The revolution that unseated Hosni Mubarak stoked hopes among Egypt-watchers
that the country’s press might mature into a responsible force dedicated to
informing citizens rather than merely inflaming or redirecting their
anger.
But the Egyptian media’s collective response to this month’s
terrorist attacks near Eilat – as in the wider Arabic press, one of almost
unanimous justification, topped with allegations of Israeli complicity – suggest
that goal is as far off as ever.
RELATED:'Egypt mulling buffer zone on Gaza border'Egyptian official: Israel agrees to Sinai troop increaseEight Israelis, including six civilians,
were killed and more than 30 were wounded in southern Israel on August 18 in a
series of coordinated attacks launched from Gaza via the Sinai
Peninsula.
Six Egyptian security personnel were killed in the crossfire
as Israeli forces pursued the gunmen along the border. The attacks also prompted
a series of IAF strikes at Hamas and Popular Resistance Committees outposts in
Gaza, killing 15 people including four civilians.
Al-Ahram, the
126-year-old government mouthpiece that has Egypt’s largest circulation, ran an
editorial last week accusing Israel of planning an assault on Egyptian
soldiers.
“He errs who thinks that the events in Sinai were not
premeditated by Israel and by terror organizations that have been infiltrated by
the Israeli security apparatuses,” it said, according to a report released this
weekend by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
The editorial said
peace with the Jewish state was foisted upon the Egyptian people against its
will and must be overturned: “The people, which never accepted the peace with
[Israel]... will not be dragged [into] a stupid [deed] or into providing Israel
with free excuses to be used against Egypt. What is certain is that Israel has
opened the gates of hell for itself with its own hands.”
Peoples of the
region, it said, must “pressure the Arab governments to remove all
[manifestations] of normalization, return to the starting point, and end the
pathetic farce called the peace process.”
Ahmad Abu Douh, a columnist for
the privately owned
Al- Dustour daily, wrote two days after the attack, “We
cannot rule out that the attack in Eilat was carried out by Israel, considering
that it coincided with the escalation of protests within Israel against the
current government. This is why it was necessary to occupy public opinion in
Israel and calm the atmosphere there.
“I think that the killing of the
Egyptian soldiers was premeditated, and disagree with... those
commentators who accept the [Israeli] account,” Abu Douh wrote, according to the
MEMRI report.
The Palestinian and pan-Arab press offered similar
assessments.
Adli Sadeq – a former PLO ambassador to India and a
columnist for the Palestinian Authority’s official daily
Al- Hayat al-Jadida –
praised the attack as a “great operation.”
“May Allah have mercy upon the
shahids [martyrs] who fell during Ramadan, those of them who went out to
confront the occupation forces and did not return,” he wrote the day after the
attack.
“What happened yesterday may be considered one of the most
successful infiltration operations... this was a quality operation that will be
difficult to repeat,” he wrote, according to the monitoring group Palestinian
Media Watch. “A Palestinian – whether he sets off to infiltrate and have a
confrontation or whether he is bombed in his home – is the oppressed victim in
this situation, from beginning to end.”
Similarly, a news presenter for
the Fatah-owned Filastin television channel said, “Naturally those who carried
out the operation engaged the Israeli military forces in battle and those of
them who were killed, died as
shahid,” according to PMW.
PLO Executive
Committee member Ahmed told the station, “It will come as no surprise to us if
there will be clear intersection points between whoever carried out the
operation and the Israeli government.”
A number of Palestinian
commentators and officials deliberately distorted the Israeli death toll.
Columnist Adel Abd al-Rahman wrote in
Al-Hayat al-Jadida that the “operation”
led to “the deaths of seven and the injury of approximately 30 officers,
non-commissioned officers and soldiers.”
Mustafa Barghouti, a former PA
presidency candidate widely touted as a reformist, told Filastin, “This
operation harmed soldiers and people from the Israeli army, and was not directed
towards civilians.”
A
Hayat al-Jadida news story read, “Armed men killed
eight people in southern Israel yesterday, among them a soldier and a police
officer... in three attacks along the border with Egypt. Israel responded with
an air strike on Gaza, as a result of which six residents died as shahids...
Washington and the European Union hurried to condemn the attacks in Eilat in the
strongest terms, without addressing the massacre which the occupation carried
out in a home in Rafah.”
No mention is made of the fact that the IAF
strike targeted the home of the Popular Resistance Committees
commander.
Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-inchief of the London-based pan- Arab
daily
Al-Quds Al-Arabi, wrote that Israel bore direct responsibility for the
terrorist attack on its soil.
Referring to the attack as a
fidai, or
“self-sacrifice,” operation, he wrote, “This attack put the spotlight back on
the most important struggle – that for the honor of the Arab and Islamic
nation... Resistance is a legitimate right as long as land is occupied and the
people and holy places are humiliated... Any democratic change that is
born out of the Arab revolutions but does not embrace the resistance will be a
partial and superficial change, incompatible with the principles of Arab and
Muslim honor. Democratic revolution and resistance to the occupation are two
parallel lines.
“The Eilat operation, as I see it, corrected the course
of the Arab revolutions and refocused them on the most dangerous disease, namely
the Israeli tyranny. This disease is the cause of all the defects that have
afflicted the region for the past 65 years,” he wrote, according to the MEMRI
report.
Born in Gaza, Atwan is a regular contributor to the BBC program
Dateline London. In 2007, he told Lebanese television that should Iran strike
Israel with nuclear missiles, “by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance
with delight.”
The following year he wrote a column justifying the
shooting attacks at Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav yeshiva on March 6, 2008, which he
described as “hatching Israeli extremists and fundamentalists.”
Atwan
described the celebrations in Gaza following the attack, which killed eight
students and wounded 11, as symbolizing “the courage of the Palestinian
nation.”
Referring to the Egyptian servicemen’s death in his column last
week, Atwan wrote, “The Israeli attack is not only an opportunity for the SCAF
[military council] which rules Egypt to reopen the Camp David Accords and
restore full Egyptian sovereignty to Sinai; it is also [a chance] to gradually
revoke these accords in practice, as long as Israel is not committed to them.
"Israel's policy, which is directed toward, and even takes pleasure in,
the abasement of the Arabs and Muslims ... is responsible for this
operation and for all future operations of its kind. [This policy] is
what killed the peace and sowed the seeds of extremism," he wrote.
"Whether Al-Qaida is behind the Eilat operation, or whether it is
Palestinian or Arab groups that have adopted its ideology, it is the
extremist right-wing Israeli government, and the Israeli people who
elected it, that summoned Al-Qaida and prepared the ground for the seeds
of extremism and for the enlistment of the frustrated and humiliated
into its cells."