One thing this does show is that the Egyptian Army led government/junta has its hands full in Egypt and even if this is a "minority" of the opposition or of the Brotherhood the road ahead isn't going to be an easy one..........
For links see article source......
Posted for fair use......
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/world/middleeast/11egypt.html
September 10, 2011
Israelis Quit Cairo Embassy as Protesters Invade Offices
By DAVID KIRKPATRICK and ETHAN BRONNER
CAIRO — Israel evacuated most of its embassy staff here at dawn Saturday after six members had been trapped in the embassy for hours by a mob of protesters who attacked and invaded its offices overnight.
The attack was the second time in a month that an angry mob stormed the Cairo embassy and tore down its flag. Coming a week after Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador over its refusal to apologize for a deadly raid on a Turkish ship, it left Israel was facing crises in relations with its two most important regional allies, with ambassadors in neither country.
The episode also raised concerns about whether Egypt’s military-led transitional government would be able to maintain law and order and meet its international obligations, and to what extent popular rage unleashed by the Arab Spring would send a chill over the region.
Israeli officials said the six trapped embassy staff members were rescued by Egyptian commandos early Saturday morning, after hours when Egyptian military and security forces had appeared to stand idle on the sidelines for fear of confronting the mob.
“This went on for 13 hours and there was real concern for the safety and lives of our people,” an Israeli official said. “The mob penetrated the embassy and at the end there was only one wall separating it from six of our people.”
Two Israeli military jets arrived around dawn to carry away the ambassador and about 85 other diplomats and family members. One Israeli diplomat, the deputy ambassador, stayed behind, taking refuge in the American embassy, diplomats familiar with the arrangements said.
For Israel, the embassy attack and evacuation represented the most ominous deterioration yet in its relationship with its neighbor in the seven months since the revolution that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak, a strongman who suppressed the Egyptian public’s hostility to Israel in order keep his country’s alliance with Israel and the United States the pole star of its foreign policy.
The Egyptian prime minister, Essam Sharaf, who serves under the council of military officers acting as a transitional government, called an emergency cabinet meeting on Saturday as the Egyptian interior ministry put police on alert to guard against more violence.
For Egypt’s interim military rulers, allowing the invasion of a foreign embassy is an extraordinary breach of Egypt’s international commitments that is raising security concerns at other embassies as well.
“It has led to a complete loss of credibility in the government internationally from all directions,” a Western diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the situation. And it poses a new dilemma for the military council, which has sought to avoid confrontations with protesters and, often, to accede to the popular will in order to guard its own tenuous legitimacy.
It was the second time in four weeks that Egypt and Israel stood on the brink, following a dispute last month over the killing of three Egyptian soldiers along the border by Israeli military forces pursuing terrorist suspects. And it comes at a time when Israel is feeling new pressures from all sides, with the Palestinians gathering support in the United Nations general assembly for a bid to establish their nominal statehood next month and the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador from Turkey.
For some, the image of the fleeing diplomats boarding jets at dawn evoked comparisons with the 1979 evacuation of the Israeli embassy in Tehran after the Iranian revolution replaced a former ally with an implacable foe.
“Seven months after the downfall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Egyptian protesters tore to shreds the Israeli flag, a symbol of peace between Egypt and its eastern neighbor, after 31 years,” Aluf Benn, the editor in chief of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote Saturday. “It seems that the flag will not return to the flagstaff anytime soon.”
The attack on the embassy marked a new turn toward violence in the previously peaceful protest movement that has flourished in Cairo’s Tahrir Square since the revolution. At a demonstration called Friday to reiterate a litany of liberal demands, thousands of hard-core football fans showed up looking for revenge on police who attacked some of them after a match earlier in the week, and they injected a new impulse toward mayhem into the day.
Exercising a new freedom of expression, Egyptians have staged protests outside the Israeli embassy nearly every day since the dispute last month over the Israeli killing of the Egyptian officers near the border, and last weekend the Egyptians erected a new wall in front of the embassy’s block to help protect the buildings from damage.
But on Friday demonstrators marched to the building Friday carrying hammers and determined to tear it down, and after its demolition went on to break into the building while thousands of others clashed with riot police outside, hurling Molotov cocktails and setting several cars on fire.
The Egyptian Interior Ministry said Saturday that at least two had died from the clashes around the embassy — one from a bullet wound and the other from a heart attack — while as many as 1,200 had been injured from the overnight clashes with the police. As late as Saturday afternoon, enough tear gas lingered in the streets around the embassy to force passersby to clutch tissues over their noses as they hurried by.
Throughout the night, desperate Israeli officials had placed several calls to their American counterparts seeking help pressing the Egyptians to take more action to protect the embassy. Defense minister Ehud Barak called Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to President Barack Obama, Israeli and American officials said.
In Washington, the White House said in a statement that Mr. Obama had “expressed his great concern” about the embassy situation in his conversation with Mr. Netanyahu. The statement said Mr. Obama had called on the government of Egypt “to honor its international obligations to safeguard the security of the Israeli embassy.”
Since the dispute last month over the killings at the border, many Egyptians have clamored for Egypt to expel Israel’s ambassador as a reprimand. And when word reached the crowds outside the Israeli Embassy in the early hours of Saturday morning that Israel was evacuating its ambassador, some reacted with satisfaction that the attack on the embassy had succeeded in expelling him.
On Saturday, though, Egyptian politicians at every level—from the young leaders of the revolution to the older liberals and Islamists—spoke out against the outbreak of violence the night before. But Gamal Abdel Gawad, director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, warned that given the popular pressure repairing relations with Israel could be “an uphill battle.”
And he noted the increasingly unruly character of the street protests only added to the uncertainty. “The deterioration in relations could happen regardless of the wishes of the various political actors,” he said. “This is a group of young people who are quite militant and barely politicized, who know little about politics but have strong feelings, and they made the embassy a target.
“This is a mob mentality rather than a political mentality,” he added. “Nobody can claim leadership for this group—in fact, they defy leadership, which is why the situation is very serious.”
David Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem. Heba Afify contributed reporting from Cairo.
Related
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The Lede Blog: Protesters Topple Wall Outside Israel's Embassy in Cairo (September 9, 2011)
