“We should not be looking for love and warmth from the Egyptians. We should be looking for quiet and helpful cooperation instead,” Knesset member Ksenia Svetlova of the Zionist Camp told Al-Monitor in response to the suspension of Tawfik Okasha from the Egyptian Parliament. The parliamentarian was punished for inviting Israel’s ambassador to Egypt, Haim Koren, to his home for dinner. Okasha also had a shoe thrown at him in parliament, an incident that received wide coverage in the Egyptian media. The Israeli media also made much of the incident, and there has been speculation that Okasha had actually been sent to meet with the ambassador by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. If so, he would have been a test balloon, sent to see if it was possible to tighten relations between Egypt and Israel. Today, those relations consist primarily of military cooperation.

Svetlova, who was born in Russia, is an expert in Middle East affairs and a former commentator on Arab affairs for Channel 9. While working as a journalist, she covered the Arab Spring in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Today she is completing a doctorate, writing her dissertation on coverage of Israel in the Egyptian media from the dawn of peace in 1977 up until 2011.

The rest of the interview follows:

Al-Monitor:  Do you see the incident involving Okasha and the Israeli ambassador as indicative of the normalization of Egypt’s ties with Israel?