If Zionism were still based in Europe — and right now that doesn’t seem such a bad idea — its call for a Jewish state in Palestine, a land always inhabited by another people, would have been seen as an absurdity, and as a crackpot notion by the overwhelming majority of Jews — as indeed it was when Theodore Herzl broached it in 1896 in his book “Judenstaat.”
Because of the confluence of several tricks of fate — European sympathy for Jews in the wake of World War II, massive American support, and weak Arab states that had just barely emerged from generations of stultifying colonial rule — Zionists were able to transform themselves from mendicants with begging bowls, in the 1930s, to conquerors with Apache helicopters ruling over the destiny, land and resources of the whole of Palestine and its native people in our time.
Today, this rule extends even to the threat of expulsion, or assassination, of these people’s chosen leaders. The latest such threat? The expulsion of Yasser Arafat from his homeland, formalized by the Israeli Cabinet last Thursday.
Much of the world, in its own fashion, denounced the decision. Washington saw it as “counterproductive,” the UN’s Security Council as “unwise,” the European Union as a “terrible mistake,” and the Arab League as a “declaration of war on the political process.”
All well and good. But how do Arabs — real, ordinary Arabs — see this latest outrage? They’re hopping mad at the brazenness of the whole exercise. That is, they’re saying, in effect, who are these illegal immigrants in Palestine, who hail from Russia, Poland, Morocco, Brooklyn and elsewhere, to tell Palestinians, at this late date in postcolonial times, what leaders they should have in, and what leaders will be expelled from, their homeland.
Zionists, after all these years, still don’t get it, do they? They don’t realize, for example, that their enemy is not Yasser Arafat — a man who, entre nous, a lot of us don’t hold a brief for — but the Palestinian people themselves. They can keep him or expel him, talk to him or render him “irrelevant,” bomb his compound or shake his hand on the White House Lawn, but in the end it is the Palestinians whom Israel must answer to. These proud people will not allow themselves to be humiliated by a 300-pound gorilla like Ariel Sharon, effectively telling them: “We’re going to expel your leaders because we don’t like them. So there, have a nice day.”
Yet Israel has tried to do that, and much more, over and over again, since 1967, resorting to every conceivable measure of repression to subdue Palestinians — name an instrument of repression at the hands of a brutal occupier, they’ve used it — and still failed to have its way. So what gives with the Zionist entity in Palestine?
Israelis, I say, don’t get it. The question of whether or not they expel Yasser Arafat is, beg pardon, “irrelevant.” What is relevant is that, led by hard-core, old-guard expansionists still living in colonial times, Israelis, alas, appear today to be in the ring committed to fighting Palestinians till the bitter end. One people stays, one goes. One has his day, the other his eclipse. The outcome of that fight, however — a fight between a native people backed by the entire Arab world, the Islamic world, the non-aligned world, and much of the European world, and an Israel ensconced in the heartland of the Middle East, all by itself, whose only backer is a big power with shifting strategic interests — is pre-ordained: Israel will end up kissing canvas. Knocked down and out by historical imperatives, if not by Palestinians themselves.
Meanwhile, if Yasser Arafat is indeed expelled or murdered, it is likely that the resistance in the occupied territories will show Israel a bit of Palestinian steel.
Yes, we’re hopping mad. If you got nothing, you got nothing to lose, that is, if you must die by the sword, you will live by the sword. So there, Sharon, have a nice day.
- Arab News Opinion 18 September 2003
