The Palestinian Situation… Think of Others
What you are reading here is not one more article on a cause that the world believes it already knows. It is an attempt to understand — to understand how a people that has carried its dream for decades continues to carry it, on a land that has never fallen silent and never will. This text is the introduction to a multi-part study on the Palestinian situation, in its historical, political, and human ramifications. Because what is unfolding cannot be reduced to a headline. And because silence, too, is a stance.
As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(Do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you conduct your wars, think of others
(Do not forget those who seek peace).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(Do not forget the people of the camps).
These are the words the poet Mahmoud Darwish spoke at the close of the last century — after his return to his homeland under the Declaration of Principles on interim self-government arrangements in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, as a consequence of the Six-Day War, as Israel calls it, or the war of the "Naksa," as the Arabs named it.
The poet had declared neither his approval nor his opposition to the Oslo Accords of 1993. He had chosen instead to resign from his eminent seat on the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization — the highest recognized political authority — as though he wished to take the measure of things in his own poetic way, on a terrain from which he had long been absent.
Yet the poet was soon to express his astonishment and wonder at what he saw: the unceasing popular celebrations among the people of Gaza and the West Bank as they welcomed the returning exiles; the veneration of the accord's maker and architect, the emblematic Yasser Arafat; and the overflowing joy at the deep and sweeping transformation the agreement had brought to the daily lives of ordinary people — their sense that freedom was approaching, that peace was within reach, above all when the Israeli army withdrew first from the major cities and the direct grip of occupation was lifted from five million Palestinians after more than a quarter century.
But the decisive scene was the overwhelming popular mandate — the vote of the vast majority in favor of President Arafat in the first elections ever held on Palestinian soil in 1996. And returning to our finely sensitive poet, who had become one of the pillars of the new era, commanding an elite and popular consensus that President Yasser Arafat himself had never enjoyed, one might venture to say that his profound intuition regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — with all its intractable problems — had made him keenly aware of its fragility, and had kept alive in him the premonition of its collapse, ever since Israeli extremism had drawn its pistol and murdered Yitzhak Rabin at the height of his glory, at the very moment he was being crowned as "king." And the forces of extremism had also brought down, through the ballot box, the seasoned Shimon Peres.
At the same time, Palestinian extremism was whetting its daggers and unleashing its suicidal energy to blow up "the accord of treachery," as the parties of the "resistance and rejection" axis call it.
And today they celebrate their "victory" over the peace process, with not a thought for what has befallen the people of the tents in Gaza, or the inhabitants of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The poet's intuition proved right when he urged everyone to think of others. But the extremists on both sides are indifferent to this call.
Terrorism
Whatever the intentions when thinking of the other — whether brother, friend, adversary, or enemy — and whatever the aspiration, be it coexistence, compromise, reconciliation, or simply living together, the peacemaker must first contend with extremism within his own environment before he can engage with the other.
In this context, I call for abandoning the term "terrorism," which has come to carry meanings far beyond its technical and linguistic definition. It has become a political epithet hurled about by terrorists themselves, a ready-made charge wielded by states and politicians and slapped, at times, on their most balanced and moderate adversaries and enemies. Our most telling example is the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas!
I therefore believe that "national supremacism" among great powers, "religious fanaticism," and "political extremism" are terms far more objective in their denotation and description of what humanity endures than the word "terrorism."
Building on what was said in the first section, one may say that its moral dimension raises challenges of an altogether different order — challenges that belong to the very core of contemporary political theory, which expresses the international order of the post-World War II era. That era witnessed an exceptional ascent in the fields of science and technology, the human and social sciences, and the production of the most refined legislation across many domains.
Yet we also witnessed massacres and slaughter, from the Vietnam War to the war of extermination in the Gaza Strip, as defined by the International Court of Justice.
We have also seen ethnic cleansing, from the Balkans and Myanmar to Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as forced displacement from Syria, Sudan, and other countries. And if we single out the wars waged in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, it is precisely because they were launched for no other purpose than to uproot terrorism and eliminate terrorists!
