Their Independence… and Our Nakba

 In this same day of the year 1948 there came to pass what we have given the name of Nakba… then elapsed a time when Palestine was no more than a worn record spinning on repeat in the Arab pavement cafés… then came a time when Palestine became once more the intonation of a people that had recovered its voice and felt its muscles reawaken… then came a time when the Palestinian cause became a spreading oil slick upon the waters and a gaping well drained of its substance, around which all the buckets jostled in an endless tumult… then came a moment when fear arose for the Palestinian body of a new wandering, more terrifying still than the first, for the Palestinian mother had become like a cat bearing her kittens from one place to nowhere… The ages succeeded one another and dissolved into each other… until Palestine finally appeared upon its own land as an epic composition…… but a solo played upon living flesh!!

It is in these singular formulations that Mohammad Hussein Chamseddine summarised his definition and approach to the commemoration of Nakba Day, at a conference held in Beirut under the title "From the Nakba to the State," in 2003, at the very hour when the Intifada was opening onto contradictory perspectives, torn between the advocates of peaceful struggle and the partisans of a return to the violence of arms.

The alternative imposed itself between the strategy of a historical settlement with the State of Israel and the triumph of projects of violence and integral liberation, from the sea to the river, with the abolition of the Oslo Accords as its standard, a rallying cry so dear to the heart of the axis of resistance and its vanguard, the Hamas movement.

More than two decades have elapsed for the commemoration of their independence and our Nakba to return, once more, while the world witnesses a madness without equivalent enveloping the Palestinian body in its own homeland and in several of the diaspora camps, in Syria and Lebanon. And the opacity of the international and regional moment, open to prospects that are perhaps not commensurate with what the Palestinian people aspires to in having its Nakba transform itself into a day of independence, continues to thicken.

The Madness of the Dance

The madness of the dance that wells from the seed of love places you before that Zorba of bereavement and tenderness, while the madness of the dance that bursts from the seed of hatred reveals itself with Ben Gvir and his ilk within the current Israeli government. In the time of Foreign Minister Abba Eban, a journalist had asked how they could boast of being a modern, democratic Zionist state when the Knesset received rabbis from an age long past. Abba Eban had smiled and replied that they deposited their cloaks on the threshold of the Knesset before going in to debate the policies of the State. But today, with Netanyahu and his so-called "secular" accomplices, it is the religious cloak they don to enter it.

The madness of the dance that Ben Gvir practises with the "hilltop youth" inside the Al-Aqsa mosque, and over the heads of those abducted by the Israeli navy off the coast of Cyprus, has not yet reached its term, for what is being pursued far exceeds what has been accomplished since the October 7 operation and the war of extermination.

The madness of the dance upon the seed of hatred is the gestural expression of a delusion of grandeur that invariably accompanies all those who claim to be invested by "God," the "Lord," or "Yahweh" with the mission of leading peoples across the land, upon the seas, and through the heavens.

When Finance Minister Smotrich makes a show of his accomplishments by declaring  that during his tenure he has silently led the revolution of radical change in the West Bank and that they have there erected a hundred colonies… in the cradle of their eternal biblical homeland  (according to correspondent Hagit Rozinam for the Ba'shevaa site, press of 21/5), the cooperation between Smotrich and Colonies Minister Orit Strock has formed what she names a "pincer movement," whose ambition is  to destroy the "Palestinian Authority" through economic strangulation, to extend the perimeter of direct colonial domination… to deny workers access to the Israeli labour market and to build a geographic continuity of settlements between Jerusalem and Hebron.

This type of extremist government takes little heed of the reports that international institutions raise to document, with irrefutable figures, that  the Israeli army has killed thousands of children , testimony retained by the International Court of Justice and upon which have been founded the rulings that visit infamy upon this criminal gang. Nor did they attend to the counsel that Henry Kissinger had lavished upon Rabin during the stone Intifada, while Rabin was crushing the bones of Palestinian youth:  do what you will with the Palestinians, but behind the cameras, not before them.

The delusion of grandeur of these ministers has reached such a pitch that they arrogate to themselves the right to dance upon the bodies of the living and the dead, on the public squares, in what resembles a blood-steeped and tenebrous ritual performed in the very face of the sun.

Thus has Israeli Independence Day, the fifteenth of May each year, transformed itself into an occasion to give the repressed free rein without the slightest restraint, from the moment the destructive power of the State of Israel has reached a summit permitting it to efface the Palestinian Other and to proclaim without circumlocution the programme designed to achieve this end.

This year, however, this festive ritual knew how to innovate, the settlers of the "hilltop youth" having taken for targets the children's schools, once the repertoire of "Bedouin" and "peasant" objectives had been exhausted.

Perhaps they imagine themselves capable of occupying the future of children and forbidding its advent.

