The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  But the limited Cairo-and Alexandria-based campaigns of the no advocates had little chance of winning over the broader public. The Muslim Brotherhood, the ultra-conservative Salafis, and groups affiliated with the former party of Mubarak, the National Democratic Party (NDP), were endorsing the amendments and targeting their efforts at the working classes—laborers and farmers. The Muslim Brotherhood—the largest and most organized movement apart, perhaps, from the remaining political network of the former regime itself—initially distributed flyers urging the yes vote as a religious obligation. But activists and the media quickly got wind of this strategy—stirring up longstanding suspicions about an underlying Brotherhood agenda to turn Egypt into an Islamist state—and the Brotherhood adopted the more palatable slogan “Yes is a vote for stability.” The day before the referendum, around noon, I could hear from my desk the distant sound of an imam promoting yes-for-stability in his Friday sermon; there were reports that the same was taking place at mosques across the country.

  When Saturday came, there was only one place to vote in my neighborhood, a public school, and by the time the polls opened at 8 AM, the lines of voters—parallel ones for men and women—ran down a narrow side street, past the post office and an art gallery, around a corner by a flower shop, and all the way down to the Bahraini and Algerian embassies a mile away. My mother, who is in her sixties and had never voted, woke up at 6 AM, eager to make it to the voting station early. By 8:05 AM, tweets were already coming in from those who had cast the first ballots, and from others standing by as election monitors. “I went to vote in Zamalek,” tweeted the telecom tycoon Naguib Sawiris, who had been an active mediator between the youth and the regime during the revolt. “At 8 o clock the line was endless. My body shivered of happiness.” Many seemed hopeful, if not for the immediate results, than certainly for the future.

  After an hour, I decided to head to a polling station near parliament, a few minutes from Tahrir Square, where Amr Moussa—the departing secretary-general of the Arab League who had taken an active part in the protests and was considered a leading candidate for president—had earlier voted no. (Moussa said that the proposed amendments were not in line with the democratic ambitions of the Egyptian people, arguing that a temporary constitution should be created instead to provide for presidential elections followed by a more full-scale, independent redrafting of the constitution in the coming year.) When I got there, I saw Cairo’s governor, Abdel Azim Wazeer, jump the line with a large entourage and cast his ballot. One man watching, furious, screamed, “Some things never change,” and several hundred voters erupted into the familiar chant “Irhal” (Depart). “What does he know about order and standing in lines,” a woman beside me said. “He’s part of the old regime. We can’t expect anything better from him.”

  The Muslim Brotherhood had been campaigning hard all week, and by 10 AM, I was getting reports that its followers were congregating outside voting stations around the country to press for yes votes. They had already distributed thousands of bags of sugar and other staple goods off the backs of trucks—another of the social services they have provided for years, winning them followers—and some of their members were reportedly preventing “no” voters from entering polling stations. I was curious about this, and along with a friend—the artist and photographer Lara Baladi—hailed a cab and headed to Shubra, a largely working-class and Coptic area. Our taxi driver, a man in his forties, said he was voting yes. “This won’t do anymore. We need a parliament. We need a president. We need life to get back to normal and for business to pick up again.”

  I had spent much time with Coptic protesters downtown following the destruction of a church by thugs on March 5, and expected to find many of them in Shubra, voting no for fear of an Islamist takeover. But they were nowhere to be seen and we were met instead by Muslim Brothers—bearded men and women covered in black from head to toe, with only small eye-slits revealing slivers of skin.

  At the first polling station we entered, we were followed by guards—familiar state security types—and the police, soldiers, and even the judges overseeing the ballots did little to calm things when dozens of voters started screaming at us to get out. As we left, we tried to speak to some people at the exit, asking them, “Why yes?” Their arguments were all the same: “stability.”

  Around the corner, at another Shubra polling station, we were met with even more hostility. A Muslim Brother manning the door took our IDs and walked away. When we asked for them back, saying we would leave, he refused, gripping them harder, refusing to explain why. When we vigorously protested, the crowd started yelling that we were “ ‘no’ people.” We finally grabbed our IDs from the man’s hand and quickly left.

  In the week leading up to the referendum, pro-democracy activists and supporters had accused the military of cutting a power-sharing deal with the Brotherhood to preserve its hold on power. The armed forces had not explicitly taken a position on the amendments, but they sent text messages telling people that participation in the referendum was a vote for “democracy.” And while they left Brotherhood members to freely campaign for yes, they harassed youth activists who were calling on people to reject the proposed amendments, arresting several the day before the vote.

