Reuters reports: Israel has become a punchbag for politicians vying for votes in Egypt’s presidential race, playing on popular antipathy in Egypt towards its neighbor, but the realities of office are likely to ensure a 33-year-old peace treaty is not jeopardized.

An ex-air force commander in the race boasts of bringing down Israeli aircraft in 1973, the last of Egypt’s four wars with Israel. One Islamist often refers to Israel as the “Zionist entity”, rather than by name, and describes it as an “enemy”.

A leftist candidate pledges to support the Palestinian resistance against Israel, where officials have watched Egypt’s political turmoil with increasing wariness after the downfall of Mubarak who oversaw a cold yet stable peace.

None of the candidates want to tear up the document signed in 1979 but they repeatedly warn in rallies and debates it should be reviewed. Many of them grumble at provisions in the U.S.-brokered deal they say are biased in Israel’s favor.

Yet, beyond the bluster of the campaign trail, the next president’s in-tray will be full of more pressing issues such reviving an economy on the ropes.

Hossam el-Hamalawy writes: A little over a week ago, in Obour City, hundreds of Egypt’s notorious Central Security Forces (CSF) conscripts mutinied over torture received at the hands of their officers. The conscripts took to the highway, blocked the road, and even started chanting a famous anti-police song composed by the Ultras White Knights, one of the country’s football fan groups. The mutiny was put down quickly by the army, together with concessions and promises offered.

This was not the first time such a mutiny has occurred since the January 2011 revolution. Several mutinies occurred on the “Friday of Anger“. The following day, I met a guy in Mohamed Mahmoud Street while marching on the interior ministry who was a CSF conscript who escaped from his camp to join the protesters. Repeated mutinies were reported in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere over the course of the following months, over ill treatment by officers, long working hours and bad food.

The CSF is the interior ministry’s army, and its central arm in crushing street dissent. Those conscripts are poorly paid, poorly fed, tortured, and made to do the state’s dirtiest job. The last time they undertook a full-scale mutiny was in 1986. It was brutally crushed by Mubarak who sent in the army. [Continue reading…]

Peter Beaumont reports: There is a narrow footbridge overlooking the entrance to the ministry of defence in the Abbasiya district of Cairo. On Friday afternoon, this crowded bridge provided the best view of the frontline in the latest round of violent clashes between the army and demonstrators who suspect the country’s ruling generals of wanting to hold on to power.

On one side of a ring of barbed wire, soldiers hurled bricks and fired tear gas. Below the bridge, the protesters facing the soldiers threw their own missiles, while others removed the injured on motorbikes or carried them limp on their shoulders, some insensible, others spattered in blood.

I bumped into Hazem Abdel Rahman, a young protester, drenched in sweat, holding his injured arm. “I came here this morning and everything was peaceful. People linked arms to keep the crowd back from the ministry of defence. But then after Friday prayers people came who we did not know and infiltrated our demonstration and started throwing stones,” he said.

Others say the trouble started after some protesters were grabbed by the soldiers trying to cross the wire. A few minutes after I spoke to Hazem, the first sound of live gunfire rang out, driving the protesters back in panic. I ran, but found myself trapped between two groups of soldiers, forced to climb several walls and cross a railway line to escape, only to be confronted by an angry group of supporters of the military.

“You are a spy,” one shouted, attempting to drag me away for questioning, prevented in his efforts by the intervention of other residents. Other journalists covering events in Abbasiya in the last few days have not been so fortunate. Eighteen have been arrested or injured, including one who reportedly had an ear cut off during an attack.

Egypt’s long-awaited presidential elections – the first round of which begins on 23 May – appear to be unravelling amid rising violence and protest. By the end of Friday, two people were dead, including a soldier; hundreds had been injured or arrested; and a curfew had been imposed by the army in the area where the violence was worst.

Once again, the most significant faultline of the protests – one that threatens to overshadow the election campaign – has been the growing rift between the generals and the political parties who would replace them when – or rather if – the army relinquishes power, as it has promised to do, on 30 June.

Some of those out protesting on Friday have special reason to despise them. In Tahrir Square a few hours before the violent dispersal of the protest in Abbasiya, I had met Mohammed Atta, a 45-year-old tour guide. He had been in Abbasiya on Wednesday and witnessed the baltagiya – well-organised gangs of armed thugs – attack a sit-in dominated by ultra-conservative Salafi Muslims and supported by revolutionaries, outside the defence ministry. That day at least 11 people died, many shot in the head at close quarters.

