Khaled Diab, an Egyptian who lives in Belgium, and Anat, a.k.a. "Israeli Mom," became online acquaintances during the Second Lebanon War, via the ME Forum message board that Anat initiated. More than half-a-year later, Khaled has come to visit Israel.

He is blogging extensively about his visit, and Anat is writing about her observations on her blog, too.

This visit is not about group hugs, olive branches and another chorus of Kumbaya. Khaled and Anat are way too smart and clear-eyed for that kind of stuff. They don't always agree, but they are not afraid to listen to one another, and to face their own prejudices.

Khaled stayed at Anat's home for the first couple of days of his visit. Here's an excerpt from the post he called At home with the Zionists:

"...in the early days of the conflict, it was a simpler age, and Zionists were invariably portrayed as comic book villains – and how many of those have time to fit in a family, do the cooking, shopping and cleaning, in between all that villainy and political manoeuvring? Today, many more species of Zionists have been discovered by Arab political zoologists, but they are still, in the Arab psyche, essentially a dangerous and possibly deadly political animal which roams the Palestinian territories and occasionally neighbouring countries.

Given this backdrop, you can imagine how bizarre and surreal it felt to find myself coming down to breakfast in an authentic Israeli Zionist household! This weirdness was accentuated by the fact that it wasn’t so weird – that once you move beyond the conflict, you notice how they are just folk like us, as the Americans would say.

In Israel, they like to say that whenever you bring two Jews together, they will have three opinions. Well, after some empirical observation, I have come to the conclusion that if you throw an Arab or two into this mix, you're guaranteed hours of political debate for the whole family."