He was always happy or acted happy doing the chores around the little restaurant and grocery store where he worked. The place was owned by a Lebanese man who happened to be a Christian Maronite ; Hanna who happened to be an Egyptian Christian-Copt, who left his original home in Upper Egypt with his wife and immigrated to America.
The Lebanese store is his home now, away from his original home, and America is his country, but he still talks about Egypt. The time was few months ago-last year, the period that preceded the fall of Egypt’s last Pharaoh, Hosni Mubarak, the last of the post 1952 revolution generation generals that ruled Egypt; the irony is that those generals are the rulers now after Mubarak left; nevertheless the Pharaohs are gone.
Mubarak came to power in 1981 following the assassination of Anwar El-Sadat, the leader who took the initiative and with the State of Israel’s Menahim Begin started a historic peace process that is going and moving, sometimes in multiple directions, but it is moving.
Hanna's job at the store varied, from carrying multiple grocery bags to the customers’ cars, to helping in the butcher section, as a prep butcher, and sometimes when the cute Indonesian server is not present, Hanna would be prompted to first server; Hanna is there where needed. He sometimes gets on the nerve of the Lebanese owner, and the owner would start shouting in his Lebanese Arabic dialect " Hanna, Wlak Hanna" meaning, hey answer, or where are you, pay attention, something like that.
Before the fall of Mubarak, Hanna talked politics, but only when I start to ask him questions about Egypt- I wrote then- here- and long before his fall, that Mubarak will not be president beyond 2012. Hanna would complain about the Muslim Brotherhood and extremists and the Salafis as he used to call them-to Hanna, they are all the same; are threatening his people, the Copts, in big cities, and not upper Egypt- in upper Egypt, he said, no one dares to attack them, they all are the same and can stand for each other; he talked about how churches are being attacked and burned in Cairo and Alexandria and how the gold shops, owned by Copts, are robbed in daylight by some who claim they are doing it in the name of the divine religion of Islam.
When I ask him about Mubarak, he used to say in his Arabic Egyptian dialect ” Aho Maogood” meaning, he is there but not effective- that his wife Suzanne and his son Gamal run the business of Egypt.
One day, I went there, the place was empty, the familiar faces disappeared, and the loud but sociable Lebanese owner does not exist, and Hanna was gone too-the store is gone, not physically, but was gone in everything else- new owners took over. I forgot to mention, that the Lebanese owner had two Jordanian butchers, originally Palestinians, from towns in the West Bank, the cook and the servers were Indonesian women, the busboy was Hanna the Copt, the store manager was a Lebanese Druze. His place was a place for people to meet, eat and socialize; he created a Mini Middle East there. You would find customers from Israel, The West Bank and Gaza, and other Middle Eastern countries, also from Latin American countries, Asians, Europeans, mainly French, and of course Americans, from the US, tasting the Lebanese dishes.
The food was ok, nothing special, but the atmosphere was nice. The owner was very hospitable, offering free Turkish coffee to his special patrons- not making new ones, but the cheap ones already mixed and made; he just warmed them in the microwave. If you wanted a real cup of Turkish coffee, then you have to pay, but still, I think that was just fantastic and smart and gracious of him to even offer anything free- he would go around the tables joking around with the patrons and welcoming them to his store; his home, his address, his identity; to him the store was his life.
Before opening the store, he worked with the Saudi embassy as a driver and anything else that was asked of him to do. He used, in the final days of his ownership of the store, to reminisce on the days when Bandar Bin Sultan was the Saudi ambassador here in Washington DC, and the hundreds and hundreds of orders he used to deliver to the embassy. Everything has changed, he used to say, when terrorists- mainly from Egypt and Saudi Arabia- America’s most important allies among the Arab countries, struck America on 09/11/2001, and the sequent removal of Bandar and the sudden disappearance of generous Gulf Arab tourists, not visiting as they used to. So this owner had to depend on cheap customers like me that would go there set for couple of hours and pay around $10.00 for falafel and Hummus and in the meantime, giving him a hell of a time and pick his brains.
