{"id":17419,"date":"2025-06-30T00:02:55","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T22:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=17419"},"modified":"2026-10-08T00:39:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T22:39:14","slug":"why-dont-egyptians-revolt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/why-dont-egyptians-revolt\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Don\u2019t Egyptians Revolt? The Gaza March and the Manufacture of Futility"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 9 June, the Sumud Convoy\u2014a mission of more than 2,000 activists from North Africa\u2014set out overland through Libya towards Egypt, determined to break Israel\u2019s siege of Gaza and deliver aid. At the same time, groups of foreign activists arrived at Cairo airport intending to join the Global March to Gaza towards the Rafah crossing. Many Egyptian activists expressed support while choosing not to participate, fearing that their presence would bring the security apparatus down on everyone involved.<\/p>\n

Neither initiative got far. The Egyptian regime responded with its familiar repression: a media campaign branded organisers spies and foreign agents and accused them of plotting to damage Egypt, sabotage the country and threaten internal security. Refusals of entry, arrests, raids, beatings and deportations followed, alongside reports of assaults by hired thugs. The overland convoy was meanwhile halted in eastern Libya.<\/p>\n

Many Egyptians fell into line behind that propaganda. Among this increasingly feverish alignment with the regime were no small number of people who claim a place in the opposition and loudly proclaim its principles.<\/p>\n

Two questions echoed again: why does official Egypt, Gaza\u2019s nearest Arab neighbour, insist on such complete submission to its occupiers? And why do Egyptians not revolt?<\/p>\n

Neither question was new. Both had recurred throughout twenty months of Israel\u2019s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The quickest answer was always fear. Yet I believe that fear, however overwhelming, is not the heart of the problem. It is a symptom of something deeper, and more terrifying.<\/p>\n

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Since Camp David, Egypt has officially normalised relations with Israel, but Palestine\u2019s pulse continued to beat in its streets. Even under Mubarak, limited spaces for monitored solidarity remained, absorbing popular anger: small demonstrations whenever Israel rained fire on Gaza, closely watched gatherings at professional syndicates and universities, and convoys that occasionally slipped through the jaws of repression.<\/p>\n

The January 2011 revolution briefly broke that enclosure. It gave Egyptians a fleeting glimpse of freedom before the military crushed it. Since the 2013 coup, repression has swept through society with a ferocity the country had not previously known, closing even the narrow windows through which Palestine could enter Egyptian public life.<\/p>\n

To understand Egypt today, we must pause at this turning point. We are ruled by a military regime haunted by an obsession it cannot shake: the spectre of 25 January. That revolution split open the Egyptian equation, reversing for a moment the relationship between ruler and ruled. It left a scar that has never healed. Its memory torments the regime, which invokes it at every opportunity, and often when there is none.<\/p>\n

The regime is driven by a determination to prevent the conditions that made that moment possible from ever recurring. Its brazen submission to the Israeli occupation is not a creed but a bargain for survival. Its strong opposition to the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza is not an awakening of conscience but an instinct for self-preservation.<\/p>\n

Its silence does not spring from loyalty to Zionism as an idea, nor does its occasional agitation reflect a moral position. Everything it does, however contradictory it appears, becomes intelligible through a single objective: to endure.<\/p>\n

I refuse to lend this complicity the dignity of a moral commitment, good or evil, that might suggest a higher principle or intellectual conviction. There is no creed here, no vision\u2014only a cold security apparatus moved by the instinct to survive, fearing its own people more than it fears its enemies.<\/p>\n

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From the outset, the regime raced towards its overriding goal: eradicating every possibility of rebellion. The massacres after 2013 destroyed the very idea of gathering under any banner. The regime then dismantled civil society, crushed independent unions and hollowed out political parties.<\/p>\n

Rights estimates cited in this debate put the number of political prisoners at around 60,000, although no comprehensive official count is available. Thousands have lost more than a decade behind walls for an act of protest or a post on a screen. Hundreds have died amid allegations of torture, medical neglect or suffocating conditions in overcrowded cells. Rights reports cited by the original essay describe more than 12,000 enforced-disappearance cases over the post-2013 period; that cumulative figure should not be read as the number of people still missing at one time.<\/p>\n

People granted release are recycled through an endless succession of fabricated cases. Even a demonstration for a cause apparently consistent with the official position is forbidden unless it submits entirely to state sponsorship and a ceiling fixed in advance. The detention lists cited in this essay put the number held over solidarity with Gaza since October 2023 at roughly 159; a separately dated EIPR statement of 4 June 2025<\/a> recorded 150 people still detained out of 186 arrested.<\/p>\n

\n

In Egypt, touch the monster and it swallows you. Sometimes it swallows you even when you have not touched it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Repression has not stopped at restricting action. It has extended to remaking the person. The regime has created misshapen institutions such as the National Training Academy: factories reshaping consciousness to the ruler\u2019s specifications, producing an obedient citizen stripped of questions and will.<\/p>\n

The media has become a single, uncontested voice. Independent voices have been silenced and journalists thrown into prison. Art, literature and cinema have been reduced to state-supervised propaganda projects designed to cultivate \u201cpatriotism\u201d. The country has sunk into spirals of debt and hunger, crushing what remains of its middle class.<\/p>\n

The revolution was not merely defeated. It was slaughtered, gutted and replaced with a performance of something resembling a state. The regime became a gambler who does not play to win, only to keep his chair at the table, even if everything around him burns.<\/p>\n

