The Palestinian people have been subject to harm and oppression throughout history, with the exception of some eras of stability. This is why it is not easy for a writer to sum up the history of suffering of the people of Palestine within the limits of a weekly newspaper article.
The history of Palestine and the suffering of the steadfast Palestinian people are intertwined with conditions in the Arab world.
In 1099, the Arab world, including Egypt, the Levant and Iraq, experienced its most shocking divisions, amid chaos and animosities. Kings and Caliphs fought each other and schemed against one another. In the end, the Arab people in Palestine were always victims of these fights.
That year saw the Abbasid Caliphate take root and grow in Baghdad, a Fatimid Caliphate do likewise in Cairo and different Arab emirates in the Levant.
That past could not be more similar to the present, when blood continues to be shed in the Levant just for one ruler to preserve his rule. All this blood is being shed only for Bashar Al Assad to continue to rule the Levant. He is being abetted by the Persians, the Russians and the terrible and envious advocates of sectarianism.
In acting like this, Assad imitates Radwan, whose rule of the Levant ended in its occupation after it fell like a house of cards. He was abetted by the French. He enlisted their services to tighten his grip on this part of the world.
It is Egypt suffering instability now. It is falling prey to the whims of some people and the greed and evil of others. Some of these people live in Egypt while others live outside. Baghdad is also writhing, under Persian occupation.
The problems the people of Palestine are facing now are what encouraged me to recall the poignant history of our Arab nation. The Palestinian people are being subjected to a hateful smear campaign. They are undergoing ethnic cleansing, either through killing or through forced evacuation from Palestine as a whole. Apart from the Zionists, some Palestinians are also behind this war. These Palestinians are supported by some Arab rulers in different ways.
Palestinians are banished from Palestine with approval from what has come to be called the Palestinian Authority, and silence from other Arabs. Some Palestinians were forced to leave their lands and live in the farthest places on earth, including in Latin America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and not in the Arab countries.
Palestinians always had a big hand in defending Egypt and its security throughout history. Between 1163 and 1169, the French launched five campaigns against Egypt. It was the Palestinians who confronted the French even before they had reached Egypt. They were, however, defeated at the end, which led to the arrival of the French to Sinai and its occupation.
In modern history also, the Palestinians offered their support to the Egyptian army, especially in the 1948 war. The people of Gaza Strip and the villages surrounding it, in particular, did this. The people of Gaza were the first line of defence for Egypt during the 1956 war. They played this role for the defence of both Palestine and Egypt. Most of the military operations behind the defence lines of the enemy were carried out by Palestinian fighters in cooperation with the Egyptian army.
The people of Gaza offered their blood to defend Egypt during the Six-Day War. The war aimed, first, to undermine Egypt. The Palestinians, however, offered their blood to prevent this happening. The Egyptian government managed the Gaza Strip then. It knows for sure the sacrifices the people of Gaza have made for Egypt. The question we must ask those who control the media and politics in the aftermath of the January 25 revolution in Egypt is: Why do you harbour all this hatred and launch all these fierce smear campaigns against the people of Gaza?
This detestable campaign was passed on by Anwar Sadat to the regime that followed him in ruling Egypt. Why should Palestinians be besieged either by Israel or Egypt so that they go hungry and patients die on the border? I can understand why Israel does this. At the end of the day, it is an enemy. It wants all the people of Palestine, including the Israeli agents in them, to die. But I really cannot understand why the people of Egypt should act in this manner.
This is an unjust campaign that neither the Palestinian people nor the people of Gaza deserve. Media reports say the guards of former Egyptian president Mohammed Mursi were all from Hamas. I think this piece of information is humiliating for Egypt, its people and its Republican Guard. This means nobody should trust Egyptian soldiers to guard the president.
No one in the media, however, has ever mentioned that the most senior bodyguards of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak were from America.
Egyptian media says the military arm of Hamas is behind all the problems in Sinai. In saying this, the Egyptian media forgets that oppression, poverty and marginalisation of the people of Sinai is behind these problems.
It forgets that these problems have always been there, even before Hamas took over Gaza. Why should the free men of Egypt and its defenders make such false accusations? Do you not know that the security of Egypt and Palestine are interwoven? This fact was mentioned by the late Egyptian geography expert Gamal Hemdan.
Do not the Egyptians know that enmity with the blockaded Palestinians will harm Egypt’s security in both the long and short term?
The Egyptian media says Hamas entered Egyptian jails during the January 25 revolution to release its operatives and members of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, including former president Mohammed Mursi.
The question now is: Is Hamas a superpower that has commandos who know well the people imprisoned in Egypt’s jails? Does Hamas have planes it could have used to drop its commandos into the jails to carry out such an operation?
The media in Egypt says that Hamas used to take huge amounts of Egyptian petrol, gas and diesel in cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo and then smuggle them to Turkey to benefit from the difference in price. What nonsense!
Are Egyptians so stupid as to believe these claims? Do they not know that Gaza is blockaded by sea, land and air?
The sorry thing is that the Palestinian people are paying the price of these quarrels among Arab rulers. Will we ever see an end to this?