He used to curse those who attacked America with all kinds of curses the Arabic language Lebanese dialect, invented. It is strange though, that when it comes to the Palestinians, the Lebanese Maronite Christians, in general, have deep resentment to anything called Palestinian, they-many of them- actually hate them, they call them, " our brothers the Palestinians", but beneath the surface, reside the images of Lebanon’s civil war and images of the PLO and the images of everything that went wrong in Lebanon and the Christians there, especially the catholic Maronite there, blame on the Palestinians.
They, the Christians, have no issues with the Muslims per se; it is the Palestinians, Arafat's people- they still call them, Arafat’s people. Once a Maronite grocer, another one, When knew that I was originally from Gaza, refused to charge for a piece of Baklava, couple of dollars, and in a hidden tone, very cleverly presented, not insulting at all, said “this is for Abu Ammar- ابو عمار", referring to the famous guerilla name of Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader, that went later on and made peace with the State of Israel; a peace that is still in the making.
See, in Lebanon, the Palestinians to the Lebanese Maronite Christians are like someone accepting something that they really do not like, actually they hate and resent, and object, but they cannot say it and they cannot mention it, nor they have a real say anymore about it.
The Lebanese Maronite Christians want the Palestinians refugees out of their country now; over 300,000 Palestinian refugees that have been victims of the betrayal of their Arab brethren, not Israel; the State of Israel, again, has nothing to do with the Palestinians leaving their homes and running away from their cities and towns; the Arab leaders in recent history starting from the early last century, including the Palestinian leadership starting from Amin Al-Husseini who matched another criminal with a title of president, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, in their demagoguery and crimes. The same Amin Al-Husseini- what a shame, who once had the title of Jerusalem Grand Mufti in the 1930s and 1940s- he belonged to a well-known family from Jerusalem, a family that never liked the Hashemite of Jordan, the previous rulers of Jerusalem; actually, one of them killed at the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, king Abdullah, the grandfather of Abdullah II, the current ruler of Jordan but this is another story for another time, to the rest of the leaders that followed. Not until Yasser Arafat- with dubious background and birthplace information- emerged and rose in the mid-1960s. Arafat, a clever, savvy, some say an SOB of a leader, who the Palestinians actually loved and he revolutionized the Palestinian question and issue and correctly moved it to one area, where it belongs, the West Bank and Gaza strip; anything else has another name; it is the State of Israel. The story of Hanna the Copt turned to be the story of the Middle East from a very narrow perspective; from the stories of Hanna the Copt.
The Lebanese store is his home now, away from his original home, and America is his country, but he still talks about Egypt. The time was few months ago-last year, the period that preceded the fall of Egypt’s last Pharaoh, Hosni Mubarak, the last of the post 1952 revolution generation generals that ruled Egypt; the irony is that those generals are the rulers now after Mubarak left; nevertheless the Pharaohs are gone.
Mubarak came to power in 1981 following the assassination of Anwar El-Sadat, the leader who took the initiative and with the State of Israel’s Menahim Begin started a historic peace process that is going and moving, sometimes in multiple directions, but it is moving.
Hanna's job at the store varied, from carrying multiple grocery bags to the customers’ cars, to helping in the butcher section, as a prep butcher, and sometimes when the cute Indonesian server is not present, Hanna would be prompted to first server; Hanna is there where needed. He sometimes gets on the nerve of the Lebanese owner, and the owner would start shouting in his Lebanese Arabic dialect " Hanna, Wlak Hanna" meaning, hey answer, or where are you, pay attention, something like that.
Before the fall of Mubarak, Hanna talked politics, but only when I start to ask him questions about Egypt- I wrote then- here- and long before his fall, that Mubarak will not be president beyond 2012. Hanna would complain about the Muslim Brotherhood and extremists and the Salafis as he used to call them-to Hanna, they are all the same; are threatening his people, the Copts, in big cities, and not upper Egypt- in upper Egypt, he said, no one dares to attack them, they all are the same and can stand for each other; he talked about how churches are being attacked and burned in Cairo and Alexandria and how the gold shops, owned by Copts, are robbed in daylight by some who claim they are doing it in the name of the divine religion of Islam.
When I ask him about Mubarak, he used to say in his Arabic Egyptian dialect ” Aho Maogood” meaning, he is there but not effective- that his wife Suzanne and his son Gamal run the business of Egypt.