When the ceiling of what is permitted sinks beneath the dust through which you drag your feet each morning to earn your bread, it leaves a fracture in the mind that does not heal. Over time, the censor planted inside you becomes indistinguishable from your own voice.<\/p>\n

Yes, fear is present. It freezes the blood, shackles action and silences the tongue. But it is only the visible surface. The deeper damage that everything I have described has produced is the certainty that nothing will make a difference.<\/p>\n

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That futility runs through Egyptians today, not only the frightened, but also the most steadfast and selfless: those whose blood stained Cairo\u2019s asphalt, who filled its cells, who endured bars and isolation. I know this poison. I drank it for six full years behind prison walls, in a question that gnawed at me every night: to what end am I sacrificing? Where do all these losses lead?<\/p>\n

The regime has built its instruments of repression to ensure that every sacrifice ends in a void. It strangles movements before their first heartbeat and erases individuals before they dare imagine themselves as symbols. It saturates public life with propaganda that wipes away even the faintest shadows of a past uprising, as though it never happened.<\/p>\n

It creates an isolation that settles inside people\u2019s chests, convincing anyone who dares to think that they are alone, that nobody else is groaning beneath this weight. The country becomes a scattering of silent islands, each knowing nothing of the others. Whenever the possibility of breaking that isolation appears, the regime moves to crush it.<\/p>\n

In such circumstances, sacrifice becomes neither a spark that awakens others nor a legacy that can be passed on. It is unlike the acts that entered collective memory through Mohamed Bouazizi\u2019s death and the uprising that followed, or Aaron Bushnell\u2019s protest against American complicity in Gaza\u2019s destruction.<\/p>\n

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In Egypt, the cost is absolute and the return is nothing. Annihilation without purpose. What matters here is that this futility is neither natural nor ordained. It has been manufactured.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Our present condition is embodied in the regime\u2019s confrontation with Laila Soueif, the 69-year-old mother whose hunger strike has passed two hundred days. Her body has wasted away and she has lost close to half her weight as she demands freedom for her son, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, held beyond the date his family and lawyers say his sentence ended.<\/p>\n

The image horrifies us. The absurdity of the regime\u2019s determination to break an ageing woman, and its insistence on ignoring her, strikes us all. Yet its conduct is not an aberration. It is entirely consistent with its governing logic. If people saw Laila shake the regime, even slightly, what message might they take from that? That an attempt could, God forbid, achieve something?<\/p>\n

This is our military regime\u2019s greatest accomplishment: planting the pointlessness of trying deep within Egypt\u2019s collective consciousness.<\/p>\n

Despotism is often compared to a boiling pot with repression clamping down the lid. Egypt today is not a pot waiting for someone to lift its cover. It is a punctured lung: no air touches its walls, no breath can be drawn from it.<\/p>\n

Any talk of revolution, any call for people to take to the streets, becomes empty speech unless it is preceded by an unavoidable struggle: dismantling the machinery of futility.<\/p>\n

That is the fundamental confrontation. It is difficult and punishing, because this sense of meaninglessness did not emerge by chance. It was planted deep in people\u2019s minds, and uprooting it will exact a cost. No movement can rise or endure unless we first restore meaning to giving something of ourselves and allow sacrifice to lead somewhere again.<\/p>\n

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It is tempting to dismiss every Egyptian voice opposing the Sumud Convoy, the march to Gaza or any other attempt to do something\u2014anything\u2014as the work of electronic armies, regime mouthpieces and loyalists. Many are precisely that. Yet a significant number of Egyptians swallow the authorities\u2019 narrative not out of conviction, but to escape confronting the ruins within themselves.<\/p>\n

Accepting lies and official conspiracy theories is often easier than looking in the mirror and seeing what has become of you. That, at its core, is the completion of defeat.<\/p>\n

Still, beneath the rubble of fear and the soot of futility, Egyptians\u2019 connection to Palestine runs deeper than passing anger or momentary enthusiasm. It is a wound in memory, its pulse connected to their own wounds: a shared history of defeat and defiance.<\/p>\n

When Egyptians rose against despotism in 2011, Palestine was at the heart of their revolution. Its flags flew in the squares and its chants filled the air. A young man climbed the Israeli embassy building in Cairo, removed the Israeli flag and raised Egypt\u2019s. Crowds below burned the flag as though burning the shame imposed upon them.<\/p>\n

In 2012, Egyptian convoys travelled through Rafah to stand shoulder to shoulder with people in Gaza, as though a river had returned to its natural course after a long obstruction.<\/p>\n

The spirits of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, wounded and burdened by regret, still tremble whenever a glimmer of resistance appears, especially when Palestine is its fuel.<\/p>\n

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We do not know whether the road to Jerusalem runs through Cairo, or the road to Cairo through Jerusalem. What we know is that our fate is one, and our liberation is shared.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Egyptian regime understands this perfectly. It knows how fragile its grip can be over a people who have once tasted revolution. That is why it fears its people more than its opponents, and why it trembles at a spark that might ignite in an Egyptian heart on hearing the cries of Tunisian brothers and sisters.<\/p>\n

After all, a cry like that lit the first spark one red morning in January 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Abdelrahman ElGendy argues that fear alone cannot explain Egypt\u2019s silence: repression has cultivated a deeper conviction that resistance cannot change anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":12583,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[411],"tags":[],"kateb":[18013],"class_list":["post-17419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-op-ed-en","kateb-abdelrahman-elgendy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/\u062c\u0645\u0627\u0647\u064a\u0631.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17420,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17419\/revisions\/17420"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17419"},{"taxonomy":"kateb","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kateb?post=17419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}