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Disaster beckons an entire people, and they are all chuckling. Israel chuckles as its parameters burn. Hamas chuckles as it prepares to reign supreme over an oven—or a presto as we call our pressure cookers. And Fatah chuckles as it digs its heels into the glorified prison that is the West Bank.
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Woe to Mahmoud Darwish, every Palestinian’s poet, for taking this so seriously. Lamentations, rebukes, regrets, eloquence teetering on the edge of befuddlement graces the front page of al Hayyat newspaper, and for what? For whom?
“The prisoner, who so wants to inherit his prison, hid the smile of victory from the camera, but he could not suppress the happiness trickling from his eyes, perhaps because the hastily prepared text was stronger than the actor. We have no need of narcissism, so long as we are Palestinian. And so long as we cannot tell the difference between the mosque and the university (al Ja’ami’ wa al Jamia’a) because they come from the same linguistic root, we have no need of a state…” (My translation).
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For the first time ever Darwish declares his Palestine dead and, like a bouquet of white lilies, rests his shattered heart over its remains.
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For the first time ever Darwish declares his Palestine dead and, like a bouquet of white lilies, rests his shattered heart over its remains.
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If you are in this neighborhood, wherever you are you must be stepping on blame everywhere you look. The blogs, the newspapers, the magazines, the news programs and talk shows, my street corner in Beirut, are throwing it around like sludge in a free-for-all mud fight. As a gesture of goodwill and, I suppose, in the interest of variety, warriors from both camps are graciously indulging a good number of apologetic malcontents. On the American-Israeli side, flanking the devotees who can only conceive of Palestinian violence as a vindication of their own chauvinism, we have a band of so-called free spirits who chide Israel for its naiveté or carelessness in giving license to Islamism in the late eighties as a tamable beast with which to harass Yasser Arafat. On the Palestinian side, running very near the diehards who plunk every mishap on Zionist-American laps, we have a group who, in typical lah-ya-habibi-hatha- al hakki-ma-bisseir (roughly, this won’t do, my brother) form, scold Hamas and Fatah for letting their dirty laundry dangle from the rooftops of Gaza.
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The lines of defense thus secured, the word mistake, on both sides of the embankment, begins to do what it is so good at: recasting deliberate malice as a mere error of judgment. By way of example, we have: It was a mistake for the Americans not to engage an amenable Hamas after the Palestinian elections; and/or it was a mistake for Israel to ignore Mahmud Abbas and inadvertently strengthen Hamas; and/or it was a mistake for Fatah not to have accepted the choice of the people; and/or it was a mistake for Hamas to stoop to the level of a conniving Mahmud Dahlan on the frightened streets of Gaza… In each of these examples and their enumerable spin-offs, every premeditated outcome becomes an unintended consequence; in each of them, every indictment comes with its own built-in pardon. And it is in this way that disturbed psyches are transformed into ill-advised decisions. It is in this way that the sentence for murder is reduced, before the court of public opinion, to that of manslaughter. Now they can all go down in history as blameless victims of at best a bad calculation, at worst rudderless intentions.
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You know that yawning, incomprehensible sound that emits from a scene being replayed for the thousandth time…?
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So let’s reshuffle the deck. Let’s stretch this canvas of facts some and make it less comfortable for conventional wisdoms as they go about planting themselves all over its parched surface.
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Since we are still in the middle of my heart-to-heart with Israel, I want to stay with it before turning to the Arabs and the Palestinians.
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This is what I wrote an American journalist friend of mine towards the end of Israel’s war with Hezbollah last summer:
Why…would Israel opt, yet again, for brutal military force when much in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict tells it that, almost always, savagery will deliver plenty of what it presumably does not want and very little of what it allegedly craves? Why squeeze the life out of a whole people when, from this death, mayhem and unbearable distress and blind hate are sure to emerge? Unless—unless, of course—Israel’s declared objectives, more often than not, are only thin cover for an entirely more sinister ambition. Sixty years into this bloodletting, surely you and I can easily glimpse this fractured, devastated, radicalized Arab terrain emptied of its moderate voices and reasonable minds; a distraught, agitated landscape that cares only for those children born and bred in its own deathly image. And surely, on the fringes of this carnage, you and yours are meant to behold that lonesome lotus vibrating with life in our Eastern mud; that marvel of a nation that stands like an impregnable, fearsome military fortress on the outside and thrives like a precious Western democracy on the inside; that bastion of Western civilization in a very cruel, backward neighborhood inhabited by tyrannical halfwits and fundamentalist dimwits, a place and its people who, in their ferocity, explain the very reason for this glittering beauty that is mighty Israel.Creative chaos, whoever its real authors are, promises this: that from the rubble shall rise one of two equally wonderful Middle Easts—a chronically ill beast ravaged by social diseases and debilitated by internecine wars, or a lobotomized creature, stupid, biddable, and permanently silent. I remember the very first question that came to me only hours into this latest war: What have we wrought in this land of ours? I kept mumbling to myself… I shall leave [this country] and search for a shelter that can love me better and which, perhaps, will allow me to love it more. Where have I registered in anybody’s books as the prime casualty of this war? Where am I mentioned? And yet, all along, I have had this nauseous feeling that I am the one Israel was actually after…
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Why…would Israel opt, yet again, for brutal military force when much in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict tells it that, almost always, savagery will deliver plenty of what it presumably does not want and very little of what it allegedly craves? Why squeeze the life out of a whole people when, from this death, mayhem and unbearable distress and blind hate are sure to emerge? Unless—unless, of course—Israel’s declared objectives, more often than not, are only thin cover for an entirely more sinister ambition. Sixty years into this bloodletting, surely you and I can easily glimpse this fractured, devastated, radicalized Arab terrain emptied of its moderate voices and reasonable minds; a distraught, agitated landscape that cares only for those children born and bred in its own deathly image. And surely, on the fringes of this carnage, you and yours are meant to behold that lonesome lotus vibrating with life in our Eastern mud; that marvel of a nation that stands like an impregnable, fearsome military fortress on the outside and thrives like a precious Western democracy on the inside; that bastion of Western civilization in a very cruel, backward neighborhood inhabited by tyrannical halfwits and fundamentalist dimwits, a place and its people who, in their ferocity, explain the very reason for this glittering beauty that is mighty Israel.Creative chaos, whoever its real authors are, promises this: that from the rubble shall rise one of two equally wonderful Middle Easts—a chronically ill beast ravaged by social diseases and debilitated by internecine wars, or a lobotomized creature, stupid, biddable, and permanently silent. I remember the very first question that came to me only hours into this latest war: What have we wrought in this land of ours? I kept mumbling to myself… I shall leave [this country] and search for a shelter that can love me better and which, perhaps, will allow me to love it more. Where have I registered in anybody’s books as the prime casualty of this war? Where am I mentioned? And yet, all along, I have had this nauseous feeling that I am the one Israel was actually after…
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The fire of heedless rage or the stillness of unquestioning submission. Hamas or Fatah. Militancy that derides dignified resistance as cowardly or obsequiousness that masquerades as genuine moderation. Do you see now why Israel chuckles, thinking deliverance at last? To neither adversary does it have to cede dreams, because of neither is it compelled to rewrite raison d’etres, for the sake of neither does it need to offer more than crumbs, yield more than inches.
