FOR those readers, who may have missed last week's ‘Home Talk', I will briefly go over what I said when two of my friends, and I struck up an acquaintance one day in 1973 with three young Palestinian men. They offered to entertain the three of us in their nicely furnished apartment to express their gratitude after we'd pledged to them ��" and to their Palestinian brothers ��" that we, and millions of Egyptian young men, were ready to sacrifice our lives to liberate the Palestinian people from Israeli occupation. I mentioned last week that our newly acquired friends rudely dismissed us from their flat after the arrival of three pretty Egyptian prostitutes. I commented that, although we were ready to sacrifice our lives for the sake of their people, our Palestinian friends refused to allow us to share the female Egyptian ‘territory' they'd hired. My friends and I didn't take much note when our Palestinian friends arrogantly told us that their dream in life was to do doctorates in Europe. At the time, it didn't occur to us that the leaders of the Palestinian resistance, including Fatah's Arafat and rich Palestinian families, were making huge profits by maintaining the status quo (the Israeli occupation of their land). And nor did we realise that the Palestinian resistance movements were pressing us to wage war on Israel on their behalf, as they sat back and watched our wars against Israel on TV in the comfort of their magnificently appointed flats in Arab countries, Europe, the US and elsewhere. Our Palestinian friends' immediate change of heart (after the arrival of their mistresses) caused us much humiliation. Leaving their apartment in disgrace, we trudged disconsolately down the stairs feeling like boxers who'd been unfairly disqualified from the big bout. We never saw our wealthy Palestinian friends again. But we remembered them in 1979 when Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel. Leaders of Palestinian resistance movements led by the late Yasser Arafat launched a sickening attack on Egypt, accusing it of betraying Palestinians and the Arab cause. Although Sadat confirmed that the peace treaty would lead to a comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the Palestinian crisis, the late Egyptian leader was branded as a big traitor whose blood should be shed. In 1981, we felt even more humiliated, as we remembered once again our unhappy meeting with our Palestinian friends, when Sadat was assassinated by Islamist groups and the Palestinians led by Arafat danced in the streets in Arab countries and Europe. Following Arafat's individual culture of resistance, according to which Palestinian resistance movements would reinforce their armed presence and seek to establish a state within a state in the two Arab countries of Jordan and Lebanon (Arafat's plans tragically backfired when the Jordanian and Lebanese armies separately killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, while Arafat and his men managed to get safely away to Egypt and Tunisia respectively), the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas attempted to annex the Sinai Peninsula to Gaza. In 2007, the Hamas movement forced Fatah out of Gaza, which they declared an independent emirate that they (Hamas) controlled. The Islamist movement also dug tunnels under Rafah to dismantle Egypt's control of its national territory and borders. Just as Arafat withdrew his men secretly and fled from Jordan in the 1970s and Lebanon in the 1980s, leaving behind their fellow Palestinians to be massacred by the Jordanian Army and the Lebanese factions, Hamas leaders disappeared into the tunnels in late 2008 and early 2009 during the Gaza War, in which thousands of Palestinians were killed during a brutal assault launched by the Israeli Army. Perhaps my former Palestinian friends, whom I'd met in 1973, had obtained their doctorates and decided to stay on in Europe or join their parents in Arab countries. And perhaps they watched the Gaza War on television ��" and condemned me and my friends for not fighting Israel in Gaza. [email protected]
