Alexis de Tocqueville in his commentary on the French Revolution wrote, “Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds.”
The French political thinker was evoking an image of the men and women — the sans culottes, as they were then called — who stormed the Bastille on the morning of July 14, 1789, acting as if they were of one mind, one body, living one moment that spoke to them, about them, from them, one and all.
As we contemplate the makings of what appears to be a third Palestinian Intifada, it may be worthwhile to ask this: When does an occupied or colonized people, subjugated to a seemingly endless rule of the gun by foreign masters, begin to feel, in a moment of mystical simultaneity, that it is time to “shake off” the oppressor, time for their brutalized society to shed its worn skin of lassitude — even if the effort comes at the cost of personal ruin?
It is difficult to understand that perverse longing, that itch for sacrifice, unless you experience the collective consciousness of an occupied people inhabiting an occupied homeland, one where you are stripped by the occupier not just of every belonging but of every sheltering dignity. You inhabit a community made inert by the repressive authority of such an occupier and the odds are that you will reach a point, like everyone else around you, where it becomes clear that if you cannot choose how to live, then you will choose how to die.
You pick up a heavy stone, a kitchen knife, a meat cleaver and a molotov cocktail. And for a moment — for just one ecstatic moment — you feel free. Free, as you do what you’ve got to do. “Free,” as Martin Luther King hollered at America in his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, “free at last.” And you die a martyr. In our culture, however, when a man dies, his life ends, but when a martyr dies, his life begins.
Today, the Palestinians, sadly, stand alone. Israel’s occupation, which, as none other than Israel’s leading journalist, Ze'eve Schiff, described it, is one of “sheer despotism, selfishness and greed,” does not appear to be coming to an end any time real soon. The Palestinian leadership has effectively made itself irrelevant. The Arab world has other priorities at this time. And the only thing that would separate the US from its “special relationship” with Israel (read: we are for Israel right or wrong) is a crowbar.
All of which leaves much scope for the people of Palestine to save or doom themselves by their own actions.
Given the asymmetry in power between Israelis and Palestinians, one would imagine, at first blush, that the latter have little chance of ending their struggle on a note of grace — statehood, independence and freedom. But the imperatives of history say otherwise, for as oppressors oppress, they degrade and weaken themselves, whereas the oppressed become ennobled and empowered.
Consider in this regard the improbable odds that one would have given the “subjugated people” of the Indian subcontinent to triumph over the might of the British Empire (remember that entity?); the peasant people of Vietnam to defeat the technological behemoth of the United States; and the crushed people of South Africa to finally relegate the unspeakable excesses of apartheid to the history books. The object of oppression is subjugation, whereas the object of rebellion is freedom — and the teleological spirit of history favors the latter.
Veronica Roth, author of the “Divergent” trilogy, and an astute novelist from New York young enough to be a columnist’s daughter, once wrote this: “Do remember, though, that sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like.”
Unless Zionism joins the modern world, it will simply be another failed experiment in settler-colonialism, based on a yellowed-out birth certificate from antiquity, an ideology whose ultimate repudiation by the modern world is preordained — a laughable ideology that raises the issue, for the rest of us, about how many countries would have to be shuffled or reshuffled if a claim as old as the Jews have in Palestine is to be redeemed.
The long and short of it is this: Will Israel end the occupation or will the occupation end Israel? Will Israel dismantle its colonies — and go back to its internationally recognized borders of 1947 — or will the colonies dismantle Israel? And finally, will Israel be able to summon from within those forces that could save it from itself, save it from the calamitous reality it has created in our ancient homeland? Doesn’t look like it.
Meanwhile, it would be edifying to recall what Muhammed Halabi — the 19-year-old who stabbed to death a soldier and a rabbi in Occupied Jerusalem last week before himself being shot and killed — had to say on his Facebook page days before he became a martyr. “Rage, rage, rage,” he wrote, unwittingly evoking Dylan Thomas’s lyrics. “Wake up from your long sleep. Let the revolution burn.”
The revolution will do just that. And it will inevitably and predictably triumph.
