The Sinai Peninsula and its largest city, El-Arish, were once an important trade route from the Levant to North Africa. For a variety of reasons and generally speaking, those who live among the trade routes tend to have stronger loyalties to local Sheikhs over religious leaders or national governments. They tend to care little about who is in charge, as long as their tribe continues to profit from the trade route. This has typically been the way of the Sinai Peninsula, which has been passed from Turkish to Egyptian to Israeli and back to Egyptian hands; local allegiances to tribal leaders were of greater importance than political participation at a national or transnational level. The terrorist attacks that occurred in the Sinai in July and last October illustrate that this dynamic has shifted for some of the peninsula’s residents, as these attacks were a crude and illegitimate form of politicking at a national and international level. Further adherence to the new, transnational movement of extremist Islam is just as alien to Bedouins, who, while conservative, have practiced the same form of largely non-violent faith for years without departure.

The new dynamics may be coming about for a couple of reasons. El-Arish is a border city with the Gaza Strip, and while traditionally its residents have been content to exploit its location for gain via cross-border commerce, tourism, and smuggling, it has recently become a hotbed of pro-Intifada sentiment. Those who are pro-Palestinian militants typically look upon the government of Egypt as guilty of the greatest betrayal for signing a peace deal with Israel . Further, residents of this area historically have been neglected by the Egyptian government, scraping by in absolute poverty. These factors are part of the origins of strong anti-government sentiment as well as the newly flourishing Islamic extremism among some in the area. For harboring such views, some young men, like the Feleifel brothers discussed in this article, who participated in both sets of attacks in the Sinai Peninsula, get themselves kicked out of their tribe. No longer under the protection and control of their tribal systems these men form small gangs to survive in the brutal desert. In these groups, militant ideologies are allowed to grow and be reinforced. With no prospects of income or sustenance, cut off from their communities, surviving in the desert with others like them who can reinforce their ideologies, and having nothing more to lose, such men may fall into terrorist ideology and activity that targets both the hated westerners who use their land as a vacation spot as well as the Egyptian government they despise.