{"id":44006,"date":"2024-04-12T01:52:45","date_gmt":"2024-04-12T08:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=44006"},"modified":"2024-04-10T15:02:21","modified_gmt":"2024-04-10T22:02:21","slug":"egypt-faces-many-struggles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2024\/04\/12\/egypt-faces-many-struggles\/","title":{"rendered":"Egypt faces many struggles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twenty years in the making, Egypt\u2019s Grand Egyptian Museum is in a soft-opening period, with a section of the 81,000-square-metre site open for limited guided tours. <\/i>(photo from Grand Egyptian Museum)<\/i><\/p>\n

In biblical times, the Patriarch Jacob led his family to Egypt, the granary of the ancient Near East, to escape famine in Canaan. By the Roman era, the Nile River Valley and Delta \u2013 enriched by the Nile\u2019s annual flooding with alluvial mud \u2013 had become the breadbasket of Rome. King Herod built an artificial harbour at Caesarea to facilitate the crucial maritime shipment of wheat to the imperial capital. Today, the once fabulously wealthy country is an economic basket case.<\/p>\n

President Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his military-industrial kleptocracy blame the country\u2019s high birth rate for the inability to feed Egypt\u2019s burgeoning population of 110 million people. Taking a page from Keynesian economic theory, the regime \u2013 which toppled Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi in a 2013 coup d\u2019\u00e9tat \u2013\u00a0has triggered a free fall of hyperinflation and devaluations while building mega-projects to stimulate the country\u2019s broken finances.<\/p>\n

The country\u2019s annual rate of inflation soared to 36% in February, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) said on March 31. The Egyptian pound, called the guinea, traded at\u00a020 to the American dollar as recently as 2020. Now, one needs 52 to buy a greenback in the flourishing parallel market.\u00a0In the past 24 months, a crippling shortage of foreign currency has caused prices of goods and commodities to more than triple, forcing low- and middle-income Egyptians to further tighten their belts.<\/p>\n

The result? Strained services, a bloated bureaucracy, a huge government budget\u00a0and a staggering deficit.<\/p>\n

Compounding the economic misery, Hamas\u2019s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the resulting Israel-Hamas war in Gaza have driven away tourists from the land of Pharaonic wonders and spectacular coral reefs. Houthi rockets targeting shipping in the Red Sea have shrunk revenue from the Suez Canal, which is down 40% this year versus the same period in 2023. And Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine two years ago has driven up wheat prices and made subsidized bread \u2013 a staple for most Egyptians \u2013 more costly.<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding Egypt\u2019s inability to repay its current foreign debt of about $165 billion, el-Sisi\u2019s immediate financial problems were eased in recent weeks thanks to a bailout, more than $23 billion provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the European Union.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the United Arab Emirates launched a rescue plan to prop up its ally through the Ras el-Hekma deal announced last month. The vast real estate project envisions a new city on the barren shores of the Mediterranean Sea near the site of the pivotal Second World War battle of El Alamein. It was concluded in exchange for $24 billion in cash liquidity and $11 billion in UAE deposits with the Central Bank of Egypt, which will be converted into Egyptian pounds and used to implement the project, reported\u00a0Reuters.<\/p>\n

Where then has Egypt invested, or perhaps squandered, its largesse?<\/p>\n

One expensive pet project has been to expand the quasi-governmental Egyptian Railway Authority\u2019s network of standard-gauge train tracks. The system, the oldest in the Middle East, dating back to the 1854 line between Alexandria and Kafr el-Zayyat on the Rosetta branch of the Nile, now extends across 10,500 kilometres. A further 5,500 kilometres are currently in construction, including high-speed lines from Alexandria west to Mersa Matruh, Cairo south to Aswan, and Luxor east to Safaga\u00a0via Hurghada.<\/p>\n

Equally ambitious are plans to expand the country\u2019s clogged highways. Transportation Minister Kamel al-Wazir, who took over the accident-plagued portfolio from Hisham Arafat following the 2019\u00a0Ramses Station train disaster, in which 25 Cairenes were killed and 40 injured, plans to complete 1,000 bridges, tunnels and flyovers this year.<\/p>\n

Key to the plan to clear Cairo\u2019s traffic woes is to\u00a0complete\u00a0an ambitious, shimmering new capital 50 kilometres east of the megalopolis, whose population is estimated to be more than 22 million people. The so-far-unnamed\u00a0New Administrative Capital, under construction for nearly a decade, is located just east of the Second Greater Cairo Ring Road. It includes more than 30 skyscrapers, the most striking of which is the 77-floor Iconic Tower \u2013 the tallest building in Africa. Equally noteworthy are the\u00a093,000-seat soccer stadium, the\u00a0Fattah\u00a0el-Aleem Mosque, accommodating 107,000 worshippers, and the\u00a0Nativity of Christ Cathedral, which has room for 8,000 Copts.<\/p>\n

To date, 14 ministries and government entities have relocated to the New Administrative Capital, but the city remains a largely lifeless white elephant with few residents.<\/p>\n

Apart from these vast infrastructure projects, Egypt has been burnishing its cultural heritage. In 2022, the\u00a0Ministry of Tourism and Antiquity launched the Holy Family Trail, stringing together some 25 stops along the celebrated route that Jesus, Mary and Joseph took to escape King Herod\u2019s wrath.\u00a0Last year, the government restored the medieval Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fostat (Old Cairo), the home of the Cairo Geniza. The long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza near the Pyramids is scheduled to officially open this summer \u2013 though no date has been announced.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
The top part of the Merneptah Stele, inscribed by the New Kingdom pharaoh, dated around 1208 BCE. Line 28 reads: \u201cIsrael is laid waste \u2013 its seed is no more.\u201d\u00a0(photo from Grand Egyptian Museum)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Twenty years in the making, the GEM is currently in a soft-opening period, with a section of the 81,000-square-metre site open for limited guided tours.<\/p>\n

Touted as the largest archeological museum complex in the world, the GEM will house more than 100,000 artifacts. It will showcase the treasures discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. Other highlights will include a restoration centre, an interactive gallery for children and the Khufu Boat Museum.<\/p>\n

King Tut\u2019s funerary possessions had been on display at downtown Cairo\u2019s Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, a hopelessly inadequate leftover from Britain\u2019s colonial rule. There, a decade ago, I wandered in sensory overload gawping at the Aladdin\u2019s Cave of Wonders. As if guided by divine providence, or perhaps Ra or Isis, I stumbled upon the Merneptah Stele \u2013 a three-metre-high piece of black granite inscribed by the New Kingdom pharaoh, dated around 1208\u00a0BCE, which was discovered in Thebes in 1896 by archeologist Flinders Petrie. Line 28 reads: \u201cIsrael is laid waste \u2013 its seed is no more.\u201d<\/p>\n

For me, it symbolizes the cold peace Israel and Egypt have enjoyed since 1979. Though few Israelis would wish to repudiate that historic agreement, many share the sentiment of Eitan Haber, the\u00a0confidant of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who said: \u201cThe Egyptians don\u2019t like us and \u2013 why deny it? \u2013 we don\u2019t like them.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gil Zohar<\/b> is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twenty years in the making, Egypt\u2019s Grand Egyptian Museum is in a soft-opening period, with a section of the 81,000-square-metre site open for limited guided tours. (photo from Grand Egyptian Museum) In biblical times, the Patriarch Jacob led his family to Egypt, the granary of the ancient Near East, to escape famine in Canaan. By […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44008,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[5780,3200,3504,7945,23115],"class_list":["post-44006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-culture","tag-economics","tag-egypt","tag-financial-crisis","tag-infrastructure"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}