Israel in the "head of Satan" Egyptian .. Tourism and other areas

Bassem Magdy - South Sinai

On the beach of one of the camps in the famous Ras Shitan area located between the cities of Taba and Nuweiba in the southern Egyptian province of Sinai, a number of Israeli tourists sit on the oud and sing in Hebrew.

Along the "Ras Shitan" stretch, the camps are scattered in a simple nomadic style, with small nesting and Bedouin meetings between the mountains and the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba, an area favored by the Israelis for their proximity to the common border.

The price of accommodation in the camps of "Ras Shitan" is low, ranging between £ 300 and £ 350, including breakfast and dinner. The area can be reached by bus or taxi from Nuweiba or Taba.

Cheap tourism
She talks to us as an Israeli tourist not more than twenty years old, explaining that tourism in the Sinai is much cheaper than Israel, yet she complains that prices in the camps have doubled over the past years. The price of the night was less than 100 pounds three years ago.

Israel is now less crowded than in the summer. Camps are crowded with Israelis in the summer, and the scene is quieter and more restrained in nearby Israeli Eilat, a big city crowded with hotels and tourist resorts.

Ayman (one of the workers in the camp) says that all the camps of the head of Satan are similar, and it varies according to the season, and today's price ranges around 300 pounds, increases and decreases according to the crowd.

He adds to the island Net that the hundred shekels worth about 480 pounds, so the Israeli spend generously and enjoy whatever he wants, while tourism in Israel is much more expensive. Ayman speaks some Hebrew, as do most of the staff at the resort.

Dahab and Sharm
With a limited budget of only NIS 1,500, the 18-year-old Israeli went to Sinai with his high school friends. They took the bus from Tel Aviv to Eilat to Taba and then took the taxi to the Egyptian city of Dahab, where they spent four days.

Yaron received a South Sinai visa at the Taba border crossing between the two sides. The visa costs about 100 shekels and gives him 15 days to visit the Gulf of Aqaba and St. Catherine.

Mustapha (one of the employees of a tourist cafe in Dahab) points out that Israelis come to the city throughout the year and form a major source of tourism in Dahab.

He explains to Al-Jazeera Net that tourists who come from Israel can hardly be discriminated against from others. They do not know that they are Israeli unless they speak Hebrew, or note that some of them wear a Jewish hat.

Mustafa avoided standing with Israelis after he encountered a problem at a security checkpoint when security discovered that the tourist he was accompanying was Israeli.

Four days later, Yaron left his friends and continued his lonely journey to Sharm, and during the trip spoke to Al Jazeera Net explaining that prices in Dahab could be ten prices in Eilat.

I booked a hotel in Sharm Telfa about three hundred pounds a night and spent three days in the city before returning.

Normalization through tourism
Yaron confirms that he heard from his Egyptian friends - who knows them through Arabic and Hebrew learning exchange pages on social networking sites - that most Egyptians do not like Israelis.

It seems that this popular rejection of normalization with the Israelis is what prompted the Israeli government to try to promote it has succeeded in penetrating the Egyptian society through the tourism portal, where the page "Israel speaks Arabic" on the Facebook site that the head of Satan has become a center for resolving the Middle East conflict through music.

Naji (a visitor from Cairo to Dahab) tells of a trip to Nuweiba, and saw a group of Israeli tourists trying to enter the ceremony, but his organizers asked for their passports. When they knew that they had been prevented from entering Israel, .

The young man refuses to deal with Israeli tourists or to mix with them, and it was not acceptable to him or his friends to enter Israeli tourists concert that traveled to the presence of hundreds of young people from Cairo.

The Israelis enter Sinai in accordance with the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel, which was signed under US auspices in 1979. The Taba crossing is the most important entry point for Israelis in Sinai.

The director of the Taba border crossing that the number of Israelis who visited Egypt during the last year reached one million tourists compared to seven thousand thousand in 2017.

According to Israeli sources, 270,000 people crossed the border during July and August, 175 of them through the Taba border crossing, most of them Israelis.

Although official relations date back to 39 years, the normalization of relations remained frozen or almost frozen, especially since most Egyptians do not forget that Israel is an occupying state that killed their sons, but it differed very much after Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power. He spoke repeatedly about what he called the warm peace with Israel .