They are anxiously watching how the U.S. responds to the Saudis’ killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
For the last six years, Nancy Okail has led a relatively safe life in exile. As the executive director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, she had a high enough profile that she didn’t worry too much about the anonymous threats and harassment directed by the Egyptian regime she fled.
Then Jamal Khashoggi was killed. “I knew Jamal,” she told me in an interview this week. They were both part of a tight circle of Arab dissidents living in and around Washington. If his murder is blamed on anyone other than Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, she said, “then this is a license to kill all of us.”
As Khashoggi was, Okail is a permanent U.S. resident. In 2013 she was tried in absentia in the first major public trial of employees of foreign-funded non-governmental organizations after Egypt’s 2011 revolution. As she was held in a cage before her trial, she recalled, she read “Homage to Catalonia,” George Orwell’s devastating account of the depravities of fascists and communists in the Spanish civil war.