The sense of isolation was compounded by the signs of utter dependence on the United States to resolve the crisis at the embassy, where the security guards, holed up in a safe room, were freed by Egyptian commandos dispatched under heavy pressure from Washington.
The challenges on multiple fronts have generated debate here over whether Israel’s actions and policies have created its predicament or whether larger regional forces are at work.
The trigger for the outburst in Egypt, which led to the hurried airlift of the ambassador and nearly all of his staff members to Israel, was the killing of five Egyptian border guards last month as Israeli troops pursued gunmen who had crossed from Egypt and carried out a deadly attack in southern Israel.
But the roots of the anti-Israeli sentiment, bottled up during the rule of then-President Hosni Mubarak, run deeper, fueled by Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, for whom there is widespread sympathy among ordinary Egyptians and throughout the Arab world.
Gideon Levy, a columnist in the liberal daily Haaretz, traced much of the popular Egyptian anger to Israel’s war against the militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip in late 2008 and early 2009.
Televised images of that offensive, in which about 1,400 Palestinians were killed, many of them civilians, caused outrage across the Arab world. The campaign, Levy wrote in a column published Sunday, was “a fateful turning point in the attitude of the world and the region toward Israel.”
The Gaza operation also led to the fraying of relations with Turkey, whose prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, harshly condemned Israel’s attacks.
The relationship soured further after a deadly Israeli raid last year on a Turkish-flagged ship leading an aid flotilla seeking to defy an Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. Israel’s refusal to apologize for the killing of nine people during clashes aboard the vessel led to a Turkish decision to downgrade relations and expel Israel’s ambassador and top diplomats, who left last week.
Shlomo Avineri, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that “developments in Turkey and Egypt have coalesced” with Israeli actions, producing the crisis in ties with both nations.
In Egypt, he said, “a military junta that is effectively running the country, but with very problematic legitimacy, is both weak and looking over its shoulder at what the street is doing.” Turkey under Erdogan is trying to assert regional dominance, Avineri said, following a “neo-Ottoman hegemonistic policy” that has translated into a confrontational posture toward Israel.
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