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"To Be a Good Arab and a Good Muslim, Part of It Is to Hate the Jews"
(Israel Hayom) Dalia Ziada interviewed by Or Shaked - Dalia Ziada, 44, fled Egypt just two weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre. "It came to the point that they were using a verse from the Quran to justify my killing," she says. "A local group in my family's neighborhood went to my family's house looking for me. Thank God I was not there that night." At the same time, she says, lawyers affiliated with the Egyptian government filed complaints accusing her of spying for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, committing high treason. The trigger was her public declaration that Hamas was a terrorist organization and that Israel, like any other country, had the right to defend itself. After Oct. 7, "We saw how horrible it was, how brutal Hamas and its followers were toward Israelis, including innocent people who were literally in their pajamas in their own homes. Unfortunately, people in Egypt and in so many Arab countries were celebrating what happened as a victory. They were mainstream Egyptians, people who look like me. So I had to speak up. I had to tell them exactly what happened on that day. It is not acceptable to celebrate such brutality. Then they turned against me." At the same time, Salafist clerics circulated a fatwa stating that if she was "an ally of the Jew," then she was like them and her blood was no longer sacred. When she contacted a senior official in the Egyptian security establishment and asked for protection, "He was very aggressive with me. He said that I had made everyone angry and that I deserved what I got." "The current leadership in Egypt, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and the military, are against the Muslim Brotherhood...as a political entity that threatens their existence, threatens their throne. The Muslim Brotherhood is the only organized political group that can compete against the military....In the military ideology, until today, they still consider Israel our historical enemy, and it will always remain an enemy." "Jew-hatred is so deeply ingrained in the Arab and Muslim identity, beyond what we can imagine....Today, to be a good Arab and a good Muslim, part of it is to be hateful toward the Jews....It is not about Gaza, as some people are saying....I am not a Jew. But I think it is the fight of anyone. It is not only the fight of the Jewish people. It is the fight of anyone who believes in human rights and liberal values." "For the time being, Israel is not safe. If I were an Israeli, I do not know how you guys can sleep at night. It is very scary, very scary, to be in a neighborhood where everyone else just wants to kill you." The writer, an Egyptian scholar, is a Senior Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.