“The whole region is changing except for Israel,” said Egyptian journalist Ahmed Naje. “In three or four years, Egypt will have a democratically elected civilian government, but Israel will still have a government dominated by former army officers. The gap in mentalities will widen, and it will become very difficult to bridge. Israel must change its approach to the peace process.”

Ahmed Naje (photo: Lisa Goldman)

Ahmed, often called ‘Nagy,’* covers culture and literature for the daily newspaper Al Akhbar. The reporters are on strike to demand the editor in chief’s resignation, which is why he was able to spare me several hours for a conversation at a café in the borsa, the stock market area of downtown Cairo. It’s a picturesque street lined with outdoor cafes, popular with students and democracy activists.

Cafes in the borsa, Cairo's stock exchange area (photo: Lisa Goldman)

Nagy was one of the first people to welcome me back to the city, and so far he is the only Egyptian journalist who readily agreed to be interviewed for +972 Magazine. “I know who you are and I read +972 Magazine,” he said. “I don’t care that the contributors are mostly Israeli. What matters to me is what you write and what your opinions are.”

Agreeing to speak on the record for an Israel-based website, no matter what its politics, is a brave position to take in Egypt. The issue of normalization is hugely controversial, and is often cynically used to create media storms or carry out vendettas. The Journalists Union’s ban on normalization is not the main issue – as far as I have understood, the union does not have much power – but the social and political taboos are strong. There are plenty of people who will say off the record that they think slapping the ‘normalization’ label on every contact between Egyptian journalists and Israelis is ridiculous and hypocritical, but it’s a populist issue that isn’t going away.

Over the past two years, two prominent Egyptian journalists – Hala Mustafa of Al Ahram and Hussein Serag of October Magazine – were hit by a storm of controversy when their contacts with Israelis were made public. Under Mubarak’s regime, contact with Israelis could also arouse the undesirable interest of the dreaded Amn al-Dawla, the Internal State Security Service. Nagy’s unlikely to become the target of a media storm and the SSI has been dissolved, but there is still the issue of professional and social opprobrium. Nagy said he does not fear either one. When I repeated this to a few mutual friends, they smiled fondly and said, “Yeah, Nagy’s great.”

So we talked about the main groups involved in the revolution leading up to Mubarak’s resignation, the future of Egypt’s economy, the role and goals of the Muslim Brotherhood in a future Egyptian government – and the future of Egypt’s relationship with Israel.

It’s already a cliche to describe the situation in post-Mubarak Egypt as ‘uncertain’ and ‘confusing.’ The revolution is a work in progress; many people have told me it will take several years to rebuild the country’s economy and institutions. University students are striking for the removal of Mubarak-appointed academics, workers are striking for minimum wage and improved conditions; there are demands to reform the ministry of communications and the ministry of security, and there are demonstrations in the Tahrir area several times per week. Daily life continues, but there is a sense that the army, about which many people are quite ambivalent, is the only thing preventing a state of chaos.

Nagy is pragmatically optimistic. He acknowledges the challenges and obstacles Egypt faces in transitioning to democracy, but he sees them as bumps on the road leading inexorably to a democratic Egypt with a civilian government elected by the people. “It will take five or six years for the real revolution to be achieved,” he says. “When the 15 and 16 year olds of today are mature adults who were raised on democratic values, without the mentality of needing a ‘father figure’ like Mubarak – that’s when the real change will happen.” He is certain that Egypt – and the entire Arab Middle East – is in a process of unstoppable historical change. We are going through a period of reorganization, he says, and Egypt will soon retake its position as regional leader.

Revolutionary graffiti outside Houria Bar, near Tahrir Square (photo: Lisa Goldman)

“Obviously we want the Palestinians to have their civil rights and their own state,” said Nagy, “But no-one is willing to spill Egyptian blood to achieve this goal.”

Only one Egyptian politician has called for abrogating the peace treaty with Israel, he pointed out. Hamdeen Sabahy, of the left-leaning Al Karama (Dignity) party, made a statement to that effect during a radio interview show. According to Nagy, three or four people immediately called in to challenge Sabahy, asking irately what he meant by ‘cancel.’ The terms of the peace treaty are unpopular, but a popularly elected government can renegotiate them. “We just had a referendum in this country and the results show that people want stability,” said Nagy. “War is the opposite of stability. No-one wants it.”

