A Page of Glory

The Magazine's Word

For thirteen years we have been tongues of boasting and pride over the patriotic deeds we accomplished on the morrow of the November leap — deeds we ranked among the heroisms: the arrest of our leaders; our standing firm in the face of the colonizer, demanding independence and exposing our breasts to the lances of the hard-hearted Senegalese.. then our joining hands and standing in one rank — Muslims, Druze, and Christians, men and women — to defend the precincts of the homeland.

And this year November came with the leap of our sister Egypt. The operation was not confined to plucking the thorn out of the sound body, as it had been with us; it was a stubborn struggle to drive back the armies of deadly crime descending in force from air, sea, and land — and there was wounded Egypt, amid the armies of the English, the French, and the Jews, like a falcon fighting off a tiger — yet this falcon, small as it was, held fast to its stand, never ceasing to work its beak and talons into the huge, armored body, heedless of the feathers plucked from it and the blood dripping from it... And no wonder that the falcon triumphed over the tiger!

Egypt's leap yesterday, and the reports that reached us of superhuman heroism in the battle of Port Said, gave the West more than one lesson. They taught them that the Arabs no longer have the simplicity and good-heartedness they showed in the last Palestine war, and that their letting themselves be led by others and their believing of false promises are “mistakes that will not be repeated.”

The West made light of the strength of modern Egypt — the child of “the Revolution.” What fruit could the teachings of five years bear in a people that had been half dead?!

And the West made light of the person of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, nursing against him hatred upon hatred. How dare this young man hurl accusations at his “masters” and stretch his authority over the Suez Canal?
We shall teach him a lesson — they said!

And their military plan, contrived for attacking Egypt and crushing her — and thereby for laying their hands, once again, upon the Canal, the crown of their design — was brought to nothing. The results of their barbarous deeds came out otherwise than they had wished, for they were repulsed in Egypt, and above all in Port Said, by a resistance and a defense to the death on the part of army and people, for which the young men and the women, the old men and the children enlisted — drawing the eyes of the world in admiration and esteem.

Then the public opinion of the whole world massed against them, condemning a criminal armed aggression against an independent, peaceable country — the people of Britain itself rose up in furious revolt against Eden and his government... And the Soviet Union thundered, warning that it would send its forces down into the battle in defense of Egypt, and threatening Israel with being wiped out of existence..

Events unfolded otherwise than England and France, and behind them Israel, had wished... And thereupon a truth came forth into the light: the passing of colonialism, and of the great powers' mastery over the small, never to return. This age of ours is the age of freedom — the freedom of every people and its right to a life of dignity; and after this day no one shall succeed who tries to humble a nation that has walked in freedom's train and breathed its air.

The soil of Egypt, which yesterday was watered with the blood of sacrifice — the pure blood of her sons — won, in the battle of repelling the aggression, the sympathy of the whole world; and hers was the victory, however great her sacrifice and her loss.

We salute our striving sister Egypt in her mighty leap, which wiped from the brow of the Arabs every stain and inscribed in history a page of glory and immortality.