But one question still remains: What were they fighting for?

This weekend, Egypt reopened the Rafah crossing into the Gaza strip, which is perhaps a sign that it is time for a reassessment of Egypt’s recent revolution and the legacy of the man it brought down. Hosni Mubarak was considered a U.S. ally because he shared many of our country’s stated interests, including stopping Hamas, a group despised by Mubarak and his security chief, Omar Suleiman. The two men stood against the armed Palestinian resistance movement because they feared their own Muslim Brotherhood, a like-minded counterpart to Hamas, and Iranian expansion, which they saw as a by-product of Hamas’ power.

But Mubarak’s Egypt is no more—the military still rules as it did behind the veneer of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, but Cairo can no longer afford to be a stable U.S. ally. Mubarak has been charged with the capital crime of killing protesters during the revolution, along with assorted lesser crimes. The question then is whether the reportedly ailing Mubarak will die before the state can execute him—maybe it will be done quietly or perhaps, with a flourish, in the middle of Tahrir Square. Egypt’s rulers will spill the blood of Mubarak and his sons when they have nothing else with which to satisfy the hunger of the revolution—which is happening in the middle of an economic crisis that will make it difficult to feed a country of 83 million people.

Maybe someday there will be an accounting of all the fictions that determined our understanding of the Egyptian revolution as it unfolded. In retrospect, it is strange that an American intellectual and political class proved so credulous during the uprising. The Egyptian media and government officials are well-known for a casual relationship with the truth, as well as a tradition of anti-Semitism in the government-owned and independent presses. It was Egyptian officials who claimed that a shark attack on German tourists in the Sinai was engineered by the Mossad, a fable regarded by the U.S. intelligentsia as darkly humorous evidence of an abnormally thwarted culture incapable of distinguishing between reality and a bogeyman engendered by fearful, childish, systemic anti-Semitism.

And yet the international media took every word that came out of the Egyptian street during the revolution as the absolute truth. For instance, there was the notion that the violence of the revolution resulted from Mubarak’s order for the police to leave their posts and throw open the jails. That such an order would be followed throughout the chain of command would be a remarkable feat in a country not known for its bureaucratic efficiency. It seemed not to occur to reporters and policymakers that in the midst of general chaos—and Egypt is chaotic in its nature—many policemen may have simply left their posts for fear of being overrun by revolutionary mobs.

The people who fought with the police in the streets those first few nights seem to have been the same who later turned to violence against the demonstrators as well as the press. But this, too, was blamed on Mubarak, for these people were assumed to be thugs in his hire, as were the men who rode the horses and camels down from the Pyramids. Maybe, as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, it really was pro-Mubarak thugs responsible for the violence against the international press, but there are plenty of other Egyptian outfits hostile to free media, like the Muslim Brotherhood. According to Kristof, however, the Muslim Brotherhood is no worse than the Republican party. Pro-Mubarak thugs were even blamed for the rising tide of violence in post-Mubarak Egypt.

Mubarak was faulted for the anti-Semitism in the Egyptian media and for empowering Islamists while crushing the liberal movement. The facts, sadly, are otherwise. It is true that Mubarak had thrown certain liberals in jail, like the former presidential candidate Ayman Nour, but the former president is hardly responsible the absence of a genuine liberal culture in Egypt. Mubarak did not empower Islamists; he fought them tooth and nail for two decades, and they tried to kill him in Sudan. The reason that the Muslim Brotherhood still exists in spite of Mubarak’s ruthlessness is that Islamism is a powerful political current that represents the flower of Arab modernity and will always have a constituency in Muslim-majority countries. Nor is Mubarak responsible for anti-Semitism in the Egyptian press: The unpleasant reality is that the country and the surrounding region would be anti-Semitic if Mubarak had never been born.

None of these facts seemed to matter—not to the revolutionaries, of course, but neither to the U.S. intelligentsia, even as the narrative fit a familiar pattern. During the revolution, Mubarak came to play the role that Israel and the United States typically play in Egypt: He was the source of all evil. It is only now, as dissatisfaction with the army mounts, that the Egyptian revolutionaries are coming to recognize that the army they welcomed in Tahrir as brothers have always held the real power in Cairo.

The strange fact is that Mubarak was a reformer. Or at least he was considered so by the World Bank and the IMF, which gave Egypt high rankings over the last half decade. The army shared a common goal with the revolutionaries in bringing down Mubarak because it, too, did not want the president’s son Gamal to succeed him, lest he take a cut out of their lucrative business enterprises.

