In the 40s and 50s, the biggest, well, I would say 30s and 40s, the biggest sort of musical performer, the biggest pop star, if you like, was a Jewish woman.

That's true. Layla Murad, you know, and others also, I mean, in economy, in education, professors, in medicine, everywhere. The Jewish people were everywhere, and I was not even aware of it until I was 18 years old.

Well, we all know why that is the case, and at the end of the episode, I'm really looking forward to having a kind of open chat with you about Israel and about everything that swirls around that word. But for now, I'd like to stick with your life story. I mean, you told me that like with Hussain, and God knows it, like with everyone we talked to from the Middle East, from your generation, the second intifada really was a turning point for you. And initially, I think it further sort of solidified this negative view of Israel. Absolutely.

Actually, if you look at the timeline of the things that we were exposed to while we were growing up in my generation, I mean, you will be shocked how much it affected everyone, starting from Egypt up to Syria, including actually Al-Jolani of the HTS today. He mentioned that even the

second intifada affected

him. It also led him to a certain direction to become a jihadist, you know, while it affected some people like me to stand up for Arab-Israeli dialogue. It really made a huge change. But actually, there is one event that happened before that, I think, has primed us to be this way, to deal this way with the Second Intifada. The first event was the Iraq invasion of Kuwait.

This

was actually when we were maybe in the age of eight years old up to 10 years old, my generation, I mean. At this time, this was the first time we actually see, my generation, see an actual war in the region. And hear about people who are Egyptians, at least in my case, like Egyptian soldiers going to fight there. And it was my first time actually to learn about the dictatorship of the Iraqi president at that time, Saddam, about a country called Iran, which I've never heard about before, and about the U.S. coming to the region to fight against this dictator because he tried to invade another country. So this story somehow primed us to start to look at the bigger image of the region, at the wider region. I

see. Geopolitics certainly came to the fore.

Yeah, and also created a new sense of pan-Arabism because, you know, pan-Arabism has died in the years before that with the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the failure of his communist version of the pan-Arabism movement. This created a new version of pan-Arabism, kind of. So we grew up in this way. And then 10 years later, 10 years after that, we were hit by this big event, the Second Intifada. And the interesting thing here is that Media Blade, a very interesting role in teaching us about the Second Intifada and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a certain way that serves the ideology of the Islamists. Because at that time, Al Jazeera TV was very new. It started, I think, 1997 or so, and it was gaining momentum already in the Middle East region. All the Arabs started to watch it as the main source of information because all the other sources were not that accurate. As you know, we don't have free media. Absolutely. State

media in the Middle East was proverbial.

Exactly. Terrible. Nobody tells you the truth and you have to. And this was the only source that actually was filming from inside Gaza, from inside the West Bank. So they were there on the ground. So we depended on them as a source of information. And of course, the second intifada was also the narrative was very twisted about what was really happening on there. And it made people more leaning toward this taking the side of the Palestinians, especially if you look at people who grew up educated in a certain way, as I was just telling you, like being told from day one of their lives that be careful, Israel is our neighbor, but it's an enemy. We Jewish people are bad people. They are occupying our holy sites in Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories. And so they are torturing Muslims, they are mistreating Muslims, and all this stuff. So growing up like this, I was just like everyone else, you know, thinking Israel is the enemy. To the extent that I even joined the protests happening against Israel in the first year as a freshman student, or a fresh woman, as I like to call it, a student at my undergraduate university in Cairo. And yeah, I was just like everyone else, but something really, really important happened to me that pushed me out of the ideological box. I was stuck into my whole life, which I call, I don't call it a moment of epiphany, but a moment of cognitive dissonance. This was one of the two months after protesting, two months in the protesting. And I was so committed, like, you know, I go there everywhere, every day I wear the Palestinian coffea and everything like, you know, very, very committed. And then in a very sunny and beautiful day in Cairo, like most of the days actually there, we were doing the protest. I was standing there and the people leading the protest, whom later on, I learned that they are the Muslim Brotherhood, decided to burn some flags. So they started by burning the Israeli flag, which made sense because, you know, this is a protest against Israel. Then they burned the American flag, which I couldn't understand, like, why, you know, America exists like tens of miles away. So

you hadn't been encouraged by that point to think of Israel as a kind of as an American stooge in the region? No, no.

In my mind, they were separate. You know, America was somewhere else. It's tens of thousands of miles away. Yes, we have a problem here, but it's a local problem. It's a regional problem. So I didn't understand this well, but it was okay, fine, you know. Then the third flag they decided to burn was my own flag, the Egyptian flag. And this was a very shocking moment for me because we value this flag. So in my mind, it was like, these people cannot be good people. And at the same time, burn my flag. I had to take a step back. Like, I mean, I'm with the wrong crowd here. These are not good people and something wrong is happening. And this was the moment when I decided just to be away from all this chaos and educate myself about the issue, really educate myself about the issue. I went, actually, ironically, despite all the hatred against Egypt, there were a cultural centers affiliated to the Israeli embassy in Egypt everywhere. Yes,

I think Hussain Mansour visited the same cultural embassy at one point when he decided he wanted to kind of know the truth beyond the propaganda that he'd been told.

Absolutely. And even plus that, I was studying English literature at the Faculty of Arts in Eyn Shams University. And we have a very strong, a very famous and reputable Hebrew department.

So,

I went to their library. I read there. I went to the cultural center. I read about Israel, Judaism, the Jewish culture. Then I started to read about the geopolitics of the region, and I fell in love with it. I really fell in love with it. Our region is so complicated, as you know, Tom, but I fell in love with

it.