The Arab States are now living the third phase of occupation.

In the first phase, the Arab citizen lived under foreign occupation.

In the second, he was occupied by his local rulers acting as proxies for the foreigners.

And now he’s living the phase of double occupation, which is simultaneously local and foreign.

What Jamal al-Durra told me of the criminal killing of his son Muhammad in his arms added nothing to the stupefaction I’d felt when watching the scene on satellite TV. However, the muscles of his face and the look in his eyes as he spoke of his inability to protect his young son will stay in my mind for a long time.

Jamal al-Durra added one thing that made the week I spent in his company in Morocco bearable. He told me that his wife was pregnant and that he would name the new baby Muhammad so that Israel would have to go on living with Muhammad al-Durra even after it had murdered him.

At the time, Jamal al-Durra seemed strong to me, but when his younger brother helped him to take off his shirt one morning while I waited in their room to go with them to a joint appointment, I saw that his right arm was attached to his shoulder by a thin remnant of skin. A sudden spasm of embarrassment passed over his face when he noticed that I’d seen. My embarrassment at myself will last for a long time.

It is a strange irony that of three prisons in which Egyptian security would hold Tamim during the three days of his imprisonment, one was al-Khalifa/Deportations, the same prison they put me in in 1977.

Tamim sleeps in my place in the same packed communal cell. He eats the wedge of processed cheese and the crust of stale bread that they gave me as nourishment for an entire day. He sleeps as I slept, on the cement floor without a bed, and maybe a murderer or smuggler or thief next to him voluntarily gives him a blanket as one of them once did me. He makes his shoes into a pillow beneath his head as I once did.

I, who am free today, feel exactly as though they are imprisoning me for a second time.

As though I had never left their first prison.

As though I were in a never-ending prison that refuses to acknowledge any final act.

As though the prison were my personal city. This time we will live in it and grow up in it together, my son and I.

I entered the seventh decade of my life having spent only a few days in prison, and those in an Arab country ruled by an Arab dictator, not in Israel. The idea of prison constantly intrigues me though. In the mind of the dictator, prison is abstraction, not detail; an idea, not actualities — an idea that requires no proof or evidence, a personal concept, like temperament or taste, that cannot be questioned. This prison is the source of his unshakable peace of mind. And because issuing an order to put people in prison is the one solution that doesn’t need much intelligence, prison is the dictator’s first, easiest, and surest solution. The dictator will not change his mind so long as he is on his throne. He will change it when he is somewhere else (in a different world, for example), not before. The dictator’s throne is his opinion. The dictator squats on his opinion like a hen sitting on her eggs. He and his opinion carry out all the rituals of his day together, bathing, doing their morning exercises, eating, working, playing, and fucking one another. He takes his opinion with him to sleep the way he does his dog. The dictator is faithful to his opinion and his opinion is faithful to him. He and his opinion wake up at the same instant (note the coincidence!); it never leaves his side through the hours of the day and it never leaves his side through the hours of his rule, which are the hours of his life. If the dictator falls sick, or goes on holiday, or is afflicted with senile dementia, he leaves his opinion in the keeping of loyal followers, such as policemen, advisors, editors-in-chief, ministers of information, and former leftists who have seen the light after hesitation and cauterization and being beaten unconscious and hung from the ceiling. It is preferred that there be, alongside these, poets, novelists, and critics who have fought long and with tremendous courage in defense of their inalienable right to possess a flexible spine that enables them to bow, with dazzling ease, before the chamberlain of the dictator’s palace. They have held strikes and sit-ins to be allowed to assume a position in his government, that same government that is known for its wholehearted dedication to the patronage of culture and the intelligentsia (just like that, with no expectation of reward!). The dictator has a sadistic love of obedience, rewarding the obedient by doubling his efforts to humiliate them, to the point that he uses them for his entertainment every time he sees them. The worst thing about a dictator, though, is his minor underlings.

When the time comes for Tamim’s deportation, the deportations officer will allow me to accompany him. Two members of the security forces, charged with guarding him up to the last moment, ride with us. Near the end of the long, crowded, choking road to Cairo Airport, the driver, ‘Abd al-‘Al, gives me a word of advice: “Don’t forget the tips, Mr. Mourid.”

“The tips?”

“Yes, sir. The tips.”

“For whom?”

“For them.”

“Are you joking? Tips for the men deporting my son, ‘Abd al‘Al?”

He whispers in my ear, “So that everything goes alright at the airport, sir. So they don’t complicate matters.”

“How much?”

“Whatever you think proper, sir.”

“Fifty pounds? A hundred pounds?’

“Keep going, sir.”

I pay the tips to the two men.

I am going to keep Tamim company on the plane to Amman. This time they allow Radwa to say goodbye to us, so she comes in another car with her friend Hasna Mekdashi.

The plane’s front wheels rise and we are airborne. I feel as though I too am being deported and expelled a second time. I relive the day of my expulsion from Egypt in 1977 as though it still hadn’t turned into the past. All the people in the airport’s halls — the hundreds packing its front hall to say goodbye to their departing relatives, the dozens standing at the counter where the tickets are checked and the baggage weighed, the parallel rows for the passport stamping windows, the customers in the café in front of the gates leading to the boarding areas — all these are not here at the airport to say goodbye, travel, drink coffee and tea, or mount the steps to the departing aircraft; they are here to gaze at the iron shackle that links my wrist to that of the policeman accompanying me, who drags me through the halls before the eyes of all like a heavy suitcase.

This fat old woman will think I’m a thief. That teenage girl will think I raped a girl her own age. This customs officer with the dyed hair will think I’m a currency smuggler who has fallen into their hands as a result of brilliant planning, or an international criminal that Interpol has finally succeeded in catching after years on the run, and that now I’m being taken off under guard to suffer my punishment. A traveler in a hurry who treads on my foot by mistake and doesn’t apologize will think I represent some kind of danger and that getting rid of me is a matter of urgency to him personally. It will never occur to them that I’m a poet whom authority, or the regime, is afraid of. So many of the country’s intelligentsia and its important writers let the country — and the people — down that authority isn’t afraid of them any more. People stopped reading poetry when poets deluded themselves into thinking that modernism meant gibberish. At the same time, they watched many literary icons colluding with the ruler. They did this in three ways: by desperately striving to obtain his approval; or, if that failed, by desperately striving to avoid his anger; or, if that failed, by quitting and migrating either to their inner worlds, which had been destroyed by melancholy, or to the world outside them, where they found themselves caught between the jaws of absence and of forgetfulness.