No-one in the political leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood has called for canceling the peace treaty, either. Nagy’s a secular liberal, but he does not fear the Muslim Brotherhood. “There are a lot of misconceptions about them,” he said. “For example, it’s not true that their target constituents are the poor and disadvantaged, or that the Brotherhood has a non-democratic agenda. And it’s not true that their membership is drawn from the poorer classes, either. If you look at their membership list, you won’t find a single one who did not finish high school.”

The Egyptian narrative of the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel, and of the war of attrition that came between the two, mirror the Israeli narrative of suffering and loss. It seems as though nearly every Egyptian has an uncle or a father who served, died or was taken prisoner in one of those wars. Just as Israelis in their forties who grew up in the border regions remember childhoods spent in bomb shelters, so do Egyptians who grew up in Suez remember the many civilians who were killed by the Israeli army. Issander El Amrani, a well-known Middle East expert who blogs at The Arabist, told me that the 1967 war pretty much bankrupted Egypt. No wonder, then, that war with Israel is the last thing anyone wants.

But, warns Nagy, Israel will become a popular rallying issue for Egyptian politicians. “Israel will become part of the political game,” he said, if it continues its military occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza. Palestine is an emotional issue for Egyptians, as it is for most Arabs.

There is also a lot of popular resentment toward the natural gas deal, whereby Egypt sells one of its most valuable natural resources to Israel at a price that is well below market value. Egyptian journalists who try to investigate the terms of the deal, which were negotiated with no transparency at all, have been rewarded with the unwelcome attention of the ISS. It is widely believed that most of the revenue from the gas deal went straight into Gamal Mubarak’s bank account, to the detriment of Egypt’s largely impoverished population. Last year, there were reports – denied by EGAS – of Egypt having to re-import its own natural gas from Israel due to an electricity shortfall.

Nagy is certain that the culture of corruption and cronyism will change. Egypt, he said, will become a transparent market economy, “Because that is what the middle class wants.” He explained, “Don’t forget that January 25 was a middle class revolution. The Egyptian middle class numbers 20 million. That is huge. They want a globalized, transparent market economy and they will get it.”

“Do you see Israel as a threat?” I asked him. Nagy laughed in surprise. “Who in the world does not worry about Israel?” he asked. “Can you show me one week when Israeli soldiers did not kill civilians? What would make any Egyptian feel positive about Israel? What positive thing has Israel ever done for Egypt? Even the peace treaty was initiated by Sadat, by the Egyptian side. Not by Israel.”
Yesterday, a friend sent me this poll, which asks Egyptians about the issues they want an elected leader to focus on. The top three issues are getting rid of corruption (73%), reforming the education system (53%) and reducing unemployment (60%). Ending the peace treaty with Israel is the least important issue, with only 23 percent of respondents citing it as an important issue.

During the Egyptian revolution, a lot of Israeli Middle East analysts – mostly men in their 60s – lined up in front of the television cameras to predict that the overthrow of Mubarak would take Israel back to the bad old days, before the peace treaty, when the border with Egypt was a dangerous place and the threat of war was always present. No-one explained why Egypt would want to go to war with Israel, or why Egyptians wanted to overthrow Mubarak. As Mohamed said to me, “This revolution was not about Israel, you know. B’emet.”

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On 19 March Egyptians voted on a package of constitutional amendments. There was a sense of exuberance on the streets, with total strangers smiling and asking each other how they had voted – ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ For many, it was their first experience in participatory democracy; for others, it was the first time they bothered to vote in decades.

CAIRO — In an elementary school classroom decorated with colorful children’s drawings and guarded by two soldiers wearing camouflage and helmets, a gray-mustached Egyptian man wearing a galabiyeh and embroidered prayer cap voted for the first time in 30 years. “Because this time it means something,” he said, as he examined the pink indelible ink drying on his finger. Men and women queued up patiently – and separately – at that polling station in an elementary school in Dokki, an upscale residential area in downtown Cairo, as they waited their turn to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a package of constitutional amendments. Many emerged with exuberant smiles on their faces, waving their pink fingers to indicate they had voted and flashing the ‘V’ for Victory sign.

