Rare protests at American University of Cairo drive off former US ambassador
Students at the American University of Cairo staged rare protests against former US ambassador to Egypt Daniel Kurtzer on Tuesday, forcing him and a group of American graduate students to leave the campus.
Video footage of AUC’s campus shows hundreds of young, diverse Egyptians swarming the campus’s grounds and halls in protest against Kurtzer's arrival. Many students are wearing Palestinian keffiyehs and waving the Palestinian flag.
"Who said '67? All the land is Palestine. We won't normalise," the students chanted, in an apparent rebuke of Arab states who call for a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict based on pre-1967 borders.
In a statement, AUC’s Student Union said more than 40 student organisations had participated “in outrage, conscience, and solidarity with Palestine”.
“This is not about academic freedom but about moral responsibility,” the students said, adding that “giving a platform to someone who defends apartheid is normalisation, and we refuse to let it pass as anything else.”
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The student’s association said the protests marked “the first time in years” that so many organisations on campus had come together to reject a lecturer.
Kurtzer, the statement said, is “a former US ambassador to Israel and a representative of institutions complicit in the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people”.
The protest is notable for several reasons.
AUC was founded in 1919 and is a legacy of the US’s soft power projection in the Middle East. Notably, AUC students tend to come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds in Egypt.
Contrast to Trump visit
Egypt is Israel's oldest peace partner, but its 1979 peace treaty was tested by Israel's onslaught on Gaza, which has killed over 67,000 Palestinians and has been labelled a genocide by the United Nations, world leaders and genocide scholars.
Ordinary Egyptians seethed with anger at Israel's assault on the enclave. Meanwhile, members of Egypt's military elite worried about the security implications of Israeli threats to expel Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai Peninsula.
Protests in support of Palestine have become common across US and European universities, but have been more subdued across the Middle East. Mass political expression in Egypt is tightly controlled.
The government allowed some demonstrations in public places at the start of Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip in October 2023.
Kurtzer served as US ambassador to Egypt from 1997 to 2001 and then as US ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005. He is regularly quoted as an expert on the region in US media.
The protests by AUC students against a former senior US official offered a rare contrast to US President Donald Trump’s visit to Egypt just a day earlier and the tightly choreographed reception he received.
Trump travelled to Egypt’s Red Sea resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh as part of a victory lap to celebrate a ceasefire in Gaza.
The agreement recognised two key demands of Egypt and other Arab states: that Israel not annex Gaza and that Palestinians will not be forcibly displaced from the enclave.
However, the deal has been criticised for failing to provide details on Israel's full withdrawal from the strip. Israel has already violated the terms by bombing Gaza and slashing aid entries into the enclave.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and other world leaders stood behind Trump as he delivered a boisterous, gaffe-filled speech welcoming the deal.
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