Famous singer Sha'baan Abdel Rahim sang a song saying "I hate Israel and love Amr Moussa". Abdel Rahim gained millions of pounds from this song, what was a direct reason behind deposing Moussa from his post as Minister of Foreign Affairs. However, I hate Israel more than Abdel Rahim. I still remember October 6, 1973. We were children in Al-Shouhada (martyrs) school, where we saw pictures of martyrs on the walls. No one of us asked why the school – without courtyard or fences – had this name. We were only aware that men of our people died in the 1976 war. It was enough to look to the eyes of an orphan student to know the effect of war. We grew up and our hatred of Israel grew with us. When Abdel Rahim sang "I hate Israel", we loved the song because each and every one of us echoed "and I me". Despite talks about peace for over thirty years, the Egyptian people – thanks to their natural and patriotic intelligence – closed their eyes and ears and never forgot their hatred to Israel. How can we forget the blood of the Egyptians in the past and the blood of the Palestinians today?
However, my hatred to Israel turned – two days ago – into grudge and envy. I think that you have the same feeling, not because Israel kills us every morning, but because the scenes we watched live from Tel Aviv planted a grief inside us. That grief is difficult to be removed with time. It was very sad to see that democratic festival in the Israeli elections on the screen. There is a fierce and fair competition between the parties to win the people's confidence. The elections were transparent, and the process of counting votes was public, amid joy and celebrations of the supporters of the parties.
Minutes after seeing the Israeli elections, I hated Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabya TV channels, and even hated myself because I did not watch security forces around the election committees to prevent voters of a certain party from reaching them. There is no electricity outage so that the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) can replace the empty boxes with filled ones and rig the elections. There were no armed clashes between the candidates. In fact, we have never seen such fair elections in Egypt. Israel is a democratic country in which the regime is changed every few years and even every few months. It does not have a single party controlling everything, or opposition parties battling internally to reach power. There is no corruption in Israel because the Prime Minister is brought to account like any other simple citizen. Israel has no papers whose only job is to praise the government and the officials every morning. My hatred to Israel guided me to know the answer of this question: how and why and when have five million people turned into a great nation terrorizing a population of 300 million Arab citizens? I will leave the answer to you.