This man voted for the first time in 30 years, "Because this time it means something." (photo: Lisa Goldman)

Voting in an elementary school classroom (photo: Lisa Goldman)

'V' for Victory after voting. The woman on the right is wearing a headscarf in the colours of the Egyptian flag (photo: Lisa Goldman)

After Mohamed (known on Twitter as @travellerw) cast his ballot, he asked the young state prosecutor responsible for supervising the voting at that location if I could go in to take some photos and talk to people. When we stood in the schoolyard outside the classroom, where Mohamed also voted, a lot of people approached us to discuss their votes and their decisions. A few said they had read up on the issues via the referendum website.

Mohamed after voting (photo: Lisa Goldman)

Men lining up to vote in the referendum (photo: Lisa Goldman)

Out on the street, one man called out to Mohamed, ‘Did you vote “yes” or “no”?’ Mohamed answered, ‘I voted “no.”‘ The man gave him a thumbs-up of approval. Another man told Mohamed that he had voted “no,” “because they cannot fool us that easily.” Like many who voted “no,” the man seemed to be expressing a common feeling that the referendum was far too soon after the revolution, that people had not been given enough time to learn about the issues, which might mean that those who had drafted the amendments and those who supported them had ulterior motives.

One distinguished-looking man, a white-haired engineer wearing a suit jacket, said he had voted ‘yes’ based on only one of the proposed amendments – article 77, which would establish presidential terms of four years and limit office holders to to two terms, rather than the current unlimited terms of six years in office. Two owners of small businesses said they had voted ‘yes,’ even though they did not like many of the proposed amendments, because they wanted stability in Egypt. Change was too slow for them: one said he had not been able to pay his employees’ salaries for three months; and another said he simply was not making a living these days.

People argued animatedly, but courteously and with smiles. They were very engaged by the experience of participatory democracy. The news that the governor of Cairo was kicked out of a Cairo polling station because he insisted on going to the front of the queue instead of waiting his turn spread via Twitter and text messages, eliciting a lot of gleeful comments. There was no glee over the news that thugs attacked Mohamed ElBaradei at a polling station in a poor district of northern Cairo, throwing stones at the Nobel laureate and destroying his car.

Discussing how they'd voted (photo: Lisa Goldman)

Later, when we met up with Mohamed’s friend Inji, she announced anxiously that her cousin Ragia Omran, an attorney and well-known political activist, had just been arrested by the army, together with her younger sister, while they were observing the voting at another polling station. Dinner was punctuated with phone calls about Ragia from various friends and activists.

There is a lot of anxiety amongst the Cairo-based activists about the army – and with good reason: Over the past weeks they have played a duplicitous game, saying on the one hand that they would never shoot on pro-democracy protesters; and then, after Mubarak resigned, arresting, beating and brutally torturing many of them. According to one account, soldiers subjected detained female activists to virginity tests and threatened to charge non-virgins with prostitution.

On the other hand, someone has to run the country during the transition period leading up to elections. So there is an uneasy sense that while the army cannot be trusted, there is no choice but for them to remain in charge until elections are held.

As we walked to the car after dinner, we passed another school where the counting of votes had commenced. By the time we arrived home, just after midnight, the army had released Ragia Omran and her sister, unharmed.

Cross-posted from +972 Magazine.

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My first visit to Cairo, as described in this post, was a memorable experience. Not being there for the uprising that toppled Mubarak was a painful one. The revolution is ongoing, though, and it’s an amazing story that I would love to write about for +972 Magazine. But ours is a self-financed media shop, staffed by volunteer writers. So in order to pay for my expenses and my labor, I thought of an experimental method of financing independent, freelance journalism – by turning directly to readers. So first the story of my trip of my first trip to Cairo and then, at the end, details of how you can contribute to my returning for a reporting trip.

On the first day of my first visit to Cairo, which happened to be the day after President Obama gave his speech at the university, a friend rescued me from the fortress-like luxury hotel I’d been booked into by an eccentric potential employer and took me to see the things she loved about her city. It was a fabulous day that made a big impression. Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to return to Cairo for a longer stay – especially since the revolution, which has kept me glued to Twitter and Facebook practically all my waking hours for more than a month.

