Instead, the Zionists are everywhere and at it again, working their perfidious spells in the least discernible of ways. Last Thursday night, the BBC programme Newsnight featured an interview with Sami Khiyami, the Syrian ambassador to Britain. Khiyami writhed to account why his boss Bashar al-Assad was massacring Syrian protestors in the historically pro-Baathist town of Daraa. Their demand was an end to the 50-year-long "emergency law" that has allowed a dictatorship of a religious minority to rule over a religious majority (no accusations of "apartheid" here), but Khiyami was certain of the true origins of the disturbance: "Well, the Israelis could be behind it," he told a sceptical Jeremy Paxman, the Newsnight anchor. "They could be behind any bad thing in the world." (Important here is the fact that in January, Assad boasted that Syria would be immune to the civil unrest then engulfing Tunisia and Egypt because of Damascus's long-standing opposition to the Jewish state.) When asked by Paxman if Assad might some day stop torturing his own people, Khiyami evidently misheard him: "To Israel?" he replied with grammar as curious as his Freudian thought pattern, drawing Paxman's insistence that the topic at hand was still very much Syria.

Khiyami was only recycling a familiar theme. During the tumult in Tahrir Square, Egyptian state television — the same outlet that under Mubarak's reign exhibited a "documentary" based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — warned that the country was now infiltrated with Israeli spies posing as journalists. This was one reason, according to Lindsey Hilsum of the UK's Channel 4 News, that so many Western reporters covering the protests in Cairo and Alexandria were beaten up. James Hider of The Times of London, who was first detained by the Egyptian secret police and then assaulted by a mob while traveling with his journalist wife, reported how "both the Mubarak regime and the protesters are using Israel as a stick to beat the other," with the latter given to shout, "Ya Mubarak, leave, leave. Go and live in Tel Aviv." No more can have been expected of a society reared on decades of conspiracy theories that sought to explain away Egypt's economic and intellectual stagnation. According to a 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Project survey, anti-Jewish sentiment was at 97 per cent in Egypt, where a majority also disbelieved that Arabs had carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That same year, in response to such frightening lassitude of national imagination, Egyptian columnist Hassan Hafez wrote a depressive essay in the opposition newspaper, Al-Wafd: 

I wonder why we blame Israel for every fault in [Arab] society. This is the logic of the weak, who seek a peg on which to hang all their mistakes in order to evade a true confrontation with reality. An Egyptian plane crashed last November [and they say]: "This is an operation by the Israeli Mossad. [Muslims fight with Christian Copts] Al-Kushekh...and everyone blames the Israeli Mossad. Then, something even stranger happens: the price for a tank of gas rises up to 15 Egyptian pounds, and one newspaper claims that the reason for it is the export of gas to Israel! ... We blame Israel for failures in marketing or for the rise of prices. This is illogical and unacceptable... I wouldn't be surprised if they say that the Mossad is responsible for the social security problems in Egypt too.

Hafez had only to wait a while. But the widespread conspiracism to which he alluded helps explain the Israeli wariness of a post-Mubarak democracy where so far the ablest political movement is the Muslim Brotherhood.