadenfreude in seeing them contorting over this. But I worry about where it ends up.
There are two ways it will go. The first is to realize that the west shall not save thee, and thus we should start loving ourselves and our culture. We don't have to be a copy of them. We can be who we are and be proud of who we are. If someone says we are not democratic, we can laugh at them. If a European makes fun of how little we work in Ramada, we can send them daily work emails in August to see if they reply. We can insist that they respect who we are and leave us alone.
The other way this goes is more Islamic fundamentalism. This is how it's always gone. Killing, shock at hipocrisy, radicalization, then Islamist violence. And the final part of the cycle is a bunch of white people wondering where the violence comes from, which prompts them to do more killing. But here's the thing, we always end up losing in this. We are the ones who mostly get killed and held back.
I really wish our youths learn the right lesson this time.
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