Maybe the butler did it. Who knows? No one has so far owned up or been exposed as the culprit. Perhaps there is not any one culprit. Perhaps we may discover, like the murder of Julius Caesar, that it was, after all, a collective crime.
The crime in question? The killing of all hope of Palestine ever becoming an independent nation in the near future. I use the term “killing” not metaphorically but in its nondescript, lexicological sense, connoting the deliberate act by a party to snuff the life out of a living, breathing organism.
The events of the last two years or so represent the end of yet another sad chapter in a long, costly but so-far failed 85-year struggle by Palestinians to gain independence in the whole or even a part of their ancestral patrimony.
Immerse yourself, if you will, into the bathos of their present condition: Fenced in inside Gaza, and living under curfew in the West Bank, with their economy run into the ground, and with their leader, his stooped shoulders draped in a drab brown khaki outfit, confined to his compound by foreign occupation forces. This is no less an appalling image to Arabs all over the Arab world, to whom the ideal of Palestine was always celebrated as a fountainhead of their history, consciousness and culture, than it is to ordinary Palestinians.
Thus today every one of us who cares about this holy land would be justified in asking, “And what the blazes has gone wrong?”
Sure, Zionism has never had, and does not today have, any benign intentions in Palestine. That’s a given, a fact already in the history books. Rather, our question today, that every Arab needs to ask, and give urgency to finding an answer to, is why Palestinians have become a peripheral people, largely impotent at determining their political destiny in their own land?
The most obvious answer, bluntly speaking, is this: We had a vacillating leadership uninformed in the ways of the world, most particularly uninformed about the crucial role that a political movement’s place in the balance of power plays at the negotiating table, determining how much or how little you get there. But more than that, there is the tragic flaw, the seed of chaos, whence had sprung the free-lance uprising in 2000, mounted by a population at the end of its tether, that mistrusted its leadership, despised its corrupt bureaucracy, resented the excesses of its officials living high on the hog in the midst of rampant poverty, and feared its heavy-handed police and security forces. (Before that year had come to an end, there had been reportedly 17 suspects who had died under torture at the hands of interrogators answerable to no one.)
An era that penetrates the consciousness of ordinary men with a sense of the historical, as did the years between 1993 and 2000, needs a leadership to harness and guide its energies. In the absence of that leadership, these very ordinary folk took matters into their own hands. A rebellion by ordinary men, regardless of its heroic attributes, without extraordinary men to lead it, is doomed.
The Palestinian leadership has failed yet again, reinforcing a tradition in Palestinian history going back to the early part of the first half of the 20th century. Failing always to grasp the axiom that what rights a national struggle ultimately gains at the negotiating table is directly correlated to its place in the balance of power, this leadership failed to grasp the opportunities to be found in the 1936 Peel Commission recommendations, the opportunities in the 1939 White Paper, and the opportunities in the 1947 UN Partition Plan — all of which were spurned.
Each time, as the rights of their people retrenched further and further, these leaders, along with their successors today, asked to return to the status quo ante, and each time they were told, in effect, that inflation is not just a phenomenon in the financial world but is one in the diplomatic world as well.
Last week, a “high-level Palestinian official” plaintively called for Israel and the Palestinian Authority to start peace negotiations again on the basis of the Clinton proposals. No go.
Our generation of Palestinians created a movement in 1968 that came on like gangbusters, imbued with the moral optimism of youth and a commitment to the cause of freedom, social justice and, heh, well, yes, the pursuit of happiness, in an independent Palestine. Its leader then was a turbocharged 38-year old man who embodied Palestinian aspirations and became an object of veneration in much of the Arab world, the Third World and the Islamic world. And, my, how convinced we were at the time that we would pre-empt our tomorrow.
Rarely had there been a year as eventful for young people everywhere around the world as was 1968, a time when you were afraid to scratch your head in case you missed something. That was the year of the rebellion in France known as “les evenements,” that brought down the de Gaulle government, and the peak of the anti-war movement in the United States that brought down the Johnson administration; the year of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution in China; of the Tupamaros in Uruguay and the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland (when Catholics and Protestants marched together for the first time); of the student takeover of Columbia University and the hippie dropout in Haight Ashbury; of the student protests against Communist rule in Poland and the violent resistance against the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia; of the Beatles releasing their seminal “Helter Skelter” album and the bloody confrontations in Chicago outside the Democratic Convention. It seemed as if the youth of the world, all over the planet, was up in arms. And, yes, the Palestinians were there too, at the battle of Karameh, the one pivotal event in their modern history that gave rise to their movement.
Today, that movement, if movement it is, has been reduced to bickering over who is going to replace the laid-off chief of preventive security; its leader is effectively unemployed; and the people whom it had set out to lead sit under a tree waiting for Godot. That’s how swift and devastating the fall has been!
Are young Palestinians asking today as we had done at one time: “And what the blazes has gone wrong?” Will they learn from our mistakes so that the failures of the last eight-a-half decades will not be repeated?
Don’t ask me. I am culpable like everyone else who was out there in 1968. I am implicated in the breakdown, and I have long since, out of a sense of contrition, if nothing else, stepped aside. Will others from that era have the grace to do the same, so that a new generation, not just another generation, of Palestinians, will come forward to try again? ([email protected])
