Khalid Badr...Asked his feelings about Jews, he replied matter-of-factly. “We hate them for everything they have done to us,” Mr. Badr said, as casually as if he had been asked the time.
But Mr. Badr’s ideas have recently been challenged. He has had to confront the reality that his neighborhood was once filled with Jews — Egyptian Jews — and that his nation’s history is interwoven with Jewish history. Not far from his shop, down another narrow, winding alley once called the Alley of the Jews, the government is busy renovating an abandoned, dilapidated synagogue.
In fact, the government is not just renovating the crumbling, flooded old building. It is publicly embracing its Jewish past — not the kind of thing you ordinarily hear from Egyptian officials.
“If you don’t restore the Jewish synagogues, you lose a part of your history,” said Zahi Hawass, general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, who in the past has written negatively about Jews because of the clash between Israel and the Palestinians. “It is part of our heritage.”
So, Israel doesn't really do anything about preserving the Temple Mount and they think that's better than what Egypt is doing now?
A small prayer section for Jews is a 'mission impossible'?
We do not think we're losing our past?
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This brings up an analogy. I onced worked in an office with a secular Jew (as well as a number of nonJews). Of course, when the office brought in food, I could not eat with them. The nonJews in the office asked me a number of questions about kosher certification, cooking, and various matters involving kashrus. One of the people said to the secular Jew
"This is interesting, would you like to listen?"
He answered (paraphrase). "For you, its interesting, but if I come listen, I will have to do it."
For the Egyptians, this is a window into another culture and does not really affect their lives (aside from teaching them how they should behave). If the Israeli government were to set up a Jewish prayer section on the Temple Mount, they would have to admit to themselves that their antireligious actions in the past were wrong.
When someone is trying to deny guilt within himself, he will often attack someone who has not gone down the wrong path.
I once saw a letter to "Dear Abby" from a couple who complained that they could no longer eat in their daughters house because she and her husband insisted on only serving kosher food. "Dear Abby" found someone who pretended that Kabeid es Avicha v'es Imecha would require the children to serve and eat nonkosher food when the parents came to visit.
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