I encountered Atta attending a protest in the square called by the Muslim Brotherhood to protest at those killings. “I was in the middle of the street [in Abbasiya] when they came in from one end,” Atta recalled. “I saw them come out from where the police were.”

Atta fled, chased by 12 men. He left behind him the body of his murdered friend, Atif al-Gohary, a 41-year-old chef. “He went over to talk to them, to ask them to be peaceful,” he recalled. Instead, al-Gohary was shot in the chest and his face was stamped in.

“He was like a brother to me. He taught me about revolution. On 25 January last year when I came here to Tahrir Square at the beginning of the revolution, I was afraid to go beyond the police lines. But he called me down to join him and told me not to be afraid.”

Atta had come to Tahrir Square on Friday to participate in the millioneya – the million-man protest organised by the Muslim Brotherhood and other parties to call on Egypt’s military council, which has ruled since the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak more than a year ago, to keep its promise and stand down.

But if the Brotherhood had hoped to pack the square that became the symbol of the resistance to both the Mubarak regime and military rule, they were to be disappointed, despite bussing in supporters from hundreds of miles away. The Brotherhood, once regarded as Egypt’s most organised and potent political force, has begun to wane. [Continue reading…]

Egypt Independent reports: As the race heats up between the nation’s two leading Islamist presidential candidates, the Muslim Brotherhood is mixing its new-found political rhetoric with the more comfortable — and potentially popular — religious discourse that dominated the group for generations.

Observers believe that the revival of the Brotherhood’s religious discourse reflects the group’s confusion and threatens the tenuous trust it is building with secular Egyptians and the West.

Since he launched his campaign, the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsy, affirmed his commitment to the group’s “Nahda” (renaissance) political platform, which seeks to establish democracy, ensure equality and justice and improve the general welfare. But at campaign rallies, Morsy’s campaign often strays from these terrestrial aims.

Besides his constant pledge to implement God’s Sharia, Morsy has been touring the country with backers who portray him as the sole Islamist candidate invoking an overtly religious language. His cheerleaders have tweaked the revolution’s famous slogan, “The people want to bring down the regime” into “The people want God’s Sharia to be implemented.”

The New York Times reports: Egypt’s most conservative Islamists endorsed a liberal Islamist for president late Saturday night, upending the political landscape and confounding expectations about the internal dynamics of the Islamist movement.

The main missionary and political groups of the ultraconservatives, known as Salafis, threw their support behind Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a dissident former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood known for his tolerant and inclusive view of Islamic law.

The endorsement goes a long way toward making Mr. Aboul Fotouh the front-runner in a campaign that could shape the ultimate outcome of the revolt that ousted the former strongman, Hosni Mubarak.

Mr. Aboul Fotouh’s liberal understanding of Islamic law on matters of individual freedom and economic equality had already made him the preferred candidate of many Egyptian liberals.

His endorsement on Saturday by the Salafis now makes him the candidate of Egypt’s most determined conservatives, too. Known for their strict focus on Islamic law, the Salafis often talk of reviving medieval Islamic corporal punishments, restricting women’s dress and the sale of alcohol, and cracking down on heretical culture.

The decision was announced by officials of the preaching group the Salafi Call and on the Web site of its allied party, Al Nour. Neither group gave a definitive reason for their pick.

But Salafi leaders described their decision in part as a reaction against the presidential candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, the powerful and established Islamist group that now dominates Parliament. Though more moderate than the Salafis, the Brotherhood also favors the fashioning of an explicitly Islamic democracy in Egypt, and on social and cultural issues the group is closer to the Salafis than Mr. Aboul Fotouh is.

But in television interviews on Saturday night, some Salafis said they believed the Brotherhood’s current candidate, Mohamed Morsi, was weaker than either Mr. Aboul Fotouh or the Brotherhood’s original nominee, Khairat el-Shater. Others said the group was wary of giving a monopoly on political power to the Brotherhood, which recently abandoned its pledge not to seek control of the presidency as well as the Parliament.

