The Egyptian national soccer team’s dream run in the World Cup—one knockout round victory—is over. Palestine has been failed again.
After last week’s stunning Egyptian victory over Australia, the team’s coach, Hossam Hassan, waved a Palestinian flag and then gave a five-minute sermon on Gaza during his postgame press conference. As The Athletic reported, the performance was popular among the press: “During his lengthy answer to the question on Monday, Hassan was applauded by journalists at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta, to which he briefly paused to say, ‘thank you, thank you’, before continuing.”
It’s just a bit embarrassing that people fell for it. Egypt happens to be a longtime author of Gazan misery. If I wanted to humiliate the world of pro-Palestine activism, I would have drawn up events exactly as they happened and let Hossam Hassan make a fool of them all.
“What came out of me was simply a human reaction,” Hossam Hassan said, insisting on the humility of his extended soliloquy. “Before being Arab, Muslim, Christian or anything else, I am a human being. Through football — the world’s soft power — I want to send a message: please let the Palestinian people live. I ask athletes and journalists everywhere to help deliver that message.”
I do love that “anything else.” You can tell how important coexistence is to him.
Anyway, I agree with his main point: Let the Palestinian people live. And I am sure Hossam Hassan agrees with me when I say Egypt’s refusal to allow even temporary humanitarian access to Palestinians in Gaza throughout the war was rather coldhearted. A temporary refugee corridor would have saved lives. Instead, Hamas was able to use civilians as human shields for the specific purpose of driving up the number of war dead.
In fact, the Palestinian civilians could have used the tunnel system between Egypt and Gaza that Cairo allowed Hamas to use for so long. Overall, Egypt’s management of the border crossing suggests a desire on Cairo’s part to maximize death and suffering on the Gaza side of the border. Although he didn’t get into such specifics, I have no doubt Hossam Hassan is repulsed by his government’s actions and ashamed to wave the Egyptian flag, hence his preference for the Palestinian version.
But the problems for Palestinians in and around Egypt go back much further. The PLO opposed Egypt’s desire to live in peace with its neighbors (because some of those neighbors were Jewish) and did some very nasty things in protest. In response, Egypt began treating the Palestinian refugees from the Israeli War of Independence as foreigners with far fewer rights than natives. Of course, Palestinians were already somewhat discriminated against, because of Egypt’s desire to keep them officially homeless and stateless so they could be used as a cudgel against Israel. But by the 1980s, Palestinians in Egypt had their rights of residency, education, and employment downgraded as well.
I don’t think Hossam Hassan would approve of this, if he only knew!
On a more serious note, the whole display was a reminder that anti-Israel activism has no real regard for Palestinian wellbeing, and in fact actively militates against it. The reason the Egyptian soccer coach’s remarks were popular among “journalists” is that to the rest of the world, “Palestine” is a tool for anti-Jewish agitation.
But enough about Hossam Hassan—he had a hard day. Not only did Egypt lose a nailbiter, but some Argentina fans apparently waved Israeli flags in response to his pro-Palestinian hectoring. The Israeli flag-wavers were not, to my knowledge, applauded by the press.
Source:
www.commentary.org
