CAIRO – 10 January 2018: Egyptian-American academic Saad Eddin Ibrahim said Wednesday he is ready to travel once again to Israel if invited by Tel Aviv University.

Last week, a group of students at Tel Aviv University heckled Ibrahim for coming to speak there, calling him a "traitor" for perpetuating "normalization with Israel."



Ibrahim told Egypt Today in an interview that if being invited by the university, he would definitely visit Israel again as long as the lecture topic is of interest to him.

On Jan. 4, Ibrahim told Makan, a state-owned Israeli television channel on Thursday that the balance of international powers has changed and a lot of concepts should change as well.

"This is not my first time in Israel; it is in fact my third time there," Ibrahim said when the presenter asked him about being accused of normalization with Israel. "For 20 years I have been coming to Israel,” Ibrahim told the Israeli channel.

He clarified in his interview that he was invited last week to lecture at Tel Aviv University about the 1919 Revolution, which he described as a “real revolution.”

The three-day seminar, organized by Tel Aviv University, marked 99 years since the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, a countrywide revolution against the British occupation of Egypt and Sudan, and the revolutions that followed it in Egypt and other countries.

Ibrahim stressed that he did not receive money for visiting and lecturing at the Israeli university, deeming people who say otherwise as “witless”.

Ibrahim’s visit to the Israeli state drew a wave of anger across the Egyptian society against him.

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Who is Saad Eddin Ibrahim?

80-year-old Saad Eddin Ibrahim is an Egyptian American sociologist and author. He is deemed one of Egypt's leading human rights and democracy activists.

Ibrahim was a strong critic of former president Hosni Mubarak.

Ibrahim founded the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Cairo and the Arab Organization for Human Rights. He has been criticized for accepting international funds to promote civil society and election monitoring in Egypt, and for suggesting that the United States should condition its aid to Egypt on improvements in the country's human rights record.

In December 2007, Ibrahim worked with the Arab Democracy Foundation in Doha.

In August 2008, Ibrahim was sentenced to two years in prison for "tarnishing Egypt's reputation" according to court verdict.


Ibrahim was sentenced to two years in prison for "tarnishing Egypt's reputation"
In 2001, Ibrahim was sentenced to seven years in prison for the same charges, until he won an appeal that got him released in 2003.

Additional reporting by Kamel Kamel.