Since the country’s 2004 economic reforms, spearheaded by Gamal Mubarak and his band of technocrats, the country’s economy grew at an average of 7 percent annually. While the common charge is that the country’s economic miracle didn’t trickle down to the lower classes, the inequality index held steady. Moreover, it is not the rural or urban poor who engineered the revolution, but rather a large segment of middle-class youth enjoying the economic upturn who took to the streets on behalf, as they claimed, of all Egypt.

It’s fine if we want to chuck out IMF and World Bank benchmarks for reform, but if we are going to judge a country’s political system according to how many people social media networkers can put on the streets then that is going to mean something different for U.S. Middle East policy. In the case of Egypt, it means American taxpayers are expected to pick up the tab for someone else’s street theater.

The $2 billion that Washington has been giving Cairo every year for 30 years is essentially a bribe to convince Egypt not to shoot itself in the head by going to war with Israel. But the problem isn’t just that 1981 money doesn’t cover 2011 bills. Since the revolution, tourism, one of the country’s major sources of revenue, is way down due to the instability and ongoing violence, including several attacks against Coptic Christians, and $13 billion in foreign exchange reserves has fled the country. Egypt is not going to woo back foreign investors at this point, not just because of instability but because the policy is associated with the once-ruling family now on trial for its life.

So, how does Egypt, the world’s largest importer of wheat, feed itself if prices continue to rise because of a severe drought in China, the world’s largest exporter of wheat? Egypt’s new rulers need to show—by opening up Rafah, letting Iranian ships pass through the Suez Canal, brokering a reconciliation deal between Hamas and Fatah—what a new Egypt could look like, one that would threaten to spin dangerously out of the U.S. orbit unless the Americans pay up.

This gambit is nothing new for Egypt, which performed the same ballet under Gamal Nasser during the early years of the Cold War. Nasser used the United States and the USSR against each other to get what he wanted—prestige, power, and American money. It worked even after he concluded the 1955 deal for Czech (i.e., Soviet) arms. Sure, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to fund Nasser’s Aswan Dam project, for which the Soviets eventually footed the bill. But in 1956, Washington still thought highly enough of Nasser to demand that their British, French, and Israeli allies withdraw their invasionary forces from Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Only in the aftermath of the 1973 war with Israel did Egypt, now under Anwar Sadat, ally itself with the United States, a deal that Mubarak kept faithfully for 30 years.

Of course there is no longer a superpower rivalry, which is good for U.S. strategy in the big picture. But Egypt’s brinksmanship will still present plenty of headaches. Iran is not going to give the Egyptians money; and even if the Saudis don’t renege on the $4 billion they’ve promised Cairo, that’s hardly enough. The only place to turn is Washington, but the $1 billion in debt relief and the other billion in investment we’ve promised is evidence we don’t have the cash either.

Without bread, Egypt will turn to spectacles, and so the Mubaraks will probably hang. And after Egypt has purged itself of that evil, it will turn again to the evil that has plagued the Egyptian imagination since 1948: the Zionists and their backer in Washington. Cairo, say Western rationalists in the press and policy circles, knows it would lose any war with Israel and does not want to forfeit that $2 billion a year from the United States. But there are many other factors that will shape the thinking in Cairo in the months and years to come, and there is nothing rational about a society whose authorities believe that the Mossad exerts secret mind-control over sharks.

• The Obama administration is deciding whether to offer not only same but an actual new move in favor of Mideast peace in the president’s speech tomorrow on the Arab Spring. More at 10. [NYT]

• President Assad said his poorly trained police had made mistakes and caused more deaths. So, like, they tripped when they were brutally putting down the Syrian people’s uprising against him? [AP/WP]

• Thomas Friedman calls on Prime Minister Netanyahu to put his money where his mouth is: Stop building settlements and propose an actual two-state map. [NYT]

• A new World Bank report on Palestinian corruption is mixed, praising further prevention thereof but tsk-tsking a failure to prosecute past offenders. [AP/WP]

• Former President Moshe Katsav’s seven-year rape sentence has been delayed pending appeal, so he won’t do jailtime for now. [Haaretz]

The sinkhole into which Raz fell was one of many that have formed on the east and west shores as a result of shrinkage on the body of water—actually a lake—that borders Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel, according to Israeli Environmental Ministry spokeswoman Galit Cohen. The holes have also disrupted travel on the surrounding highways and doomed a plan to build 5,000 hotel rooms on the Dead Sea shoreline, she said. Among other problems, the receding shoreline has marooned the once-seaside spa at Kibbutz Ein Gedi a mile away from the water. In fact, according to experts, the sea has been shrinking at an alarming rate for some time, dropping a meter a year in volume for the past two decades. But a World Bank project designed to pump water into it from the Red Sea in southern Israel is raising an outcry among local environmental organizations, who say that large river engineering problems are the cause of the Dead Sea’s demise and not the solution.

