Israel/Palestine

One smart cookie. (To use a phrase I don't think I've ever used before in my 60+ years of language.)

I remember one speech he gave to condemn a mass suicide-to-homicide attack that killed Israelis, mostly not > 30 years of age.

At the end, he yelled something. Curious, I rummaged.

After saying how horrible it was that this attack happened, he yelled out the Arabic equivalent of "A million martyrs to Jerusalem! A million martyrs to Jerusalem!"

For the West, he said X. But for Arabic-speakers, at the end, he said, "That's a ruse--a million more suicide bombers!" Now, if his speech was televised on Arab tv stations, they'd have heard a voice-over that might be accurate, but they'd hear *him* in his own voice authentically saying something different. (Heh-heh.) If you're a non-Arabic-speaker, all you heard was pleasant vocables followed by something not very intelligible. Made me think of a bull with a ring through its nose being led along.

I learned the Arabic phrase--long since forgotten (seriously--at one point I could introduce myself, say where I grew up, my parents' and my occupation, my hobbies and likes, age, marital status, where I lived and for how long ... In Arabic ... Had a Palestinian "G" professor, who was pro-Palestinian but said he could never go back home because of intolerance and said he'd be better off in Israel than in his home town because in his home town he'd be in the closet or dead. But now I struggle to say "My name is" but seriously, that's 2 syllables ... it's been 17 years; my Hungarian was much better, but it's been maybe 25 years for that and my Hungarian's entirely gone for a long swim in the river Lethe).

In the few years after that Arafat speech I listened ... It wasn't the last time he rhetorically cried crocodile tears, saying how horrible a massacre was in English before calling in Arabic for a far greater massacre. Then he was buried and no longer speechified.

But alive, he covered his butt. And expressed his bona fides. One smart cookie.