In the early nineties, Cairo International Book Fair was a real "wedding" for freedom and resistance before being a wedding for culture. Cairo with its warm heart had a room for poets and revolutionaries. Cairo Fair was the place where I saw prominent writer Mohamed Hassanein Haykal and poet Nedal Ashqar for the first time. I read poems of Mahmoud Darwish and knew the value of arranging an interview with a man like Yasser Arafat. I passed the fortified castles preventing me from visiting Jerusalem when I read poems about resistance and heard the voice of great diva Fayrouz and Marcel Khalifa. I will never forget the tone of sadness in the voice of Sameh al-Qassem when he described the sense of alienation in the Arab countries because he held an Israeli identity card preventing him from entering the Arab countries boycotting Israel! In this lovely atmosphere, I discovered how to deal with your "homeland" with a heart of a "lover" and a spirit of a "warrior". I also knew that our memory should be vigilant to the extent of "pain" to curse our inaction and silence and to remind us that: "We got married without love to the female that ate our children and chewed our livers," according to great poet Nizar Qabani's poem "Al-Moharweloun" in which he talks about Israel. "Normalization phobia" infiltrated to my conscience. I was hysterically afraid of the curse of the Zionist entity, which we face - as a result of our jobs – every day; from the trial of the Israeli spy Azzam Azzam to the visit of US President Barack Obama. However, the popular will that imposed isolation on Tel Aviv is, in fact, a national dignity of which I'm proud whenever Egypt is criticized for signing Camp David Accord with Israeli. Indeed, the popular will has been an excellent example of the coherence of the Egyptian people and its innate immunity against shaking hands with the Israeli killers! I was - and still - insisting that the popular will is stronger than decisions of trade unions, and that the innate awareness of the Egyptians goes beyond expectations of the "enemies"! This is because no artist or intellectual or media man faced actual penalty on charges of normalization with the Zionist entity, with the exception of the media hype over visiting Israel and controversy over the definition of the concept of "normalization"!
On the other hand, some writers became stars just because they wore the mantle of late president "Sadat" in search of a role in the battle of the "defaulting" peace process until the liquidation of our brothers in Palestine! In fact, such writers deserve hatred and contempt. All of us know these writers. They are too impudent to justify their shameful positions and promote a deal with Israel; normalization for peace. They paid no attention to their national conscience or professional reputation! Because the number of these journalists is "limited", the Syndicate of Journalists has not held its general assembly to determine the dividing lines between normalization and the purely professional behavior. I don't say this to defend my good friend Magdi al-Gallad, who made an interview with US President Obama in the presence of an Israeli journalist. But the "fabricated" battle after this interview raised several questions: If the Arab countries did not have cards of pressure except "normalization", how can they impose it on people? Can the Egyptian street coexist with the Jews in the future or turn a blind eye to their hands that are contaminated with the blood of the martyrs? It is the same street, with its intellectuals, that criticized the Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni when he backtracked on most of his ideas against normalization. Normalization is not, in fact, a decision to be taken by the ruling regime, as the political leadership itself has not taken steps toward normalization, in tune with the pulse of the street.
All the Egyptians reject normalizations, especially in light of the Israeli massacres against the Palestinians. Indeed, each and every Egyptian house wants to take revenge of Israel. However, the "elite" are occupied with illustrating concepts and establishing theoretical frameworks for normalization. The elite are isolated from the people. It has been proved that politicians speculate with a card they do not own, namely the popular will!
