Egypt’s Televised Confusion

Excerpt

Last week, a well-known Egyptian restaurant chain released a promotional image featuring koshary, the country’s national dish, arranged to look like a missile. The hearty street food made from rice, pasta, lentils, chickpeas, and tomato sauce, is not exactly sculptural. But the image, seemingly AI-generated, began circulating on the sixth day of Israel’s Operation Rising Lion—and was widely interpreted as a nod of support for Iran. Tehran’s state-affiliated media celebrated it, even falsely claiming that Israel had threatened the restaurant after it began serving meals styled after Iranian rockets.

In Egypt itself, the missile-shaped dish drew little criticism. Instead, it fit comfortably into the dominant narrative being peddled across Egyptian media, painting Iran as the region’s new resistance hero and Israel as weak and unraveling. However, after the image began to draw criticism in Israel, which has been at peace with Egypt for more than four decades, the restaurant quietly took it down and issued a statement claiming the ad had nothing to do with “politics.” The restaurant is a frequent destination for foreign dignitaries and appears well connected to the political establishment—raising the possibility that the removal came at the government’s request.

In today’s Egypt, one can cheer for Tel Aviv’s destruction on national television, but an image of an AI-generated koshary missile might stray too far from the official script. Once a strategic tool, the regime’s narrative has grown so muddled that few seem sure what still counts as acceptable dissent, or acceptable conformity. The incident highlights a growing contradiction at the heart of Egyptian policy—and an increasingly unsustainable dissonance between the government’s geopolitical interests and the populist narratives it tolerates, and even orchestrates, at home.

What appears at first glance to be a silly marketing stunt reflects a small crack in the careful political balancing act built by Egyptian regimes. For decades, Cairo has borrowed the populist language of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who positioned Egypt as the leader of the Arab resistance to Israel, while maintaining the pragmatic peace-building approach of President Anwar Sadat, who signed Egypt’s historic peace treaty with Israel in 1979. The result is a system that rails against Israel in the public square, even as it preserves strategic coordination behind closed doors.

Mariam Wahba is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow her on X @themariamwahba.