Mick Hartley

Egypt may not be a free country, but it's not totalitarian either. Michael J Totten talks to three different liberal voices who've survived. As one of them, Gamal Abdel Gawad Soltan, says, "Mubarak was corrupt and authoritarian, but he was not Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad, or Muammar Qaddafi."

Here's novelist and professor Ezzedine Choukri Fishere:

Fishere—an opponent of Mubarak who was never shy about making his opinions known—is exactly the kind of person needed by a government that wants to reform its sclerotic institutions. "If North Korea and the former Soviet Union are a ten on the scale of social control," he said, "Egypt under Mubarak was probably a six. I published my first novel in 1995. It was very critical of the government. I was working in the foreign service at the time, so I wondered if I should write under my own name. But I went ahead, and nothing happened. No one in the government reads," he laughed.

Even more astonishingly, not only was Fishere in the official employ of the regime at the time, he was working at Egypt's embassy in Tel Aviv. As a result of this posting, his view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of Egyptian-Israeli relations is exceptionally nuanced and sophisticated. "I had never been to Israel before I worked for the embassy," he said. "It was like landing on the moon. It's very close, but it's also very far. When I got there I thought, 'Oh, damn, this is Ben-Gurion airport.' And there was a statue of Ben-Gurion. How was I supposed to relate to that? He's an absolute 'other.'

"But then Israel became my daily life. It was a great experience because I learned things that I couldn't possibly learn otherwise. I got to understand how Israel really functions, how people really think. It's a complex story. Egyptians and Syrians have the most fantastic views of Israelis because there is no interaction whatsoever. For us, our view of Israelis comes from our imagination rather than from people we deal with. I saw the complexity of the relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and complexity teaches you things."