The Second Year of the Union - Part 11: The World Bank Conference in Washington and Zionist Propaganda in New York

Thursday the 24th: On the Plane to America

We boarded the huge four-engine American plane at dawn, and its engines began turning at one minute past midnight. But one of the engines refused to turn over, so the others were shut down, and we were told: fifteen minutes and we will take off. We did not take off. They brought us back down, and we returned to the hotels. Four hours later, they brought us back to the airport, and told us a fault had occurred in the engine, and it had now been repaired. At seven in the morning, the plane took off, rising like a mountain into the sky, and ahead of us lay a flight of more than thirteen hours over the Atlantic Ocean, without a single stop. I kept looking out the window, seeing nothing but vast masses of clouds, black at times and white at others, sometimes assaulting the plane, sometimes slipping away from it, so that it trembled beneath us and made us feel as though we were a mere insignificant feather caught in the path of storms. The Atlantic was truly terrifying, its waves visible from afar, with the thick foam and the surging swell they threw up.

Should I say the journey was comfortable? Perhaps, but our eyes remained fixed, for the whole trip, on the engine that had failed in Lisbon, for fear it might catch a chill and infect us with its own contagion. Thirteen hours, suspended in God's own sky, among heaps of cloud closing in on us from every side and taking our very breath away, above an ocean stretching into infinity, over which we saw nothing but two ships, like two lost wolves in a vast desert, caught between the jaws of desolation and anxiety.

The great plane carried a mixed assortment of travelers. But what bothered us was a cluster of four heavyset Spaniards, gathered around a countrywoman of theirs and her child under the pretext of amusing it. I very nearly felt that they were straining the plane with the sheer weight of their bodies, so that it seemed to lean toward the side where they stood. I do not know where they found this capacity for talk, as though a recorded tape played on and on in their mouths throughout the entire long journey.

How tiresome they were, and how heavily they weighed on the other passengers' hearts.

We reached New York airport at half past eight in the evening by my own wristwatch, though I had set it back five hours, fixing it at half past three in the afternoon. In this way we gained these five hours of life, though we would lose them again on the way back.

The plane had scarcely come to a stop when my name was called out over the loudspeaker.

I was truly taken by surprise by a representative from the Foreign Ministry who had come to welcome me on the Minister's behalf, the surprise being that I knew perfectly well the American government's view of me was not a favorable one, holding against me my own leaning toward "positive neutrality," and my conviction that they bore responsibility for establishing Israel in the very heart of our Arab world, setting the region on the mouth of a volcano.

But I felt a great sense of relief when I caught sight of Dr. George Toameh, our consul general in New York, along with a member of the Arab embassy.

We made our way to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, passing through New York's broad streets, amid crowds of cars flowing through them in numbers far greater than I had imagined.

This hotel is a city unto itself, made up of sixty-seven floors, and it happened that one of its guests at that time was President Khrushchev, the Soviet leader.

We left the hotel to stroll through a nearby market, had dinner at an Italian restaurant, then went to the Radio City cinema, considered at the time the largest movie theater in the world. As our unlucky fortune would have it, the theater's management had, in those very days, brought in an Israeli performing troupe made up of fifty young Jewish women, who put on a striking dance performance for the American audience. A Jewish orchestra led the stage, playing plaintive melodies to accompany a famous Jewish singer, who stirred the emotions of the audience with her Hebrew songs drawn from the Torah. What truly stirred the crowd's frenzy, I am certain, was not the beauty of their legs or the splendor of the rhythm, but their hatred of the Arabs and contempt for them. The audience's response to the singer was astonishing, and it was plain she was singing for Israel, given how often that word recurred in her songs, far more than she was singing for art and its lovers.

That evening was a lesson for us, alerting us to the methods of Zionist propaganda.

I came away with an unpleasant impression: that a performing troupe and a skillful singer could do more to hearts and minds than all the speeches our own presidents and delegates give in international forums.

"And two eyes, of which God said 'be,' and they were, work more powerfully upon hearts than wine itself."

And, at bottom, our own presidents do not even know their own national language well, so that their grammatical errors undo whatever effect they might otherwise have on their listeners.

Saturday the 26th

We toured Macy's, the nine-story store. It is a market that holds everything, from the finest clothing to the most delicious food, by way of cosmetics, home furnishings, shoes, needles, and pins. It is a small, self-contained country in itself, and its employees work like a swarm of bees.

Its most glaring flaw is that it belongs to Jews, who, together with their own kind, form a bloc pressuring American political parties in Israel's favor.

