In the 1990s, a cultural movement of Israeli Jews began questioning the basic truisms of Zionism and revisited Israel’s history. The narrative they spun was very close to the Palestinian one. But the shift of the Israeli society to the right and the outbreak of the second Intifada have marginalized this critical impulse.

Chapter 2 provides an in-depth exploration of the more open state opposition structure of the Hosni Mubarak regime – which groups were co-opted, which were included and allowed to participate, and which were excluded from formal political participation – and traces the impact of these different types of opportunity structures on the political and outreach activities that different groups undertook. We see that opposition groups that were excluded from the formal political system, such as Islamist groups and pro-reform umbrella groups, adjusted their strategies in response to exclusion and were alternately tolerated and repressed by the regime. During periods of toleration, these groups – especially Islamist groups – were able to establish an extensive grassroots presence through charities, community self-help organizations, private mosques, and individual religious outreach activities. These activities at the grassroots level, while not always directly confronting the state, constituted the construction of a “parallel society” that quietly contested the regime’s legitimacy. During periods of repression, members of these groups retreated underground and into informal networks until they found new venues through which to engage with their communities.

The fourth chapter shifts to the early 1990s. The 1990s and 2000s are crucial decades that saw the emergence of a new dominant social force, led by Gamal Mubarak and other businessmen associated with him, signalling the finale in the neoliberal project put in place under the previous ruling class. The financialisation of Egypt’s economy began in earnest, a process that not only created severe social tension but also marginalized other actors within the ruling class such as the military. By engaging in the debates surrounding this new social force, I argue that their decision to accelerate Egypt’s neoliberal restructuring contributed to the ultimate collapse of the ruling class and the continuing failure to create hegemony. Tracing the rise in violence and repression, I show how the pendulum swung further towards coercion under this ruling class. I pay particular attention to increasing police brutality in the everyday; electoral politics; increasing workers’ strikes; and the shift from productive to unproductive capital to highlight these changes. I argue that it is the ultimate failure of this ruling class to create a political project that could have become hegemonic that culminated in the 2011 revolution.

Chapter three examines Egypt’s embrace of a neoliberal policy paradigm through the adoption of a comprehensive package of structural adjustment policies proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the early 1990s. This neoliberal shift was a gradual process that was contested by the conservative faction within the ruling National Democratic Party who were primarily concerned with the preservation of social order. Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, an ideologically committed neoliberal faction, aligned with transnational capital, emerged within the party and was able to establish its hegemony and form government in 2004. Under this ‘government of businessmen’, the implementation of the neoliberal agenda was accelerated by means of an increasingly disciplinary state expropriating customary and public property and enforcing capitalist property rights, resulting in rising income inequality and growing popular discontent.