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The Egyptians Are Coming: Cinematic and Literary Incursions from Israel’s Southern Neighbor
Abstract
Compared with the profusion of literary and filmic representation of the Israeli—a tourist, soldier, or performer—venturing into the territory of the Egyptian other, there is relatively little cultural production depicting the Israeli Jew from the perspective of Egyptian authors and filmmakers. Egyptian incursions into Israel in the past included military operations (the 1948 War and the Fedayyin) and the airwaves (the broadcasting of “Kol ha-Ra’am mi-Kahir” / “Voice of Thunder from Cairo” and the showcasing of Egyptian films on Israel’s Channel 1 TV). The focus of this paper is on literary and cinematic Egyptian depictions of non-belligerent incursions into Israel where the film (e.g., Nadia Kamel’s “Salata Baladi”) or the literary work (e.g., Ali Salem’s “A Drive to Israel: An Egyptian Meets His Neighbors”) accentuate the moment of the first encounter with the Israeli other. In her ethnographic work on Israeli (Jewish) tourism to Arab countries with which Israel signed a peace treaty, Rebecca Stein deconstructs “first encounter” to demonstrate that this encounter is a highly fictionalized narrative because, among other considerations, in factuality it is rarely the first. In a similar vein, “The Egyptians Are Coming” expands on the highly constructed and fictionalized nature of the literary and cinematic narratives that portray an Egyptian first encounter with the Israeli other even in documentary filmmaking (Kamel) and memoirs (Salem). Among the most outstanding features of the Egyptian first encounter with the neighbor across the northern border in Egyptian literary and cinematic works is the dichotomy they create between the “good” Egyptian-Jew (or Arab-Jew) of the past and the threatening, arrogant, narrow-minded, and aggressive Israeli-Jew of the present. If the latter is perceived mostly in negative terms, the former is rendered not only as a kin, indigenous to the area, but as a proof for Egypt’s multicultural past where, according to the discourse these works imply, members of various nationalities, ethnicities, and faiths could live together harmoniously.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Israel
Sub Area
Cinema/Film