I’ve always loathed chess, the way you hate anything you’ve never been particularly good at.
I’m not good at it is because I don’t have a brain suited to making moves that are five steps ahead of my intentions, or a drive to deliberately calculate the gains of every action I take nor a predilection towards hiding my intentions from all those around me.
This rather overdrawn prelude leads me to the situation in Gaza, once more, as a follow up to my somewhat unfocused rant of two weeks ago. As we all know, Gaza isn’t new. And all the outrage, the Facebook status updates, the long, cold marches and rallies through Trafalgar Square, Midan Ramses and downtown Manhattan, while commendable and important, are rather a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
The questions I’m fixated on today are what can we do in order to address the next Israeli/ Palestinian crisis? What moral obligation does Egypt have, as a nation, to leverage whatever influence it claims to have in order to help alleviate the future suffering of the Palestinians? And are we willing to do it without asking what’s in it for us?
Let’s talk politics: Max Weber identified two types (or, perhaps, it might be more fitting to call them strains) of politics: the politics of intentions and the politics of consequences. The first describes the political novice who aims to achieve something (good or bad isn’t important) while ignoring the consequences of those steps. The second lauds the seasoned political operator who undertakes a series of chess moves aimed at arriving at a defined goal, but calculating the incremental damage/ benefit of every single move along the way.
Weber, needless to say, favors the second route. So too, apparently, does the Egyptian government. At the expense of any moral imperative.
You see, Weber was both right and wrong: he was right that the politics of intentions are naïve in that they discount consequences of their actions; but he perhaps didn’t place enough emphasis on the power and moral necessity of announcing clear and powerful intentions. Without them, an opponent correctly characterizes you as a bystander; then make their moves, banking on your complicitous immobility.
I can’t help but think that against the appalling moans of devastated and dying civilians, the heartless proclamations of callousness by the international community, and the embarrassing and flaccid posturing of the Arab governments, a steadfast refusal to accept oppression, in any form, rings a powerful gong that forces everyone to sit up and take notice.
Exactly what Egypt isn’t doing: cutting through the politics, and trying to do some good.
Let’s weigh up our motives in all this, differentiating between government and people, since the actions of the former appear to be increasingly at odds with the will of the latter.
As a people, our objectives have everything to do with compassion and pride. Like all decent people, it hurts us to see suffering in any form (I don’t subscribe to cynics who maintain that we are only moved by Muslim suffering) and are moved by compassion and empathy to bring it to a halt.
We also feel the tinge of humiliation and dented pride that ‘some of our own’ can be subjected to such savagery, while we stand by, unable to muster even a whimper of defiance. This inaction hurts our perception of ourselves as proud Middle Eastern, passionate people and fuels our national depression: we fail, so we believe we are fated to fail, which means we continue to fail.
Our government is a different story. Our government’s image of itself as a global player is at odds with its actions and capabilities.
The need to project itself as a ‘player’ is of vast strategic importance to the Egyptian government. Some of this is ego (“We are Egypt! ) but most of it is the government’s survival instinct kicking in. It knows that if it loses face to its own people, its position as an authoritarian power will be compromised, which means ordinary people will be less likely to tolerate it.
After all, as many have remarked, all we have is our pride. Take that away from us and what do we have left?
But people’s outrage at the government’s limp response (not just internally, the condemnation of the Egyptian stance in this conflict is universal; from its reluctance to publicly criticize Israel and the US, all the way through its shameful refusal to open the Rafah crossing) isn’t just to do with the marginal, almost indifferent role its played to this point. It has a lot to do with the government’s blatant disregard for Palestinian life, and its willingness to trade human decency, for power.
That’s not Weber, that’s Machiavelli.
If Gaza were a building that was set on fire by the Israelis and the escape hatches were manned by the Egyptians, who refused to open them, how would that be? Even if I accept that the Egyptians don’t want the Gazans living in our hospitals, at least let them out to stand on the pavement.
So why is the government not doing the right thing? Simple: the consequences of helping out could anger the Americans ($2.2 billion in annual aid) and fracture an already fractious relationship with cheap-gas importing Israel. Partly because we need them economically but mostly because the government knows the value of having a ready-made bad guy for the people to focus their ire on.
Just like Hamas or the sex-offender Ehud Olmert or the Clinton, Bush and Kennedy dynasties, or Joe Biden and the Delaware senate, or Bernie Madoff or the heads of Citibank, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, the goal here is power. And the Egyptian government is no different. It’s been in power for too long to the point where it becomes inevitable that its instinct for self-survival becomes at odds with the reasons it was ‘elected’ to office: to represent the people, to promote their interests and to uphold their rights and their dignities.
The Egyptian government has long been a byword for corruption, incompetence, lawlessness and shameless authoritarianism. Now we can add other failings to that list: a loss of human decency and a failure to take a moral stand. And in this elaborate game of chess, the pawns that are being sacrificed are actual, living, breathing human beings.
Shame on you,
Mohammed Nassar is a London-based commentator who has worked in advertising, in Cairo, New York and London for the past 10 years. This column is special to DAILY NEWS EGYPT . Email him at [email protected].
Disclaimer: Commentaries published by Daily News Egypt do not reflect the position of the paper, but the independent opinions of their authors.
