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Egyptian Author: My Decision to Meet the Israeli "Enemy"
(Ha'aretz) Dr. Mona Prince - Like all Egyptians, I was raised to hate Israel and Israelis. During the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak, the headlines of Egyptian newspapers were regularly dedicated to updates about the Palestinian cause. The result was that Egyptians like myself adopted the Palestinian cause as our own, as if our own personal destiny depended upon it. Everything I heard made me imagine the Jews as beastly, ghost-like creatures who had nothing in common with human beings. Although there is cooperation between Egypt and Israel on several levels, normalization on the cultural level has a relatively long way to go. I knew I was going to face a media backlash and probably a legal backlash, but I initiated a meeting with Dr. David Govrin, Israel's ambassador to Egypt, at the end of 2018. I did so because I believe in the future. I believe that 50 years from now things will be different. I believe the coming generations will not think or act the way we do now. I did so to make this future possible, to help create space for literature and culture to undo the damage caused by politics. The writer is an Egyptian academic and novelist living in Cairo.