Quick — what’s in the name Palestinian, and why are the Israelis hell-bent on obliterating it?
As news began to emerge last week of the horrific damage done by Israeli invading forces in Palestinian cities, including the historic cities of Bethlehem and Nablus, I took an unscientific survey of roughly 20 regulars at Angles, my watering hole at Adams Morgan in Washington, and not a single one of them — and we’re talking of educated American men ad women and women here — evinced knowledge of the answer.
One patron guessed that a Palestinian is “a descendant of the Philistines,” and another, a wiseass with a philosophical bent, refused to answer the question altogether “on the grounds that it is based on a false premise.”
Is this a great country or what?
Say what you will about Palestinians — and this being America, heck, anybody can say anything about anyone — but the sad fact is that few people in the US, a deeply Eurocentric nation with Eurocentric roots, that in recent months sought Euroalliances to wage a Eurowar on terrorism, understand who the Palestinians are and why Israel has opted to mount an offensive against them aimed effectively at no less than obliterating their name from the political lexicon.
You destroy a people’s national name, and you destroy the culture, heritage and history that define them. Or conversely, by wiping this accumulated body of traditions, that represents these people’s repertoire of national consciousness, you wipe out their name, and with that their claims to legitimacy in their ancestral patrimony.
There is a method to what some might call Israel’s madness. When in 1971 Golda Meir, then the Zionist prime minister, said that “the Palestinians do not exist,” she did more than raise serious doubts about the professional skills of her optometrist; and when the first thing that Israeli troops did after they invaded Beirut in 1982 was to destroy or cart off the archives of the Palestine Research Center, the repository of Palestinian culture in exile, they were doing more than to vengefully vandalize an august Palestinian institution.
In both cases, the Zionists wanted to erase the name Palestine or Palestinian from the face of the earth. For so long as there are Palestinians around, especially those living in exile in the surrounding countries or as refugees in the West Bank and Gaza, who call themselves Palestinians from Palestine, the world will one day have to come round to asking the question: “If these people are Palestinian, and they are from Palestine, then why aren’t they allowed to return to their homeland?”
You obliterate a people’s name or heritage, beginning with either, and you obliterate them from the politico-historical equation.
And that’s what Israel’s rampaging troops have been after in their already three-week old invasion of the West Bank. Sure, they had orders to kill Palestinians at will and at random — we were all transfixed by the furtive sadism, the faceless boredom of the helmeted killers — but they also had orders to demolish those ancient buildings and historical landmarks in Palestinian cities, not distinguishing between minaret and spire, that for generations had given a shaping echo to Palestinian culture, Palestinian identity, and Palestinian history.
In Bethlehem, for example, they turned historic Madbassah Square into rubble; a 300-year old pilgrims’ hostel was ruined by fires and explosives; and a once-popular artists’ colony was ransacked. This in addition to the pervasive destruction in the rest of the city, whose people, starting in 1998, opted to sink $250 million into an ambitious remodeling project designed to attract the tourist business.
Today, Bethlehem’s Old City is in tatters, and its residents are confined to their homes under a night-and-day curfew, allowed out for three hours every few days to buy food and medicine.
Nablus too has an Old City that is now in tatters, its cobblestoned streets charred, its opulent architectural inheritance gutted. The 250-year-old St. Demitrius Greek Orthodox monastery was badly damaged, as was the Salahuddin Great Mosque. In the Old City, which is the heart and the core of Nablus, many ancient and exquisite buildings in the historic Yasmina Quarter, is now in ruins; an Ottoman-era public bath, built in the 1830s, is utterly destroyed; and the city’s ancient marketplace is a complete wreck.
Daniel Williams, filing from Nablus last Sunday, wrote: “Some residents said they felt the obliteration of Nablus’ past was the main Israeli objective.”
He quoted one resident as saying: “This is our history, our culture, our civilization. The Israelis didn’t destroy much in the way of new buildings. They knew these could be replaced. But things in the Old City can not be rebuilt.”
But guess what? Nablus and its Nabulsi population have seen Roman, Persian, Crusader, Ottoman and British invaders in their time. All of them were finally sent packing. Now it’s the Israelis, stragglers from Europe, who just will not heed the notion that their colonial adventure in our part of the world is not only an anomaly in this age, not only an exotic vestige of bygone days, but a comical exercise of power that will soon be nipped in the bud by the peoples of the Arab world.
As Tome Paine explained to his fellow American patriots about the inevitability of the triumph, against all odds, of the American Revolution’s army against Britain, it is simply a matter of common sense that an island could not rule a continent.
We don’t know when or how these European stragglers, armed with their American-supplied tanks and Apache helicopters, will finally be brought to their knees, or brought to their senses. The old adage applies here: Men make history, and even the common man realizes that he is doing so, but they can never know the history they are making.
But all histories pitting oppressor against oppressed have a marvelous finality to them, carrying within them, as they do, the transcendent energy of a people struggling to guard their name, their history and their culture — in short, their God-given rights to a communal sense of reference.
Can Israelis get away, for a while, with destroying minaret and spire? Perhaps. With massacring Palestinians and burying their bodies in mass graves? Possibly. But defying the omnipotent Deity? Not even my innocently uninformed friends at Angles in Adams Morgan will give an affirmative answer to that one. ([email protected])
