[ad_1]
With the power of a one-minute videotape recorded by a French television cameraman, feelings were inflamed here in Egypt. Every Egyptian child felt as if he had been shot, and every Egyptian parent was as if they had lost their child through the tyranny of the occupation.
The ugliness of the deliberate killing of a child added additional impetus to the “Al-Aqsa Intifada”, which had swept through the occupied territories the day before. The schoolchildren ran to paint the Israeli flag on their shirts before being burned, they did not have enough money to buy canvases to paint what they wanted to burn.
No one expected, after many years of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, that the justice of the Palestinian cause would appeal to the feelings and prejudices of a new generation, who had not witnessed the military clashes that took place before he was born, and that He had not experienced for himself the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and was told in academic curricula that Peace has been made.
In a fit of anger, newcomers to public life demanded an end to normalization with Israel and the expulsion of its ambassador in Cairo. President Hosni Mubarak convened what was called the “political group,” and the meeting did take place, but it did not come to decisions that were serious, persuasive, and capable of calming angry public opinion.
Mubarak considered asking the question again to a small group of Egyptian newspaper editors, whom he met immediately after the “political group”: “What do we do?”
The original idea was for him to meet first with the “political group”, then with the heads of the parties, but it was modified – in its second part – by a meeting with the editors-in-chief, and they were hastily contacted to go immediately to The presidency. No one at the center of the decision was convinced that any dialogue and consultation with the heads of the parties, which had been demolished for decades, made sense and it seemed that addressing public opinion through the media was more meaningful and cash.
The “political group” seemed incapable of making decisions that would help control the angry streets, since the nature of the regime did not allow such sensitive files to present new perceptions and ideas, nor to undertake any revision in the policies followed. The media were the available way out of the raging street crisis.
When the president entered the meeting room with the editors-in-chief, Information Minister Safwat al-Sharif approached several editors-in-chief with a suggestive signal and said: “The atmosphere is electrifying.” That was an explicit message not to criticize Egyptian policy, but Mubarak took the reins of criticism, attacking Israel, pointing to Ariel Sharon with excessive derision, since “he eats a single lamb”, but “stingy”. A plate of chorizo ”, and“ his politics will go to hell in the region ”, then he attacked the United States and its administration with excessive bitterness. That day, with his air and pressure in the streets, the editor-in-chief of a national magazine tried to incite him against “Al-Arabi”, saying that “there is an Egyptian newspaper that published in its main headlines a chant that hesitated in demonstrations of anger. … One by two … Where is the Egyptian army. ” Mubarak asked him, “Here in Egypt!” He replied, “Yes … Oh, I’m sorry.” She was surprised by what he did not expect, looking at me: “Egyptian newspapers are patriotic and there is no restriction on what they publish.”
This was an expression of good appreciation for the difficult situation the country is in and that any harassment of the opposition press affects public safety and increases the complexity and ignition of the crisis.
As Mubarak recounted that day, shortly after Ariel Sharon became prime minister of the Israeli government, he was visiting the United States.
At one of the official receptions organized for the Egyptian president, a prominent member of Congress approached him and said briefly and frankly: “Allow me, Mr. President, to suggest that you take your plane from here to Jerusalem to visit Sharon … East step guarantees him the Nobel Peace Prize, and the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is ready to promise him now that he will get it. “Mubarak replied,” I don’t want this award. “However, at that time he asked that this story was not published in the newspapers, and he literally said: “Al-Arabi … does not publish”, but I returned it and published it in 2008, so that the meaning does not escape oblivion and obsolescence.
Mubarak’s novel reveals some of the secrets and scenes of the “Nobel Prize”, and the objectives that accompany, in some cases, to achieve it. However, the most important significance is that he was aware of the danger of being involved in a visit to Israel, and that such a step poses a serious challenge to public sentiments, and that its repercussions may bring his regime to the same stalemate as eventually brought President Sadat.
With the exception of his participation in the funeral of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Mubarak rejected repeated pressure on him to visit Israel. And what seems to have drawn from the incident on the platform a fundamental lesson in the governance of his administration of state affairs during the years of his presidency, is summed up in the supremacy of security thinking, and this thinking, by its nature, Avoid major shocks and their repercussions on system security.
In the text of his speech on that stormy day twenty years ago, “normalization is one of the open doors for Israelis to penetrate Egyptian society in Sinai and carry out intelligence work.” Voices were raised in the closed-door meeting calling for an end to normalization. Mubarak did not mind announcing such a decision, in a statement issued by the Council of Ministers and signed by its president at the time, Dr. Atef Ebeid. It was clear and frank without cosmetics: “It will not be implemented” and “I do not put my signature on a statement that it will not be implemented.” The declaration was issued by the Council of Ministers and had a wide echo in the Arab world. I think the largest and most important Arab country is reviewing its policies and stances towards Israel. That belief was an excess of illusions and a bet out of place. With some anticipation of the consequences, Mubarak added categorically: “Jerusalem is a red line … and whoever agrees to abandon it will be a bullet.” That phrase was precisely from the aphorisms of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
In the second half of the nineties of the last century, Farouk Kaddoumi, head of the political department of the “Palestine Liberation Organization”, used to repeat it every time we had the opportunity to meet privately in a hotel in Cairo overlooking the Nile. On the same occasion, I asked him a question related to the fate of Jerusalem and the possibilities of abandoning it in any subsequent negotiations. He made the shape of a pistol with his right hand, then waved his hand as if a bullet were fired, saying: “This is the fate of those who neglect it, even if it is Arafat himself.
Ten years after that dialogue in the “Ittihadiya” Palace, which was summoned by demonstrations of anger at the murder of the Palestinian boy Muhammad al-Dura, the “schoolchildren” are back on the streets and have become young men who they hope to see their country join the era of a modern democratic state. This comment appealed to the late writer Radwa Ashour. Thus appeared the outburst of anger in early October 2000, as a sign and prophecy of a change in what will happen in “January” (2011).
* Egyptian writer and journalist
Subscribe to «News» on YouTube here
