My wife, alerted by a phone call, yelled from the kitchen: 'Turn on the TV.' On the screen was US President George W. Bush's photograph with a caption which read: 'Bush - the former dictator is arrested.' I cannot deny that it was a moment of great elation.
Mr Bush deserved to be arrested and tried - for his invasion of sovereign Iraq and Afghanistan, for the thousands of dead, and tortured men and women wherever he took his war on Islam, for his support of Enron, and for his doubtful handling of September 11. In light of the Patriot Act - which gave the government broader surveillance authority - and for the unconstitutional way he got to the White House, Mr Bush can be called a dictator. But 'former'? Had the people of the US risen up in arms and removed the tyrant?
Alas, no such luck. The former dictator referred to was, of course, the deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. What an anticlimax. Pictures of the humiliated Hussein, bearded, tired, confused and treated like a captured tiger in a zoo, were repeating endlessly. He opened his mouth, and we were forced to look in. He looked human and frail; too human, his dishevelled beard and large eyes make him akin to Leo Tolstoy or Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If, in 1941, Hitler's army had not been stopped by the Red Army on the outskirts of Moscow, this would have been the fate of Joseph Stalin. And it would have been Mao Zedong's fate, too, had Chinese soldiers not stopped General Douglas MacArthur's hordes on the Yalu river in 1950.
In a Palestinian cafe, where Jerusalem artists and teachers mingle with villagers gloom was hanging like a rain cloud. The Palestinians were distressed and spoke in hushed tones. Their feelings had been hurt by the dishonourable display of the captive ruler. Whether Hussein was liked or not, he was the president of a great Arab nation and his humiliation was the humiliation of all Arabs.
He was not the first captured ruler in the world's bloody history. More than 800 years ago, a victorious Arab army captured west European crusader princes. Then, however, the Arab commander, Saladin, treated his captives courteously. He did not parade them with an open, red-painted mouth in front of his troops. But chivalry and honour, so dear to an Arab heart, are not American virtues: the US dared to attack Iraq only after 10 years of United Nations sanctions.
The Palestinians had additional reasons to worry. Iraq was a big and independent Arab country. It was by no means a counterbalance to the united might of Israel and the US, but its existence could stay the Zionist hand from particularly wild actions. In 1948, Iraqi volunteers stopped the Israeli army expelling the Palestinian residents of Jenin and Nablus and saved them from the fate of homeless refugees. In 1973, the Iraqi presence stopped Israelis moving on to Damascus. Since then, the Iraqis have supported Palestinians, collecting money to send to widows and orphans of the resistance.