Words into deeds

Mahgoub Omar:
In the face of experience
His constancy bridged the gap between words and deeds
Profile by Aziza Sami
Mahgoub Omar, as one Palestinian friend put it, "has devoted his life to Palestine." A doctor by profession, for 14 turbulent years, from 1968 to 1982, he was active in the ranks of the PLO, first in Jordan and subsequently in Lebanon, leaving when the PLO was forced to move its headquarters to Tunis after the Israeli invasion. It was only then that he returned to Egypt.
When the Israeli army's current invasion of the West Bank and Gaza exploded with such mind-numbing violence at the end of March and everyone seemed to be fishing around for Egyptians to interview who might have direct experience of such events, who might provide a meaningful commentary, his was the name which seemed to be on everyone's lips.
Mahgoub Omar: I was familiar with the name for it had appeared many times in the lead of articles, often published in the now defunct opposition newspaper Al-Shaab. But for those who did not always delve deeply into that paper -- among whom I must include myself -- Mahgoub Omar might all too easily have appeared just one writer among many who peddled their views on the one-time socialist oriented, and then Islamic, pages. I was familiar, too, with the face: I had seen an occasional, passport-sized photograph accompanying an article. I did not, though, at the time know that this was the face of the man Jean Genet had described as "the most beloved" of Palestinian commanders, despite his penchant for discipline, which extended even to the banning of card games.
Mahgoub lives with his Lebanese wife, Mouna, in a small, ground-floor apartment in an old building in Qasr Al-Aini. It bears remarkably few signs of affluence and is devoid of gadgets except for a personal computer connected to the Internet.
Mahgoub is 70 now, and has some health problems. He sits behind a high table, high enough so that he will not have to bend too much. In the corner of the room a television is switched on to the Palestine satellite channel, though occasionally he switches to other stations, providing a running commentary. "This one," he says, having switched to Al-Jazeera, "was never really pro-Arafat, not before the siege of Ramallah, not after. But they do what they do under the guise of media freedom."
He last spoke to Yasser Arafat by phone on 28 March, a day before the Israeli army began its siege of Arafat's Ramallah headquarters. Since then there have been no communications, a situation that has hit Mahgoub hard. He has known Arafat since 1968, the year Mahgoub joined the PLO, and the year Arafat became chairman of the organisation.
Mahgoub (born Raouf Nazmi Mikhail in 1932) hails from the traditional Egyptian left. He joined the Egyptian Communist Party as a student in the early 1950s and was twice imprisoned under Nasser. Less prone to theorising than many of his political co-travellers, he was also rather more willing to work with his hands. Among those who shared his imprisonment he is remembered as someone who would roll up his shirtsleeves and trouser legs, tilling a plot of land in the prison grounds with a yellow striped towel over his shoulder. Later still others, in the fedayin bases where he was in charge of political and military training, remember his uncomplaining approach to the most menial chores.
"His actions showed the kind of consistency between word and deed rare among the ranks of the Egyptian left," the prominent leftist intellectual Ismail Sabri Abdallah says of Mahgoub.
In 1966, following his release from a second stint in prison, Mahgoub published many articles, among them "Sources of Fragmentation in Arab Political Movements" and, in 1967, "The Art of the Possible, and the Inevitability of Confrontation".
He joined the PLO in 1968 because, he says, he saw it "not as a theorising body but a movement for and of the people, a movement that refused defeat on the ground."
"It represented, if you will, the sum-total of the Palestinian will to return to the land." Palestinian liberation, furthermore, is, Mahgoub believes, "the first line of defence" for the Egyptian nationalist movement.
His involvement with the PLO took many forms: he worked as a doctor in refugee camps in Southern Jordan, compiling lists of medicines required by the Red Cross. He was a military and political trainer in fedayin bases, first in Al-Tafila in Jordan, then in Lebanon. In the late 1970s he headed the PLO's bureau for planning.
Perhaps it was his association with Al-Shaab that fuelled rumours that along with the name change there had been a change of religion. The subject of the rumours, though, smiles when they are broached. No, he is not a convert. Mahgoub Omar, he explains, was adopted as pen name, as well as a kind of code name, after joining the PLO.
"Differences," Mahgoub believes, "must never be allowed to obscure the fundamentals upon which we all agree."
Fatah, the largest faction of the PLO, appealed to him not only because of its popular base but because of the catholicity of its membership: it embraced, he said, "Muslim and Christian, right and left with an all-encompassing plurality."
(A pack of cigarettes, inadvertantly left by Mouna, lies on the table in front of Mahgoub. He toys with one of them, playing with it in his fingers, before lighting it and smiling. The smile is that of a child caught doing something he should not. The cigarette is left half smoked.)
It is a plurality with which Mahgoub has been familiar since he was a child. His father, Mikhail, an employee in the postal service, made no distinctions between Muslims and Christians, save, perhaps, Mahgoub says, that he had a slight aversion to priests. But the family home was open to all, and Mahgoub was early introduced to the Quran, an introduction that resulted in a daily habit of listening to Quranic readings.
