Forty years after the ink dried on the Camp David Peace Accords between Cairo and Tel Aviv, the domestic political context in which former Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat operated often still remains poorly understood. While IMF-mandated price-hikes sparked spontaneous mass civil unrest in January 1977, opposition to the so-called ‘peace process’ with Israel, by contrast, seemed isolated and small-scale; neither Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, nor the Camp David Accords in 1978/9, generated any spectacular instances of public protest. The absence of mass demonstrations has given rise to a perception that Sadat’s conclusion of a separate peace agreement with Israel, though unpopular in some quarters, nonetheless was tolerable to most ‘ordinary’ Egyptians. The present paper seeks to challenge this view by showcasing a little-known incident of politically-motivated hostage-taking in rural Qalyubiya that was timed to coincide with the investiture of Israel’s first ambassador to Cairo in February 1980. While Sa‘d Halawa’s day-long stand-off with the security forces received scant news coverage inside Egypt, this paper argues that Halawa’s demand for the abrogation of diplomatic relations with Israel and Sadat’s resignation nevertheless resonated with the public on a deeper level. Drawing on an oral history project conducted by an investigative journalist a few years after the events in question, it reconstructs the frequently sympathetic attitudes of eyewitnesses. Parsing the villagers’ recorded testimonies, it explains how official investigations into Halawa’s death have obscured the prevailing pulse of public opinion and the regime’s use of violence. This reappraisal of the peasants’ beliefs and the subsequent appropriation of Halawa’s act by the left-wing urban intelligentsia indicate that the possibility for oppositional mobilization inspired by Arab nationalist ideals continued to exist latently at a time when Islamists seemed to go from strength to strength and the organized left suffered a massive crackdown. Halawa’s doomed operation suggests that, beneath the highly visible political ruptures of the late 1970s, a sizeable body of public opinion in Egypt continued to adhere to Nasserite ideals in ways that cut across presumed rural-urban or elite-subaltern divides. The peasants’ reactions to Halawa’s act thus imply that political quiescence in this period is better understood as a function of the state’s policies of coercion rather than supposed public apathy: they demonstrate that many ordinary Egyptians sought to preserve, reinforce, and adapt the legacies of Nasserism to the changed realities their country faced in the early 1980s.