Hussam Fahmy

Those who follow the Egyptian cinema during the past hundred years, but during more than that, will find that it was and still is a political means expressing the mood of the Egyptian authority always, and sometimes Egyptian society.

At the heart of this political impact was the Arab-Israeli conflict present, and specifically the Palestinian issue, which the Arabs consider their first and eternal issue, especially as it is the only Arab people who suffer from the occupation and usurpation of their land from foreign military forces to this day.

The strange thing is that the Palestinian cause, despite its continued burning, has begun to disappear gradually from the Egyptian cinema screen, so that the matter becomes questionable, especially with the approach of the United States and Israel to bury this issue in a deep and unavoidable grave, through the American peace plan known to the media as a "deal" The Century "under which Israel seizes the last remaining Palestine, and the people remain imprisoned in the remaining crumbs that do not represent even a tenth of the occupied Palestinian territories. So how did Palestine disappear from the oldest and oldest cinemas in the Arab region?

The catastrophe and rotten weapons
The most important beginning of the emergence of the Palestinian cause in the Egyptian cinema may be through the Egyptian films that talked about the war of 1948 between the Arabs and the Zionist gangs, which was famous in Egypt especially as one of the reasons for the "Free Officers" organization to stage a 1952 coup against King Farouk, which the organization accused of causing In the Nakba 48 as a result of the Egyptian army's supply of a deal of corrupt weapons.

Talking about Palestine in the fifties and sixties, then it was with the consent of the authority of the Egyptian President at the time Abdel Nasser and his companions, and we mention here two films that were produced in 1957, they are "The Land of Peace" directed by Kamal Al-Sheikh and starring Omar Al-Sharif and Faten Hamama, and "Red Heart" directed by Izz Al-Din Zul Al-Faqqar and starring Shukri Sarhan and Maryam Fakhr Al-Din.

war and peace
In the seventies and eighties, Egyptian cinema was undoubtedly affected by the events of the October 1973 war against Israel, then the Camp David Treaty 1978, where Palestine almost disappeared from the cinema in the period between the Six Day War or the June 1967 setback and the 1973 war, with the exception that it may be the only one that is the film "Deceived" by the director The Egyptian Tawfiq Saleh in 1972, but his crew are mostly non-Egyptian.

In the 1980s, the atmosphere of the peace treaty dominated so that the Palestinian cause was timidly returning in the early 1990s in a manner that might not be serious through Nadia El-Gendy's intelligence films, the most famous of which is "Important in Tel Aviv" in 1992, and more seriously through the Palestinian guerrilla figure who helped the Egyptian naval division In carrying out a mission against Israel in the movie "The Road to Eilat" in 1993, we must also remember here the movie "Naji Al-Ali" in 1991, starring Nur al-Sharif and directed by Atef al-Tayeb.

Clean cinema
The end of the nineties and the beginning of the third millennium witnessed a golden age for the Palestinian issue on the Egyptian cinema screen, especially as a result of the flare-up of the Palestinian uprising at that time, and the martyrdom of the Palestinian child Mohammed Al-Durrah in front of the cameras of international news agencies.

The Israeli flag appeared flaming even in comedies, the most prominent of which was the 1998 movie “My Assassin at the American University” starring Mohamed Heneidy. Heneidy remained true to the issue and appeared again as he threw stones at the Israeli occupation forces in the movie “We Got the Next Statement,” as his enemy was The archer in "Hammam in Amsterdam" is a young Zionist who also lives in the Netherlands, and the same continued along the way to the movie "Nightingale El-Dokki".

The Palestinian cause also appeared during that period in many films, including of course "Friends and No Business" starring Amr Waked and Mustafa Qamar, and even in the comedy film "A Journey of Love" starring Mohamed Fouad and Ahmed Helmy, and we saw school demonstrations in sympathy with the Palestinian cause after the killing Al-Durrah.

The killing of Al-Durra also had an impact in the movie "The Embassy in Architecture" starring Adel Imam in 2006, in which we witnessed the killing of a Palestinian child by the Israeli occupation forces, and in the same period we also followed the movie "Bab Al-Shams" by Egyptian director Yusri Nasrallah in 2004, though The cast was not Egyptian.

vanishement
With the end of the first decade of the third millennium and the January revolution igniting, the Egyptians undoubtedly got busy with their revolution, which was not unfortunate at the cinema level either, it was documented only in a few films during 2011 and 2012, and with the 2013 coup succeeding in overthrowing the late Egyptian president. Mohamed Morsi and the return of military rule again This revolution disappeared from the cinema, just as Palestine disappeared completely.

For example, in 2017 and during the period of forced recruitment of the Egyptian actor Mohamed Ramadan in the Egyptian army, Ramadan made two films. The first is a documentary film about the Egyptian thunderbolt weapon called the “guards of the nation”, in which it appears that the most important enemy of the Egyptian state is “terrorism” and not Israel .

As for the other film, it is a dramatic film called "The Answer to Arrest", in which Ramadan appears as a regrettable terrorist after the group of which he belonged to a member of his family. The Palestinians and Syrians were involved in terrorist operations inside Egypt, and the most famous of these accusations, of course, were prison break-ups in the wake of the January revolution.

Israel nonetheless appeared as an enemy in a single film that talks about the stage of the war of attrition after the setback 67, which is "The Passage" in 2019, but without any mention of the Palestinian cause.

It appears, therefore, that the Mubarak regime, despite its maintenance of commercial and economic relations with Israel, was satisfied with the emergence of Egyptian public anger and continued solidarity with the rights of the Palestinian people, as observers and critics see, which has completely changed with the current Egyptian authority, which is trying to change the belief of the Egyptians to become "terrorism" As the Egyptian Authority describes it, he is the first enemy, not Israel.