Pride, I’ve never been more proud to be Arab than I am now. Growing up in this country, I have always heard or been told to my face, “You Arabs are lazy, you Arabs are backwards, you can’t do anything for yourselves, you just want handouts from the U.S., you want to blame all of your problems on Israel and America.” I wish I could travel back in time and shove the words of Joe Biden down all their throats, “Joe Biden says Egypt’s Mubarak no dictator, he shouldn’t step down…” or PJ Crowley who said that despite Mubarak’s faults he is a friend of Israel and that is all that matters.
Oh Egypt, I thought you were in a deep coma for so long. Do you know how many conversations Palestinians have had about this very moment that is happening now in your country, hypothesizing what the outcomes might be, when it might happen? And when I’ve started dreaming too much, I’ve always been told that revolution would happen one day, but probably not in my lifetime. How wrong we all were. We didn’t realize that you were festering in your misery silently, waiting for the right opportunity to risk life and limb and liberty to stand up for your freedom and your basic human dignity.
I want to breathe and eat Egypt, to inhale all the tear gas so that you don’t have to. The protests–all of what I have seen–has left me overwhelmed, unable to focus on anything else. It’s been difficult to compile news on anything other than Egypt, to sleep, to eat, to work. I’m waking up in the middle of night to check twitter on my cell. But the pride that I feel for these courageous nameless people I am watching on the news has changed me and all the other Arabs that I know forever. We are so proud to see that potentially two despots might be overthrown in the same month. I am taking a lot of comfort in an anonymous Arab internet community and seeing for the first time what Arab brotherhood really looks like– reading comments on youtube, on twitter and on Facebook from Arabs all over the world expressing that now we are all Egyptian. No matter what happens tomorrow, that will stay with me for a long time.
I don’t know what will happen to you beautiful people tomorrow, but I do know that I will pray to all versions of Gods and deities tonight that you won’t suffer many causalities and that you will be victorious.