On that June day, we started my introduction to the city with a coffee and a long chat at the Alain le Notre Café overlooking the Citadel. My eyes kept wandering back to the romantic view of old Cairo, its haze- shrouded mosques and minarets, even as I kept up a running conversation with my companion. After coffee, we strolled along the paths that wound through the meticulously maintained green spaces of Azhar Park. Young couples sat on the grass under trees, discreetly holding hands until a tongue-clicking uniformed guard admonished them against public displays of affection. The scene reminded me of a talk given to a small group at Tel Aviv University by a junior diplomat from Egypt. He spoke passionately about the social crisis caused by delayed marriage in Egypt – about young couples that could neither afford to get married and set up a household, because of the high unemployment and low salaries; nor find a place to be alone in a conservative, crowded city that offered little privacy. The visceral understanding of that speech came when I saw the embarrassed expressions on the faces of those young couples that were just looking for a place to sit quietly and hold hands.

Alain le Notre Cafe (photo: Flickr/Sdhaddow)

Al Azhar Park (photo: Lisa Goldman)

Lunch was koshary at Abou Tarek’s – where I photographed the famous proprietor in the flesh, nonchalantly reading a magazine behind the cash register and oblivious to my camera. Like Hosni Mubarak, he looked considerably older in person than in his official photos.

Abou Tarek (photo: Lisa Goldman)

Abou Tarek's koshary (photo: Lisa Goldman)

After lunch, my friend showed me the new art gallery scene – edgy raw spaces in an industrial area crowded with auto repair shops. The gallery owners we met were like my friend – young and cosmopolitan, shifting easily between Arabic and English. In their dress-style and body language they were practically interchangeable with people their age – in their 20s and 30s – that you’d see hanging out at galleries and cafés in Istanbul’s Beyoglu district or Beirut’s Gemmayzeh. For all their sophistication and gloss, Paris, London and New York seemed tediously world-weary, pretentious and stagnant compared to the energetic creativity bubbling in the old-new cities of the Mediterranean region.

In the late afternoon we sat at the rooftop café of the Odeon Palace Hotel, with its faded old-world lobby and wood-paneled elevator. The waiter was a bit grumpy, but the view of the narrow downtown streets was very photogenic.

Street view from the roof of the Odeon Hotel (photo: Lisa Goldman)

At the Diwan Bookstore I pocketed a postcard advertising ashtanga yoga classes in Zamalek. Whenever I visit a city I like, my default is to imagine living there; and for me, a livable city must have a good yoga studio. 

A couple of days later, at a casual meet up with some local bloggers at Le Grillon, I responded enthusiastically to one woman’s polite question about my impressions of Cairo, adding that wished I could stay longer. “That’s because you can leave,” she answered, smiling bitterly.

A few minutes later, the journalist sitting to my right engaged me on the subject of contemporary Hebrew fiction. “I am not so crazy about Amos Oz,” he said, “But I like that younger guy – Keret.” Etgar Keret, 43, is best known for writing short, sometimes surrealistic stories in idiomatic Hebrew. Nael Elthoukhy, an Egyptian who studied Hebrew at Cairo’s Ain Shams University, had translated a few of Keret’s stories into Arabic and posted them on his blog, which was all about contemporary Hebrew literature. Already thinking about my own blog post – the one I never did write about that trip – I asked the journalist at Le Grillon if I could mention his name as the person who introduced me to Eltoukhy’s Arabic blog about Hebrew fiction. He thought for a moment and answered, “Better not.”

As we left the restaurant, someone pointed out a couple of men loitering on a corner, at the edge of Tahrir Square, and identified them as police spies. During the revolution, I learned that they were more commonly called thugs, and that everyone was afraid of them. A year after my Cairo visit, a couple of them beat to death Khaled Said, a 28 year-old Alexandria man, because he refused to show his identity card when they barged into an internet café without a warrant.

Throughout my five days in Cairo, people that I knew only via their blogs and occasional email exchanges went to a lot of trouble to make sure I had a good time, and that I saw as many sides of the city as possible. They were proud of the good and never tried to hide or excuse the bad – like the thugs, the dirt, the corruption and the sexual harassment. They were smart and articulate and honest. They were also depressed and frustrated. Many were semi-employed, unable to find full-time jobs that matched their skills and education. Some lived with their parents, even though they were approaching 30. The fear factor was always there, in the knowledge that anyone could be arrested and jailed without charge. Even though that was unlikely to happen to them, just the knowledge that they would have little recourse if it did happen – that they could just disappear if someone from state security wanted to make them disappear – was always there. Which is what happened to Khaled Said, another well-educated, middle class, under-employed man in his late 20s. Between the fear, the unemployment and the corruption, their lives seemed to be on hold.

