Conversation with Prof. Donna Divine

By Cindy Mindell

Donna Divine

WEST HARTFORD – West Hartford resident Dr. Donna Divine is  Morningstar Family Professor in Jewish Studies and Professor of Government at Smith College, as well as associate faculty member at the University of Haifa and Bar Ilan University in Israel.

Divine spent the month of June co-facilitating a study and internship experience in Jerusalem, part of the Smith’s Global Engagement Seminar program. An expert on Middle East politics

and cultures, she not only engaged her students in an exploration of the political and religious history of the holy city, but also cast an eye south, to the goings-on in Egypt in the wake of the May elections.

Divine spoke with the Ledger about how the new political order is apt to affect Israel and the region.

Q: Does U.S. media give us a clear idea of what’s been happening in Egypt since the protests?

A: I have been arguing that the media doesn’t fully understand what’s going on in Egypt – because a member of the Muslim Brotherhood was elected president and the Islamist parties did so well in the parliamentary elections. Some see this as a takeover by the Islamists. Alternatively, because the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces deprived the president of powers, it was essentially a military coup. That’s not entirely accurate, because a lot of the interventions were through the Egyptian court system, both administrative and constitutional.

What’s going on in Egypt is that you have a number of different institutions – the court system, unions, professional associations – and under Mubarak, they were allowed limited freedom and a range in which to operate and he often used them to counter one another. If the labor strikes were demanding too much and hurting the economy, he could get the court system or security forces to intervene.

What you have are institutions that have a history of operating under a very authoritarian regime, but who haven’t agreed on a new set of rules, so are operating the same way as always. The Supreme Court decisions are based on precedents of the Mubarak era because there is no new Constitution. There are now different kinds of institutions operating without a common set of rules,

The situation is very chaotic and uncertain, and tends toward instability or provoking instability. But it’s not clear that you only have two political entities fighting for power. You have power that has been fragmented and divided much more widely, and it will be very difficult to overcome all these issues: not only what office has power to do what, but by what set of rules do you decide that? There are many unknowns,

Layering over this situation, and not helpful, is the deep and abiding conspiratorial outlook and set of values that affect even the more educated, liberal sectors in Egypt. From people who ought to know better, there is a kind of rational approach to things where you need evidence: for example, it was an American conspiracy that caused a Muslim Brotherhood person to win the presidency, and that allowed the military to withdraw certain powers from the president.

In reaction to the killing of the 15 Egyptian soldiers this week in the Sinai, you have the Muslim Brotherhood blaming Mossad.

This is not helpful. If you have a sector of Egyptian society that wants to organize and modernize and have some kind of credible democracy, you have to have some real sense of what’s going on, not base your approach on animosities or deeply embedded hostilities.

Q: What is important to understand about the power of the Muslim Brotherhood over Egyptian hearts and minds?

A: The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 in Egypt. The founder and Egyptians who supported it believed that Islam has the power to motivate people and that, when you’re weak scientifically, economically, etc., and when people are controlling you, the only way to escape that control is to use the power of religion. It was founded to free Egypt from the British, with branches elsewhere.

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