THEIR women are sluttish schemers. Their men are scowling thugs, prone to blood-spilling and to a strange guttural barking. Two decades of peace have done little to soften the image. Egyptian popular culture still pictures Israelis as the enemy everyone loves to hate.
Demonisation pervades the press, publishing and movie industries. So much so that when Cairo tabloids alleged that a millennium-eve concert at the pyramids was in fact a satanic Zionist ritual, the jittery government cancelled parts of the show. Apparently, some Egyptians actually believed that a golden pyramidion, which was to have been placed on top of the Great Pyramid, was secretly intended to represent a Jewish skullcap.
Most of the blame for such attitudes lies with Egyptian film makers. Israeli villains have featured in half a dozen Egyptian television serials and a dozen full-length films since 1992. Worse, of the 20 films released by Cairo studios last year, a quarter exploited anti-Israeli themes.
Plots vary, but tend to travel well-worn ground. There is the wicked Israeli woman who ensnares innocent Egyptian youth, as in the films “Love in Taba” (1992) or “A Girl From Israel” (1999). There is the savvy Egyptian hero who foils Israeli intelligence, as in “The Road to Eilat” (1995), “48 Hours in Israel” (1998) or “Al Kfir” (1999). In the climax to the popular 1998 comedy “A Country Bumpkin goes to College”, the politically correct hero burns the Israeli flag.
Even more disturbingly, some of this movie fare includes scenes that are frankly anti-Semitic. Last year’s most popular film, “Hamam in Amsterdam” follows the comic trials of an Egyptian émigré whose struggle to make it in Europe is thwarted at every turn by a bad guy called Yehuda. In “A Girl from Israel”, the father of the Israeli seductress is portrayed as a satanic manipulator. When the naive Egyptian youth’s father—a man who has a habit of quoting sagely from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—washes after shaking hands with the devilish Israeli, the water runs red.
Israeli diplomats express anger that the Egyptian government refrains from using its wide powers of censorship against such stereotyping. “Would Egyptians be so patient if their flag was burned in an Israeli film?” asks Israel’s press counsellor in Cairo. Speaking more philosophically, however, he suggests that the hostility reflects a culture with deep fears of losing its dominant role in the region.
Egyptians generally attribute the fashion for Israel-bashing to the commercial success of the first hostile films, whose release coincided with events that had already blackened Israel’s image, such as the brutal suppression of the Palestinian intifada and the bombing of civilians in Lebanon. Yet Egypt’s leading film critic, Moustafa Darwish, believes there is truth to the charge that the censors remain too lenient.
How seriously does the Egyptian public take all this? Luckily, not very. Cairo critics have panned most of the recent films. “Al Kfir”, which tells the story of a dashing Egyptian aviation engineer who sabotages an Israeli fighter prototype, lasted barely a week in Cairo’s cinemas after audiences laughed out loud at the hero’s supposed seductive power over Israeli Amazons. Mr Darwish is hopeful that such flops spell the end of the trend—and, in fact, none of the new films this winter touches on Israel.
Even so, the ugly imagery may have an enduring impact. Egyptian sensibilities aside, it has certainly made Israelis feel increasingly unwelcome. Ten years ago, tourists from the Jewish state travelled all over Egypt. Of the 300,000 who visited in 1998, 90% never left the Hebrew-accented beach resorts of southern Sinai.
The Economist