The other day I and a fellow editor spoke at the United Nations Correspondents Association about our Goldstone Report book. Diplomats were having press conferences about Libya elsewhere, so the event was thinly attended, a dozen or so people.
Most of the questions came from a Lebanese journalist in a gray suit who was sympathetic to Hezbollah. His comments grew in intensity, from stating that a conspiracy of western powers had bisected Palestine before WWI and that the occupation of Palestine began in 1948, to valorizing armed resistance, to, outside in the hall after, saying that Israel had no right to exist and that he is an extremist (in response to my profession of liberalism).
I found the exchange distressing… and also clarifying.
The Arab revolutions are all about popular representation. This is what Nasrallah has said. And it is what Obama said:
the change in the region will not and cannot be imposed by the United States or any foreign power; ultimately, it will be driven by the people of the Arab World. It is their right and their responsibility to determine their own destiny.
For decades we have suppressed the popular will in the Arab world. Zionism and the Israel lobby played a large role in this suppression. In 1945 Roosevelt promised the King of Saudi Arabia that the Arab peoples would be consulted before the western powers determined the future of Palestine; and Truman went back on that promise by voting for Partition and recognizing the state of Israel. A State Department aide said prophetically: This state can only be established by force and preserved by force. Prophetic because: Six decades and six wars on, we are being told to get ready for an attack on Iran. Bobby Kennedy… Sabra and Shatilla… Cast Lead… the body count only mounts.
I was frightened by the man’s extremism, and yet later I thought, if someone had sought to establish a colony in my state, my friends and I would be up in the hills with guns. We would honor our martyrs and instruct our children in the nationalist cause, just as James Joyce was instructed in Irish nationalism… We would say that extremism in the pursuit of liberty is a virtue…
Looking at the Palestinian experience, I would have to say that these people have shown remarkable restraint. Twenty years ago, out of weariness or hospitality or grace, they said they would accept 1/5th of the historical land. Today even that fragment is begrudged them, and still they pursue nonviolent methods of resistance.
American have no idea about all this. Our media have failed us. We think the Egyptian revolutionaries are great and the Libyan rebels are valiant– well these people are no different from the Palestinians who seek their dignity and freedom and franchise and who are persecuted endlessly, with American imprimatur.
Our political discourse is blinded to the Palestinian experience because the Jewish European narrative of Europe has (through the application of political force) foreclosed the possibility of learning about the Palestinian one. Look at Seham, one of the best writers on this site, a young highly-educated American who believes in nonviolence; she cannot even use her full name because of her reasonable fears of the consequences of doing so.
Our racist refusal to recognize the noble and historic pursuit of freedom by Palestinians is very American. It recalls our defense of slavery for generations, and later our acceptance of Jim Crow. And I tell you, some day it will come to an end.
But meantime the denial of the Palestinian reality in America, and our false picture of Israel, even as the Arab tyrannies fall– we have created a tragic situation, we are arming extremists.
