From the time of Gamal Nasser’s seizure of power in 1956 to the mid-1970s, Egypt, due to its large military, its anti-imperialist rhetoric, and its support for Arab unity, was recognized as the leader of the Arab world. In 1977 Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat (1918–1981), negotiated a peace settlement with Israel known as the Camp David Accords. Each country gained: Egypt got back the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had taken in the 1967 Six-Day War (see Map 31.3), and Israel obtained peace and normal relations with Egypt. Israel also kept the Gaza Strip, taken from Egypt in 1967 and home to about 1 million Palestinians. Some Arab leaders denounced Sadat’s initiative as treason.

After Sadat was assassinated by Islamic radicals in 1981, Egyptian relations with Israel deteriorated, but Egypt and Israel maintained their fragile peace as Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, took office. Mubarak was a consistent supporter of Israel and a mediator for peaceful relations between Israel and the Arab world. In return for helping to stabilize the region, the United States gave Egypt billions of dollars in development, humanitarian, and military aid. Domestically, this aid failed to yield economic development, and Mubarak ruled with an increasingly dictatorial hand. Many of the government’s critics charged that massive fraud and corruption funneled Egypt’s wealth to a privileged few. Over 40 percent of Egyptians lived in poverty.

Human rights under Mubarak’s thirty years in office were no better. Emergency law, in place since 1967, legalized censorship, suspended limited freedom of expression and assembly, allowed for the establishment of a special security court, and gave the government the right to arrest people without charge and detain prisoners indefinitely. Mubarak used the emergency law to create a wholly separate justice system in order to silence all opposition and punish, torture, and kill anyone perceived as a threat to his rule. Demonstrations, political organizations, and even financial donations that were not approved by the government were banned under the law. Thousands of people were arrested. In May 2010 the parliament approved the law’s extension for another two years.

In December 2010 demonstrations broke out in Tunisia against the twenty-three-year authoritarian rule of President Zine Ben Ali, leading to his downfall on January 14, 2011. This populist revolt soon spread across North Africa and the Middle East, including to the streets of Cairo and other cities in Egypt as Egyptians of all ages united in revolt against Mubarak’s dictatorial rule. After three weeks of increasingly large demonstrations, coordinated through Facebook, Twitter, and other electronic communications networks, Mubarak stepped down as president in 2011 and was arrested soon after. Libya, located between Tunisia and Egypt, also witnessed an uprising against its dictatorial leader of forty-two years, Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi struggled violently to remain in power, but was deposed and killed amid European and U.S. air strikes. That same year, a lengthy and intense civil war erupted in Syria, pitting opponents of ruler Bashar al-Assad against an army equipped and trained to oppose Israel.

The “Arab Spring” uprisings that swept the Middle East shook a political order that had rested in the hands of the armed forces and pursued secular, nationalist objectives. The deposed leaders were the ideological descendants of Nasser, though their regimes had come to rely more on force than on modernizing social reform. The reaction against these regimes was often religious and culturally conservative. The political transitions resulting from this upheaval tended to pit secular and religious factions against each other amid debates over the nature of government and social change.