PALESTINE AND HOPE

Raja Shehadeh

THE MIDDLE EAST of my youth was a very different place from what it is now. In a small instance of an issue that looms large in the cultural politics of today, I don’t remember hearing a discussion about whether women should wear the hijab. Whether or not a woman chose to wear a headscarf was a personal choice, not done to impress or even necessarily to indicate religious affiliation. Many older Christian women wore a scarf just like their Muslim counterparts, while middle-class urban Muslim girls, like their Christian friends, snuck lipstick and tried to wear their skirts as short as possible – a practice I would have encouraged had I not been such a shy teenager. We, Christians and Muslims, observed each other’s holy days. These were occasions of celebration and neighbourly competition – but mostly over the most tasty food on offer. Of course there was prejudice – I grew up in a small town, after all – but our jokes about people from Hebron, the fecklessness of the Lebanese or the family down the street that consistently produced drunkards were relatively harmless.

However, it was not as though these times were not difficult and even dark. Growing up in the shadow of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 – I was born in 1951, after my parents had fled Jaffa for the West Bank town of Ramallah – I spent the first sixteen years of my life under Jordanian rule. Palestinians had no political freedom and freedom of speech was scant indeed. My outspoken father spent some months in a Jordanian desert prison called El Jafer. It was a harsh experience for him, but nothing like what was to come. The same prison was used after 9/11 for extraordinary rendition, the CIA-sponsored secret detention and interrogation, often accompanied by torture, of ‘extrajudicial’ suspects.

When my family travelled overland to Lebanon through Jordan and Syria, as we did every summer in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we had to cross a number of borders and were given a difficult time. The army ruled in Syria and the security services justified their severity by the need to be strong and vigilant in face of the Israeli enemy looming at the border. My parents had friends whose children had disappeared in Syrian jails after being tortured. We were stopped for hours at the borders and held our breath, knowing that we were going through a country with a repressive regime and had to be careful what we said and how we behaved. All this excessive concentration on the military and security was supposed to be for our own good as Palestinians, for the Arab countries were preparing for the coming war against Israel and the eventual liberation of our usurped land, Palestine, and the return of the refugees. Writing of his country, Egypt, in this volume, Khaled Fahmy observes that ‘not only has the century-long Arab–Israeli conflict sapped our energy and diverted precious resources, but our despots have also used it cynically to postpone indefinitely democratic reforms’.

When, after a long and trying eight hours crammed in a hot car, we finally arrived in Beirut the atmosphere seemed different. There was a measure of freedom of expression, as well as a greater variety of religious faiths and affiliations that seemed to coexist side by side, including a small Jewish community whose members operated a number of celebrated shops on the famous Hamra Street.

In Palestine and the several Arab countries I experienced, there seemed to be an acceptance that religious practice and observance was a personal choice. There was generally tolerance and acceptance of the different faiths. Yes, there were fanatics, zealots and just pure crazies – Palestine has had its share of all these throughout history. But for the rest of us, political hardships could not be blamed on religion.

In 1967 the long-awaited war with Israel took place: the ensuing disaster changed everything. In the words of Israeli general and Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan, Israel now became an empire. Israel was on the march, colonising more of the occupied Palestinian territories through building Jewish settlements and doing all that was possible to encourage the Palestinians to leave. And yet if the Arab armies had proved highly ineffective in liberating Palestine, their failure did not sever the emotional link between the rest of the Arabs and those suffering under Israeli rule.

Not only did the Arab world follow the travails of the Palestinians with a profound sense of frustration; it watched in bewilderment the successes of the Israelis, including their effective use of the media to impress on the world Israel’s own mythical and exclusive version of the history of our country. No less disturbing to the ordinary Palestinians and Arabs was the biased, indeed unfettered, support of the United States and Western Europe for Israel, whatever violations of international law it was committing.

After the 1967 defeat, many Palestinians joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation in its political and military struggle against Israel. The less political, like myself, thought that the struggle for human rights and international law could also open new avenues for justice for Palestine. Both these paths had resonance in the rest of the Arab world: the absence of the rule of law and democracy in many Arab countries had to be addressed. As contributors to this volume have observed, the Arab states, in their colonial origins and their development, have been marked by a lack of legitimacy and a failure to be representative of, or accountable to, their people.

It took many years before the struggle that the unarmed Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza waged against the Israeli army, the strongest in the Middle East, served as an inspiration to the Arab masses, first in Tunisia and then in Egypt. The Arab Spring that began in January 2011 was a time of hope that democracy might be finally sweeping the region. I was transfixed by the power of ordinary people to make change. Several essays in this book described how the revolutions that occurred in the Middle East region released the creativity among the populations of these places that had long been in abeyance. Malu Halasa described how the people of Syria used the internet, cartoons, drama and video to give voice to the Syrian popular opposition, and she also notes the links that emerged between the Syrian poster artists and those of Egypt. There too street art, which had long been prohibited, flourished. If anything this confirms how indomitable is the human spirit. For decades the people of Syria and Egypt have endured oppressive regimes that stifled all forms of creative expression and yet their spirit and aspiration for freedom could not be extinguished. It also indicates how quickly change can happen.