It is one and the same day shared with those we call our cousins, the fifteenth of May each year, that is for them Independence Day and for us the day of the Nakba. It is there, perhaps, that reside the secret of the delusion of grandeur, the secret of the violent dance, and the secret of hatred, for the Other struck down by the Nakba continues to live! This fact lays bare a formidable equation between the strong and the weak, one that operates from the moment the weak persists in living under the sign of the Nakba and reminds the strong that his independence remains unfinished, a secret equation whose existence only the strong capable of healing himself can venture to confess. Our Nakba will thus continue to undermine their independence and to transform the celebration into a palliative designed to conceal the consciousness of a lack and an incompleteness, corrupting the festival to its very foundations, for no way out is conceivable without transcending the excess of power and resolving upon the historical reconciliation between two peoples inhabiting one land, endowed with equal rights.

Two Walls

This is not a matter here of the separation wall that encircled the West Bank, isolated the colonies, and swallowed 10% of its area, some 560 kilometres of the finest agricultural lands, with their water sources and their axes of global strategic control. Nor does it concern the wall known as the "Jerusalem Envelope," which isolates villages and towns from the neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem and penetrates, in the literal sense of the word, farms, houses, and private properties, stretching over some 180 kilometres, for these two walls belong henceforth to the past and have been the subject of an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice concluding that their construction infringes international law.

The two walls in question here are those the Israeli government intends to raise by seizing the zone known as E1 (East 1), to the east of the Arab city of Jerusalem, a historical territory of Bedouin tribes spanning 12 square kilometres, home to communities established on Mount Baba and separating the Adumim colony from the city of Jerusalem. This zone, the consuls of European states accompanied by their American counterpart have ceaselessly visited in order to prevent Israel from seizing it, not out of love for the Bedouin tribes, but because it would definitively sever the north of the West Bank from its south, and East Jerusalem from the Jordan Valley, that is to say from the Palestinian-Jordanian border, thus transforming the West Bank into isolated cantons, should the first colonial wall come to be built from Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley over some 35 kilometres, by linking the settlement blocs and sealing every gap between them, making of the city of Jerusalem a city that reaches the frontiers of Jordan.

As for the second wall, it is the one that would link Jerusalem through colonies to the city of Hebron, some 40 kilometres to the south, where anyone who travels by Palestinian bus observes that access to the highway reserved for settlers is forbidden to the indigenous populations, who are compelled to take old, winding roads reaching up to 70 kilometres, so as to guarantee the comfort of the Hebron settlers and the swiftness of their access to the capital.

This zone E1 constitutes the pivot that assures the continuity of the first colonial wall toward the Jordan Valley and of the second toward the city of Hebron, and it is precisely this of which Smotrich boasts under what he has called the plan of radical change, elaborated in concert with Netanyahu.

Until now, however, this zone remains silent and the bulldozers have not yet been set in motion; the efforts deployed by the National Authority with Washington and the states that exercise an influence over the Israeli government delay their mobilisation, as do the dissensions that have arisen within the government, leading to the prospect of new early parliamentary elections, thereby opening a propitious interval for preventing the execution of this project. It remains that for Israeli governments, suspending execution means only awaiting a more propitious moment, nothing more. That is how matters proceed there.

The Forgotten

The Special Envoy of the Peace Council, Nikolai Mladenov, has summoned the Hamas movement to surrender its weapons in order to be able to proceed with the application of the second clause of the Trump plan, but the Hamas leadership rejected this injunction on the grounds that the crux of the matter lay not in the arms, but in the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the entirety of the Gaza Strip. For its part, the Netanyahu government held fast to Mladenov's demand, pursuing its blockade policy and forbidding access of trucks to Gaza, while also blocking entry authorisations for members of the administrative commission into the Strip.

Caught between the intransigence of Israel and the obstruction of Hamas, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk recorded in his new report, published by the press on the 19th of this month,  that the acts carried out by Israel since the outbreak of war on 7 October constitute a flagrant violation of international law and are comparable to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Türk has further enjoined Israel to ensure  that its soldiers commit no act of genocide, and that it take all the measures that impose themselves to prevent any incitement to genocide and to guarantee its punishment.

Enough to plunge the Trump plan into paralysis over the question of arms, which blocks the entirety of the other avenues, only 80 trucks being admitted out of the 500 scheduled.

In this scene, while the inhabitants are in their death throes there from a slow famine and clinical death, Mladenov did not address to President Trump the question that imposed itself, he who allowed Hamas to dig in with its weapons and concluded with its leaders, through the intermediary of his mediators and security services, arrangements authorising the movement to continue governing the western part of the Strip until further notice, in connection with the questions of constitution and financing of an international force. Thus does the forgotten people pay, with its very flesh, the price of unavowed bargaining, whose sole public expression remains that indirect formula from President Trump suggesting he is in no hurry to disarm Hamas.

It would have better befitted Mr. Nikolai Mladenov to tell the truth to the forgotten.