Hanging on Netanyahu's hopes for peace with the Palestinians • Hated Hizbullah • Liked Rabin • Oded Granot recalls a leader he interviewed a few months before his overthrow

• Oded Granot (right) and Hosni Mubarak, 2010 // Screenshot: Courtesy of Channel 1

My last meeting with President Mubarak was only four months before he was forced to retire in the Tahrir revolution, and I was the last Israeli journalist to talk to him. The TV interview he gave to Channel 1 was held at his villa in Sharm El Sheikh, followed by a conversation on the couch on the wide balcony overlooking the golf course.

The rais, not quite healthy, was already slow, but it was clear and sharp. In a conversation, not for publicity, he was amazed to draw with a small smile, and in spoken and played Egyptian language, lines to the image of almost all Israeli leaders, whom he met during his reign.

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak dies at age 91 // Photo: Reuters

He loved Rabin and also told of a secret mission he carried out at the request of the Prime Minister to Hafez Assad, Bashar's father. Netanyahu had high hopes for peace with the Palestinians. On another Israeli personality he adamantly ruled that he would never succeed in the presidency of Israel - and justice. It was an instructive look at us from the Arab world leader.

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The peace he had with us for 30 years was a cold peace, but a strict peace without breach, or a severing of relations, which also lasted during the most difficult times: bombing of Iraq and Syria reactors, two intifadas, the Lebanese war. Countless skirmishes in Gaza.

Moreover, although he himself did not visit Israel except once in Be'er Sheva as vice president with Sadat and another time to attend Rabin's funeral, the fact that he hosted in his palace all the persons from Israel and the extensive publicity given to these meetings in the Egyptian media, alongside the concurrent broadcasts of the interviews he gave me on television The Egyptian was a small but important step towards normalizing and assimilating the recognition of the hostile Egyptian public that Israel is an existing fact and can be talked to. Much more than his successor in the post, Aissi, dares to do to this day.

He hated Hamas, was dismayed by the organization's takeover of Gaza and despised Hezbollah, but repeated countless times that without a solution to the Palestinian problem, Egypt would find it harder to warm relations with Israel. He was not a great Democrat to say the least, but managed to maintain a stable state by maintaining a balance between violent oppression of the opposition on the one hand and allowing some freedom of speech and controlled demonstrations to release steam on the other.

Never, by the way, did he understand why the Americans were urging him to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to run in free elections. "Explain to me, y'all encouraged, they want them to take over Egypt?" A year after Mubarak's ouster, his nightmare came true, and Assisi had to kill thousands of Morsi supporters to keep them out of power.

The irony is that he could have saved himself the shaky and humiliating experience of trial and jail time until he was released had he listened to the protest sounds heard in Egypt in his final year of office. All the protesters wanted was not to run for another term and give up his intention to bequeath the term to his son Gamal.

Had he done it in time, he would have been able to end his life leisurely at his villa in Sharm El Sheikh but he procrastinated and when he finally did, it was very late and hundreds of thousands had already filled Tahrir Square.