Incidentally, I learned that Zionist societies raise money for Israel by every means, licit and illicit alike, and that they compel Muslim and even other Arab communities to contribute to the Jewish collection fund. The Arabs defend their own shameful conduct in this by saying that if they refused to pay, they would face a boycott from the great Jewish merchants, and a refusal by the banks, which are almost entirely under Zionist oversight, to do business with them, and even a refusal by small Jewish shoppers to patronize their small shops, which would spell the end of their business and expose them to bankruptcy.

We rode a small boat cutting through the swell of the sea to pass in front of the Statue of Liberty, crouched on its rock at the entrance to New York Harbor, a statue that has lost much of its own luster since President Wilson's time.

We went back to Fifth Avenue and visited Broadway and the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world, its first elevator carrying us up eighty floors, and its second carrying us the rest of the way.

We were told that the height of the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt is 146.50 meters, and the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris is 300.50 meters, while this towering American building stands at 381 meters, with 120 floors, all of them apartments rented out to the wealthy, plus a tower rising above them equivalent to twenty more floors.

Should I say the building made us feel a certain tremor as we looked down at the streets through the special telescopes mounted at its top? Or was it simply the first stirrings of vertigo overtaking me at this dizzying height?

It is the greatness of the human mind, which has achieved, in our own age, what might well be added to the seven wonders of the ancient world.

Sunday the 27th

We left the "world-class" hotel where I was never once able to find my way to my own room without the help of one of its staff, whenever the arrows of its signage failed me.

The room cost about 25 dollars a night.

This was a steep price compared to what we had paid at the Plaza Hotel in Madrid, ten dollars a night for a "suite" made up, as a rule, of a bedroom and a separate sitting room for receiving guests.

A friend of mine, recently back from New York, told me that a single night at the Waldorf Astoria (in 1994) now costs more than 600 dollars.

We rode with the counselor of the Arab embassy in Washington in his own car to see the countryside and the highways, stopping now and then at rest stops that "lift the spirit" and ease the nerves, for their own cleanliness and that of their staff.

Over six hours on the highway, which is, in fact, six broad lanes, three each way, lined with tightly packed rows of cars surging forward in an awe-inspiring traffic order, we saw a truly magnificent sight: caravans of millions of cars carrying millions of people, advancing as though their cars scarcely moved at all, so precisely did they hold to the traffic order.

What was strange, indeed remarkably strange, was that we did not witness a single accident, nor did we hear anyone curse the driver to his left or right, or honk his horn at him in reproach or threat.

Baltimore lay on our route, but we did not enter it, for we passed through a tunnel built beneath it, to ease its own congestion.

We stayed at the Sheraton Park Hotel, booked for us by our embassy.

Monday the 28th

We went down to the conference hall, which we had come to take part in, one of the halls of our own hotel, and President Eisenhower of the United States entered and gave a welcoming address, then withdrew amid modest applause.

So this was the man who had commanded the greatest military campaigns in history against the Nazi forces in the Second World War, and this was the very man who had, in 1956, stood against the British-French-Zionist invasion of the Suez Canal and Egypt.

I lived through the war years in their entirety hearing talk of the commander of the multinational allied forces invading Europe, then occupied by Hitler's forces, in whose wake Italian forces set out to claim their own share of the spoils, once Europe had become powerless to offer any resistance at all. We used to wait, morning and evening, for the slightest statement issued by this "Supreme Commander" on the state of his multiracial, multicolored forces, as though they were the very forces al-Mutanabbi meant when he said:

"An army whose advance stretches from the east of the earth to its west, its clamor reaching even the ear of Gemini itself,

gathering together every tongue and every nation, so that the newly arrived understand nothing but through interpreters."

The "loveliest" figures in the hall were the delegates of Ghana in their national dress: yellow and red wrappers, and every other color of nature besides, draped over jet-black bodies.

Speaker after speaker took the podium to praise Mr. Eugene Black, the American president of the World Bank, and to laud the generosity of the United States. I was told that Black himself had asked the delegations not to forget him in their own "flattery."

Yet I felt not the slightest degree of regard for this "Black" man, so white in complexion, for he had fiercely resisted granting Syria any loans at all,
so that we relied instead on our own resources and capabilities, carrying out the draining of the Ghab plain with our own limited funds, just as we built the port of Latakia from the sweat of our own laborers, soaked in the state's own money.

We went about attending the many delegations' banquets, beginning with the Pakistani delegation, passing through the Moroccan delegation, and ending with the Indian delegation.

El-Kaissouni was at the forefront of those in attendance.

