Posted on 04/25/2002 11:16:33 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
L SHEIK ZWAYED, Egypt, April 21 — One day recently, a 23-year-old Egyptian man, Milad Mohammed Hemeida, strode past Egyptian guards near the border with Israel, scattering them with a warning: "If anyone comes near me," he said, "I will blow myself up."
Mr. Hemeida kept going, security officials said, straight into the narrow no man's land that separates the two countries. From the other side, Israeli soldiers ordered him to stop, then fired over his head. "God is great!" Mr. Hemeida shouted back in Arabic.
One of the Israeli soldiers fired again, felling the young man with a single shot.
Mr. Hemeida was not carrying any explosives, officials said. But since his death the following day, he has been celebrated in Egypt as the first in a new line of Arab martyrs to the Palestinian cause.
The specter is one that has long frightened officials in both Israel and the Arab countries that surround it — of promising young Arabs, frustrated by a lack of opportunity at home and infuriated by Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, joining the fight in a way they have not done since 1948.
It is also a prospect that has suddenly become very real.
Egyptian officials have confirmed that half a dozen young men and women, including Mr. Hemeida, have been stopped trying to sneak into Israel since last week, apparently to carry out attacks. One Egyptian security official said that since last month, the security forces have been arresting several such young people each day.
In response, Egypt has tightened control of the border, carefully searching young people at checkpoints well back from the international line. Last Sunday, security officials outside this northern town turned back journalists trying to reach the city of Rafah, on Egypt's seven-mile border with the Gaza Strip, saying they could no longer visit without special Interior Ministry permission.
"We are careful not to provoke anything," the Egyptian government's chief spokesman, Nabil Osman, said, calling the border arrests isolated incidents. "But the situation in the Palestinian territories is very provocative."
Yet unlike the Muslim partisans who flocked to wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya, young Arabs have no easy path into Israel. Although Jordan, Lebanon and Syria all have large Palestinian populations, Israeli officials have reported only a few recent incursions from those countries, all of them apparently by Palestinian militants.
The cry for leaders to "open the doors to jihad" in Israel has become a standard of Arab street demonstrations. Despite the religious overtones of such demands, the explosive response of young Arabs is largely rooted in secular concerns.
"This is about a new culture emerging in the Arab world," said Mahdi F. Abdul Hadi, a Palestinian political scientist and historian. "It is not Islamist or pan-Arab; it has to do with a new sense of dignity among young people in the Arab world who identify with the suffering of the Palestinians."
Such feelings echoed strongly in the life of Milad Hemeida, the second of four children from a poor farming family in the Nile Delta.
The young man's parents, descendants of a Bedouin tribe called the Awlad Ali, live only an hour's drive from Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city. But they work and dress much as their ancestors did, and their lives are still guided by long-held notions about family, honor and shame.
Like many others of his generation, Mr. Hemeida was born into a world of new possibilities — including a school, financed by the United States Agency for International Development, that opened in 1985 just down the dirt road from his home. It was the sort of project intended to foster pro-American sympathies in the Egyptian countryside, and there is some indication that it succeeded.
"People have always looked for a place that represents justice and freedom,"' said Gamal Hishmet, a member of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood who represents a nearby district in the Egyptian Parliament. "They thought they would find in the United States what they could not find in their own countries. But America will never maintain its position unless it adopts more just policies."
When two American reporters arrived at the Hemeida family's mud-brick home last Friday, shortly after Milad Hemeida's burial, his relatives could barely restrain one another.
"You are the ones who killed him!" one of Mr. Hemeida's uncles shouted bitterly, as dozens of men in cotton robes poured from a richly carpeted funeral tent. "Those Israeli bullets are paid for by the United States!"
The anger had scarcely subsided a day later. Eventually, though, a cousin confided that the family had also been warned to keep silent by state security agents. Government-controlled newspapers have ignored Mr. Hemeida's death entirely; opposition papers only began to report it several days after it occurred.
Once persuaded to talk about Mr. Hemeida, his relatives and friends could scarcely be interrupted.
They described him as a proud, unusually sensitive young man who, as custom dictates, remained devoted to his family even as he moved beyond his village world. He loved soccer and the beach. He carried the small copy of the Koran in his pocket, they said, but struck no one as a zealot.
"He wanted to have a family and a house and kids, just like anyone else," said an older cousin, Abdel Moneim Hassan Rashid, 36, a lawyer. "He was a very ambitious person. But he was always more worried about other people than he was about himself."
After finishing at the American-financed primary school, Mr. Hemeida enrolled at a secondary school for agricultural studies in the nearby town of El Dilingat. "I spent all the money I had trying to help him learn," his father, Mohammed, who cannot read or write himself, said sadly.