Abdel Moneim El Shahat, a spokesman for the Salafi group, acknowledged a big difference with Mr. Aboul Fotouh over his understanding of a verse of the Koran declaring, “There is no compulsion in religion,” which he interprets to mean that the state should not compel people to follow religious rules. But such compulsion “in reality is not possible now” in any case, Mr. Shahat said.

Al Jazeera reports: The head of the Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company has said it has terminated its contract to ship gas to Israel because of violations of contractual obligations, a decision Israel said overshadows the peace agreement between the two countries.

Mohamed Shoeb, the gas company’s top official, said Sunday’s decision was not political. This has nothing to do with anything outside of the commercial relations,” Shoeb said.

He said Israel has not paid for its gas in four months. Yigal Palmor, Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, denied the claim of not paying.

The 2005 Egypt-Israel gas deal has come under strident criticism from leaders of the popular uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak, the longtime Egyptian president, last year.

Critics charge that Israel got bargain prices, and Mubarak cronies skimmed millions of dollars off the proceeds.

Ashraf Khalil writes: Last week, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading light, Khairat al-Shater, looked like a confident front-runner in Egypt’s presidential race. On the night of April 12, more than 5,000 men — and another 1,000 or so women, in their own section — packed into a huge canvas-walled enclosure in the working-class district of Shubra al-Kheima, a Brotherhood stronghold, to hear what their candidate would do upon capturing the Egyptian presidency.

The rally, one of Shater’s first since announcing his candidacy, managed to be both tightly organized and raucous — Muslim Brotherhood cadres of all ages drowned out the noise from the neighboring multi-lane roadway. Supporters brought dozens of rolled white flags declaring a coming “Egyptian renaissance,” which they joyfully unfurled on cue. Meanwhile, senior officials at the head table drank from coffee mugs emblazoned with Shater’s rather imposing headshot.

Shater’s last name means “clever” in Arabic — a fitting moniker for the self-made millionaire — and one handmade sign carried by a young woman declared, “Egypt needs someone clever!”

A tall broad-chested man who spent years in prison under the Mubarak regime, Shater commanded the room without even rising from his seat. He barely talked religion, instead focusing on rebuilding the economy, the country, and Egyptian pride. “My brothers, we need to feel like we’re at the beginning of a true renaissance,” he said. “We want to build our country. We’re coming out of a period of looting.”

As befits a frontrunner, Shater generally avoided attacking his political rivals. However, he made one notable exception: He repeatedly called out Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s longtime intelligence chief and Hosni Mubarak consigliere, who had recently thrown his hat in the political race.

“Omar Suleiman and Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence men are trying to drag us backwards,” he half-shouted. They want to “steal the revolution and forge the elections.”

Just over 48 hours later, Suleiman was out of the race. But so was Shater — and the landscape of Egypt’s post-revolutionary transition had morphed yet again. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: On a warm Wednesday morning last October, around 500 Egyptian army officers based at the Air Defence Institute on the outskirts of Alexandria staged a mini revolt.

According to a lieutenant colonel with direct knowledge of the protest, the men were angry about the punishment given to a fellow officer by his superiors. After refusing to train, the officers demanded to meet either Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of Egypt’s military and in effect the country’s acting president, or his second in command. They wanted to meet the commanders, they said, to make the case for better treatment.

“Their reasoning was: Egypt is having a revolution and they too have demands,” the lieutenant colonel said.

The rebellion, unreported before now and confirmed by three other officers in the unit, lasted several days. As Egyptians were calling for quicker and deeper change – demands directed at the military council that runs the country – at least one part of the country’s military was itself split.

The popular protests that ousted Hosni Mubarak last year were rooted in the yawning gap between rich and poor, and the desire to get rid of a leader about to enter his fourth decade in power. The wealth in Egypt was, and is, controlled by a small and often uniformed elite. To most Egyptians, Mubarak, a career officer in the air force, was both symbol and cause of those inequities.

As in the country, so in the barracks. Over the past six months, more than a dozen serving or recently retired mid- and lower-ranking officers have said they and their colleagues see Egypt’s revolution as their own chance to win better treatment, salaries, and improved conditions and training. They are tired, they said, of a few very top officers becoming rich while the vast majority of officers and ordinary soldiers struggle.

