There are three friends that have made a large impression on me and brought me to dialogue, a South African, an Israeli, and an Algerian.

My white South African friend was actually a member of the ANC. What many people don't realize is that in the early eighties the ANC was considered a terrorist organization. It was not mainstream. Mandela was not accepted in the west. I was very intrigued by that. My friend said that the ANC was a multicultural movement; it had blacks and whites. I started to read about the ANC and got completely fascinated about the struggle in South Africa against apartheid. That made a lasting impression on me.

In some ways it doesn't matter who oppresses whom. Everybody is oppressed. Oppression is a universal phenomena in human beings. What matters is not to let that oppression become ingrained in our history and in our people so that it becomes a justification for a whole national culture that is built from that. Unfortunately I think that has happened to both the Jews and the Palestinians.

My second friend was an Algerian. From him I learned a lot about Algeria during the French colonization. I also met several French people from him. What I learned is that what the French have done to Algeria has definitely hurt France, but it has hurt Algeria so much more. The struggle to kick the French out of Algeria has cost Algerians and is costing Algerians now. It is basically a country that has been so dramatically altered by this colonization that they are still struggling to find their identity even amongst each other. He told me that what happened in Algeria is struggle to a point that people forget what they're struggling for. It became an ideology to defeat the French by any means. By any means may seem all right while you're doing it, but it leaves an impact on your identity and on how you conduct things. So after the war was over and the French were defeated and there was victory, the Algerian different factions and different groups treated each other in the same way. So each group became a traitor for the other groups. Women became oppressed; a lot of things happened. I read a lot then, from Franz Fannon on about what colonization does to people. I was mostly interested in what it does to the colonized because I viewed that as the situation that I was in....

I naively asked Nasser if he had some photographs from his visit to Israel that we could include on this page.

He replied: “ It is always a nightmare to try to take pictures out of Palestine because I always get searched and delayed if I have any pictures or anything like that. ”