The people I spent time with in Cairo were privileged, although not from the super-rich elite. Most of them had gone to the best schools and spoke fluent English, but they were not rich. They were internet savvy, well-informed and outward looking – much more so than Israelis, who seem increasingly to look inward. These young Egyptian bloggers had been born in a country that was once, not so long ago, the intellectual and cultural center of the Arab world; now they lived in a country that was poor, corrupt and stagnating, and they were depressed because they didn’t feel they had the power to effect change, or even to control their own lives. There was no meritocracy, no democracy and no freedom of speech. The only country that did not require Egyptian nationals to apply in advance for an entry visa was Iran. Many talked about leaving, although few knew how or to where. “I can’t think of any reason to be proud of being Arab,” said one.

Just over eighteen months later, just a few days after the revolution began, I listened as that same friend told a radio interviewer exultantly about his pride in being Egyptian. I watched video clips showing people I knew demonstrating on the streets of Cairo, clapping rhythmically and shouting, “Masr!” (Egypt), as they faced rows of black-clad, baton-wielding riot control forces. On January 25, pride suddenly became the new theme amongst the Egyptian bloggers I’d been following for more than five years. I was amazed that they had overcome all those psychological barriers – the fear, the passivity, the helplessness and the depression – and taken control of their lives, just like that. Where did they find the inspiration and the courage?

Over the following three weeks I watched – via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube and Aljazeera – as those disheartened people I’d met in Cairo went to the streets and led a popular revolution that was informed by remarkably democratic principles. They organized that revolution intelligently, and without a charismatic leader. They left the fear barrier far behind and faced down some pretty terrifying state-sponsored violence. Someone I knew and cared about was beaten and detained, and there was nothing I could do about that except lose sleep (he is fine now). And then I watched as Omar Suleiman announced Mubarak’s resignation, and I read the exultant tweets from the internet-savvy young activists in Tahrir, and that was the most amazing, exhilarating thing I ever experienced.

Even as I tweeted and facebooked the revolution obsessively from my desk in Jaffa, I mourned not being in Egypt to experience it first-hand. Two months earlier, the idea of positive change in the Middle East had seemed too remote even to contemplate. The whole region was stagnating – or, in the case of Israel, taking huge strides backward. Suddenly, everything seemed possible. Optimism was possible. This was something amazing, and I wanted to experience it and write about it.

I was not the only freelance journalist who watched the revolution from afar. It’s not news that the news business is in a financial crisis, and there was no way to put together enough commissions to pay my expenses – let alone pay for my work. Quite a few of my colleagues found themselves in the same position. I love writing and I am optimistic that it will become a means of making a decent living again soon, but for now I do my most interesting work for free. +972 Magazine is a volunteer project that we bloggers maintain with our own funds. Writing an opinion piece for the New York Times was an honor (especially when it was picked up by Andrew Sullivan on his blog, the Daily Dish), but not a paid one. The same goes for having my interview with “Ali,” a friend in Tripoli, picked up and re-posted on the Reuters site after I published it on +972 Magazine. Lots of credit, but little-to-no (mostly no) remuneration, is all too common in the world of contemporary freelance journalism.

The Egyptian revolution is far from over. There are all sorts of things going on – like the protestors’ raid on state security headquarters this past Saturday, and the ongoing Friday demonstrations at Tahrir. Mubarak may be gone, but much of the old regime is still in place; will the protesters succeed in pushing for system-wide change?

Then there’s the changing definition of the role of women, who figured so prominently in planning and leading the protests. There are the workers’ strikes, which the army has forbidden. There is the uncertain relationship between the army and the protesters. What happened to the national museum after it was damaged in late January, allegedly by thugs? How are the very poor – the ones who live on less than two dollars per day – managing these days?

I would like to spend about three weeks in Egypt, staying with friends in Cairo and reporting from there, but also going beyond the capital – to the small towns in the south, to Alexandria and Port Said and other cities. I would like to publish my reports here on my personal blog and on +972 Magazine, while I am in Egypt.

So I am going to try an experiment. I am turning directly to readers to fund the trip and pay for my work, via donations to my PayPal account. To participate in my experiment – and I hope it’s obvious that a relatively small amount, like the cost of a magazine ($2, $3 or $5), is more than welcome – just click on the ‘donate’ button below.