George W. Bush received two messages recently. The one was from the most wanted man in the world, which arrived days before the presidential election in the form of a five-minute video appearance on the Al-Jazeera satellite channel, and the other was a congratulatory note from Britain’s prime minister, which arrived at the White House shortly after it was revealed on Tuesday morning that the American president had won a second term by clinching the 20 electoral votes of Ohio.
I for one do not put much stock in what Osama Bin Laden has to say these days, and has had to say in the past. To start with, he is a liar. Soon after Sept. 11, it will be recalled, he denied that he had anything to do with the attacks, but in his latest video he takes credit for them, asserting essentially that the thousands of innocent Americans he murdered on that day were somehow “paying for the crimes” of their leaders.
That is egregious. But what is even more egregious are the brutal acts that groups claiming allegiance to him have committed in recent months, including the kidnappings, beheadings, executions and bombings of civilians all the way from Spain to Iraq and from the Netherlands to Indonesia.
This comes on top of the fact that Bin Laden’s extremist and reactionary interpretation of Islam is by no stretch of the imagination a model for Muslims in the modern world to emulate.
Yet, there was something in Bin Laden’s message — hardly an original thought by itself, to be exact, but there you have it — that seemed to speak cogently to the Arab psyche when he said his ideological transformation as a young activist, who loathed America’s “arrogance,” came about in 1982 when he witnessed the savageries perpetrated by the American-supported Israeli invasion of Lebanon that year, an invasion that resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian men, women and children.
In fact a similar transformation in the consensus of the international community began to take place roughly around the same time, a consensus that saw a dramatic shift away from the view that Israel was a “tiny state” established rightfully on a small sliver of land by a plucky people defending themselves against the Arab hordes out to drive them into the sea, to a view that was, shall we say, less benign.
It became obvious to people around the world, and significantly so on the European continent, that Washington’s blatant tilt toward Israel was the most important single factor in feeding anti-American radicalism in the region, which in turn produced the kind of terrorism that the US has now employed the whole kit and caboodle of its big power resources to combat worldwide.
Thus when Bin Laden railed in his video tape at the “injustice and tyranny of the American-Israel alliance against our people in Palestine,” he seemed to hit a sensitive chord even in those folks who reviled him and his ideology.
Tony Blair, in his congratulatory message to the American president, essentially expressed that shift in perception that has taken place in Europe in recent years, when he insisted that a settlement of the question of Palestine was “the single most pressing challenge in our world today.”
The single most pressing challenge in our world today is this: Will George Bush realize, in his second term in office, that the time has come for his administration to put itself in top gear and adjust its approach to Israel, or will this administration’s traditionally anomalous and uncritical support of Ariel Sharon’s Israel continue unchecked, unchanged and unqualified?
If there is a shift to the former, we can say that the American government has come round to the notion that no people can occupy and subjugate another indefinitely — as Israelis have done to the Palestinians for almost four decades — and that the rights of one people, as the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights had it in March 1976, to “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development” cannot be achieved at the cost of denying those same rights to another people.
In this context, I proffer here a bit of history. The Jews of Palestine (present day “Israelis”) were never empowered at any time, by anyone, to create the rigidly defined, ethno-national entity they finally created in 1947, expanded territorially in 1948 and expanded yet again nineteen years later - all by force of arms.
The question of whether the three-sentence Balfour Declaration did in fact sanction, or that those who issued it were authorized to sanction, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine is at best dubious and at worst laughable.
Let’s be fair to the British: They were mandated by the Versailles Conference to run Palestine’s affairs, and by 1939 they had come to realize, Balfour Declaration or no Balfour Declaration, that they were also mandated to protect the rights of the Palestinian inhabitants by limiting the influx of Jewish immigration into the country, thus preventing the potential transformation of its Arab majority into a minority.
To that extent, they issued the White Paper that year, which stated categorically that it was the duty of “His Majesty’s government” to ensure that Palestinian Arabs would never become subject to foreign rule under a Jewish state.
Alas, the native people of Palestine did become subject to foreign rule — and then some. They were robbed not only of their movable and immovable property, of whole towns, villages and farms, but also of home, homeland and name. In effect, this was the case of one people robbing another of its entire patrimony.
And all this happened in Palestine, the heartland of our world.
The Arab world’s passionate preoccupation with the question of Palestine remains a mystery to most Americans. That is because they are unaware that the land where Jerusalem is located, a land that Crusaders assaulted and turned into a blood-soaked killing field in 1099, has a special place in the historical consciousness of Arabs, and along with them other Muslims around the planet.
It is a land, in other words, with evident and concrete foundations in the Arab people’s history and society, their culture and values, their religion and contemporaneous life.
The trauma of 1948 — known as the “nakba,” or the dismemberment and conquest of Palestine — is a landmark, archetypal event for the peoples of the Arab and Islamic worlds, a trauma that transcended the ancillary fate that befell the Palestinian people themselves.
It has been a commonplace of political debate among Arabs over the last 87 years — say, since the Balfour Declaration — to assert that cultural and social events in their region mirrored the ebb and flow of the struggle over Palestine.
Washington has master plans to introduce democracy, freedom and human rights — not to mention Norman Rockwell, Norman Mailer and, if the neocons have their way, Norman Podhoretz — to our part of the world. But how can we trust these master plans if Palestine is not included in the equation?
George Bush may not pay heed to Bin Laden’s putative message about the immeasurable suffering of Palestinians.
The slayer of men has no right to speak about the grief of men. But he should pay heed to what world leaders have to say, as embodied in Tony Blair’s message last week, about how and why the question of Palestine will need a discerning response over the next four years.
We will have an opportunity soon to find out if there is evidence that the Bush administration intends to have a fresh start by the stand it will take on Yasser Arafat’s desire to be buried in Jerusalem, and whom it will send, if anyone at all, to his funeral.
Trust me on this one, George: The road to Baghdad passes through Arab Jerusalem, not the other way round. We know our region better than you do, and your neocon idea-brokers ever will.