The outcome? Negotiation with those very terrorists. And the only tangible achievement: the destruction of states, homelands, and peoples.
Now that the war of extermination against the people of Gaza has been halted by decree of the master of the White House — while the firing has not ceased for a single moment to this day, and operations aimed at displacing millions of Palestinians from their land have not relented — this reality demands a new analysis, which may be summarized as follows:
1. The geography of historic Palestine and its people constitutes a living, ongoing case study, revealing the utter incapacity of international law and its relevant conventions to secure the most basic rights of life — water, food, medicine — let alone to provide a simple tent... a tent, nothing more! Who can believe this is happening in an age of civilization and human values?!
2. What is unfolding — this slow extermination without heavy artillery — is in fact a comprehensive test of the credibility of the concepts that Western governments have exported to us with a measure of condescension and a measure of contempt.
3. The function of the White House's ceasefire decree is to protect the international political order and its mechanisms of operation as seen through the American lens, and to prevent the erosion of Israel's standing, as Trump himself declared. And in order to protect the Israeli government, he graciously extended to the Palestinians the gift of halting the war of extermination, while permitting the war of attrition to continue.
Thus has modernity, in its most splendid guises — through artificial intelligence and by its means as well — enabled the production of genocide, whose effects continue unabated, as the Israeli government has not retreated from its declared objectives of ethnic cleansing, annexation of lands, and the political crushing of the Palestinian political entity and its historical social fabric.
All of this emanates from a modern state sponsored by the largest secular democracy on the planet — and yet, with remarkable ease, modernity may be discarded and a return made to biblical myth to demonstrate that the purpose of all this is the fulfillment of the "divine promise," as the American ambassador to Israel declared. He did not, however, tell us whether this biblical promise was written before the Big Bang, after it, or at the precise moment of its occurrence!
The October 7 Attack
The suicidal attack of October 7 triggered a state of collective hysteria across Israeli society — from the apex of the political hierarchy, through the military, all the way to the settlers. The Israeli mind could not absorb this sudden collapse of the military and security barriers deployed along the Gaza Strip's border — and above all, the failure of the high-tech electronic fence to sound an early warning!
It is well known that this pivotal event brought about a deep and qualitative transformation in the nature of Israeli-Palestinian relations at every level.
Nothing remained as it was. Rage, hatred, and the direct drive to destroy the other exploded with full force. Such became the equation between the two parties — and the world witnessed it, filmed and documented, on screens everywhere.
On the Palestinian side, only a small fraction of the elites condemned the Hamas attack, for the vast majority of ordinary people saw in it a natural act of retaliation against the brutality and torment inflicted by the Israeli occupation army.
Others viewed it as a confrontation between the Jewish religious extremism practiced by the Israeli government and the Islamic religious extremism practiced by the Hamas movement.
In this debate, I find it illuminating to shed light on the visit paid by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during the Biden administration, to Ramallah and his meeting with President Mahmoud Abbas — a visit in which he quickly pressed Abbas to condemn and denounce the attack and classify it as terrorism…
But President Abbas replied in a sharp tone and a loud voice: "You are the ones who created the Hamas movement, and you are the ones who brought it to power in the Gaza Strip… The responsibility lies with you, and do not ask anything of me."
After that episode, American and Israeli media began to speak of the Authority's corruption, the need for change, the old age and incapacity of the Palestinian administration — culminating in the delegitimization of its political standing, without pausing before the truth that reveals how the peace-building process between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples had ground to a halt ever since Netanyahu's team seized power in Israel on the ruins of the Rabin-Peres government at the end of the last century.
And because American administrations, in the wake of the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, succeeded in nothing but expanding the use of violence that negates justice and entrenches domination by force — all while calling it a "peace process" — we are today harvesting the fruits of policies of accommodation and exploitation of political Islam, in both its Sunni and Shia dimensions, as evidenced by the renewed outbreak of violence under new-yet-old headings that signal the redrawing of the map of the Greater Middle East.
And we do not know when the war will lay down its burdens after the liquidation of the ruling elite in Iran, for the matter is not who governs Iran but who steers the world from the White House.