Jewish Academic a Pariah in Cairo
CAIRO — The director of the Israeli cultural center in Egypt's capital flips through a thin Arabic-language pamphlet. He stops at a picture of himself with the caption, "Professor Sasson Somekh, the famous Jewish spy."
Life in the Arab world's largest city has been frustrating for Somekh, and it is only becoming more so as Egypt's cold peace with Israel turns frigid.
Egypt's press has stepped up attacks on Somekh and the center. Egyptian academics who once considered visiting Israel have halted contacts. Even Somekh's American-born wife, Terrie, finds doors closing--a job offer was withdrawn after a potential employer read a scathing article on the center.
"We are pariahs here," said Somekh, a graying, soft-spoken professor of Arabic literature from Tel Aviv University who is one of the world's top experts on Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian author who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in literature.
Somekh said he plans to leave Egypt as soon as his term at the center ends in October.
"We are being treated as though we are trying to rob Egypt of something, not as scholars," he said, sitting in his small office. On the wall is a painting of Saadia Gaon, a Jewish scholar born more than 1,000 years ago in Fayoum, a town south of Cairo.
The Israeli Academic Center--the facility's official name--was set up in 1982 by Israel's six universities to boost cultural ties with Egypt after the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace accord. But it was never well received because many Egyptians remain suspicious of their former enemy.
As the Middle East peace process stalled, that wariness has sometimes turned to hostility, especially in the news media.
"Appalling Israeli cultural scheme," the English-language Egyptian Gazette said in a headline for a story that accused the center of trying to "brainwash students with Israeli ideas and thaw the ice between Egypt and Israel."
Somekh, 63, dismisses as ridiculous newspaper reports that the center is spying on Egypt.
He agreed to head the center in 1995, two years after Israel signed its peace agreement with the Palestinians. He hoped for warmer relations with Egypt and envisioned the center growing from a library putting on lectures on Israeli history and culture into a meeting place that would expand ties between scholars.
"I had a feeling things were changing," said Somekh, who was born in Baghdad but fled to the newly established state of Israel in 1951 along with many in Iraq's Jewish community.
