Regional Outlook : At Peace, but Still Not Friends : Arabs are reluctant to fully normalize relations with Israel even after three historic treaties.

At the gala opening of the annual Cairo International Film Festival last week, jewel-bedecked stars and new films from throughout the Middle East were on display. Top filmmakers from Syria, Algeria, Morocco and Egypt rubbed elbows.

What wasn’t there, in this era of Middle East glasnost, was anyone from Israel. Despite the Jerusalem government’s repeated requests over the years to take part in the event, there were no Israeli films and no Israeli stars. The Israeli Embassy’s cultural attache to Egypt--until this year the only Arab country with which Israel was at peace--stayed home.

The festival might have set a different tone, since the past two years have seen Israel signing peace agreements with Jordan and the Palestinians that mirror its landmark, 15-year-old peace treaty with Egypt. But that didn’t happen. The audience sat back opening night to a three-hour premiere of “The Road to Eilat,” a heady celebration of a successful Egyptian amphibious operation against the Israeli navy in 1969.

What happened to peace and cooperation? It was being celebrated across town at the Giza Zoo, where officials, with much fanfare, signed a new cooperative agreement with the Tel Aviv Zoo. But that pact drew a disdainful response from Saad Eddin Wahba, the film festival director. “Only donkeys, monkeys and foxes are interested in normalizing relations with Israel,” he sneered.

Normalization has come hard, even with Egypt. The momentous peace agreement signed at the White House last year by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat raised hopes that have yet to be met, or even approached. The hands that clasped in Washington, that led to the Nobel Peace Prize for Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Arafat and Rabin, remain firmly pocketed most of the time back home in the Middle East.

The film festival snub wasn’t unusual: No Israeli film has ever been shown in Egypt. A number of Egyptian tour companies began offering travel packages to Israel for the first time earlier this year, but then all but one canceled them by September. The artists, directors, actors, musicians, lawyers, engineers, doctors and journalists syndicates all forbid their members to travel to the Jewish state.

Fifteen years into peace between Egypt and Israel, there are only two major joint economic projects under way--both launched only this year.

The peace treaties signed with both Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization have plunged the Arab world into one of the most difficult dilemmas of peace: How much, and on whose terms? When governments sign treaties, are citizens obligated to follow with open arms? Exactly when will Israel finally become a functioning partner--economically, socially and culturally--in its own neighborhood?

“The battle of political and cultural normalization with the Jews is the fiercest battle facing us,” Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt said at a recent conference in Beirut called specifically to find ways to combat moves toward normalizing relations.

For a wide spectrum of Arabs, peace as a means of ending more than four decades of warfare is an idea whose time has come. But going a further step and embracing Israel as a partner and neighbor is an idea with little appeal for most Arabs. “Normalization” has become a hot new debate from Morocco to the Persian Gulf, and in most quarters it is being greeted with suspicion, if not outright hostility.

“Normalization is defined as a normal relationship with the state of Israel on cultural, political and social levels. We do not believe that normalization is possible for the simple reason that Israel is a colonial settler state which occupies Arab lands and practices all forms of violence and human rights violations,” said Radwa Ashour, a Cairo novelist and professor who is active in the Committee to Protect the National Culture. One of its primary goals is guarding against cultural cooperation with Israel.

In Jordan, the National Islamic Front issued a religious decree against normalization, declaring that “God has strictly forbidden subservience to those who usurp the land of Muslims or expel them from their homes,” and warning “honorable merchants” not to “buy the goods of the Jews or deal with them or engage in any form of industrial, tourist or agricultural cooperation.”

In Lebanon, Islamic intellectuals and secular nationalists from around the Arab world met in October and agreed on a program to schedule meetings, rallies and seminars as a means of “rejection of normalization with the Zionist enemy.”

“Agreements between governments do not concern us. Nationalism is not so much a government concern as it is the concern of the people,” declared Mohammed Baalbeki, president of the Lebanese Press Assn.

Hezbollah, the Islamic militia fighting Israeli occupation in the south of Lebanon, said it would conduct regular mosque sermons urging Muslims to boycott Israeli products, deter the exchange of tourist, cultural and educational delegations, and obstruct trade with the Jewish state.

For the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, one of the low points came only a few weeks ago, when heavy factional fighting between Palestinian Islamic militants and the Palestinian police in the Gaza Strip was greeted with editorials in all three government dailies in Egypt--blaming the Israelis, who hadn’t even been present.

Israeli diplomats complained they had never had an opportunity to meet with Egypt’s top newspaper editors--their overtures were repeatedly rebuffed--and asked whether this was the way to repay Israel’s peace initiatives with the Arabs.

Arabs see the normalization card, particularly on the cultural level, as the ordinary citizen’s last means of expressing opposition to Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank, Golan Heights and the self-declared security zone in south Lebanon.

