Photo: ReutersEvan Hill reports for Al Jazeera English:
The Israeli embassy in Cairo --- the first of its kind and one of only two in the Arab world --- sits on the top floor of an unremarkable 15-storey office building near the Nile, a short drive south and across the river from the revolutionary epicentre of Tahrir Square. From the roof, a poll protrudes and makes a right angle high above Ibn Malek Street. Fluttering from the poll is one of the most hated symbols in the Middle East: the Star of David.
Thousands of Egyptians protested below that flag on Sunday afternoon, the 63rd anniversary of Israel's independence. They wanted their post-revolution government to hear demands that Egypt break ties with Israel. Instead, they ran into a harsh post-revolution reality: The unchecked power of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
The demonstration had proceeded peacefully for hours before a surge toward the building's entrance at around 11pm caused the street to dissolve into a battlefield of burning tires, hurled rocks and swirling tear gas. Central Security and military troops violently dispersed the rally with rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition. One man was shot in the head and another in the abdomen.
Two hours into the fight, with the crowd thinned to hundreds of young, rock-throwing men, independent journalist Mohamed Effat arrived half a block away, in a square marked by a famous, 83-year-old statue of a sphinx and a peasant woman removing her veil – "Egypt's Renaissance."
The crowd around Effat shouted chants for a few minutes before a barrage of tear gas landed among them. The group ran several blocks south to escape the gas and paused on a corner near a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Four Seasons hotel. Moments later, soldiers charged from the other direction, firing their guns in the air. Effat and the others scattered into side streets leading toward the Nile, but the army had sealed the entire Corniche.
Soldiers quickly rounded up the group and herded them to the embassy, where hundreds of police and army troops had assembled underneath a bridge. Effat and the protesters were made to lie face down on the pavement with their hands behind their heads. Officers cursed and berated them.
They threatened anyone who looked up with a beating and said each protester faced a three-year sentence. Effat was released, but around 150 others were taken away by the army.
"Please, go ahead to military prison," a policeman said. "You'll really enjoy it there, you youth of the revolution."
By positioning itself as the guardian of stability, the army has garnered support from a public that remembers clearly how the loathed police force abdicated responsibility for the looters, vandals and street thugs unleashed by the regime against the revolution just a few months ago.
But since it was deployed to the streets on January 28, that same army has subjected thousands of ordinary Egyptians to incommunicado detentions, trials and sentencings in front of military courts that provide little or no due process. Soldiers have stormed demonstrations in Tahrir Square and have beaten activists with metal bars, ropes and electrified batons.
The military's new sweeping law enforcement power, sometimes used in coordination with the internal security apparatus, sometimes against it, and sometimes not at all, has thrown public life in Egypt into disarray.