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No Room for Israel in Egyptian Hearts

[Moneybiz-South Africa] Sixty years after its creation, and 30 years after the Camp David accords paved the way for a 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, Israel exists only virtually as far as its neighbor to the west is concerned. Maps sold in Cairo's main bookshops omit Israel, with the area comprising Israel and the territories simply labeled "Palestine" in Arabic. "No, there are no maps with the name Israel. We follow the rest of the Arab world in this, peace treaty or not," snapped Ibrahim Mahmud, who works in a bookshop. A widespread boycott of "normalization" with Israel means there are no Israeli books in libraries and no Israeli films shown on Egyptian screens for fear of lodging Israel into people's consciousness, observers say. "A cold peace does exist. At the top of the social ladder there is dialogue and business, but at the bottom there is a void," said Emad Gad, a researcher at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, who edits a monthly publication of Arabic translations of Israeli texts. In a reflection of predominant opinion, widely read journalist Salam Ahmed Salama described Israel as a "dangerous cancer" in a column headlined "60 terrible years" in the state-owned daily Al-Ahram.
2008-06-02 01:00:00
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