He admits being raised with tales of Anti-Zionist “heroes” and admits at one point he was a “wannabe jihadist.”
By Shula Rosen
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, who, like many Egyptians, was raised to distrust Jews and particularly Israel, is now a lobbyist in DC for Arab-Israeli cooperation and against Islamic extremism.
A senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs (JCFA), a think-tank formerly known as the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Mansour says his goal is to promote a vision for a new Middle East.
Mansour believes that although the Hamas invasion of October 7th was intended in part to interfere with normalization efforts between Saudi Arabia and Israel, it’s only a matter of time before normalization goes forward.
He envisions 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.”
He told Times of Israel, “If the trend of normalization continues, the next generation of Arabs will be culturally immune to Iran’s primary weapon: ideology,”
Born in 1989 to a devout Muslim family in Cairo, Mansour was raised with the antisemitic tropes many Egyptians live with every day.
Despite the Peace Treaty that was signed at Camp David in 1979 between then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated because of the treaty, Mansour says Egyptian society is rife with anti-Zionist sentiment.
He admits being raised with tales of Anti-Zionist “heroes” and admits at one point he was a “wannabe jihadist.”
“My generation is probably the most indoctrinated generation in the modern history of the region,” Mansour said.
However, Mansour emerged from this indoctrination when he internalized the principle of “know your enemy” and found out more about the Jewish State–and what he learned amazed him.
He learned Hebrew at Cairo University and then discovered more about Israel on his own.
Soon, he realized “the complete humanity of the Jews and the ridiculousness of what people [in Egypt] think about them.”
Mansour ran into trouble for his frequent visits to the Israeli Academic Center in the Israeli Embassy in Cairo and his participation in the Arab Spring protests in 2011.
Since then, He has been committed to bringing his vision to Washington.
“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.