Paper Abstract: Egyptian Israelists: The View from Israel Arab Spring revolutions have introduced the Israeli public to a frequently ignored reality: Hebrew-speaking Egyptians. The existence of Egyptians who learned the language and were educated in Israel and Jewish studies in their homeland,or “Egyptian Israelists,” remained generally unknown to the Israeli public that was surprised to have Egyptian Israelists being hosted in Israeli radio and TV stations and expressing their views in fluent Hebrew. This surprise is an anomaly for a society that has established a reputation in the extensive knowledge of its Arab neighbors. The goal of this paper, therefore,is to map and analyze this phenomenon by answering the following questions: What does the Israeli public know, as a background, about Egyptian Israelists? Why was the Israeli public mostly surprised of Egyptian Israelists? How does the Israeli public explain the reality of Egyptian Israelists? Given the exploratory nature of this research, this paper will employ the methods of field research and unstructured interviews. Field research, including description of the relevant attitudes inIsraeli society and informal interviews, will be used to induce explanatory propositions informed by field observations. Unstructured interviews will be conducted with members of the small community of Israelis, e.g., scholars and diplomats, who worked in Egypt after the 1979 peace treaty. The interviewees' unique perspective -- in that they have for long been familiar with Egyptian Israelists -- will be used to learn more about what the average Israelis think of the phenomenon as well as to learn more about why they think as they do. My preliminary research indicates that the Israeli public perspective is governed by a standard view of the "anti-Israel Arab authoritarian regimes" which prevented people-to-people interaction, and therefore Egyptian Israelists were never known to the average Israeli. From the same view, the Israeli public tends to explain the existence of Israelists in Egypt as part of the security establishment. Little importance, nevertheless, is assigned to the tendency of Israeli scholarship and media to ignore the reality of Israel Studies in the Arab World. These, however, remain preliminary findings and until they are adequately tested to answer the above research questions, a gap in our understanding of Israel Studies in the Arab world, that is, how these Studies are perceived in Israel itself – the equivalent of asking how Orientalism is perceived in the Arab Middle East – will remain.