The lake’s contraction, geologists agree, owes mainly to extensive Israeli and Jordanian dam-and-diversion projects for agriculture and drinking water that have reduced the Jordan River to little more than a trickle. Mineral and potash extraction on the Dead Sea shores in both countries has taken a further toll. A Ministry of the Environment study found that the sea’s surface area went from 1,000 square kilometers (about 386 square miles) in 1950 to 650 square kilometers (about 250 square miles) in 2006. For the past year, the World Bank has worked with the Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian governments to study a Red Sea-Dead Sea canal as possible remedy for the ailing sea. The plan would pump 200 billion cubic meters (about seven trillion cubic feet) out of the Red Sea on the Eilat and Aqaba shores, to be pumped 112 miles northward to the Dead Sea. Along the way, half the water would be desalinated and shared by the three parties. The remaining brine would go to the Dead Sea. Supporters claim this will solve the region’s water shortage and preserve the unique tourist attraction from ruin.

But others, like Raz, are skeptical. He has written that Israel has neglected to check alternative methods to save the Dead Sea, such as importing water from Turkey or increasing desalinization. In addition, he notes, the World Bank’s environmental impact study will be too short to fully assess damage. “This plan would result in about 84 million tons of dissolved salts entering the Dead Sea annually, about 31.5 times more than the Jordan River supply in the past, with a different chemical composition,” Raz wrote.

Raz’s doubts mirror the concerns of Friends of the Earth Middle East, an environmental organization with offices in Tel Aviv, Bethlehem, and Amman. Spokeswoman Mira Edelstein said that the different water supplies may cause red algae to form on top of the sea, while a chalky plastery substance might form in layers underneath. Further south, the pumping stations in the Red Sea could wipe out coral reefs.

“Israel and Jordan live off of tourism in that area,” said Edelstein. “Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by pumping this water out of the Red Sea?”

Edelstein added that Friends of the Earth is researching the cost of a Northern Option to open the dams holding back the Jordan River. “Our protest is not the Red-Dead Canal specifically, because the feasibility studies are not yet finished,” she said. “But they’re only studying one option to save the Dead Sea…The World Bank has agreed to study the Northern Option, but they aren’t doing it with the same intensity.”

The World Bank said studies are looking at all the options. “We’re spending well in excess of five million dollars studying the environmental effects of the proposed water conveyance program,” said Alex McPhail, lead water and sanitation specialist at the World Bank Group. “We understand that there are lots of environmental and cultural concerns. We don’t have any results yet.”

According to Eran Feitelson, a trans-boundary water expert, Friends of the Earth’s stance leaves out the severity of Jordan’s water problems. Whereas Israel plans to desalinize its way to drinking water supplies, most Jordanians live far away from the country’s only shoreline and seawater desalinization option at the Red Sea. “From a strategic perspective Israel is interested in the stability of Jordan,” he said, pointing to a long history of water cooperation between the two countries.

Friends of the Earth’s opposition is a far cry from Israeli attitudes to water works in the past. When Israel opened up a pipeline in 1955 from the Yarkon River in the center of the country down to the Negev Desert, the public enthusiastically embraced the plan.

“That project definitely had deleterious effects on the Yarkon River,” Feitelson said. “And 30,000 people came to celebrate the opening of the pipe, out of a population of 2 million. It was seen as a great development.”

Since then, the environmental movement has grown and with it, more skeptical stances to giant development projects. One milestone in this development was the 1953 draining of the Huleh Lake in northern Israel, which later proved to be an irreplaceable sanctuary for cross-continental migrating birds. Huleh has since been reflooded.

For now, no digging has commenced on the canal; the World Bank’s feasibility study is expected to be finished in 2011. After a meeting on June 25 between Silvan Shalom and the World Bank President Robert Zoelick, Shalom’s office announced it would begin a pilot program to test the impact on the Dead Sea. But a World Bank statement on the meeting made no reference to the pilot, only alluding to “the possibility of phased implementation.”

Galit Cohen said that the Ministry of the Environment has pushed Israeli water managers to increase water flows in the Jordan River, but that it would be a drop in the ocean compared to what reviving the lake requires.

“Even if Israel let all the water flow down the Jordan River to the Dead Sea, it’s not even one quarter of the amount of water we need for stabilizing the Sea,” Cohen said. She added that Middle Eastern water management is a zero-sum game. “We know that if Israel will let water flow down Jordan River, the Palestinian Authority and the Jordanians will pump it, because they have a very serious drinking water problem. It’s a tragedy.”