The child born 68 years ago in the village of Adwah, in northern Egypt, might have been a lot like the peers with whom he grew up, receiving a very limited education and becoming enthusiastic consumers of Muslim Brotherhood propaganda. Mohammed Morsi was a gifted child who abandoned his village for the big city of Cairo, where he would earn a BA and an MA from Cairo University and then receive a rare scholarship from the Egyptian government to pursue advanced studies in the United States. After earning a PhD in materials science at the University of Southern California, Morsi spent the early 1980s working with NASA as a consultant on the design of a new engine for the Space Shuttle.

Most people in Morsi's position would have stayed in the United States and built a career for themselves there. That is what some other famous Egyptians did, such as Omar Sharif, but not Morsi, who returned and began teaching at Zagazig University in 1985. He also became an enthusiastic supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and their positions, including vehement opposition to the existence of the State of Israel and consequently to the 1979 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Morsi was still teaching at Zagazig when he was elected to the Egyptian parliament in 2000. He had run as an independent candidate because the Islamist movement he supported was banned.

Upon resigning his university position in 2010, Morsi gave a speech on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood in which he preached hatred of Israel and Jews, not least because of the way he claimed they treated his Palestinian brethren. On the other hand, during a visit to Germany in 2013, he denied that he hated Jews and said that his comments had been taken out of context. Nevertheless, he seemed to blur the line distinguishing Israelis and Jews. He considered the two-state solution to be a form of Arab surrender to Zionism and adamantly opposed it. He called Israelis bloodthirsty and the descendants of apes and pigs, terms that also appear in Hamas' charter. For Israel, there could be no greater nightmare than imagining this man, once thought to represent the delusional fringe, becoming the leader of Egypt.

After the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 in a popular uprising driven by the protesters who filled Tahrir Square and supported by the top military brass, Egypt decided to hold free elections for the presidency. Days after Mubarak's overthrow, Morsi had been arrested, but escaped two days later. The Muslim Brotherhood then chose Morsi as its presidential candidate, running for the ostensibly independent Freedom and Justice Party, founded one year before the balloting. In the 2012 elections, he ran against Ahmed Shafiq, who had served as prime minister under Mubarak and was seen as representing the old regime. Morsi beat Shafiq by a few percentage points in the second round of voting to become Egypt’s fifth president and the first to be democratically elected. His supporters included quite a few young liberals who voted for him because they wanted “anyone but Mubarak and his lackeys.” They cheered when Morsi emerged the winner.