On Sunday this week, hours after US President Donald Trump had announced that the US had joined Israel in its attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Ahmed, an attendant at a traditional coffee shop in Downtown Cairo, was keeping an eye on the breaking news as it appeared on the Arab satellite channel that the TV in the café was tuned to.
While serving a coffee to one of his customers, Ahmed said in a loud voice Allahu Akbar, Aho Kida – “God is great; Come on” – when he saw an announcement that the Iranian Parliament had agreed to block the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the strikes the US military had conducted against Iran in the early hours of Sunday morning nine days after the Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities and individuals began on 13 June.
Ahmed, in his early 30s with limited chances of education that did not go beyond the high school phase, said he did not know much about the Strait of Hormuz or how Iran could block it or for that matter how this would impact the region, especially Egypt. He said that he only knew one thing – that “Iran has been giving Israel a hard time and is not lying down in front of the Israeli and [now] the American strikes without reacting.”
According to customers having drinks in the café, there has been a sense of vindication with every image of the destruction caused in Israel by the Iranian missile strikes in retaliation for the “Israeli war on Arabs and Muslims.”
“For two years now, we have been seeing Israeli brutality against the Palestinians in Gaza. Every day we have been seeing Palestinians killed and maimed while the world has not done anything to stop it. Now we see Israel suffering the same horror and the same destruction,” said Anwar, a lawyer in his early 40s.
While agreeing that it is hard to compare the level of destruction that Israel has inflicted during its genocidal war on Gaza since 7 October 2023 to the destruction that the Iranian retaliatory military sorties have brought to Israel, Anwar said that it “is not about the levels but about the pain”.
“The Israelis are now feeling the pain” that they have been inflicting on the Palestinians. “They are fearing for their lives” in the same way as the Palestinians.
The seven customers sipping their coffee in the café that afternoon were born well after the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty in March 1979. None of them had much knowledge of the Egyptian wars with Israel over the Israeli aggression against and occupation of Egyptian and Arab territories. However, they said that they can all see what they called the “Israeli hatred for Arabs and Muslims” demonstrated in the repeated attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Their knowledge is mostly gained through TV and social media.
Khaled, a salesman in his late 20s, put down his coffee and reached out to his smartphone to review items on his social media feed. He showed videos that were coming out of different Arab countries mocking Israel, the Israeli Army, and the Israeli Iron Dome defence system. He then showed “a widely shared” video of Israeli targets coming under Iranian missile attacks with audio from popular Egyptian soccer commentators.
He said that he had watched it repeatedly and that it had allowed him to see Lebanese, Tunisians, and Qataris making videos using audio from Egyptian dramas, including music from the well-known TV soap opera Raafat Al-Haggan that depicts an embedded Egyptian spy in Israel and quotes like “tears in daring eyes” (domoua’ fi oyoune wakeha).
However, Khaled’s favourite videos are those that depict long queues of Israeli men and women trying to find an exit out of Israel either on a boat across the Mediterranean to Cyprus or across the Egyptian borders where they either choose to stay in a Red Sea resort or move on through Egyptian airports to Cyprus or some other third destination.
“It is so ironic. They wanted to displace the Palestinians out of Gaza, but it is they who are being displaced now,” he said. He referred to press stories that he had read on X on the Israeli government’s attempts to block the exodus. “They are rushing out. It is not their land. They don’t want to hold onto it,” he said.
PUBLIC OPINION: Other social media sites have less-trending stories including quotes from interviews with Arab politicians and intellectuals.
They include material about the “irrevocable imperialist intentions” of Israel and the US towards the Arab and Muslim countries, images of the torture that Iraqis underwent at the hands of US soldiers at the infamous Abou Ghraib Prison after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, also “on the same unfounded claims” of developing weapons of mass destruction, and stories of the killing of Afghan civilians during US airstrikes on weddings in Afghanistan, under the claim that these events were “terror cells.”
There are many other references to American and Israeli violations of international law and the international law of human rights.
According to a European diplomat in his fourth and final year in Cairo, it was never hard to sense that Egyptian public opinion is never neutral about Israel. “When I first arrived in Cairo, I often heard Israeli diplomats complain about their isolation despite decades of normalised relations,” the diplomat said.
He added that when he compared the sentiments of Egyptians to those of Jordanians during the years he served in Amman between 2015 and 2019, he thought that despite the fact that the Jordanian-Israeli Peace Treaty came 15 years after the Egyptian-Israeli one “the sentiments were similar.”
“In Amman, I thought it was about the fact that there is a segment of society that has Palestinian origins, but in Cairo I was not sure about the reason, especially as the majority of the population was born after the end of the last war with Israel in 1973,” he said.
In October 2023, this diplomat was “perplexed” by the level of public rejoicing that dominated in Cairo, and as he “learned in some other Arab capitals,” including in the Arab Gulf, “which has never been at war with Israel,” over the 7 October Al-Aqsa Flood attack launched by Hamas. He said that he was also “surprised” at the wide popularity of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and the sadness that came with the assassination of Hizbullah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in September last year.
Today, this and other foreign diplomats in Cairo said that it was hard to see any serious prospects for Israeli integration into the Middle East. The “massive” and “surprising” military “victories” that Israel has been making under the government of Likud Party leader and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have only led to more resentment of Israeli in Cairo like in other Arab capitals.
In the words of another European diplomat who served in Israel at an earlier point of her career, “Israelis always wonder about their perception in the region, and when I came here [three years ago] I told Israeli friends that unfortunately Israel is seen as the enemy.”
“Israel has been making considerable progress in its peaceful relations with the governments of the region, but in most Arab countries the people do not like Israel,” she said.
For many Cairo-based foreign diplomats familiar with Arab-Israeli relations and Arab-Iranian relations or Arab-Turkish relations, the Israeli strikes on Iran and the Iranian retaliatory strikes on Israel and the subsequent US strikes on Iran would not have been of such great importance to Arab public opinion, aside from in countries that have large Shia populations, had it not been close to the two-year Israeli War on Gaza.
Today, these diplomats argue that with the Israeli-Iran War, the situation is no longer just about Palestinians but is also about Muslims. Since its creation in 1948, Israel has not engaged in such open fighting with any country outside its immediate Arab surroundings. Its military attacks against Iran have changed this equation, even for populations that do not traditionally have much sympathy with Iran.
According to the same diplomats, there is no telling how sentiments will flow in the case of a prolonged Israeli-Iranian confrontation, which would unfold in parallel with the Israeli War on Gaza and a possible Israeli annexation of the West Bank. If this confrontation were to expand with retaliatory Iranian attacks on US targets in the Arab Gulf countries, the diplomats argued, it would be hard to predict the impact of such an escalation on the image of Israel in the region.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 June, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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