In the second week of July 1982, soldiers manning a checkpoint yanked a man’s tote bag off his shoulder and forcibly confiscated a sandwich he had inside. The man was a Lebanese citizen traveling in a service cab from East to West Beirut, and the soldiers were Israeli. They were under orders to prevent food from entering the Lebanese capital, which Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s defense minister, had earlier put under a siege reminiscent of medieval times. The city’s water and electricity were cut, which reduced people to getting their water from wells and power from generators.
Beirut was being bombed mercilessly on a daily basis during the three-month siege. Thousands died. In one bombing raid alone in the middle of August, a high-rise building in the upscale neighborhood of Massana collapsed, resulting in 285 civilian deaths. Still the people of Beirut, and of Lebanon as a whole, endured and their resistance movement, after many years, chased the invaders out with their tails tucked between their legs.
Twenty years on, after four weeks of relentless attacks by Israeli soldiers on Palestinian towns and refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, culminating with the assault on Ramallah just before dawn last Friday, where they pummeled and then broke into the Palestinian leader’s compound, using tanks, armored personnel carriers and armored bulldozers, we are shown that Israel, a latter-day settler-state, has no future in our part of the world. Its repeated aggressions against neighboring Arab countries, perpetrated without letup since 1948, must make us wonder whether peace with this entity is possible or, even for that matter desirable.
How different are these people from the Crusaders, who, armed with a messianic vision, came to our part of the world in 1099 and proceeded, from their redoubt in occupied Jerusalem, to confront the entire Arab world for the next 88 years, before they were sent packing to where they had all come from?
Not much. Just as the Crusaders hailed from what was then called d’outremere and were essentially the riffraff of Europe, so we have once again another alien group of malcontents from the Continent who have come to Palestine in our time, equally armed with a messianic vision and a racist view of the native people who inhabit it.
How else, pray tell, would you identify a community that has chosen a man like Ariel Sharon as a leader, a man, too dumb to know the dialectic of history, is inexorably driving them to a disaster of monumental proportions — maybe not this year or the next, or maybe not this decade or the next, but sure as hell, and sure as history has implacable laws, driving them to a disaster nevertheless?
A man, who, a day after the entity he leads is made a historic peace overture by an Arab summit, mounts a military offensive against the Arab citizens of Palestine, in pursuit of the elusive goal of persuading them to accept a permanently subservient position under Israeli rule, is not someone you want to do business with.
Sharon remains essentially a man who is the product of that Zionist mindset transplanted to Palestine around the turn of the last century, a time when colonial enterprises were fashionable, and “subjugated” peoples were expected to know their place, and not get uppity about their national rights. Sharon, in other words, remains afflicted with that upstairs-downstairs mentality, where Europeans have extraterritorial rights and the peoples they occupy are essentially a lower species of brown or black men whose lives are to be managed for them by freckle-nosed colonizers.
Ariel, hey, you got it wrong, boy. The times have changed, though you have not. Moreover, to us all, you will continue to be an old terrorist whose hands drip with the blood of murdered Arabs. And the fact that your soldiers wear uniforms and ride tanks does not make them any less the terrorists they are. And you are so totally out of it, so frozen, I say, in your 1890’s mindset that you actually asked to be invited to address the Arab summit in Beirut in order to explain your views on the Saudi peace plan.
Puleeze! How out of touch with the times can a man be?
Moreover, events of the last few weeks have shown that whatever extremes Sharon’s government takes will be matched in equal measure by the Palestinian resistance. And no matter how boxed in Yasser Arafat is, so will be his nemesis, who remains trapped in pursuit of a phantom victory in a struggle pitting military superiority over national will, a struggle that history has taught us favors the latter.
The US government’s position on all this remains the same: The onus is on the Palestinian leader “to move vigorously against terrorists,” at a time when this leader has been hemmed in his Ramallah headquarters since December, and pinned to three rooms there since last weekend.
The fact of the matter is that the US is implicated in this whole dreadful mess. Ariel Sharon would not have sent his forces into Ramallah to assault the Palestinian leader’s compound, moving room by room within it, and to terrorize the population of this Palestinian city, with house-to-house searches, were he not convinced that the American administration backed him all the way.
This column is notorious for being somewhat unkind to Yasser Arafat, but the unkindness was always expressed within an accepted context of reference, namely, the context of a Palestinian leader being taken to task by a Palestinian commentator who disagrees with his policies. But this is different. Like it or not, Yasser Arafat is the chairman of the PLO. He is now, and has been for decades, a symbol of the Palestinian national struggle. When he is humiliated, we are all humiliated.
And when he is humiliated by a fat, ugly, two-bit settler colonist from d’outremere, who leads a rinky-dink state superimposed on our ancestral patrimony, we are up in arms, both literally and figuratively.
Israel can hold Yasser Arafat prisoner, but it cannot hold Palestinian militants from attacking Israelis. Palestinian society, occupied, mortified and pauperized, will continue to produce a limitless supply of patriots willing to die for the cause of freedom. In fact, to young Palestinians these days — Palestinians denied the right to choose the way they live — choosing the way they die has become, almost by a process of osmosis, encoded in their consciousness. It’s an everyday impulse born naturally out of their unspeakably painful political reality.
Consider this: Ayat Al-Akhras, the high-school student who blew herself up in Jerusalem last Friday, reportedly went to school in the morning to attended classes before heading on downtown to mount her operation.
At the end of the day, we are left with the question: Who are these people behind Ariel Sharon, these people who back him, cheer him on, and vote for him? Are they really, as we have suspected all along, the riffraff of d’outremere, like the Crusaders before them?
Looks like it. (disinherited@ yahoo.com)
