Israeli-Egyptian Peace: The Beginning of the End

From Friday evening to early Saturday morning the equivalent of a high-jinks, nail-biting rescue movie occurred at the Israeli embassy in Cairo. As far as the endangered individuals were concerned, it even had a happy ending. Nothing else about it inspires much cheer, though.

FrontPage Magazine
by P. David Hornik

It started (timeline here) at about 5 p.m. on Friday when about five thousand Egyptian protesters who had been at legendary Tahrir Square—from which not long ago Thomas Friedman was extolling the “democracy youth” and saying “Israel was not part of this story at all”—made their way to the nearby Israeli embassy “armed with clubs, hammers, axes and explosives.” The “youth” started cursing Israel and demanding that its ambassador and other diplomatic staff be expelled.

Over the next few hours they hammered down a concrete wall surrounding the embassy, overran the building (the Israeli offices were on the 16th-19th stories), smashed windows, set fires, spray-painted anti-Israeli graffiti, looted the embassy’s archive, and—in a reprise of an earlier such exploit on August 20—tore down and burned the Israeli flag. (You can see some of it here, including Egyptian security forces standing around doing nothing.)
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