I expected him to host a reception for the delegations, or at least some of them, but he did not, even though the President had given him a thousand pounds for this very occasion.

I visited him at the hotel where he was staying, the Mayflower, named after the ship that carried the first group of English migrants to America's shores in the sixteenth century.

The twenty members of the delegation (from the Southern Region) moved about the lobby like a beehive, waiting for the "moon" to descend from the heights of his own suite.

I wondered why the embassy had booked me and my office director at the Sheraton, far from the delegation's own hotel. Was I not its deputy head, and one of its own members?

At noon, an embassy official came to me bearing an invitation card to a dinner at the embassy, held "in honor of Dr. El-Kaissouni, head of the delegation, and his wife." He asked me whether I intended to accept the invitation, and I told him: no. This is not an official invitation at all, but a private one in honor of El-Kaissouni and his wife, not for the delegation as a whole. Besides, I have another reason not to visit the embassy, which is that its ambassador, Dr. Mustafa Kamel (an Egyptian), never once troubled himself to pay me a courtesy visit.

The embassy official left, and exhausting "negotiations" began that lasted until evening, ending at last in a "happy solution": the ambassador would visit me first, then I would attend the reception in return for this visit, after which each of us would go his own way.

The reception was set for two days later.

We had the chance to visit George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, now a museum overlooking the flowing Potomac River, at one of its most enchanting bends.

We dined at a seafood restaurant.

We spent an evening at a cafe where a singer beloved by Americans, Tony Martin, performed, and we sat with him much as a poet before us once sat with a foreign singer, saying of her:

"I did not understand her meaning, yet she stirred my very heart, so that her song was not lost on me,

and I was like a blind man, tormented, who loves beautiful women yet cannot see them."

Thursday, 1 October 1959

The Arab students held a reception for our delegation at the Sheraton Hotel. I was told their number in North America alone stood at around four thousand students. Mr. Abdul Khaleq Hassouna, Secretary-General of the Arab League, was invited to the reception, one of the pashas of the old order, skilled in flattery, but, as the saying goes, like a Swiss Omega watch: worthless, neither adding nor subtracting anything at all.

I had seen him at the United Nations headquarters in New York, in a booth beside ours, sound asleep, so deeply that he once snored and woke himself up.

A Syrian countryman, a Damascene named Abdullah al-Armanazi, invited me to lunch. His beautiful home lay in a suburb of Washington whose residents were mostly Black Americans. When we left the villa, he left its door open, and I asked him whether he had forgotten to lock it. He said the area was safe, that he felt great sympathy for Black Americans and they for him, and that no one had ever broken into anyone's home here, since all the residents coexisted here in the very best of terms. Today, as I write these memoirs, America has become the world's "capital of crime," especially organized crime, in drug trafficking and the white slave trade, whose worsening has caused the spread of AIDS ("SIDA" in French), known as "acquired immune deficiency syndrome," a disease that was previously unknown, and for which there is still no cure.

The statistical charts tracking the movement of crime in "this New World" point to terrifying trends.

Friday the 2nd

Today was the conference's closing session.

What was strange was the Moroccan delegate rising to praise France, for no reason at all except sheer flattery toward it. I could not understand why he did this.

Equally strange was the delegate of Ceylon, a state almost no one had even heard of, rising to propose to the conference that the Australian delegate be chosen to head the conference at its next session, and likewise proposing his two deputies and a number of members.

His proposal was approved by silent consent.

I came away with an unshakeable conviction: that the great powers do the planning, and they are the ones who carry it out as well, while Ceylon and states like it are mere pawns moved by the fingers of those holding the largest shares in the International Monetary Fund, pulling strings from behind a curtain that hides nothing of what goes on behind it.

Out of a concern for the future of our Syrian-Egyptian union, I resolved to say, both in Damascus and in Cairo, that the Egyptian members of our two embassies in Madrid and Washington had been in complete neglect of us, the Syrians. We saw almost no one from them, and they saw almost no one from us, apart from that Egyptian attache who accompanied us on some of our outings in Madrid.

And apart from what these "negotiations" produced: the Egyptian ambassador's visit to me, and my own return of that visit by attending the dinner held "in honor of Dr. El-Kaissouni and his wife" at the embassy.

Without doubt, had it not been for Dr. Ma'mun al-Hamawi, the sole Syrian counselor at the embassy, we would never have known how to make our way around this great American capital.

We were forced to miss the great reception held by Mr. Black, the World Bank's president, because we were late in renting the tuxedo required for attending it, since the embassy officials had never told me it was necessary to attend in one, as protocol required, a protocol I knew nothing of.