“Israel perceives of culture as a point of entry to the Egyptian mind. Yet Egyptians--and here I mean the people rather than the government, which abides by the spirit and text of the treaty--have been reluctant to engage in cultural relations,” said Salaheddin Hafez, managing editor of Cairo’s semiofficial Al Ahram newspaper.

“Cultural normalization should be conditional on Israel meeting the legitimate demands of the government, demands that include Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab lands and compliance with international conventions eliminating weapons of mass destruction,” Hafez added. “The meeting of such conditions would display Israeli commitment to a comprehensive peace in the region. And without such a commitment, any talk about a culture of peace remains pie in the sky.”

Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, at a meeting of writers and intellectuals in the southern Egyptian city of Luxor last month, urged Arabs to begin embarking on cultural normalization as a natural follow-up to strides already being made on the agricultural, trade and economic front, most notably with the recent Middle East economic summit in Morocco.

Since the signing of the Israeli-PLO accord, Egypt has opened its border with Israel at Rafah 24 hours a day and dispatched four government ministers on visits since June. A delegation of 50 Egyptian business leaders visited Tel Aviv to discuss trade issues Nov. 5, about the same time that the Israeli shekel, for the first time in history, began being traded in Egyptian banks.

Overall, 12,000 Egyptian tourists visited Israel this past year--up from almost none in past years, though still much lower than the 150,000 Israelis who came to Egypt--and trade volume between Egypt and Israel is expected to reach $35 million this year, a nearly fourfold increase over 1992.

Yet many Arabs are skittish even on the economic front. Though the Arab boycott against Israel is falling to shreds in the wealthy Arab countries of the Gulf, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, it remains in full force in Syria and Lebanon. Lebanon, the Arab world’s historic commercial center before its disastrous civil war, is at the forefront of those Arab states who fear that Israel will quickly dominate any new Middle East market at the expense of the Arabs.

“The normalization of relations with Israel is against the interests of Lebanon, particularly on the economic side. We already compete with Israel, especially in tourism and banking. We used to be the banking center of the Arab world, and we would like to be again,” said Issam Naaman, a member of Parliament in Lebanon. “In the case of normalization of relations, we would be losing on both fronts.”

Syrians, Lebanese and Jordanians have been critical of the few cultural strides made between Israel and the Arab world. At the Lebanese anti-normalization conference, Arabs complained that Israel is successfully seeking to change the way history is taught to Arab students and to redraw maps of Palestine to show the presence of Israel.

An Israeli official, who asked not to be identified, said that indeed Israel had insisted, as part of the Camp David accords, that references to Israel as “the enemy” in school textbooks be deleted. “After you make a peace treaty with a country, it is only natural that you won’t call it the enemy again,” he said.

He said Israel wishes the Arabs would undergo the same kind of “education for peace” that Israel is embarking on--requiring all students to learn Arabic, teaching them about the benefits of peace.

“We are in the midst of a hell of a peace process. We explain to children what is the peace process, what are the circumstances, what are the consequences, what can it bring. I would be very glad if this kind of stuff would be taught in Egyptian and Arab schools,” the official remarked. “I don’t say all Arabs should learn Hebrew. But it shows an attitude to education.”

In the midst of the storm, a growing number of Arab intellectuals are bucking the prevailing winds, tentatively cracking a door that many believe will open full-scale once the economic benefits of peace begin to take hold.

Both the journalists and musicians syndicates in Cairo have indicated they are going to review their longstanding ban on travel to Israel early next year, reflecting the fact that some artists and writers are already, in fact, traveling to the Jewish state.

Egyptian singer Medhat Saleh traveled to Israel to perform three concerts in March, which he said were intended “to share with the Palestinians their joy for regaining a precious part of their land.”

Playwright Ali Salem followed a month later, embarking on a 23-day odyssey around Israel after which he wrote a book on his impressions of the Jewish state, “A Trip to Israel.” The book has been scornfully received in Cairo.

“Some people say, ‘We are with peace, but where is it? We have to wait till its implementation,’ ” Salem said. “I say, OK, you wait. I’m not going to wait. I’m going to share in making it. That’s all. Because peace will not make itself.”

In counterpoint to the vitriol hurled at him in the Egyptian press, Salem got dozens of letters of support from readers.

One came from a man in Zawya al Hamra, one of Cairo’s worst slums. The man identified himself as “a very simple Egyptian citizen.”

“I read what you said about your trip to Israel, and I admired it. It proves to every citizen that you are a patriot,” the man wrote. “I thought of this and I said to myself, ‘Why haven’t our thinkers gone to invade Israel to find out what they are thinking about our future as Arabs and Israelis?’ Instead of burying our heads in the sand, why don’t we converse with them? Why don’t we find out what they want from us, and what we need from them?”

Otherwise, the man wrote, “why is there a peace? Was it to stop wars only?”