Haaretz
Published 06:00 26.08.11 Latest update 06:00 26.08.11
Will Egypt be too busy to hate?
It is naive to think that Egyptians - or, as polls indicate, the Arab world
writ large - will ever accept the presence of a Jewish state in their
midst.
By _James Kirchick_
(http://www.haaretz.com/misc/writers/james-kirchick-1.353998)
CAIRO - "Give us weapons and we'll kill all the Jews."
So chanted several hundred people outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo last
Friday. The proximate cause of the protest was the conflagration in Sinai,
following the terror raid near Eilat. But no specific incident is ever
needed to stir the Egyptian masses to express hatred for their Jewish
neighbors. The intense and academic debate in the West about where legitimate
criticism of Israel ends and anti-Semitism begins doesn't resonate in Egypt,
or
anywhere in the Arab world. A poll conducted last year by the Brookings
Institution, for instance, found that just 3 percent of Arabs feel empathy for
Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Though various Egyptians I interviewed at
last week's protest fitfully tried to distinguish between "Jews" and
"Zionists" in their denunciations of Israeli perfidy, their subtlety got lost
amid the Hamas T-shirts and open calls for genocide.
Egyptians had their choice of whom to shake their fist at last Friday. In
addition to the scene of the mob chanting "All the Israeli blood isn't worth
the boot of one Egyptian soldier," another demonstration coalesced outside
the U.S. Embassy, calling for the release of Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind
sheikh" sitting in a federal prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing. Consisting of bearded men and niqab-clad women, these
protesters were noticeably more peaceful, in both their composure and their
demands ("He's just a blind man," a 31-year-old member of al-Gama'a
al-Islamiyya, a once-banned Islamist organization, pleaded with me ), than the
group
outside the Israeli Embassy, which featured fashionably dressed youth and, of
course, the odd Westerner (no anti-Israel protest in the Arab world is
complete without the requisite French, Italian or Swede in a kaffiyeh ).
Americans concerned about their country's low popularity on the proverbial
"Arab
street" can rest assured that it continues to hate Israel far, far more.
It would be a mistake to think that the views expressed at last week's
protest are separate from the Egyptian mainstream. Anti-Semitism is the common
political language in Egypt. It is the one thing on which all the major
political factions can agree - from secular "liberals" to Islamists. While
they'll say the most awful things about each other behind closed doors, the
one group these two will happily slander in public are Jews or Israelis. For
instance, two months ago, at a conference in Budapest sponsored by the Tom
Lantos Institute and the Center for Democratic Transition, the vice
chairman of Egypt's legendary (and ostensibly "liberal" ) Wafd party declared
that
"the Holocaust is a lie" and that Anne Frank's diary is a forgery. "Gas
chambers and skinning them alive and all this?" he asked rhetorically.
"Fanciful stories."
A remark like this in a Western democracy would result in the end of one's
political career, if not a jail sentence. But "anti-Semitism remains the
glue holding Egypt's disparate political forces together," according to the
young Egyptian writers Amr Bargisi and Samuel Tadros, whose prescient
article two years ago, "Why are Egypt's 'Liberals' Anti-Semitic?," caused a
stir
back home. In his new book, "The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the
Middle East," Reuel Marc Gerecht observes that "Dinner parties with the
conspiracy-afflicted Egyptian, Saudi and Jordanian secularized elites, for
example, can make Noam Chomsky look nice, introspective and analytically
even-handed." Last week, after I stepped out of the office of a prominent
liberal political figure, he asked my translator if I was a Jew.
"All the candidates are trying to outdo each other in anti-Israel
rhetoric," a 23-year-old Egyptian Christian, who is extremely worried about
the
future of his country, told me.
Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood now
running for president, called upon Egypt's military government to expel the
Israeli ambassador last Friday, when Israel mistakenly killed five Egyptian
soldiers after last week's firefight. "Gone forever are the days when
Israel will kill our children while we do not respond," former Arab League
head
Amr Moussa, another presidential contender, declared on Twitter.
