Former Egyptian ambassador to Israel reveals himself to be an antisemite ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, May 11, 2026

Former Egyptian ambassador to Israel reveals himself to be an antisemite

Atef Sayyed el-Ahl served as Egypt's ambassador to Israel. This is one of the most sensitive diplomatic postings in the Arab world, representing a country that signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 at considerable political cost, and which has maintained that peace across decades of regional turbulence. The job requires, at minimum, a capacity to engage with Israel and Israelis as they actually are.

El-Ahl has recently been publishing and appearing on television to explain what Israel actually is. The picture he paints is not that of a diplomat who spent years developing an honest understanding of a difficult neighbor. It is rantings of an antisemite.

He fully subscribes to the discredited Khazar theory, claiming that He argues that Jews in Israel have no real ancestral connection to the Land of Israel. He is not even careful to distinguish Ashkenazi Jews from Mizrahi Jews - to him, all Jews in Israel are not really Jewish. This hypothesis has been demolished by modern population genetics — study after study finds that Jewish populations share a common Near Eastern ancestral cluster, with Ashkenazi Jews genetically proximate to other Middle Eastern populations including Palestinians. The Khazar theory survives today almost exclusively in antisemitic literature, where its political utility outlasted its credibility by decades. Denying that Jews are Jews — that the Jewish people have any genuine connection to their own history, ancestry, and land — is antisemitism, regardless of how many footnotes accompany the denial.

El Ahl also argues that the Jewish Temple may never have existed, citing the absence of definitive archaeological proof of its precise location, claiming that the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim might have been the real one. We see this accusation in Arab media all the time, that there is not one scrap of archaeological evidence of the Jewish Temples.

Yet the Temple left its walls behind — and not just Herod's walls. The Eastern Wall of the Temple Mount, still standing today, preserves three distinct building phases readable in the stonework itself: the Iron Age section dating to King Hezekiah in the 8th century BCE, visible on either side of the Golden Gate and near the southeast corner known as the Bend; the Hasmonean extension southward; and Herod's later expansions to the north and south. Leen Ritmeyer, the archaeologist who has personally measured and documented more of the Temple Mount than any living scholar — Christian, Muslim, or Jewish — has spent decades mapping exactly these phases in the physical fabric of the walls. The Temple Mount is not an assertion. It is a structure, and its pre-Herodian stonework is visible to anyone standing in front of it. Temple denial is not a scholarly position. It is antisemitism with a footnote.

In his television interview, el-Ahl went further still. He claimed that Israel has dug nine tunnels beneath Jerusalem, three of them running under Al-Aqsa itself, "in an attempt to find any means to make it collapse," and concluded: "I believe the takeover of Al-Aqsa is now very close." This is not geopolitical analysis from a former diplomat. It is a classical antisemitic conspiracy theory — Jews secretly scheming to destroy the holy site above them — dressed in the borrowed authority of ambassadorial experience.

Taken together, these are not peripheral or incidental views. They form a coherent worldview: today's Jews are not really Jews, their Temple never existed, and they are now tunneling to collapse the mosque built over the Temple Mount they have no right to. Every element strips Jews of historical legitimacy. Every element portrays Jewish claims as fabrication in service of dispossession. That is the architecture of antisemitism, and el-Ahl has built his analysis on every beam of it.

The question worth asking is not whether el-Ahl holds antisemitic views — he clearly does. The question is what it means that Egypt sent this man to Israel as its representative. He arrived, apparently, having already concluded that his hosts were historical frauds. An antisemite not qualified to be an ambassador to any country, let alone Israel. That he was Egypt's ambassador to the Jewish state should be a scandal.

But the world expects Arab nations to be antisemitic at their core. So no one thinks twice about a person who denies Jewish existence and history being a respected diplomat who is interviewed very often on Egyptian TV, today.