  Still, the former MP Mona Makram Ebeid—who served on the council designated to negotiate between the youth and the military—was skeptical about claims of military collusion with the Islamists. “They are keen to get back to the barracks,” she told me when I saw her at a downtown polling station the morning of the referendum. Former army generals, pointing to the ominous state of the region and the threat of instability along Egypt’s border with Libya, had also told me that the military needed to return to its normal job. Even the widely disliked Army Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi seemed reluctant to meddle for long in Egypt’s daily affairs. (A December 2009 diplomatic cable disclosed by Wikileaks described Tantawi as saying “that any country where the military became engaged in ‘internal affairs’ was ‘doomed to have lots of problems.’ ”)

  More plausibly, military leaders view the Brotherhood as the devil they know; even in the event of a large Islamist representation in parliament, they would understand what they were getting and how to deal with it. The Muslim Brotherhood, which had previously announced it would run for 30 to 40 percent of parliamentary seats, has said it is now reconsidering that ratio, and may compete for more. It is also expected that other Islamic factions will campaign for seats independently, including the recently legalized Islamist al-Wasat party. A parliament of young revolutionaries could threaten the military’s position. Since the military has been the backbone of the system for decades, many also believe that there is corruption of significant scale to be uncovered in the history of the army’s dealings. “You have to understand,” the activist Basem had told me earlier, “the military is not a radical institution—why would they support us? They only responded to our demands when we were a critical mass.” At the time, that mass included the Brotherhood and people from the working class.

  I visited several other ballot stations on Saturday, and nowhere else did I experience the hostility we found in Shubra. But a report had come in that thugs had prevented ElBaradei from entering a polling station, and a picture was circulating that showed his car window smashed, splintered glass covering the seats. Contacts in the Coptic community (almost 10 percent of the population) were also reporting that Copts were being harassed into voting yes by polling station staff, or simply prevented from voting at all. A Coptic priest in the southern town of Naga Hammadi—where gunmen killed eight Copts as they were exiting church following Christmas prayers last year—said that Christian voters were being obstructed. In some towns with large Coptic communities there were reports that election officials, or their minders in the military and police, had apparently left voting stations closed.

  Despite such reports, however, the referendum was perhaps the most legitimate poll the country has seen. “They were clean,” the law professor Amr
Shalakany told al-Jazeera. “But they weren’t fair.” Amr was right—few people I had spoken to in the streets had a firm grasp of what a yes or no vote really meant. Yes, most people thought, meant a quick solution to the country’s economic woes. Even the design of the ballot seemed to encourage the notion: the yes circle was a bright, promising green color; the no circle was black.

  By Sunday morning, preliminary returns suggested that 65 percent of the estimated 18 million voters had voted yes. Among those who cast votes were the former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq and many of the former president’s much-hated men, including former Speaker of Parliament Fathy Sorour. According to reports, the presidential family voted too—in the seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Later, when the official results came in with even more in the yes tally, reactions varied. In some neighborhoods people celebrated with fireworks. In others, they were simply celebrating the right to vote democratically. It was mainly on Facebook and Twitter that disgruntled voices were airing grievances: about reports of fraud, about the “dirty tricks” of the Islamists, and about the “absolute insanity” of the military. “This is crazy,” one wrote. “We’re going to have another NDP government, this time filled with Islamists too.”

  By Monday, the Brotherhood had already begun preparing its parliamentary campaign, and a video of hip-looking young Brothers—each featured answering the question “Why are you with the Brotherhood?”—was circulating on Facebook. A prominent Salafi sheikh announced that religion had won the yes vote, saying people had effectively declared “yes to religion.” In response, activists and friends started making an urgent appeal to regroup their supporters and ponder their next steps. A widely circulated post by the blogger Sandmonkey advised, “Start organizing yourselves into an offline grassroots movement, Zenga Zenga style.… Start reaching out to Imams and Priests now.… Know thy enemy.”

  With parliamentary elections around the corner—the military leadership has said they will take place in September—many political hopefuls are talking about forming parties, though just how easy that will be remains unclear. Despite the military leadership’s announcement on March 28 that religiously based political parties will continue to be prohibited, the Muslim Brotherhood will likely still form a party under its previously announced “Freedom and Justice” banner. Moreover, even if the Brotherhood is not legalized under the new party formation law—which reformists have dismissed as cosmetic—its members can campaign as independents, and they already have the support of a considerable swath of Egyptian society. Esraa had told me recently that she planned to campaign for a parliament seat herself, but now, with just a few months to prepare and much other work to be done, it’s looking less likely.

  Elsewhere, Mubarak loyalists are busy planning their next steps too—few doubt that many familiar faces will emerge when parliamentary campaigning gets underway. There are already rumors that some of Mubarak’s closest associates will run themselves, and while there isn’t much apparent popular support for the NDP, the party has pockets of strength and many loyalists are businessmen with huge stakes in the national economy. Even some of those now in jail continue to employ tens of thousands of people in factories and industries, and could wield outsize influence in a future election.

  No one seems to know what a parliament dominated by former NDP members and Islamists might mean. What will become of the youth activists and their movement for change? What will happen to sometime leading figures in the uprising like Amr Moussa and the Google executive Wael Ghonim? May the army, as many fear, crack down on more radical calls for change? Already in late March, the cabinet took steps to outlaw protests and strikes, which the army swiftly used as a warrant to force its way into Cairo University and disperse student protesters with Tasers on the following day. Those with grievances, though, remain undeterred—activists and labor movements protested again in late March, and were calling for a million-man march on April 1.

