Many people, especially in our Arab region, live by the illusion of “the inevitability of the oppressed one’s victory”, convinced by a strange emotional and religious discourse that promoted the idea that the oppressor is inevitably defeated and the oppressed will prevail without fail. This intellectual anesthesia made the holders of right lean on the justice of their moral cause and on circumstances as a substitute for planning and organized institutional work. But history and life deliver to us, in every event, a slap stronger than the one before, and leave us to swallow the bitter cup in silence, and prove that the oppressed will not recover his right merely because he is oppressed or possesses the right. Abstract right possesses no self-sufficient power to save itself; rather, right is rescued. Indeed, organized and intelligent work crushes scattered and disorganized right.” History is decided by decisive deeds, not by legal arguments” (Charles Malik, the book America, Israel and the Arabs, p. 13).
If we take the Palestinian cause as a model of the greatest cause of major injustice still open without redress — a cause of a people that possesses a land subjected to settler-colonial occupation and then subjected directly to a replacement occupation, and to this day this people has not had its state recognized, nor its right to its land acknowledged, and every year the geographical area of Palestine upon which this people lives shrinks in favor of the area of the state of Israel. But the conflict was not a conflict over who possessed the land first; rather, it was a matter of who possessed the tools of the age. And although this project was supported by a great power, it was not an inevitable project — that is, it was not an accomplished cosmic destiny or a predetermined result, but rather a conditional inevitability as Charles Malik warned early on” the Jewish era will certainly come if the Arab world remains in its present backwardness and fragmentation” (same reference, p. 12).
From here we see the gravity of the many errors committed in defense of a just cause, while in contrast the oppressor succeeded in defending himself in all fields. The Zionist movement was able to create a cause for the Jews of the world, a common cause, namely the establishment of a state that gathers them; then they worked to obtain a promise from the great power to establish their state, and understood the modern institutional path through which they could defend the cause they created. Before 1948 they worked on building diplomatic and financial networks and organized institutions such as the Jewish Agency, which worked inside the American and British decision-making centers. Charles Malik said, as a witness: ” the weight of the Arabs in America is nothing compared to the Jews”, while the Palestinians, at that stage and at every stage, lacked a unified central leadership and modern institutions capable of confronting this international influence, and relied on Arab regimes suffering from external dependency and a struggle over power.
The Palestinian arena has faced sharp and continuous internal division and conflict, beginning with factional disputes and ending with the sharp geographical and political division among the local political leaderships, between the West Bank and the Strip. This division weakened the Palestinian position, made a unified reference absent, and provided the international parties with the pretext of the absence of a clear partner for peace. Israel excelled at exploiting the various opportunities by the means suited to it, making its survival and superiority a vital interest for the Western system, militarily, in intelligence and technologically. Meanwhile, the Palestinian condition was presented for long periods as a humanitarian burden and a source of security concern, so that the discussion shifted from the right of self-determination to a matter of crisis management and refugee relief.
Israel was able to build for itself a history and a modern democratic state system that becomes a peer and partner to the international community, addressing the Western and Eastern mind (the Soviet Union) in its language, style and concepts: democracy, progress, the right of self-defense in the face of a fiercely hostile environment, benefiting from improvised Arab speeches that promoted slogans of the style ” throwing the Jews into the sea”. In contrast, the Palestinian discourse suffered a great gap with the West, and ideological slogans dominated the Palestinian discourse, and Western memory became associated with the episodes of armed action, which Israeli propaganda exploited to link the cause to accusations of extremism instead of considering it a cause of national liberation and human rights.
They understood from the first moment that fixing the entity on the ground — the recognition of their state — is the essence of survival. Charles Malik also summarizes “the Zionists realized what was absent from the mind of the Arab world:… that the rise of their state or its disappearance depends on their power to accomplish the fait accompli, not on their ability at legal quibbles, and that the media means and political negotiations are all of no value whatsoever in deciding the shape of history unless they rest on a decisive force that executes its will, and that the political balance and the international conflict are in the end a balance of real forces, not a conflict of arguments” (same reference, p. 13).
The success of the Zionist movement in establishing the state of Israel, and the failure of the Palestinians and the Arabs, was not a criterion of the justice of one party and the nullity of another, but the product of one party’s ability to possess the tools of influence. The Zionist movement was able to use the effective and influential ways and tools in the world and address the world in the language it understands. “The Zionists proved to world public opinion that they are worthy of surviving as a people, and qualified to establish their state in the heart of the Arab world (same reference, p. 39). What is striking is that America did not support the Jews in establishing their state before it saw their ability to prove themselves and their capacity to realize their project, and they were able to realize their project, while the Arabs failed. In contrast, their cause turned from a just cause into a burden on the international community.
The justice of a cause is not a sufficient condition for its victory. Without a correct language and correct tools, strong institutions that protect the cause, and a cold strategy that reads reality correctly and not as one wishes it to be, right turns into an elegy, and the state of being oppressed turns into an eternal defeat.