Reading into our own comments: the story of Yasmine, the Egyptian-Israeli girl

Different media readings of the same story provide us with an uncensored insight into the perception of Egyptians and Israelis of one another

The eyebrow-raising story of Egyptian-Israeli 12-year old Yasmine Nessim-Leibovitch has been the topic of long feature in liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, whose reporter attended the child’s Bat Mitsvah, her Jewish ‘coming of age’ ceremony that was held in her Egyptian’s father’s Sinai resort. Two days later Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, gave a relatively accurate, but shortened rendering of the original Hebrew article, augmented by a short interview with an Egyptian coworker of the father.

It’s a rare occurrence for a human interest story, due to their inherently local nature, to be of interest to people on both sides of the border. It is rarer for it to be presented in such similar terms. For all that, this article, and the readers’ reactions to it, offers a unique, uncensored, and unusually interesting platform for comparison and analysis.

Take the article headline, for instance.

The Israeli version was titled “Yasmine, Jewish-Muslim, celebrates her Bat Mitsvah in the Sinai”. The primary emphasis is on the religious aspect of the young girl’s identity was what struck the writer first.

Interestingly, the Egyptian article put the dual citizenship element before the religion one - twice: the front page summary was given the title "Yasmine: I am half-Egyptian and half-Israeli... Jewish and Muslim... I speak Arabic with father and Hebrew with my mother”. Inside, the main article headlines “Yasmine, product of the marriage of an Egyptian and an Israeli, officially embraces Judaism on the land of the Sinai”.

It is no coincidence.

Israel is primarily thought of in geopolitical terms; memories of wars with Israel remain very vivid in the Egyptian collective memory, by nature or by design - commemorations of the 6^th of October 1973 Arab-Israeli war never fail to dwarf those of the national holiday on July 23^rd, in no small part because president Mubarak took part in the former. Israel’s war on Arab populations, with the IDF amounting to its main international spokesperson, is a continuous reminder.

Egypt has traditionally viewed Jews as a religious community as opposed to a national one - unsurprising given the centuries of religious peaceful cohabitation in Cairo, Alexandria and its other major urban centres. Interreligious marriages were never a rare occurrence, and I have recently had the opportunity to meet Egyptian women and men, offspring of such relations, who are practicing Muslims but partaking in cultural Jewish holiday celebrations in Egypt.

All that fuss for that little girl's 12th birthday?

On the other hand, the Israeli self-definition in terms of Jews as opposed to Arabs or Muslims greatly influences the choice of words in the article, and indeed the interaction of Israelis with their neighbours. To step for an instant into politics, the official insistence of the Israeli administration to be recognized by Palestine as a “Jewish” state is symptomatic of this reduced self-image; more critically, Israel’s ironclad differentiation of its own population as Jews and Arabs permeates its perception of itself vis-à-vis its own national communities, and projects its own perception of international relations into an ethnic dimension in which Arab countries, Egypt included, cannot or will not step into.

The tone of the article is also overall noticeably different. Gideon Levy, for Haaretz, is near caricaturally gushing as he tells his story, noting the pretty “melting pot” that is the family photo and seeing the presence of former soldiers on both sides as a man-sized metaphor for peace. Mohammad Abboud for Al-Masry Al-Youm, appears somewhat incredulous and judgmental - mainly of Egyptian dad Hisham Nessim. He describes the mixed attendance as ‘surprising’, and while Levy describes with effusion the ex-military men on both sides who have come to celebrate a child’s life, Abboud marks this occurrence with an exclamation mark.

The family is obviously secular - Yasmine attends a secular Waldorf school - and so was the celebration.

But the concept of “secular Judaism” however remains naturally foreign to the Arab readership -Judaism being primarily defined to them as a religious identity, and secular Judaism a recent and mainly Ashkenazi phenomenon. Although it describes what a secular Bat Mitsvah is like, I believe it is without malice that the Egyptian article referred to the ceremony as “her christening to the Jewish faith”. This important differentiation has however set the tone for a large number of the readers’ comments.

Some comments were neutral, some congratulatory. Past those however, we can identify general trends highlighting the points of discord of both readerships.

Al-Masry Al-Youm readers pointed, in severe terms, to the question of Egyptian-Israeli marriages. With several thousands Egyptians residing in Israel and marrying locals - Arabs and Jewish - the Egyptian public opinion has taken habit in regularly imputing them with treason charges; something readers have not omitted doing, by referring to Yasmine and her father as a “national security threat” or a "fifth column".

The other question regarded Yasmine’s religious identity. Religion being patrilineal in the Muslim faith, commentators deplored or condemned Yasmine’s confirmation as Jew - but more importantly, her father’s participation in a ceremony many readers viewed as a moral and religious outrage.

Many Israeli readers were indignant vis-à-vis the mother, Vered Leibovitch’s “assimilation” - codeword for “marrying a non-Jew”, which has recently been the subject of recent media campaigns and deemed a threat to Jewish continuity. A treason.

Young Yasmine has not been spared the vitriol either, with Hebrew-written accusations of being a ‘self-hater’ and a ‘Jewish girl in captivity’, primarily because the girl declared her wish to live in Egypt when she grows up. This did little to gain her favour in the eyes of the Egyptian readers, who, sadly enough, lamented the thought that she would one day integrate in the Egyptian society and 'marry a local, or become a first lady'.

Readers on both sides have primarily been critical of their own fellow-country(wo)man, displaying a nationalistic reflex vis-à-vis what they considered a treason of allegiance. That the spouse was generally spared is no reason to rejoice, for the “other” remains by default untrustworthy.

The dissimilate identification, on citizenship vs. ethnicity, highlights where the different fault lines are. In a sense, angry commentators have done this debate, indirect as it may be, a good favour.