  In the meantime, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood has said he is considering running for president, an Islamist activist has confirmed he is preparing to campaign, and there are reports that Salafists have been inciting violence against secularists, women, and Copts. They have also been distributing antidemocracy flyers arguing for an Islamic state. Despite the army’s promise to hand over powers to a new president within six months of Mubarak’s departure, it is evident that the presidential elections will be postponed. Loyalists of the former president’s son, Gamal, have now announced that they are forming a political party.

  —April 28, 2011

  25

  An Exclusive Corner of Hebron

  Jonathan Freedland

  A chilling aspect of life in Israel today is the way average, well-meaning, law-abiding Israeli citizens can ignore the violence and humiliation visited upon Palestinians by other Israelis.

  What goes on around the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, where black-hatted zealots wreck the harvests and seal the water wells of Palestinian farmers, where the children of these zealots throw stones at elderly Palestinian women, and where Palestinian families are driven from homes owned by their families for generations, and all this in full sight of the Israeli army, can be safely ignored if you live in Netanya or Tel Aviv.

  More corrosive to Israeli society than the sometimes violent oppression of Palestinians is this cocoon of civil indifference. Security is a valid concern. Terrorists can do great damage to a country. But so can turning a blind eye to injustices done in that country’s name.

  —I.B.

  IF YOU EXCLUDE Jerusalem, Hebron has the largest population of any Palestinian city in the West Bank. It is, along with Nablus, a commercial center, and what serves today as its thronging market square brims with life and trade, noise and fumes. There are stores selling groceries and electronics, as well as sidewalk stalls consisting of simple tables laid out with fruit and vegetables, toys, trinkets, and children’s clothes. Those are concentrated especially by the bus station, with its yellow public buses, and by the ranks of taxis and private minibuses, many of them heading north to Bethlehem. Palestinian police, in Palestinian uniforms, direct the traffic. If you walked no further, you would assume that Hebron, home to an estimated 175,000 Palestinians, is a thriving Arab city.

  Until, that is, you got close to the crossing point that marks the de facto border between the Palestinian-controlled 80 percent of the city, known as H1, and the Israeli-controlled remainder, known as H2. Not everyone can cross. Since the start of the second intifada, Israeli citizens have been forbidden by their own government from entering H1, just as they are barred from entering the wider Palestinian-controlled Area A of the West Bank. The ruling is based on security grounds, Israel concluding that visible Israelis, especially settlers, would likely be attacked and the Israel Defense Forces insisting that it can guarantee the security of Israeli citizens only in those areas it controls.

  For those who are permitted, however, crossing the line that separates H1 from H2 is to cross into another realm entirely. For H2, which consists of a substantial eastern chunk of the city, combined with what looks on the map like a wide, stubby finger jabbing westward, includes the historic heart of Hebron. This strip, the finger on the map, might account for no more than 3 percent of the total geographic area of Hebron, but it is here that you find the sites that have made it a place revered by both Muslims and Jews, indeed ranked by Jews alongside Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Safed as one of Judaism’s four holy cities. It is here too that you find an eerie, emptied ghost town whose once-thriving markets stand shuttered and deserted, its Palestinian population subject to a policy of separation and restriction that makes the city the place where Israel’s forty-four-year occupation of the West Bank shows its harshest face.

  You can hear the battle for supremacy between the approximately 30,000 Arabs and eight hundred Jewish settlers who live in Israeli-controlled H2 even before you see it. On the crisp, bright morning I visited, there was Hassidic-style klezmer music playing loudly from the Gutnick Center, an
event hall that welcomes Jewish visitors from around the world and especially the United States, offering both refreshments and tours, its website reassuring any nervous customers that “all buses are bulletproof.” Minutes later, those melodies of old Ashkenazi Europe were joined by the traditional muezzin, singing the Muslim call to prayer. The two tunes continued, at full volume, filling the ancient square with dueling, discordant noise. This is Hebron’s so-called loudspeaker war.

  Any visit usually begins at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the magnetic core of Hebron’s religious power. Judaism deems the site, recorded in the Bible as the Cave of Machpela, purchased by Abraham, as second in sacred value only to the Temple Mount, that part of ancient Jerusalem on which the First and Second Temples were built. Inside are caskets said to contain the remains of Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham himself, revered as a forefather by the three ancient monotheistic faiths.

  As the Jews of Hebron remind visitors, including the busload of African Christians that pulls in, for seven hundred years Jews were barred by the city’s Mameluke, Ottoman, British, and Jordanian rulers from entering this holy site; they were allowed to ascend only the first seven steps toward it. In 1967, when Hebron and the rest of the West Bank were conquered by Israel in the Six-Day War, Jews could at last walk the eighth step, and the fifty-odd more, and enter.

  Today, there are separate entrances to the tomb for Jews and for Muslims. But what is more striking is the road approaching the site: it is divided according to nationality, with three quarters of the thoroughfare available to Israelis, and the narrow remainder set aside for Palestinians. Concrete blocks separate the two parts. The Israelis are given the greater portion because they are allowed to drive down this road, a right denied to Palestinians.