CAIRO — A thin cloud of concrete dust hangs over the reception room of the Israeli Embassy here these days. Piles of tiles, ready to be laid, are stacked in a hallway. Walls are about to be knocked down, counters replaced.
The bedlam that was the visa application section has been moved 16 floors down, to a new office posted, unbelievably, "Israeli Embassy Tourism Office."
Unbelievable because, during decades of enmity, the conventional wisdom has been that Arabs don't do Israel, especially not on tour buses. Even during the last 15 years of official peace between Egypt and Israel, the idea of Egyptian tourists traveling to Israel was virtually unheard of.
But now, with the signing of a peace agreement between Palestinians and Israel, the Egyptian government has quietly dropped restrictions on travel to Israel and opened the border stations at Taba and Rafah 24 hours a day. While most Egyptians still are not flocking across the frontiers, the Holy Land has become a new pilgrimage point for hundreds of Egypt's Coptic Christians, who are paving the way toward a warmer peace between Arabs and Israelis.
"We know now that thousands of Copts have visited Jerusalem, and there are no restrictions at all from the government any longer," said Antoine Zedhoum, publisher of the Coptic weekly newspaper, Al Watani. "When people say it is time for full relations with Israel, I say, 'Why not? Why not?' "
The number of Egyptians crossing the Rafah border into Israel has climbed from its usual trickle of about 200 a month last fall, before the new policy took effect, to about 500 a month, rising to an estimated 1,000 during the Easter season this spring.
Egyptian travel agents say about 80% of their business to Israel is Coptic Christians.
In launching the first wave of Arab tourism to Israel, the Coptic community risks further angering Islamic militants, who have laid siege to the community in recent years.
The tourists are also going against the edict of the Coptic Christian patriarch, Pope Shenouda III. Urging Copts to show solidarity with their Muslim compatriots, he ordered Egyptian Christians not to visit Jerusalem until the entire issue of Israeli occupation, especially the status of Jerusalem, is resolved.
"It's not the Pope's business," shrugged Tais Luka, a retired Coptic schoolteacher who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with a tour group this spring. "He said (not) until we take the Al Aqsa mosque (Islam's third holiest shrine, in east Jerusalem). Well, could he guarantee that we're going to live up until then? Why should we suffer for something that will get us nowhere, and they (the Muslims) don't appreciate it."
Egypt's 5 million Copts have taken a low profile in recent years with the growth of militant Islam and an increasing trend toward Islam in the schools, in the press and even in the streets, where most women now adopt the loose dress and head covering of the Islamic hijab .
Over the last three years, a new wave of violence has targeted the Copts, particularly in the rural villages of Upper Egypt where they are the most numerous.
Groups of angry Muslim militants, in incidents deplored by Muslim officialdom, have burned churches and attacked Coptic shops, often raising shadowy allegations about Coptic plots against Muslims and labeling the Copts as "unbelievers."
At least 150 Copts have been killed in the violence. In March, two Coptic priests and three other Christians were shot to death outside a monastery in southern Egypt.
Although the anti-Christian violence has abated in recent months as Islamic militants have focused their fury on foreign tourists and Egyptian security officials, the Coptic community nonetheless is feeling isolated in a society that increasingly has turned to conservative Islam.
Well-known Muslim clerics broadcast anti-Christian messages from the mosques. The best jobs usually go to Muslims, and few Copts are allowed to advance to the top of their faculties at Egyptian universities, particularly in medical fields.
Even the selection of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian Copt, as secretary general of the United Nations in 1991 did not do much to encourage Copts in the Egypt's political community, where leaders note that no Copt has ever risen to the rank of full minister.
The Egyptian government, hoping to avoid a rise in Christian militancy, has come strongly to the Copts' defense, publicly urging religious harmony and emphasizing the message of the equality of all Egyptians. Police guards are now posted outside every church in Egypt.
Pope Shenouda and most Coptic intellectuals have urged a low-profile response to attacks, confident that the government will move to stop the violence and fearful that a militant response from the Copts could plunge Egypt into the kind of communal misery that destroyed the social fabric of neighboring Lebanon.
