Who Will Arrest the Israeli Ambassador?
By Alaa Al-Aswany
February 2, 2010
In the early hours of the morning of November 17, 2004, Egyptian conscript Amer Abu Bakr Amer was on night guard duty in the Egyptian town of Rafah. With him were two colleagues – Ali Sobhi el-Naggar and Mohamed Abdel Fattah. It was very cold and the time passed slowly. What were the three soldiers talking about? Were they tired and hungry and looking forward to the end of their guard duty so they could have a hot meal and go to bed for a deep sleep? They were in their early 20s, so were they dreaming about finishing their term of military service, starting their lives, getting married and having families? Was one of them talking enthusiastically to his colleagues about the fiancee that he loved? We don’t know the answers but what we do know is that about three o’clock in the morning they noticed an Israeli Merkava tank advancing towards them. The Israeli tank continued to approach until it was twenty metres from the Egyptian soldiers, then suddenly fired a tank round, followed by heavy gunfire which ripped into the bodies of Ali Sobhi el-Naggar and Mohamed Abdel Fattah, killing them instantly. Amer Abu Bakr was seriously wounded and later died in hospital. So three young Egyptians performing their military service were martyred — men who had committed no crime or offence, had never harmed anyone or done anything to upset the Israelis. But the Israeli army killed them in cold blood and in such a brutal manner that it was difficult to recognize their features when they were buried. What did the Egyptian government do when it heard of the massacre? It submitted a strong protest to Israel and described the killing as irresponsible behaviour (What a feeble expression!). Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at the time, quickly contacted President Mubarak and apologized for the incident. How perverse and feeble the word ‘apologize’ looks in this context! People usually apologize when they are late for appointments or tread on their neighbour’s toes unintentionally in the crowded metro, but when three innocent people are killed in this brutal fashion then to make do with an apology is in itself an insult, indicating extreme contempt for the dignity of the victims and for the value of human life. The Israeli authorities promised to carry out an urgent inquiry into the crime but six full years later Israel has not announced the results of the inquiry and maybe it did not carry one out in the first place. Unfortunately the Egyptian government has completely forgotten the three soldiers who were killed and in the meantime dozens of meetings have taken place between Egyptian and Israeli officials, without a single Egyptian official asking for the results of the investigation into those who killed the Egyptian soldiers. But the family of Amer Abu Bakr Amer filed a lawsuit against the Israeli ambassador in Cairo, in his capacity as the representative of the Israeli government. The case went back and forth in the Egypti
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