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I miss aspects of being in the Arab world - the language - and there is a tranquility in these cities with great rivers. Whether it's Cairo or Baghdad, you sit there and you think, 'This river has flown here for thousands of years.' There are magical moments in these places.

When I was born here on one of the farms in Israel, my childhood, I never thought for one day that we will not be living together with Arabs.

Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men's minds.

Going through different places, I stopped through Dubai and stayed there overnight. There I had an ultra-culture shock.

The decision to open up Bahrain to embrace all people indiscriminately was fostered in me ever since I was a child.

Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.

We were the outliers: my mother was the only Western woman (khawagayya, in Egyptian Arabic) to have married into the family, and during my childhood, we were the only members living outside of Egypt. So between my father's prestige as the eldest son and my own exotic pedigree, I basked in the spotlight.

Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers, terrible: a death in life.

Social change doesn't happen in the Arab region through dramatic confrontation, beating, or indeed, baring of breasts, but rather through negotiation.