Barry Rubin: An Egyptian Mob Attacks Israel’s Embassy and Captures the Egyptian Revolution

An Egyptian Mob Attacks Israel’s Embassy and Captures the Egyptian Revolution

By Barry Rubin

“You have always yearned for this chance and now you have it. A wind is blowing from paradise sweet with the smell of martyrdom.”
— Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s leader Hasan al-Banna, December 10, 1947


“The world will see it is impossible to beat Arabs by force.”
— Arab Summit Declaration, December 24, 1947


“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down!”
— Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

How is Egypt’s revolution different from a real democratic revolution, as in Eastern Europe? Here’s a symbolic way to remember it.

The most famous line, at least from an American, on the road to Eastern Europe’s transformation cane from President Ronald Reagan: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Eventually the East German people did the job. The tearing down of the wall was a symbol of opening the borders, letting in the light of the outer world, throwing out the old totalitarian ideas that had sat on the people’s heads and pecked at their brains for decades.


While the tearing down of a wall in Berlin signaled a democratic and liberating revolution in Eastern Europe, it symbolizes the decision to make the Egyptian revolution the basis for a new dictatorship of hatred, blindness, and destruction.

Consider Robert Frost’s 1914 poem about walls.

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Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, to be published by Yale University Press in January 2012. You can read more of Barry Rubin's posts at Rubin Reports, and now on his new blog, Rubin Reports, on Pajamas Media

Technorati Tag: Egypt and Arab Spring and Middle East.