As the military and the Muslim Brotherhood both press their own candidates ahead of the presidential elections scheduled for May and June – former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman entered the race as the army’s choice last week and Khairat al-Shater, the Brotherhood’s deputy, two weeks ago – the tensions in the lower ranks shed light not only on the country’s most powerful institution but on Egypt itself.

“Military ranks struggle like the rest of Egyptians because, like Egyptian society, the wealth of the military is concentrated at the top and does not trickle down. You have to reach a specific rank before wealth is unlocked,” one major said.

Tantawi, his Chief of Staff Sami Annan and other top commanders have moved to contain the officers’ frustration, holding regular meetings with military units in an attempt to boost morale and assure soldiers that their salaries will be raised and their concerns addressed, military leaders and mid-ranking officers who have attended the meetings said.

That seems to have placated the disgruntled officers, who say they will hold off on pushing their demands further until the ruling military council hands over power to an elected civilian government. But they insist they need real change. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Former President Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence chief and vice president filed papers in Egypt on Sunday declaring himself a presidential candidate. His entry gives Egyptians a chance to cast a vote against the revolution and for the old order.

The former vice president, Omar Suleiman, has been considered a potential candidate for months, and his formal entry is unlikely to shake up the race. In a recent poll taken by Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a state-financed research institution, about 9 percent of voters volunteered that Mr. Suleiman was the candidate they would choose, putting him in fourth place. The poll was completed before the popular Muslim Brotherhood nominated its own candidate, Khairat el-Shater.

Mr. Suleiman, a retired general, could become a magnet for the support of Egyptians most unhappy with the revolt that ousted Mr. Mubarak. Although the uprising produced Egypt’s first free and fair parliamentary elections, it has also led to more than a year of continued street protests, soaring crime rates, an economy on the brink of collapse and an increase in the power of both moderate and conservative Islamists.

Although almost no one is calling for Mr. Mubarak’s release from confinement or for a restoration of his government, many long for order. And a few still whisper that it takes a strong hand to control a country like Egypt, with its high rates of poverty and illiteracy.

Mr. Suleiman’s closeness to Mr. Mubarak is hard to overstate, and he was often talked about, along with the former president’s son Gamal, as a potential successor. For decades, Mr. Suleiman was Mr. Mubarak’s closest adviser, often trusted with the most delicate matters, like Egypt’s talks with Israel and the Palestinians.

As chief of intelligence, Mr. Suleiman knew all the secrets of the old government, its friends and its enemies. American officials have said that on matters of foreign policy, talking to Mr. Suleiman was as good as talking to Mr. Mubarak himself, and State Department cables released by the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks show that Mr. Suleiman collaborated with the United States in the interrogation of people suspected of being terrorists. Torture was routine under the Mubarak government’s security services.

The Jerusalem Post reports: Labor MK and former defense minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Monday that Egyptian presidential candidate Omar Suleiman would be “good for Israel.”

Ben-Eliezer, who held close personal ties to former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, told Israel Radio that Suleiman is a patriot, “he loves Egypt.” The former Egyptian intelligence chief, Ben-Eliezer added, views relations with Israel as a cornerstone of strategic importance for Egypt.

The Guardian reports: Egypt’s presidential race was thrown into further turmoil when a former ally of Hosni Mubarak announced that he had decided to run, and supporters of another candidate flooded Tahrir Square protesting that he was being pushed out by allegations his mother was a US citizen. Omar Suleiman, who was the ex-president’s intelligence chief, has inside influence that will make him a likely frontrunner in the elections, to be held on 23 and 24 May. His main opponent is likely to be Khairat el-Shater, candidate of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood.

Suleiman, a former general who appeared on television in February 2011 to announce that Mubarak would step down, said earlier this week that he had decided not to run. But he issued the statement on Friday on the state-run Mena news agency saying he had changed his mind after hundreds of supporters held a rally urging his candidacy.

“I can only meet the call and run in the presidential race,” he said. He had previously blamed organisational and financial constraints for not standing.

Suleiman must get 30,000 supporters to sign a petition before he can officially submit his application to stand in order to meet the official filing deadline on Sunday. Meanwhile thousands of supporters of another candidate, Hazem Abu Ismail, took over Tahrir Square on Friday to protest against what they said was a conspiracy brewing against their presidential candidate, regarding the supposed US citizenship of his late mother.