But when Mr. Hemeida graduated into the stagnating Egyptian economy of the late 1990's, he found that his education was not the ticket it might once have been.
"This economy puts a great deal of pressure on the younger generation," said Donald P. Cole, an anthropologist at the American University in Cairo who has studied the Awlad Ali tribe. "Kids who are 22 don't have even the same opportunities that their older brothers and sisters did — and their expectations are even higher."
Down the road in any direction, Mr. Hemeida could see the big, red-brick homes that stand as monuments to his neighbors' toil as itinerant workers in the Persian Gulf. Such jobs have long been the stuff of Arab soap operas, heavy with scenes of humiliation by oil-rich sheiks. Still, their allure is as tangible as the satellite dishes that sprout everywhere from village rooftops.
In late December, after the holy month of Ramadan ended, Mr. Hemeida went to join his elder brother in Libya. Though he found construction and other work, he returned home soon after Israel began its military offensive in Palestinian territories.
Mr. Hemeida did not say much about his time away. Some of his cousins guessed that he had suffered some of the abuse that often goes with such menial jobs. But what impressed them most was how angry he seemed about events in the West Bank.
"What is happening is not fair!" he told one cousin, Helmi Abu Sheeba. "How long are we going to remain silent about what is going on?"
Mr. Hemeida's relatives said they had all been shaken by the attacks of Sept. 11, his birthday. But he felt far more strongly about the fate of the Palestinians.
After his death, relatives said, they learned from one of his friends that he had first tried to cross the Israeli border at Rafah in early December, but was detained and beaten by the Egyptian security forces.
The friend also gave them a poem that he said Mr. Hemeida had written. It began: "In the name of a man who has lost his rights and lost his dignity
"In the name of a man who is dying for a time in which he can live freely."
Even in a village where satellite broadcasts have helped politicize many people who had previously followed world events only through the filter of government-controlled news, Mr. Hemeida was unusually consumed by what he saw on television. But none of his relatives gave it much thought when he told his mother he was going off to find work "on one of those new agricultural projects."
It is not clear how Mr. Hemeida reached the border town of Rafah, only that he did so quickly.
The Israeli Defense Forces said he was shot on Monday afternoon; Egyptian police officials and Mr. Hemeida's relatives said it was Tuesday morning.
Within days, the quiet, sensitive young man was already becoming lost in myth.
Opposition newspapers hailed Egypt's "first martyr to the Palestinian cause." Teachers voted to rename a local school in his honor. "He was born the day he died," said a cousin, Gubr Abu Sheeba.
An older cousin, Fawzi Anwar, saw the loss a bit differently.
"It is very important for the American people to understand what is on the minds of these young people," he said. "He was a young man who loved life. He wasn't a hostile or angry person. The humiliation and injustice that he saw pushed him to do what he did."
Some of the 9/11/01 ers were Egyptian ; those that weren't Saudi Arabian. If they think that they are " feeling the humiliation " for the Palis, then at least he had the decency to just manage to commit suicide alone. Now, if they can just get the rest of these people to do the same thing, it might finally dawn on others, that this doesn't work real well, to " save " the Palis. On second thought, maybe not; they don't seem to be able to think all that well.
There's that word again. I'm starting to think this is all about wounded pride.
Ever read this front page February 24, 1957 article from the New York Times? Makes you want to pick up an AK-47 and head for the Sierra Maestra to help out Fidel.
Down the road in any direction, Mr. Hemeida could see the big, red-brick homes that stand as monuments to his neighbors' toil as itinerant workers in the Persian Gulf. Such jobs have long been the stuff of Arab soap operas, heavy with scenes of humiliation by oil-rich sheiks. Still, their allure is as tangible as the satellite dishes that sprout everywhere from village rooftops.
Hi! I'm your new teacher at the school financed by the United States Agency for International Development. Today, we're going to analyze the maudlin sap that Tim Golden just poured over the real motives that drove Mr. Hemeida to get his deserving, stupid a@@ shot. Read it one more time, class.
Let me ask you, class, has anyone met an ISRAELI or AMERICAN SHEIK lately? No?! Really? Oh, my. Well neither have I.
Okay, now, class, spell, "J E A L O U S Y".
Very good, now spell, "D I S P L A C E D A N G E R".
Good, now spell, "R A T I O N A L I Z A T I O N".
Excellent! Now you're getting it! And, since you've got it, your next assignment is to write a 1,000-word expose' highlighting the life of an Israeli citizen whom your brethren have UNJUSTLY murdered. You might wish to begin with the 10-month-old baby in the stroller in Jerusalem who was blown to pieces, making sure to emphasize how this child in any way influenced the career opportunities for Hamhead, the lazy b*st*rd whose father gave up everything so HE could go to college, but being the spoiled, whining s.o.b. that he, is, who couldn't make the grade in school.
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