Why do citizens in authoritarian Arab countries hate Israeli Jews? - opinion

A full year has passed since the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in the areas surrounding the Gaza Strip. These events have turned into a global moral issue, where the fall of some people into support for terrorism was resounding, as moral standards were disrupted and human values were absent.

A massive number of citizens from Arab countries, too large to count, came out in defense and celebration of Hamas's actions against unarmed Israeli civilians. These actions, which included torture, rape, murder, burning and terror, are beyond what words in any language can describe, as if we are living through a catastrophic and dramatic act reminiscent of the works of Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwright and pioneer of dramatic theatre. It's as if they breathe and inhale hatred.

Why do citizens in authoritarian Arab countries hate Israeli Jews? I will answer through my personal experience when I was in Egypt. This is the same experience of millions of others - yes, millions. Although the level of institutionalizing and rooting hatred of Israelis varies from one country to another, the core is the same, like a theatrical script.

I WILL present four scenes based on real events that happened to me and remain vivid in my memory.

The Four Scenes

Scene 1: I remember that during my middle school years at Ras El-Tin School in Alexandria, some parts of the curriculum fostered hatred toward Israel. Some teachers would say different phrases with the same meaning: Israel is our sworn enemy, and we must crush and obliterate it when the opportunity arises.

On one occasion, the history teacher asked us to study some texts and complete an assignment he described as very important, which he would review the next day. I stayed up all night at home to finish the assignment. The next day, nothing was corrected – the entire lecture was about Israel, on the sidelines of Israeli-Palestinian tensions.

I asked him, “Are you going to correct the assignment, sir?” He shot me a look of anger that I will never forget, a look that meant “to hell with the assignment; what I am talking about is a thousand times more important.”

Scene 2: I rarely went to Friday prayers at the mosque, but over 90% of the times I did, the sermon was either inciting hatred toward Jews or praying against them, or both. The preachers described Jews as being the misled, the hypocrites, the covenant-breakers, the prophets' killers who must be exterminated and wiped off the face of the earth.

They would say that Islam mandates this, according to the well-known saying of the Prophet Muhammad: “The Hour will not be established until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims will kill them until the Jew will hide behind stones or trees. The stones or trees will say: ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him, except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews.”

I always asked myself: Why would God create a people only for the others to kill and exterminate them? Is God so sadistic and trivial? Why did He create them in the first place?

Scene 3: A rumor, later proven false, spread widely and became the talk of the town at the time. It claimed that “a sexual gum was being smuggled into Egypt from Israel, which caused Egyptian girls to become sexually aroused and seek the nearest person to have sex with.”

The common phrase at the time was that Israel wants Egyptian girls to become promiscuous, meaning they would become prostitutes. Later, I learned that such rumors were mainly intended to distract the masses and divert their attention from far more important issues.

Scene 4: This is related to general incitement against Israelis in the press, media/films, series, and plays. Every professional union in Egypt has rules for punishing anyone and banning them from practicing their profession if it’s proven that they have any connection of any kind with Israel. This is a major crime that means they are a normalizer, traitor, collaborator, and an enemy of the nation and Arabism.

FOR ME, everything I mention here was shattered against the rock by my maternal grandmother, who always told me stories about the remaining Jewish neighbors they had when she was a young girl and how incredibly decent they were. “Truly good neighbors,” she would say. Her words sparked hundreds of questions within me, which remained unanswered until I met my teacher and mentor, the writer and political thinker Amin El-Mahdy, one of the most prominent peace advocates in the Middle East, whom I met in early 2012.

El-Mahdy explained everything to me about the true nature of the "Arab-Israeli" conflict and what the Egyptian regime was doing. This free thinker passed away on October 11, 2020, under circumstances that can be described as mysterious at the very least, as he was a fierce opponent of the authoritarian regime in Cairo.

My grandmother passed away in 2019, and Amin El-Mahdy followed a year later. I was in exile and could not visit them or place flowers on their graves. The question remains: How many people in Egypt are like my late grandmother and the thinker Amin El-Mahdy?

Is the situation the same today?

I’m sorry to say that it has gotten much worse, especially after the terrorism of October 7. What I am discussing here will be further demonstrated with undeniable facts in the next article. It's time to answer all the tough, postponed questions since we live in a critical, dangerous period.