Issandr El Amrani writes: Since a little over a week ago, when the Islamist majority in Egypt’s parliament rushed through the appointment of a constituent assembly without any serious attempt at building a broader consensus, the country’s already ailing transition began to appear that much more fraught. The Muslim Brotherhood’s decision on Saturday to nominate its strongman, Khairat Al Shater, as a presidential candidate delivered another shock wave that could end whatever chance Egypt had left at achieving a stable democratic transition.

It should first be noted that the Muslim Brothers are perfectly within their rights to have chosen this course of action. The constitutional declaration in place since the end of March 2011, accepted by most political forces despite some doubts about its legality, gives parliament the right to appoint the constitutional assembly.

In allying with the Salafist Nour Party, with which it controls over 70 per cent of parliament, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) could very well control the process and outcome of the nomination process for the assembly. Likewise, even if it had repeatedly stated that it would not field a presidential candidate, and even expelled members who disagreed with this decision, it has the right to change its mind according to the changing political context.

Nonetheless, the decision to abandon any pretence of inclusiveness in the appointment of the constituent assembly is a mistake – one that might be explained by the distrust that reigns between the military junta now ruling Egypt and the Brotherhood, but a mistake nonetheless.

What it shows first and foremost, as the Brotherhood stands on the threshold of the political power it has sought for over eight decades, is a contempt for other political forces at a time when Egypt is sorely in need of a consensus that can support the momentous changes ahead. The question, for now, is not so much what the Brotherhood and other Islamists intend to do about the constitution – even if they can be expected to maximise the role that Sharia will play in the new Egypt.

In fact, unlike Salafists, the Brotherhood has provided few details of what its ideal constitution would look like, and not even a clear position on contentious issues such as the implementation of traditional Islamic punishments or the treatment of non-Muslims.

The New York Times reports: Hazem Salah Abu Ismail is an old-school Islamist.

He wants to move toward abolishing Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and cites Iran as a successful model of independence from Washington. He worries about the mixing of the genders in the workplace and women’s work outside the home. And he promises to bring extraordinary prosperity to Egypt, if it turns its back on trade with the West.

He has also surged to become a front-runner in the race to become Egypt’s next president, reconfiguring political battle lines here. His success may help explain why the United States offered signs of tacit approval over the weekend when the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamic group, broke its pledge not to field its own candidate.

With a first round of voting set for late May and a runoff in mid-June, the first presidential race here since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year is shaping up as a battle among Islamists.

The Brotherhood, which leads Parliament, had pledged not to seek the presidency for fear of provoking a backlash from the Egyptian military and the West. But Mr. Abu Ismail’s surge raises the prospect that the winner might not be a more secular or liberal figure, but a strident Islamist who opposes the Brotherhood’s pragmatic focus on stable relations with the United States and Israel and free-market economics.

Mr. Abu Ismail poses a subtler threat, too, challenging the Brotherhood’s status as the main voice of Islamist politics in Egypt and threatening to undermine its campaign to set aside Western fears of political Islam. The Brotherhood is taking a considerable risk in running its own candidate against him, since its victory is by no means assured.

And so, in a remarkable inversion, American policy makers who once feared a Brotherhood takeover now appear to see the group as an indispensable ally against Egypt’s ultraconservatives, exemplified by Mr. Abu Ismail.

American diplomats — surprised by the success of ultraconservative, populist Islamists known as Salafis in parliamentary elections — have watched Mr. Abu Ismail with growing alarm.

On Sunday, speaking on condition of standard diplomatic anonymity, State Department officials said they were untroubled and even optimistic about the Brotherhood’s reversal of its pledge not to seek the presidency. The Brotherhood’s candidate, Khairat el-Shater, a millionaire businessman considered the most formative influence on the group’s policies, is well known to both American diplomats and their contacts in the Egyptian military. Though in and out of prison, he was the Brotherhood’s main point of contact with Mr. Mubarak’s security services and is now its main conduit for talks with the council of generals who took power at his ouster.

Mr. Shater has met with almost all the senior State Department officials and American lawmakers visiting Cairo. He is in regular contact with the American ambassador, Anne Patterson, as well as the executives of many American companies here, and United States officials have praised his moderation as well as his intelligence and effectiveness.