Hurrah for Egypt!

by Uri Avneri

28/01/12

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1327671448/

THE IMPOSSIBLE has happened. The Egyptian parliament,
democratically elected by a free people, has convened
for its first session.

For me this is a wonderful, a joyful occasion.

For many Israelis, this is a worrisome, a threatening
sight.

I CANNOT but rejoice when a downtrodden people arises
and wins its freedom and human dignity. And not by the
intervention of outside forces, but by its own
steadfastness and courage. And not by shooting and
bloodshed, but by the sheer power of nonviolence.

Whenever and wherever it happens, it must gladden the
heart of any decent person around the globe.

Compared to most other revolutions, this Egyptian
uprising was bloodless. The number of victims ran in
the dozens, not thousands. The current struggle in
Syria claims that number of victims every day or two,
and so did the successful uprising in neighboring
Libya, which was greatly assisted by foreign military
intervention.

A revolution reflects the character of its people. I
always had a special liking for the Egyptian people,
because they are - by and large - devoid of
aggressiveness and violence. They are a singularly
patient and humorous lot. You can see this in thousands
of years of recorded history and you can see it in
daily life in the street.

That is why this revolution was so surprising. Of all
the peoples on this planet, the Egyptians are among the
most unlikely to revolt. Yet revolt they did.

THE PARLIAMENT convened after 60 years of military
rule, which also started with a bloodless revolution.
Even the despised king, Farouk, who was overthrown on
that day in July 1952, was not harmed. He was bundled
into his luxurious yacht and sent off to Monte Carlo,
there to spend the rest of his life gambling.

The real leader of the revolution was Gamal
Abd-al-Nasser. I had met him several times during the
1948 war - though we were never properly introduced.
These were all night battles, and only after the war
could I reconstruct the events. He was wounded in a
battle for which my company was awarded the honorary
name "Samson's Foxes", while I was wounded five months
later by soldiers under his command.

I never met him face to face, of course, but a good
friend of mine did. During the battle of the "Faluja
pocket", a cease-fire was agreed in order to bring out
the dead and wounded lying between the lines. The
Egyptians sent Major Abd-al-Nasser, our side sent a
Yemen-born officer whom we called "Gingi" (Ginger),
because he was almost totally black. The two enemy
officers liked each other very much, and when the
Egyptian revolution broke out, Gingi told me - long
before anyone else - that Abd-al-Nasser was the man to
watch.

(I cannot restrain myself from voicing a pet peeve
here. In Western films and books, Arabs often bear the
first name Abdul. Such a name just does not exist.
"Abdul" is really Abd-al-, which means "servant of"'
and is invariably followed by one of Allah's 99
attributes. Abd-al-Nasser, for example, means "Servant
of (Allah) the Victorious". So please!)

"Nasser", as most people called him for short, was not
a born dictator. He later recounted that after the
victory of the revolution, he had no idea what to do
next. He started by appointing a civilian government,
but was appalled by the incompetence and corruption of
the politicians. So the army took things into its own
hands, and soon enough it became a military
dictatorship, which lasted and steadily degenerated
until last year.

One does not have to take Nasser's account literally,
but the lesson is clear: now as then, "temporary"
military rule tends to turn into a lasting
dictatorship. Egyptians know this from bitter
experience, and that's why they are becoming very very
impatient now.

I remember an arresting conversation between two
leading Arab intellectuals some 45 years ago. We were
in a taxi in London, on our way to a conference. One
was the admirable Mohammed Sid Ahmad, an aristocratic
Egyptian Marxist, the other was Alawi, a courageous
leftist Moroccan opposition leader. The Egyptian said
that in the contemporary Arab world, no national goal
can be achieved without a strong autocratic leadership.
Alawi retorted that nothing worthwhile can be achieved
before internal democracy is established. I think this
case has now been settled.

AS WINSTON CHURCHILL famously said, "democracy is the
worst form of government except all those other forms
that have been tried." The bad thing about democracy is
that free elections don't always turn out the way you
want them to.