One day, I went there, the place was empty, the familiar faces disappeared, and the loud but sociable Lebanese owner does not exist, and Hanna was gone too-the store is gone, not physically, but was gone in everything else- new owners took over. I forgot to mention, that the Lebanese owner had two Jordanian butchers, originally Palestinians, from towns in the West Bank, the cook and the servers were Indonesian women, the busboy was Hanna the Copt, the store manager was a Lebanese Druze. His place was a place for people to meet, eat and socialize; he created a Mini Middle East there. You would find customers from Israel, The West Bank and Gaza, and other Middle Eastern countries, also from Latin American countries, Asians, Europeans, mainly French, and of course Americans, from the US, tasting the Lebanese dishes.
The food was ok, nothing special, but the atmosphere was nice. The owner was very hospitable, offering free Turkish coffee to his special patrons- not making new ones, but the cheap ones already mixed and made; he just warmed them in the microwave. If you wanted a real cup of Turkish coffee, then you have to pay, but still, I think that was just fantastic and smart and gracious of him to even offer anything free- he would go around the tables joking around with the patrons and welcoming them to his store; his home, his address, his identity; to him the store was his life.
Before opening the store, he worked with the Saudi embassy as a driver and anything else that was asked of him to do. He used, in the final days of his ownership of the store, to reminisce on the days when Bandar Bin Sultan was the Saudi ambassador here in Washington DC, and the hundreds and hundreds of orders he used to deliver to the embassy. Everything has changed, he used to say, when terrorists- mainly from Egypt and Saudi Arabia- America’s most important allies among the Arab countries, struck America on 09/11/2001, and the sequent removal of Bandar and the sudden disappearance of generous Gulf Arab tourists, not visiting as they used to. So this owner had to depend on cheap customers like me that would go there set for couple of hours and pay around $10.00 for falafel and Hummus and in the meantime, giving him a hell of a time and pick his brains.
He used to curse those who attacked America with all kinds of curses the Arabic language Lebanese dialect, invented. It is strange though, that when it comes to the Palestinians, the Lebanese Maronite Christians, in general, have deep resentment to anything called Palestinian, they-many of them- actually hate them, they call them, " our brothers the Palestinians", but beneath the surface, reside the images of Lebanon’s civil war and images of the PLO and the images of everything that went wrong in Lebanon and the Christians there, especially the catholic Maronite there, blame on the Palestinians.
They, the Christians, have no issues with the Muslims per se; it is the Palestinians, Arafat's people- they still call them, Arafat’s people. Once a Maronite grocer, another one, When knew that I was originally from Gaza, refused to charge for a piece of Baklava, couple of dollars, and in a hidden tone, very cleverly presented, not insulting at all, said “this is for Abu Ammar- ابو عمار", referring to the famous guerilla name of Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader, that went later on and made peace with the State of Israel; a peace that is still in the making.
See, in Lebanon, the Palestinians to the Lebanese Maronite Christians are like someone accepting something that they really do not like, actually they hate and resent, and object, but they cannot say it and they cannot mention it, nor they have a real say anymore about it.
The Lebanese Maronite Christians want the Palestinians refugees out of their country now; over 300,000 Palestinian refugees that have been victims of the betrayal of their Arab brethren, not Israel; the State of Israel, again, has nothing to do with the Palestinians leaving their homes and running away from their cities and towns; the Arab leaders in recent history starting from the early last century, including the Palestinian leadership starting from Amin Al-Husseini who matched another criminal with a title of president, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, in their demagoguery and crimes. The same Amin Al-Husseini- what a shame, who once had the title of Jerusalem Grand Mufti in the 1930s and 1940s- he belonged to a well-known family from Jerusalem, a family that never liked the Hashemite of Jordan, the previous rulers of Jerusalem; actually, one of them killed at the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, king Abdullah, the grandfather of Abdullah II, the current ruler of Jordan but this is another story for another time, to the rest of the leaders that followed. Not until Yasser Arafat- with dubious background and birthplace information- emerged and rose in the mid-1960s. Arafat, a clever, savvy, some say an SOB of a leader, who the Palestinians actually loved and he revolutionized the Palestinian question and issue and correctly moved it to one area, where it belongs, the West Bank and Gaza strip; anything else has another name; it is the State of Israel. The story of Hanna the Copt turned to be the story of the Middle East from a very narrow perspective; from the stories of Hanna the Copt.
