As a child, I grew up very religious. I discovered my faith at a fairly early age, and at 15, I reached a level of piety that makes me quiver now that I look back at it. I never missed a prayer, not even the discretionary ones. Every day, I woke up at dawn, performed the cleansing ritual and then scampered to the half-empty mosque next to my house to do my fajr prayer.

It was at that mosque where I grappled with a bitter cognitive dissonance: On the one hand, as a universalist raised in a secular home, I saw people of all races, religions and nationalities as equal; but as a devout Muslim, I was convinced that Islam, for some reason, transcended all other religions. “God, please aid us to victory against the Nasara and the Jews”[1] the imam harped every Friday.

Luckily though, one of the key skills I was taught in school – a cornerstone of the systemic religio-nationalist brainwashing all Egyptians are subjected to as children – was the Orwellian art of Doublethink: the ability to relieve myself of any internal conflicts by simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs.

However, as time passed, logic caught up with me. I could no longer escape the obvious, so at 17 I banished religion and nationalist politics from my life[2]. I had finally become disillusioned with the congenital dogmatism that infects Arab culture – a rigid, stubborn mentality etched into the brains of all Arabs that breeds unquestioning loyalty to authority figures and an absolute uniformity on all worldly subjects.

In the years that followed, I made some attempts to get into politics again (encouraged by my mother, who worked indirectly with the government at the time[3]) but I couldn’t muster the interest.

One day, just 2 weeks after arriving in Canada, with no friends and little to do, I decided to buy a book on the infamous six-day war, the Naksa – not to be confused with Nakba which was in 1948[4]. It was a topic that, unlike the 1973 war in which Sinai was recaptured from Israel, never made it to the Egyptian history textbooks, so I knew very little about it except that it was a national embarrassment that belongs in the dustbin of history.

As I sifted through the pages, blatant distortions aside, I realized that if I were an Egyptian publisher I wouldn’t touch the topic with a ten foot clown pole either.

After all, who would want their children to learn that Egypt couldn’t stave off an invasion by a country 1/70^th its size with an army half the size of its own?

By the end of the book, I was finally able to grasp the emotional trauma that Egyptians must’ve felt at the end of the war (especially considering that all during the war, they were being told we were on the verge of victory). Concomitantly, I couldn’t help but feel some sympathy, if not admiration for Israel. And that made me very uncomfortable.

At the time, I knew that the author of the book, Michael Oren, is a well-known right-wing lobbyist for Israel, so I thought it fair to look into Egyptian accounts of the war, and so I read Mohammad Hassanain Haikal’s Al Infigar[5], which unfortunately did little to alleviate the shame. Aside from that, I found that his account of the Yom Kippur war later in the book deviated wildly from the school history textbooks which seemed to suggest that Egypt spared Israel out of mercy.

As the disappointments mounted, I felt it was time to recoil again into apathy. And so, for about 2 months I stopped reading or talking about politics altogether. That was until January 2008 when Gazans breached the Rafah border crossing and flooded into Egypt to escape the prison they call home.

Having been in Egypt at the time, I saw for myself the public reaction (a slew of hateful xenophobia), which left me stunned and disgusting. For a country that lists the “Palestinian cause” high on its list of priorities – it’s actually the only uniting Arab cause – it sure was enlightening to see how hostile people were toward the fleeing Gazans. The whole debacle brought back memories of the Sudanese refugees who set up camp in one of Egypt’s biggest squares to ask for clemency only to get gassed and deported under horrendous conditions by security forces, all to Egyptians’ content.

It was at that time that I finally truly became aware of the tragedy of Palestine.

And so I dove into the subject and started reading furiously about it. The more I did, the more outraged I got. In the first couple of months, it consumed me. I watched tens of hours of documentaries, followed blogs, attended seminars, and wrote about it in my university paper. Essentially, I became an activist, something I never imagined myself to be in a million years.

Two years have passed since then, and I have toned down my rhetoric (for security reasons), but an indelible mark has been imprinted upon my ideology. I can never find it in me to accept the names Ashkelon, Bersheeba or Ashdod. I still refer to them by their Arab names: Asqalan, Beir al sab’ and Isdud.

And however hard I try, I can’t find it in me to feel much sympathy for the civilians who live in these towns.

To me, Palestine doesn’t symbolize anything, since I don’t identify with it religiously or ethnically as do most Arabs. But it represents one of the greatest injustices in modern history, not unlike the holocaust.

Some Jews might admonish me for that statement, thinking perhaps I’m equating the plight of Palestinians to the Holocaust, which I’m not[6]…but so what if I am? The words “Holocaust” and the name “Hitler” are a fundamental part of every right-wing Israeli politician’s vocabulary, using them constantly to draw comparisons with Iran’s nuclear ambitions or to refer to Muslim leaders.

In my view, one crime against humanity, regardless of its scale, does not warrant another.

Nevertheless, I have come to accept Israel, on pragmatic grounds. It’s not a difficult conclusion to reach once you brush off the religious zeal that impairs logical judgment. However, in the Arab world, where the word ‘Jew’ is a pejorative and the mention of Israel sends a shudder up people’s spines, there’s much to be done on the grassroots scale before diplomacy should even be considered, and that burden falls on our[7] shoulders.

For that, we will need two things that are in short supply in the Arab world: Free speech and common sense. The first will inevitably be available in the years to come. As for the second…well…only time will tell.

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[1] In Arabic: “اللهم انصرنا على النصارى و اليهود” is a common ‘prayer’ that is said near the end of every Friday khotba (sermon) in some mosques; it is followed by “amen” from the crowd

[2] That doesn’t make me atheist

[3] My mother is not an active supporter of the ruling party. She’s only a civil servant.

[4] Both words mean the same thing: disaster

[5] الإنفجار: حرب الثلاثين سنة for those who are curious

[6] I don’t rank crimes, especially on this scale

[7] Meaning Arab youth