The televised images of violence, the random killing of civilians in Jenin and Nablus, indeed, all across the West Bank, are scenes with which Mahgoub is already familiar. He has seen it all before, in 1970, in Amman, during Black September. (His eye-witness accounts of events at Al-Ashrafiya hospital in Amman, bombarded by the Jordanian army, have been published in book form.) He was in Tel Al-Zaatar in Lebanon six months before Israel's phalangist allies massacred the inhabitants of the camp in 1976.
At Tel Al-Zaatar he was responsible for the supply of goods to the camp from the nearby industrial district, where the factories were owned by Maronite Christians. The camp, in return, provided workers for the factories.
"For a time there was Lebanese Palestinian intermingling, and it acted to protect the Palestinians."
It did not, however, last. The massacre at Tel Al-Zaatar provoked reprisals by Palestinians in the Maronite village of Al-Damur, as events spiralled into civil war. All of which served only to reinforce Mahgoub's belief in building bridges. "The guns," he insists, "when they are pointed should be pointed at the common enemy, not among ourselves."
Following the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel Mahgoub "felt tormented by the way the media in Arab countries dealt with the role of Egypt and attacked the Egyptian people."
"Even if public opinion was with Sadat then and against the Palestinians," he says, "I never felt that it was justified to attack the popular base."
In July 1980 he wrote a paper, "The Strategy of the Egyptian Negotiator," which though unpublished was widely circulated. In it he argued that the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, as contracted, had deprived Egypt of important levers that should have been maintained even in peace. Relinquishing war as a strategic option within the context of the Camp David accords being one example. It placed Egyptian negotiators in an impossibly weak position, he wrote, leaving no room for the exercise of even the minimum pressure necessary in any political negotiations.
Following the PLO's expulsion from Lebanon Mahgoub settled in Egypt, paying only brief visits to Tunis. "Not," he says, "because there were any differences with the PLO but because I felt, especially after the rift between Egypt and the Arab world, that a Palestinian base was needed inside Egypt." To which end he devoted his energies, writing and compiling a bibliography of works on Palestinian politics, history and culture.
It was at this time that he began working in the room made available to him by Dar Al-Fata Al-Arabi, the publishing house with which he had been associated since its founding in Beirut, and which moved its headquarters to Cairo in 1975.
It is Dar Al-Fata Al-Arabi which published Mahgoub's children's books. Alongside these he has produced a myriad articles, on the history and politics of Palestine which, together with several full-length studies, detail the dispossession of the Palestinian people and underscore his unwavering belief in the fundamental right of return and compensation of the Palestinian refugees. Indeed, the collection of books and other published material amassed by Mahgoub throughout his life, and to which he endlessly refers for his own works, constitutes one of the finest Palestinian archives in the region. It is stored in the flat above that occupied by Mahgoub and his wife.
After all he has seen, after all his involvement, how does he feel about what is now happening in Palestine?
"My first reaction," he says "is optimism, despite everything." The Oslo Peace accords, despite all defects and inconsistencies, at least afforded the Palestinians a foothold to fight for their land while they were on it. New realities, he believes, are being created on the ground every day: it is no longer a war by proxy, there are no more "Palestinians on the outside and those from within." The problem has gone back to its roots, which will, he believes, serve to clarify issues.
A few weeks ago he forwarded an e-mail to Yasser Arafat including an article, written by the Israeli author Israel Shamir, whose support of the Palestinian right of return has ensured his ostracism by the Israeli establishment. The article, "The Return of the Knight" -- the title is a pun on the name of Farris Ouda, the Palestinian boy whose photograph, standing alone, slinging a stone at a tank as it closed in on him became one of the most enduring images of the Intifada -- argues that the Palestinians need neither compassion nor pity but, rather, due recognition of their dignity, and of the chivalry of their fight for independence. (Farris was killed by an Israeli sniper a few days after the photograph was taken.)
He is currently engaged in compiling a selection of writings from the Israeli left which will be published under the title Exodus. On the wall of the room in which he works is a photograph of Khalil El-Wazir (Abu Jihad), the PLO leader assassinated by Israel in his home in Tunis in 1988. Countless of his friends, and his "children" as he called them, have been imprisoned, assassinated, killed in action.
Any attempt to embroil Mahgoub in debates on "wars against terror", to induce him -- who has lost so many friends -- to repeat yet again the justifications for the Palestinians armed struggle, would be an affront.
Recently he sent the diaries of a nurse who had witnessed the Sabra and Shatilla massacre to writer Gamal El-Ghitani, extracts from which Ghitani published in the weekly literary magazine Akhbar Al-Adab. Yet beyond his compiling of Exodus Mahgoub's own writing has been curtailed by ill-health.
Does he feel frustrated that he cannot do more?
No. Egoism is not part of his character. He has never felt that he is the only one, nor that his role has been unique, singular. Events in Palestine have been "written by many" he says. "There are many bridges. Mahgoub Omar is one."
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