Massad on Egypt and the Palestinians

✚  Egypt's nouveaux riches and the Palestinians

I find Joseph Massad wrong on most of what he writes about, and far too nativist for my taste. In this piece, while he outlines the terrible anti-Palestinian actions of the Mubarak regime, he is delusional when he argues that it was a narrow nouveau riche class that adopted anti-Palestinian postures. It's a lot more complicated than that, and while there are wonderful pro-Palestinian efforts in Egypt from the left and Islamists, there is also a very widespread suspicion of Palestinians (much of it the result of regime propaganda, of course). Some of it is part of a wider xenophobia, some of it due to a reluctance to be drawn into the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. But I feel, after over a decade in Egypt, that there is more anti-Israeli sentiment than thoughtful pro-Palestinian sentiment, at least outside the activist groups. Just look at the sorry state of the normalization debate in Egypt, as if it were the 1980s, and general ignorance of Palestinian-led movements like BDS.

And the language in this piece is really OTT.