Resistance against Israeli occupation and Egyptian repression has a long history in the Sinai peninsula. Now escalating Islamist violence has erupted in a fury of revenge against decades of misrule.

Mohamed Youssef Tabl, 31, was shot by an Egyptian soldier at the gates of Sheikh Zuwayyid, 30km east of Al-Arish, capital of North Sinai; he worked for the water supply company and happened to be on a government mission. Tabl was well known and his death did not go unnoticed. Sympathy and solidarity helped his friends and family contain their anger. That is not the case for thousands of unnamed victims. The circles Tabl moved in, even inside Al-Arish, are mostly urban and well educated. The community in the border area is mostly Bedouin, marginalised and stigmatised; victim of a scorched earth policy, it has been forced to take up arms.

Al-Arish was part of Egypt’s peaceful revolution in January 2011. But the reaction to the killing of the first demonstrator on the main square in the nearby Bedouin town of Sheikh Zuwayyid was particularly violent. Local political and human rights activists withdrew; women began to break rocks into stones small enough for children to throw; and men got out their Kalashnikovs and RPGs.

Three decades of injustice, oppression, humiliation and government lies did not produce as strong a thirst for revenge as did the last few years of the Mubarak era. After a first major wave of terrorist attacks in South Sinai in 2004, the local population was brutally repressed. There was an unprecedented surge in the number of of human rights violations, against women in particular, by police in Rafah and Sheikh Zuwayyid, surpassing even those perpetrated by the Israeli army during the occupation of 1967-82 (starting from the Six Day war). This strengthened the determination of armed groups, especially the Salafist and jihadist militias such as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis (ABM).

The early jihadists

In Sinai, religion-based resistance against Israel started in 1948 when the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) established training camps for volunteer soldiers in Al-Arish and Sad al-Rawafaa. After Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers seized power (...)