In the weeks before October 7, Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the verge of establishing diplomatic relations, a dramatic move that was poised to change the course of history in the Middle East.
Hamas has repeatedly indicated that one of the objectives of its savage October 7 assault on southern Israel was to halt that normalization process, which would have rippled around the region and led to the signing of peace agreements between Israel and various moderate Muslim countries.
And while Iran-backed terror groups managed to temporarily halt high-level talks with Riyadh as Israel is mired in war on multiple fronts, the integration of the Jewish state into the moderate Middle East appears to be on an irreversible path, and just a question of time.
Recently, a top Israeli official even insisted that a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia can still happen before the US presidential election.
“If the trend of normalization continues, the next generation of Arabs will be culturally immune to Iran’s primary weapon: ideology,” said Egyptian-American analyst Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, 35, in an interview with The Times of Israel from his home in Washington, DC.
The Cairo-born expert has skin in the game. About two months ago, he was appointed senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs (JCFA), a prominent Israeli think tank formerly known as the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
His mission: To promote his vision for a new Middle East with policymakers in Washington, both American and foreign, in in-person meetings and public talks.
His stated goal is to advocate for the “creation of a new regional political reality in which Israel is accepted by the dominant Arab powers of the region, and create a new cultural reality that will replace the current one.”
“This is basically what Iran tried to stop on October 7,” Mansour said.
Tehran’s scheme to extend its tentacles throughout the region through proxy militias unleashed against Israel has many of its Arab neighbors on edge.
“There is an alignment today between how certain Arabs see things – my kind of Arabs — and how Israelis see them,” Mansour said. “We understand that Israel is here to stay. We understand that Palestinian statehood is not the actual catalyst of this conflict – Iran is.
“We decided to bring those Israeli and Arab voices together because that is completely missing in Washington. There is a huge gap between how we see the region and how people in DC see it, in Western academia and the Western media in general. We want to help people here see this different perspective, and hopefully change the way they formulate policies for the region.”
‘The Unchaining of an Arab Mind’
Mansour’s life journey is a paradigm for the shift he campaigns for.
Born in 1989 to a Muslim family in Cairo, he grew up in an environment steeped in antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment.
“Egypt used to be the Iran of the region for decades. It was the ideological edge and the leader of the whole anti-Zionist project – a unifying cause for the region,” he explained.
Opposition to Israel was one of the ideological pillars of the regime of revered Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser, a Socialist leader who led the country between 1956 and 1970 and shaped Egyptian national identity.
Even though Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979, the diplomatic breakthrough never translated into acceptance of Israel among the Egyptian populace. A central reason was the hatred of Jews that pervaded Egyptian society.
“When I was growing up, antisemitism was everywhere – stories about conspiracies, espionage, Jewish supervillains gathering in basements to plot evil plans,” Mansour recalled. “As a child, I loved that stuff – I was obsessed.”
His childhood favorite readings were books from the action series “The Man of the Impossible,” which narrated the heroic deeds of an Egyptian secret agent against Zionist enemies. Growing up in a devout family, as a teenager — like “almost every young Arab Muslim man” — he even fantasized about becoming a jihadist, as he wrote in a 2020 Commentary essay, calling himself a “wannabe jihadist.”
His coming of age, in the early 2000s, coincided with a wave of radicalization in the Arab world, spawned by the Second Intifada, the 9/11 attacks, the ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of Al Jazeera and its inflammatory rhetoric against the West and Israel.
“My generation is probably the most indoctrinated generation in the modern history of the region,” Mansour said.
Intrigued by anything that involved Jews, Mansour started teaching himself Hebrew on the internet and then studied it at Cairo University. The more he discovered about Israeli society, however, the more he realized “the complete humanity of the Jews and the ridiculousness of what people [in Egypt] think about them.”
In 2009, he began frequenting the Israeli Academic Center attached to the Israeli embassy in Cairo. His visits drew the suspicion of Egyptian intelligence officers. He was surveilled, harassed and ultimately imprisoned.
Mansour’s participation in the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo further exposed him and endangered his life, leading to his escape to the US in 2012, where he was granted political asylum.
In America, he soon got a job as a Hebrew language instructor at a military academy in California.
“How many countries would take a complete foreigner and give him a job in their security establishment because he fits? That’s the beauty of America,” he commented. He acquired US citizenship in 2017.
His transformative journey is detailed in his autobiography “Minority of One: The Unchaining of an Arab Mind,” released in 2020.
In the US, he soon began to give lectures and pen articles for various Jewish publications, including a prolific blog on The Times of Israel, discussing a wide variety of topics ranging from the modern history of the Arab world to Marxism, antisemitism, and Western politics. He also became an educator and public speaker for various Israeli advocacy organizations.
Today, he insists he doesn’t want to be viewed as a token Arab doing hasbara (public advocacy) for Israel. He maintains that Arab pro-Israel commentators are often showcased in a bid to “score points” with progressives, in conformity with the rules of American identity politics.
“I don’t want to introduce my statements with phrases such as ‘As an Arab and a Muslim,’” he said. “I refuse to play the game of a self-absorbed segment of American society.”
Instead, the lecturer and author has decided to take his activism a step further, to a less scholarly and more pragmatic direction for the sake of the Middle East as a whole.
“Intellectuals are great at talking about problems, but whenever they give solutions, it’s a disaster,” he quipped.
The German philosophical roots of Islamism
In conversation with Mansour, one cannot help but be struck by his intellectual honesty and lucidity, and his ability to encapsulate in a few sentences complex subjects that he has researched and reflected upon for years.
“I spent my life trying to figure out why I grew up this way, why is the Middle East in this condition, why is antisemitism this bad in Arab societies,” he added.
“When you see images of Palestinian families cosplaying their children as Hamas fighters, you have to ask yourself why. I am not Palestinian, but still, I’m Arab. I came from these people, I know them. They are not demons, they are human. They are my family members. I spent a lot of time trying to understand how this happened.”
Mansour traces the origins of Arab extremism, both secular and religious, back to the influence of a specific branch of German philosophy on the Middle East in the early 20th century.
“Revolutionary German ideologies focused on the fulfillment of a mystical meaning in history through struggle, such as Marxism and romantic nationalism, had a profound impact on Arab intellectuals from the late 19th century on, at a time when Arab mass societies were emerging,” he explained.
“Their tenets shaped modern Arab identity and Arab nationalism, but also Muslim identity. That’s the line of thought that led to the birth of Islamism, as the struggle to fulfill the meaning of Islam in history,” he continued. “A core component of that way of thinking is antisemitism, thanks in part to the intensive propaganda campaign carried out by the Third Reich in the Middle East during the Second World War.”
Acceptance of Israel as a litmus test for the Arab world
Ultimately, however, intellectual analysis can only help to understand the root causes of the extremism plaguing Arab societies, but does not provide concrete responses, Mansour noted.
“The solution lies with policymakers and statesmen, and with the strategy of bringing the Arabs and the Israelis together to counter Iran and its brand of Islamism,” he said.
In his new function as a campaigner in the halls of power in Washington, Mansour also gets to sit down with diplomats from Arab countries, many of whom align with his vision.
“On a personal level, there are issues that they also understand, such as the depth of the problem of antisemitism in the region. They understand that basically, acceptance of Israel is the new litmus test for Arabs, between those who belong in the previous century of destruction, and those who are past that,” he said.
“The Jews are today the battle line,” said Mansour.
