An Eternal Issue: Zahar in his own words

the suffering of his people will persist, says the bearded and stocky 62-year-old Cairo-trained medical doctor

Interviewed at the Economist:

He certainly would not now “accept the reality” of Israel, as some of his senior colleagues have hinted. It may, instead, become “an eternal issue”, he says, looking ahead to a distant future when, “like your European Union”, the Arab nation will form one state across its historic lands, joining up with other Muslim nations such as Turkey. “We [Palestinians] were never an independent state in history,” he notes. “We were part of an Arab state and an Islamic state.”