It’s taken the NT Times over 700 Palestinian dead and some 2,000 injured before presenting an alternative to the official Israeli line on the current Gaza massacre.
It’s clear, unequivocal, and analytical in tone, as opposed to emotional, which is the only tone Western media outlets will deign to hear the brown masses speak in, because for some reason, it’s okay to be hysterically emotional when 3,000 Americans die in a cold-blooded act of paramilitary cruelty (and expect the world to join in your hysteria as well), but it’s, like, totally uncool to show emotion when 700 brown people, er, Palestinians, die in a cold-blooded act of military cruelty.
It’s a great piece from beginning to end, but it’s the last line, a 2002 quote from an Israeli Defense Forces chief that really brings it home:
“The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
There are two separate, defining moments in my life as a Palestinian that this quote reminds me of.
Back in college I wrote a paper for a political science class about the 1980s Intifada (the Arabic word for ‘uprising’ which has come to represent the mass protests - mostly peaceful - of Palestinians against the occupation of their territories. The first Intifada ended with the 1993 peace accords, and the second Intifada, this one not so peaceful, began in 2000 when the peace accords gasped their last breath.)
I read a lot of books and quoted a lot of “experts” and threw in a bunch of stats, and when I showed the end result to my dad, I expected nothing less than to be showered with fatherly pride. Instead he told me that I’d missed the whole point.
The Intifada didn’t happen just because Israel had diverted fresh water sources for its own use and away from the Palestinians, or because Palestinians had being slowly bullied off the land for decades, or humiliated at checkpoints. The Intifada was the spontaneous, grassroots response by everyday Palestinians to an attempt by Israeli state policy to slowly eat away at their will to exist as a nation.
Somehow every book I’d read on the subject had missed that subtle but crucial point.
The second moment was a defining one only in retrospect - at the time it was just an innocuous afternoon of English Lit class spent sitting for a quiz about an innocuous story, or so I thought when I was reading it. I can’t even remember what it was called, or the name of the author. It might have been a famous story, but I couldn’t tell you. All I can remember is that it was a particularly grim but otherwise totally forgettable Holocaust story with forgettable characters. There was no heroic comedy, as in Roberto Begnini’s “Life Is Beautiful”, no love story, no kid hiding in an attic, heroically scribbling away her thoughts while everything around her crumbled.
When our teacher collected the quiz back from up and quickly scanned the results, he declared, unsurprisingly, that no one had gotten the last question right - the one that asked what the whole point of the story was.
The point, my friends, turned out to be about this: the human right to weakness.
When we’re programmed to glorify firefighters who dash into smoking buildings to rescue babies, soldiers who willingly sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity, it’s easy to forget that in reality, we as a species aren’t wired for heroics although we’d like to think we are. We’re actually quite mediocre, designed to watch out for ourselves and our own, that most of us will give our grandmothers away under torture, and if we think we can’t win a fight, we will simply run away. When we act contrary to our survival instincts, it’s because something else, a belief in something bigger than ourselves has kicked in, and it’s a lot harder to tap into this reserve of heroism than Hollywood would have you believe.
The great irony of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an irony that few books or experts or pundits will tell you about, one that is incredibly subtle but absolutely crucial, is that both sides have been poisoned by the need to rewrite history.
No child of Holocaust survivors relishes the fact that Jews as a group were so weak, so vulnerable to the whims of fanatics and world powers, that 6 million of them perished at the hands of just one such fanatic.
No child of Palestinian refugees can hide from the shame that her people fled their homeland in panic instead of standing their ground and dying, and in doing so, condemned her and generations after her (how many?) to perpetual statelessness, humiliation, and robbed her of any sense of national identity.
Jon Stewart aired a spoof of the Gaza conflict back when headlines were hijacked by news of Israel’s potential withdrawal from the strip, and the ensuing PR circus and protests. The skit showed a desolate slab of barren land, blowing sand, destruction, not much else. This was the joke: is this what you guys are fighting over? Seriously?
It would have been a good joke if a tiny, ugly strip of desert was all what was at stake, instead of the chance to rewrite history, and this time - just this once - come out on top.