The recent Egyptian election was won by "Islamists".
The tumultuous first session produced by this whiff of
freedom was dominated by deputies with religious
beards. Elected members of the Muslim Brotherhood and
the more extreme Salafists (adherents of the Salafiyeh,
a Sunni tendency which claims to follow the teaching of
the first three Muslim generations) form the majority.
The Israelis and the world's Islamophobes, for whom all
Muslims are the same, are aghast.

Frankly, I don't like religious parties of any stripe -
Jewish, Muslim, Christian or what have you. Full
democracy demands full separation between State and
religion, in practice as well as in theory.

I would not vote for politicians who use religious
fundamentalism as a ladder for their careers - whether
they are American presidential candidates, Israeli
settlers or Arab demagogues. Even If they were sincere,
I would still vote against them. But if such people are
elected freely, I accept them. I certainly would not
let the success of the Islamists spoil my joy at the
historic victory of the Arab Spring.

The way it looks now, Islamists of various shades are
going to be influential in all the new parliaments that
will be the products of Arab democracy, from Morocco to
Iraq, from Syria to Oman. Israel will not be a "villa
in the jungle", but a Jewish island in a Muslim sea.

Island and sea are not natural enemies. On the
contrary, they complement each other. The islanders
catch fish in the sea, the island shelters the young
fish.

THERE IS no reason for Jews and Muslims not to live
peacefully together and cooperate. They have done so
many times in history, and these were good times for
both.

In any religion, there are many contradictions. In the
Hebrew Bible there are the inspiring chapters of the
prophets and the abominable calls for genocide in the
Book of Joshua, for example. In the New Testament,
there are the beautiful Sermon on the Mount and the
disgusting (and obviously false and later inserted)
description of the Jews calling for the crucifixion of
Jesus, which has caused anti-Semitism and untold
suffering. In the Koran are several objectionable
passages about the Jews, but they are overshadowed by
the admirable command to protect the "peoples of the
book", Jews and Christians.

It is up to the believers of any religion to pick from
their holy texts the passages they want to act upon.
Once I saw a Nazi book composed entirely of quotations
from the Talmud - hundreds of them. I was certain that
they were all false and was shocked to the core when a
friendly rabbi assured me that they were all authentic,
only taken out of context.

JEWS AND Muslims can and did live peacefully together,
and so did Israelis and Egyptians.

Just one chapter: in November, 1944, two members of the
pre-state underground Lehi organization (aka Stern
Gang) assassinated Lord Moyne, the British Minister of
State for the Middle East, in Cairo. They were caught,
and their trial in an Egyptian court turned into an
anti-British demonstration. Young Egyptian patriots
filled the chamber and made no effort to hide their
admiration for the accused. One of the two (with whom I
was acquainted) reciprocated with a rousing speech, in
which he dismissed Zionism and defined himself as a
freedom fighter out to liberate the entire region from
British imperialism.

When Israel was founded soon after, some of us
suggested that the new state use this and other acts in
order to present ourselves as the first Semitic state
that had liberated itself from foreign rule. In this
spirit, we publicly welcomed Abd-al-Nasser's 1952
revolution. But in 1956, Israel attacked Egypt in
collusion with France and Great Britain, and was
branded as an outpost of Western colonialism.

AFTER ANWAR SADAT'S historic visit to Jerusalem, I was
one of the first four Israelis to arrive in Cairo. For
weeks we were the heroes of the city, lionized by one
and all. Enthusiasm for peace with Israel gave rise to
a carnival mood. Only later, when the Egyptians
realized that Israel had no intention whatsoever of
allowing the Palestinians to achieve their freedom, did
this mood evaporate.

Now is the time to try to restore this mood. It can be
done, if we resolutely turn our face toward the Arab
Spring and its winter offshoots.

That raises again one of the most basic questions for
Israel: Do we want to be a part of this region, or an
outpost of the West? Are the Arabs our natural allies
or our natural enemies? Does the new Arab democracy
arouse our sympathy and admiration, or does it frighten
us?

This leads to the most profound question of all: Is
Israel just another branch of world Jewry, or is it a
new nation born in this region and constituting an
integral part of it?

For me, the answer is clear. And therefore I salute the
Egyptian people and their new parliament:
Congratulations!

___________________________________________

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