The Road Not Taken

By Amira Howeidy | SEP 02, 2014 Within four months of the military’s ouster of Mohamed Morsi, one of the icons of liberalism serving in the new cabinet, Ziad Bahaa-Eldin, admitted to CNN that those who called for political reconciliation, like himself, were alienated by the political mood, where the very concept of reconciliation has become “a dirty word” in Egypt. Yet when

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Egypt Offered Hamas an Impossible Deal

  Antoun Issa Posted: 08/25/2014   The resumption of fighting between Israel and Hamas can be largely attributed to Egypt’s failure to broker a fair, enduring cease-fire. Egypt’s cease-fire proposal, as outlined in 11 points, was effectively a call for a return to the status quo: a besieged Gaza Strip with token, unspecified assistance to help it rebuild – the third reconstruction

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Everything was possible

  Saturday, August 17, 2013 – 22:26 by Omar Robert Hamilton I sit, for the 12th hour now, alone and struggling for what to do. For the first time since I got on a plane for Egypt on January 29, 2011, I am at a loss. Worse days than today lie ahead of us. We thought we could change the

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Egypt's Rabaa massacre: one year on

The killing of 817 protesters last August was this week judged a crime against humanity equal to, or worse, than Tiananmen Square. But feelings on the ground are mixed   Patrick Kingsley The Guardian, Saturday 16 August 2014 “To this day, I can’t believe it happened. I reached a point where I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t talk to

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A Grand Entente

Posted by Baheyya 12 Aug 2014 01:28 PM PDT In the old days, when the Israeli military bombed and shelled Palestinians and sought to destroy their society, Hosni Mubarak used a well-worn formula, fully abetting Israeli actions while uttering pro-Palestine platitudes. Occasionally, when huge protests rocked the streets, he green-lighted theatrical gestures such as his wife heading a relief convoy to

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The Air Was Hot with Hysterical Nationalism

  August 14, 2014 A year after the Raba’a massacre in Cairo, one writer struggles to redraw her relationship to the city By Yasmin El-Rifae A year ago I woke up in Cairo to the news of a massacre, the second of the summer. I was subletting a friend’s apartment downtown, a beautiful place that gave me solitude above the

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