Egypt events

I didn’t check the news upon returning, so only learned from Facebook about protestors breaking into the Israeli Embassy and causing some damage. It’s an unfortunate event, and may be the last straw for the career of the embattled Prime Minister.

Just a few weeks ago I was at a house party with three activist Egyptian women, and we were discussing what a terrible location that is for the Israeli Embassy– right by Cairo University, an area often rife with protests. If Israel is going to keep an Embassy in Egypt after this, it will probably need to be some sort of heavily secured remote compound.

The U.S. Embassy is directly in the center of Cairo, but it’s a highly fortified mass of concrete (whereas Israel’s is obviously a smaller operation, part of one floor of a high-rise). The location of the U.S. Embassy is actually quite unfortunate, because it messes terribly with traffic flow in the city center. It used to not be so bad, but after 9/11 they pretty much shut down all of the surrounding area to traffic.