rashad archives — Page 2 of 4

Demoralized by the failure of the 1977 Bread Intifada, and faced with an escalating witch-hunt campaign and purges by Sadat’s regime against leftists in the universities and civil service, thousands of Egyptian communists and radical nationalists left the country and sought refuge in Libya, Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait (yeah, believe it or not, Kuwait received tons of Egyptian communists back then!) and Yemen… Four months after my birth, my family left Egypt for Yemen in 1977, where we lived in Sana’a for two years. In the above photo, taken in 1978 or 1979, my father (on the left dancing while carrying a stick) is dressed together with an Egyptian friend in a Yemeni traditional costume, during a trip outside Sana’a. Below, is a pic of Hoss and Abu Hoss taken on 13 June 1979.

Another pic from the Family Album:

My dad, standing first to the right, wrote on the back of the photo, “Fayoum” but no date is mentioned. I’d suggest it was taken sometime in 1966 or 1967 before the June War. One of the persons I recognize in that pic is his best friend, whom I won’t name or point out at the moment since he’s still alive and I didn’t consult with him whether he wanted to talk about this part of his and my dad’s lives or not. But it was through this friend that my father was first introduced to Fatah, during his post-graduate years.

Launching the “Palestinian Revolution” in January 1965, Fatah earned the suspicion and the denunciation of the Nasserist regime. Despite using the Palestinian cause as a cornerstone for his legitimacy in Egypt and the Arab World, Nasser was sure to exert full control on the Palestinian armed activities, setting up the PLO and imposing his stooge Ahmad el-Shoqueri whose job was praising Nasser and making sure no “miscalculated and adventurist” armed Palestinian resistance operations occurred against the Zionist state.

When Arafat and his posse took up arms in 1965, Nasser naturally viewed them with suspicion as “Syrian agents” and accused them of “adventurism.” News about the group’s (few, but were picking up) armed operations were censored in the Egyptian state-controlled press. But news were leaking into the Egyptian universities about this new mysterious Fatah group through the Palestinian students…

My father’s best friend was dating, and later married, a Palestinian who was affiliated to Fatah, and was studying in Cairo when they met and fell in love. Both him and my dad were staunch believers in Nasser, and sincerely believed he was working towards liberating Palestine. But the two were also on the more radical left side of their peers in the (regime-sponsored) Organization of the Socialist Youth. They looked up to Nasser, but felt “more was needed.” So they got into an endless cycle of love-hate towards Nasser, and already felt before the 1967 defeat that some “extra push” was needed to make Nasser tackle this or that.

The 1967 defeat came as an earthquake and shattered many of their illusions, radicalizing them further to the left. While his friend went on to get more involved in supporting Fatah, my father started sniffing around for a communist organization to join.

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