The hatred that the vast majority of Egyptians feel toward Israel aside, it
is highly unlikely that the "new" Egypt will renounce the 1979 Camp David
peace treaty or fundamentally alter its relationship toward Israel. This
might seem paradoxical, given that the Egyptian people, who have been
excluded from the country's political life and whose loathing for Israel was
therefore never allowed to manifest itself in Egyptian foreign policy, are
slowly taking the helm of government. But the institutional architecture that
exists around the preservation of the Camp David treaty - $2 billion a year
to the Egyptian military, stability in the Sinai and the Suez Canal, tourism
- precludes any dramatic change in Egyptian-Israeli relations, at least
for the foreseeable future.
"Cancel for what? Are we ready to go to war with Israel? The answer
definitely is no," a prominent Egyptian political analyst told me last week in
Cairo (of course, I could not introduce myself to any Egyptian as a
contributor to an Israeli newspaper - even Haaretz - and thus, cannot quote
any
Egyptian in this article by name ).
Egyptian national security, this analyst says, is also adversely affected
by the smuggling of weapons and militants out of Gaza, and by emboldened
Islamist elements in the Sinai Peninsula. "We can differ from [Hosni] Mubarak
concerning some stories like the gas agreement, relations with Saudi
Arabia, and corruption in the previous regime," he told me. "But national
security? We cannot differ from Mubarak."
Hatred of Israel, he notes, is predicated partly upon "the story of
occupation, the story of aggression," but was also encouraged by the
Mubarak-era
state media and educational institutions. "If you are an Egyptian and read
the textbooks under Mubarak's regime, you must hate Israel," he says, adding
that a democratic Egypt - one in which secular elements win more influence
than Islamist ones - may become less antagonistic to Israel, as they will
be able to change the "many, many false stories in our history textbooks."
This was an admirable acknowledgment, all too rare, of one of the most
serious problems to bedevil Arab society. But confronting it is a tall order,
particularly in a country where people widely believe that they defeated
Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
After talking to a cross section of people in Egypt, I have come to the
conclusion that it is naive to think that Egyptians or, as polls indicate, the
Arab world writ large will ever accept the presence of a Jewish state in
their midst. Gestures like the much-heralded Arab Peace Initiative are
offered by unelected dictatorships; in no way do they express the actual will
of
the people. It's unclear if even the majority of Palestinians support a
two-state solution, despite the official negotiating position of the corrupt
and sclerotic Palestinian Authority. Most of those Arabs who say they
support a two-state solution do so only because that is the stance of the PA;
were the Palestinians to one day renounce their recognition of Israel (a
recognition that does not extend to the state's Jewish identity ), then those
Arabs who follow the lead of the Palestinian leadership would respond in
kind. Arabs are willing to tolerate Israel, but my fear is that's the most
that can ever be expected. It is with this reality in mind that Benjamin
Netanyahu has been so insistent on Palestinians recognizing not only Israel's
right to exist, but its right to exist as a Jewish state.
All this means that attempts by American administrations and leftist
Israelis to alter Arab attitudes by hastily arranging a two-state solution,
thereby falling into the trap of "linking" the Palestinian issue to a variety
of
regional and global problems, are a waste of time. To be sure, the
Palestinians deserve justice and a state for their own sake, but the impulse
to do
right by them should not be animated by a desire to achieve the chimera of
Arab approval. Attempts to please the "Arab street" - which will work
itself into a froth of rage over Israelis mistakenly killing five Egyptian
soldiers, but seems complacent at Bashar Assad killing thousands of his own
people - are as fruitless as they are dangerous.
Egypt has massive domestic problems on its hands, and one would think that
a wrecked economy, rising Islamism, and increasing lawlessness as the
result of a gutted police force would convince most Egyptians to turn inward
rather than rattle for confrontation with the Zionist entity. But massive
social and political dysfunctions are nothing new in the Arab world. Indeed,
they are endemic. And far from convincing elites of the need to focus on
self-improvement, the backwardness of Arab societies has made the appeal of
anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism - blame-shifting in general - all the more
appealing. The hope for Egypt, however, and what may make this moment an
exception in its own history and in that of the Arab region as a whole, is
that its newfound open political culture will make room for responsible voices
to combat the cancer of anti-Semitism. In the 1960s, the municipality of
Atlanta, Georgia, proclaimed that it was "the city too busy to hate." The
most that Israelis can probably hope for is that the same will be true of
Egypt.
James Kirchick is writer at large with .Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
and- a contributing editor of The New Republic.
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