Ending empire grievances redirected Egyptian activism to broader Arab and African causes

Evidence

For those who held them, those hopes have been disappointed. The general situation in the Middle East, far from improving, deteriorated rapidly. The Egypt-Israel border, after a period of comparative calm, became and remained the chief battlefield of Israeli-Arab conflict. The removal of the last specifically Egyptian grievance left the Egyptians free to take up the larger causes of those whom they call their Arab and African brothers. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1177

Categorization

• XREF: The counterintuitive causal claim — that removing a specific grievance freed actors for larger ones — echoes a pattern in decolonization studies and Said-adjacent accounts of how colonial withdrawal did not pacify but re-channeled anti-Western energy.