- Introduction:
To speak of liberating Palestine entirely is a dream that haunts some of those asleep in the corridors of the Arab narratives. History is not a novel, nor is it a story at whose end good triumphs and the villain dies and joy and peace prevail (necessarily) because good is good, or because the cause we champion has a legitimate source. History is not made by miracles and rights; rather, it is formed through events that have their context and their causes, and it crystallizes through accumulated human actions shaped by interests, passions, ignorance, knowledge, ethics, and the many-sided forces — cultural, military, economic, and political — and by the ruling political systems and their orientations; and even the failure to read it constitutes it.
- Good does not triumph merely because it is good:
As for the logic that says good and the wronged will triumph because they are good in themselves, or because the bearer of a right is triumphant for his right, this is a logic that does not hold in the context of human history but only in the world of the Kingdom. Gustave Le Bon says: “It is not by truths alone that people live and the movement of history proceeds.” It is not the arguments and the right of the wronged that determine the movement of history; the arguments and the right of the wronged determine the context of judgment, not history. Charles Malik says: “History is determined by decisive actions, not by legal arguments”; it is determined by the truthfulness of its instruments, its strength, the source of its support, and its goals, and by fidelity to the cause.
- Its liberation was possible:
The liberation of Palestine was entirely possible in previous historical moments, when our destiny was in our own hands, and our ancestors did not take advantage of them and failed, intentionally or unintentionally, to read the future, and consequently failed to take advantage of their present, which crystallized our present as it is now. Charles Malik says: “The Zionists grasped what escaped the attention of the Arab world: that history is determined by decisive actions, not by legal arguments, and that the establishment of their state or its disappearance depends on their strength to accomplish the fait accompli, not on their ability to engage in legal quibbles, and that the broadcasting media and political negotiations are of absolutely no value in determining the shape of history unless they rest on a decisive force that carries out its will, and that the political balance and the global struggle are, in the end, a balance of real forces, not a struggle of arguments”[1].
- Israel today:
Israel today is a sovereign state in the East with law, recognized by 165 states, and a permanent member of the United Nations; there is no longer any room for its removal or for turning history back to 1947. Charles Malik says, one year after the declaration of the State of Israel: “The Arab world cannot now throw the Jews into the sea”[2]. If this was the situation in 1949, how much more so today? Especially since Israel is not a classical colonial state.
It is good for a person to compare accordingly: the possibility of removing a state like the Islamic Caliphate state (ISIS) was possible, easy, and achievable, because although ISIS declared itself a state, no one recognized it, it was not sovereign, and it did not bear the qualifications for recognition as a state, and it arose on the lands of sovereign states (Syria and Iraq). Whereas Palestine itself has not been recognized until today as a state.
- The cause as an instrument:
As for the opportunities to liberate Palestine and build a Palestinian state on the entire land, the Arabs squandered them completely. Today, liberating all of it is not possible; rather, it makes the existence of the slogan-bearer and his interests a possible existence. The criterion of the sincerity of an armed or unarmed resistance movement that fights the occupation is not that it fights it, but the sincerity of its goals that suit the cause.
As for liberating it and praying in Jerusalem: empty slogans, or a new failure to read the present. There are those who want to ride the Palestinian cause and its people to achieve private political interests, and to use it for the struggle between the axes and to consolidate the legitimacy of existing regimes and entities, because the Palestinian cause has often been turned into an instrument for bargaining with the West led by the United States. Azmi Bishara says: “Everyone knew that what was called the leadership of the axis of resistance at the time, represented in the Arab world by the Syrian regime, was officially engaged in rounds of peace negotiations with Israel, the last of which were taking place in those days via Istanbul, and the Palestinian cause was not on the negotiating agenda, but rather the withdrawal from the Golan”[3]. Today it is used as an instrument for bargaining with Israel itself (see Professor Najib George Awad’s article: Toward a reading of the tragedy of Gaza with a cool mind).
- The criterion of the sincerity of any resistance:
Fighting the occupation is not enough for a movement to become a legitimate resistance movement; this struggle may be for the sake of private interests. The criterion of its sincerity and legitimacy is the sincerity of its goals and the legitimacy of the goals it pursues, which accord with the goals of the wronged themselves, and also the instruments through which it works. Nietzsche says: “When you fight with the same weapons as your enemy, you become like him.” The absence of the goals of the Palestinian cause (which are: the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, the demand for the civil and international rights of the Palestinian people, and its right to life and to determine its own destiny) from the discourse of the armed resistance movements means precisely that the interests for which the struggle is waged are completely different from the interests of the Palestinian people, and that the struggle is not for the sake of its cause. For since the beginning of the struggle, the demand for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders and for the civil and international rights of the Palestinian people, its right to life and to determine its own destiny, has been absent from all the political discourse of the resistance movements — from Hezbollah and Hamas and the rest of the axis — because the whole cause is nothing but an instrument.
Those who declare resistance to liberate Jerusalem are nothing but bearers of slogans, benefiting from its being the last liberation cause still open, and toying with the emotions of the Arab peoples who yearn for dignity and have not attained it; rather, they have been subjected to many violations through setbacks, catastrophes, defeats, and routs. What happened on October 7 has actually proven that liberating all of it is not possible. Whoever awaits a comprehensive war, believing that its liberation will be accomplished and the Jews will be thrown into the sea and the Arabs will enter from every direction to pray in Jerusalem, is a writer imagining that history proceeds according to a scenario he writes. Most of what will happen is destruction and thousands of victims of children and women, and the war will end “with the two sides, Israeli and Iranian, sitting at the table to build understandings and divisions of roles and responsibilities,”[4] upon the blood of our peoples.
- Conclusion
All this talk does not mean that we should take a position of positive or negative neutrality toward everything happening, because the Palestinian cause is an Arab cause that touches our identity as Christians and Muslims, and it touches us as a human cause — the liberation of a wronged people — and it touches us at the core of our Christian message as a theological cause for us as Christians: the liberation of the wronged from the forms of sin and evil. Otherwise we would have betrayed the values of Christ and declared our failure to embody the mystery of salvation. Nor does it mean that we accept the existence of Israel as it wishes and submit to it; rather, it means that we do not accept the non-existence of a Palestinian state for a Palestinian people on its lands. And because we, as peoples, are like the Palestinian people who woke up and found themselves facing bombs and rockets on October 7, let us ask, at least morally and intellectually, if only in our depths: where is the cause of the Palestinian people in this struggle? After it has paid, since October 7, 39,550 martyrs and more than 90,000 wounded, apart from destruction, hunger, and disease — a price that will be paid from the blood of our peoples in Syria and Lebanon if the struggle rolls into a devastating regional war. And why do the goals and the interest of this people disappear from your discourses? We must ask and question: what are the goals of this struggle if the demands and rights of a people dying in the name of its cause are absent?
References:
[1] Charles Malik, Israel, America, and the Arabs (Predictions from Half a Century), “Report on the Current Situation, 5 August 1949”, introduction by Ghassan Tueni, third edition, Dar An-Nahar, Beirut, March 2003, p. 13.
[2] Charles Malik, the same reference, p. 20.
[3] Azmi Bishara, The Future of the Palestinian Cause and Its Fates in Light of the Current Situation, the Fifth Conference for Historical Studies: Seventy Years since the Nakba of Palestine, Memory and History, 12-14 May 2018, Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, pp. 6-7. Link: https://2u.pw/UAZ61BzU
[4] George Najib Awad, article “Toward a Reading of the Tragedy of Gaza with a Cool Mind”, Al-Nas News website, 1 November 2023, link: https://2u.pw/Cu0Udiio