Four years later, looking around me, listening to the news and travelling through the region, I constantly realise how much it has changed almost beyond recognition. Despair is now the dominant sentiment and optimism is in short supply. Like others, I sometimes feel paralysed by the horrors ordinary people have had to endure now in Syria, Iraq and Egypt.

From the perspective of occupied Palestine, where I live, the shared taxi ride from Ramallah to Jerusalem tells a larger story of our journey through all these difficult decades to our crisis-ridden present. Part of the story is obvious: the increased physical obstacles and denials of freedom of movement that have made this short journey of ten miles a Palestinian nightmare. But the ride also evokes the political and psychological climate. As a teenager, I always enjoyed riding in a shared taxi, the servees, or the bus, on the journey to Jerusalem. Everyone spoke to everyone else. It is true we all kept away from politics, but there were jokes told, stories shared and loud happy music played. How different it was then, and not simply in the absence of checkpoints and an annexation wall, but also arriving to see Jerusalem’s pastoral beauty, now vanquished by the highways and bridges criss-crossing it, connecting the Jewish settlements to the east with the western Jewish part of the city while largely erasing the Arab part of the city. Later, during the 1980s and particularly during the first Palestinian intifada, the servees served as our Facebook, exchanging news of coming demonstrations and past arrests and tales of our young ‘generation of stones’. During the hard times of the second intifada, passengers and driver simply tried to get to their destination, discussing whether a route through an olive grove or a stone quarry would serve. Today, the passengers are mostly silent in the long wait at checkpoints. What is there to say? Sometimes a taxi driver pontificates with a sigh, ‘Our struggle with the Jews is eternal, so says the Holy Qur’an.’ The small talk that was common and the joyful music that was played have turned to total silence, with everyone lost in their own dim thoughts or concentrating on listening to the Qur’anic readings and recitations coming from the radio. I would attribute this less to an embrace of piety than a loss of hope. So, is there hope for Palestine and the Middle East?

I still believe that there is, but only if the core problem, the Palestinian problem, is resolved on grounds that allow equality between Israelis and Palestinians and for the Palestinians to enjoy their own state. Only then could the deadly fuse that was ignited more than a hundred years ago and which has been slowly burning further and further afield, setting off many bombs along its route over the large region of the Middle East, be extinguished. Only then could calm return and with it hope for a better future. But in our crisis-ridden times, it is also clear to me that the foundations of a solution to the question of Palestine – equality and an end to exclusivity – must also underlie a new vision of our whole region.

The possibility would then arise for movement between, and cooperation among, the countries of the region. The Middle East is not meant to be fragmented. As the essays in this book have shown, this was the doing of the colonial powers after the First World War. The different parts of the region complement each other and would derive huge benefits in every sphere from the interaction between them. In some there is capital, in others labour. Here entrepreneurial spirit, there a wealth of business experience. Here empty land, there congestion. Here an excess of educated people, there a need for teachers and professionals. Here excess wealth and run-away consumption; there enormous needs for investment in people and infrastructure. From the interaction would arise many benefits from a rich cultural and religious mix, bringing a new cosmopolitanism rooted in our history. The region would go back to acting as the bridge between East and West as it has done for many centuries in the past.

None of this can happen as long as the borders remain closed, as long as the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is not resolved and the security of Israel is used as an excuse to continue Western military interventions and restrictions on the people of the region. But this is not all. Much also depends on how the other issues that are troubling the region are understood.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seems to thrive on the frustration of people facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their fight for greater rights and freedom within their own states and the failure of the Palestinians to win the liberation of their land occupied by Israel over four decades earlier through the reliance on peaceful resistance and invocation of the rule of law. The cause of law, whether municipal or international, as a vehicle for peaceful change and transformation was also not furthered by the wide definition US law gave to terrorism that rendered legitimate resistance to occupation and oppression as illegal.

ISIL seems to have learned dangerous and brutal lessons from the repeated failure of Arab states and armies in their fight against Israel and the Western powers: how to manipulate the media perhaps from Israel’s noted success, how to be cured of illusions about the democracy of the West from the actions of the West itself. Discredited rhetoric about the rule of law and democracy – and the absence of both in the Arab regimes the West has supported – both undermines the states ISIL challenges and leaves people without these powerful tools to fight their own battles against ISIL barbarism. These lessons and legacies are proving chillingly effective in ISIL’s control of the Syrian and Iraqi territories it has conquered.

Speaking to the BFM TV in the wake of the January 2015 attacks in France that killed seventeen people, the former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who led the opposition to the Iraq War, described the Islamic State as the ‘deformed child’ of Western policy. He wrote in Le Monde that the West’s wars in the Muslim world ‘nourish terrorism among us with promises of eradicating it’. His analysis was right, as was his warning against simplifying these conflicts in the Middle East by ‘seeing only the Islamist symptom’. It is hoped that this book will have made it possible for readers to better understand the issues at stake in the Middle East and to think beyond simplistic paradigms and sound bites.

As the authors of the essays here have ably demonstrated, writers have an important role to play in bringing about change, not only by analysing what is taking place but also by imagining how things could be different. In this way writers can ultimately tilt the balance and encourage the victory of those with positive creative energy over those who espouse the negative energy of terror and violence. These essays have demonstrated that the energy of creation is still alive, whether in Egypt, Syria or Iraq, even in the darkest of times and the seemingly most desperate of places.