Despite the moral crises plaguing our contemporary history, Arab culture remains among the richest humanity has ever known. The art of discourse in our tradition has outshone all that preceded or followed it in other civilisations. Across the Arab world, regardless of dialect, one finds a proverb for every situation in life, often exquisitely descriptive, deeply wise, and irresistibly amusing. ‘When the courgette ripened, it told the cucumber: “You’re a bean”’—a quintessential Egyptian saying. It is invoked when someone fabricates or repeats an absurdity, persisting in it even though everyone knows it to be utter nonsense. They repeat it so insistently that, in vain, they convince themselves it must be true, defending it as if it were undeniable, even as its falsehood glares like the midday sun.
This proverb perfectly captures the tragicomic spectacle staged by Arab foreign ministers at the United Nations. Begging for a peace whose meaning and purpose remain elusive, their pleas were met by Israel’s language of choice: cluster bombs. While Arab nations chose resistance as the path of dignity and justice, standing by every mother who lost her child to the bullets of an enemy masquerading as a peacemaker, their leaders clung to hollow rhetoric. The people, disillusioned, have long turned their backs on these rulers, who are accustomed to ‘calling the adhan in Malta’—a proverbial act of futility. This time, however, they took their empty prayers to the global stage, performing before the Security Council cameras, chanting: ‘My country and its fresh cucumbers of peace.’
They all stood, auctioning off the cucumbers, declaring this to be the first gathering of all cucumber sellers in sixteen years. Back then, they had shared the cucumbers on the salad platter of the Oslo Accords. Standing tall, ‘Uncle Abu Mazen’ declared, ‘Do not let the salad plate fall from my hands!’ Their voices rose in unprecedented unison, proclaiming: ‘Yes to the cucumber of peace.’ But their farce was exposed when Qatar’s foreign minister candidly admitted there had been undisclosed Arab-Arab agreements that sabotaged the charade—apparently to appease the ‘market bully’. Israel, too, rejected their wilted, disreputable cucumber of peace, leaving them to return home defeated, their failure so profound that it was proverbially described as ‘riding a camel’. Back in their capitals, they struggled to market their cucumbers to domestic audiences who had no appetite for salad anymore, bitterly recalling Lebanon’s victories.
Arab governments are now desperate for their people’s approval, but the road back has been blocked by Camp David, Oslo, and Madrid—agreements in which the people had no say, no choice, not even access to the details. Now that their lies have festered, and their courgettes have ripened, these governments can no longer peddle cucumbers and say: ‘You’re a bean.’
This article is originally published at Caravan in Arabic and later translated in English by AI.