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Palestinians Are Forever
By Andrew Hammond*
03/02/2001
In an opinion article entitled "Jerusalem Is In My Heart" which appeared in The New York Times, the Jewish Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel argued that Jews have more claim to the holy city of Jerusalem than Muslims. Among several arguments made to prove that the city is Jewish, Wiesel said that Jews have more rights in Jerusalem because the name of the city is mentioned 600 times in the Bible but, the column claimed, not a single time in the Qur'an. Islam Online contributor Andrew Hammond responds to Wiesel's article.
The opinion of Elie Wiesel is probably the most hurtful and alarming of all opinions expressed by Jews, Israeli or otherwise, about this most heart wrenching of conflicts.
It comes from a peacenik, a humanist, an intelligent and clearly sensitive man; one awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, no less. And yet, its intellectual basis, as is the case 99% of the time when dealing with pro-Israelis, is one of fundamental moral superiority accorded Israel - moral superiority in its actions, its motives, and its very presence in the land - not just Israel, but all of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - in the first place.
This, in turn, is a position that reduces Palestinians to a people moved by irrational passions; with a bent for a violent solution; less than capable of logical thinking; not deserving of rights; but, in light of their miserable conditions, perhaps in line for some of "our compassion." Cruel images of Israeli soldiers aiming their guns at youth stone-throwers - often aiming deliberately at their heads - is at worst an excess by a fundamentally benign Israel, in Wiesel's rendition of the white man's burden.
To put it bluntly, it is a biased view that says Israel has natural, no-questions-asked, self-accorded rights over all of historical Palestine; the Palestinians deserve a bit of the pie; well, because they happen to be there, and our Judaeo-Western values aren't above finding a humanitarian solution for the wretched of the earth. This is the mindset of a colonialist and a racial supremacist, but in the form of an intellectual.
Since the Jews are only one piece of the rich tapestry that makes up humanity, a neutral and fair approach can only start with United Nations resolutions.
Jerusalem was not a part of the Jewish state envisaged by the U.N. partition of 1947 because the Jews who had come to Palestine in the fifty preceding years had mainly settled in coastal areas most notably in Tel Aviv. Jewish refugees from the Second World War had also settled in those areas. The establishment of a Jewish state on this land was primarily seen as a place of safe refuge for a persecuted people.
Wiesel's opinion is indicative of that phenomenon which has swept Israeli and Jewish society since the 1967 war, and conflates the original raison d'etre of the state with a religious dream which posits all of historical Palestine as by rights Jewish, promised to them from the first of history by God.
It is an idea that resulted from the fact of having seized control of all of the land after 1967, and has led to a churlish desire to relinquish nothing. They want it all. The arguments result from this fact and not vice versa. Not surprisingly, then, their arguments don't make sense when we look at the realities.
It doesn't take long to see why East Jerusalem arouses Palestinian nationalist passions. As a geopolitical reality, there is no Arab Palestine without Jerusalem. It has been the living political, religious and cultural focus of life in Palestine since Arabic became its language over 1,000 years ago. And contrary to Wiesel's claim, Jerusalem is indeed mentioned in the Muslim holy book. Sura'tul Israa' refers to Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa - the Aqsa mosque after which the current Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, is named - from where Muslims believe that Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.
This Jerusalem has resided in the hearts of Jews without their political control over it for 2,000 years of continuous history. Only since 1967 has this not been the case. The old city which Wiesel laments losing was not built by Jews; it is the product of past and present Arab-Islamic Palestine. Any visitor to the old city can attest to its quintessential urban Arabness. Its alleyways, its architecture, its smells, its life is typical of Arab cities from Morocco to Iraq. There is nothing Jewish about it at all, except that it is the seat of a culture in which Judaism flourished in a spirit of tolerance that Europe never knew.
In fact, virtually none of the Eastern city, bar the Western wall and Jewish quarter, is Jewish. The western part is Jewish because the new state of Israel built it after 1948. There was nothing to oblige Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to publicly signal readiness in recent months to cede the Jewish areas in the old city - from a legal point of view, it was an act of largesse that one could argue was a political blunder.
Arafat's promise to accord the Jews religious rights and freedoms, I see no reason to doubt. If the Jordanians did not do the same from 1948 to 1967, I imagine Arafat would be the first to say that was wrong - though one can have some sympathy for their anxiety given the spectacular gains of the Zionist movement in the first half of the century.
Arafat has, in fact, been the champion of historical compromise with the state of Israel since the early 1970's, but he knew it would take years to take the body of Palestinian public opinion down that road. As it was, Oslo in 1993 was controversial enough for Palestinians.
Why? Because this is not, and neither should it be, merely a matter of negotiating a form of independence for a subjugated people. Those, like Wiesel, who think this way display both blindness and arrogance - which would be beyond belief were it not for the example of the way all colonizers have dealt with subjugated people.
I prefer to see it the other way round: why should a people who constitute roughly 50% of those now living on the land of historical Palestine (3 million Palestinians in the occupied territories and 1million inside the state of Israel), with some 4 million more displaced and now residing in surrounding lands, accept the Israeli logic that it is Israel's prerogative to dispense or withhold their independence? I have to nip myself to remember that it hasn't been this way since the beginning of time. Until Theodor Herzl invented this logic in Vienna a hundred years ago, most Israelis didn't see it that way until 1967.
In fact, the logic behind the refusal to consider the right of return is in itself enlightening. Israelis argue that this would destroy the Jewish character of their state (i.e., the state could not exist without dispossession). This is not news. Israeli historians themselves (e.g., Benny Morris) have demonstrated how founding figures like Ben Gurion were well aware of this.
Ben Gurion had the British authorities to lean on. Britain's Peel Commission made its conclusion before the outbreak of the Second World War that for a Jewish state to be viable, some 250,000 Palestinians in coastal cities would need to be "transferred." The truth is that Ben Gurion was an ethnic cleanser. It shocks us today, but why should we be surprised? "Transfer" was the Europeans' preferred solution to many problems during that historical period (for example, the Greek and Turkish population swaps that accompanied the emergence of the two modern states from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire). The state of Israel is one of the last examples of that logic - unacceptable today - in action.
More than Wiesel's Palestinian hate, I sense Jewish disappointment. Disappointment that the subjected Palestinian people will not accept their claims to superiority, to superior rights, to their supremacy as bearers of Western civilization (although they themselves are a people who fled from its evils). Disappointment that they will not accept as their destiny unknowable suffering.
Perhaps it was the misfortune of the Jewish settlers of Palestine that they did not bring with them deadly contagious diseases to decimate the native population and leave them a small subservient population, as happened to the American Indians before European colonizers. Perhaps it was a misfortune for Israel's internal logic that hundreds of thousands more of the indigenous people did not flee over the Jordan River in 1967. Perhaps it was a misfortune that that the promised land was not without a people.
But they are there and they cannot possibly be expected to acquiesce in Jerusalem's unity under Israeli sovereignty, the right to maintain settlements under Israeli sovereignty amidst Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and Israel's refusal to recognize that it necessarily came into existence through their dispossession.
*Editor's note: Andrew Hammond is a Cairo-based reporter who writes on Middle Eastern political and cultural affairs.
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