Baskin: How Arabs & Turks really see Israel

My hat tip to Lilly Rivlin for citing this important edition of   Gershon Baskin's Jerusalem Post column: 'The view from Cairo' Since Friday I have been in Cairo. ... I came to Cairo to attend a small  meeting of MECA – the Middle East Citizens Assembly. This small  but important organization was founded by Walid Salem, a Palestinian peace and democracy activist from east Jerusalem who decided that for real democracy to take root in the Arab world, citizens needed to take  responsibility, stop acting like subjects and become active participants.  Walid succeeded in creating a network of democracy activists from all  over the Middle East.... Walid has consistently demanded that Israelis  be included at every meeting. ... .... I learned of the horrible attack against the Israeli Embassy, and the  failure of the Egyptian security forces to prevent it. My friends at the  MECA meeting condemned the attack both publicly and in private, and  also expressed their concern for my security and their solidarity,assuring  me that they would protect me. At the meeting, the well known professor and democracy activist Saad  Eddin Ibrahim, who had been jailed and tortured by Mubarak, gave a  brilliant presentation about the Egyptian revolution and how Tahrir square,  and many other squares around Egypt, had been transformed into  “Parliaments of the People.” In my speech, which followed Prof. Ibrahim’s, I tried to express the deep concern felt by Israelis at what we saw going on  around us in “the neighborhood.” The “Parliaments of the People,” I said,  were beginning to look like “Parliaments of the mobs.” .... THE NARGILA boy in the coffee shop in Zamalek asked me where I was  from. “Falestin,” I said. “Very good,” he replied, “we love Palestine ... I will  kill all of the Israelis for you!” I asked him why he hated Israelis so much. Did he know any Israelis, I asked?  No, and he didn’t want to, he replied. He hated the Israelis, he said, because  they killed Palestinians and took their land, and because now they were also  killing Egyptians.  I asked him what he would think if Israel ended the occupation and made peace  with a Palestinian state. After a brief pause, he said, “if they make real peace  and free the Palestinians and let them have a state, we will have nothing against  Israel, ahalan w’sahalan (welcome).” This young man, educated on the street, and by Al Jazeera, probably knows  almost nothing about the conflict, but his views reflect those of millions of Arabs  all over the region, and millions of Turks as well. People across this region are  willing to accept an Israel that lives in peace with its Arab neighbors. Israel is  hated in the Arab and Muslim world not, as many Israelis believe, simply  because they deny our right to exist. If Israel would only understand that its  relations with the Palestinians determine the level of its acceptance in the region perhaps we would be at a very different place today. [My emphasis  added.] People in the MECA meeting said that the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative was still  on the table and serves as the basis for Israel to be a welcome member throughout  the region. All of the Egyptians that I have spoken with condemned the attack  against the Israeli embassy. ... They say that these people are actively working to undermine the revolution and  to show that post-Mubarak Egypt is a lawless society where all security has broken  down. They hope to hijack the revolution and to bring back the old regime. .... It seems there is a very real possibility that these attacks were in fact carried out by  anti-revolutionary “agents provocateurs.” From my admittedly non-scientific reading  of the Cairo street “map,” the Egyptian masses do not support the attack against the  Israeli embassy. They do not support warm peace with Israel or forms of normalization  because in their view Israel has not implemented the second chapter of the Israeli- Egyptian peace treaty of Camp David – ending the occupation, but they do understand  and support the strategic importance of the peace for Egypt. Egyptians do not want to  go to war against Israel. .... You can read this entire column by clicking here.