File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2002/postcolonial.0204, message 216


Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 04:43:01 -0700 (PDT)
From: Marwan Dalal <dmarwan-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: An Essay by Mahmoud Darweesh


Al-Ahram Weekly
11 - 17 April 2002

http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/581/fr2.htm

A war for war's sake

What we are now seeing is the expression of the will
of a people that has no choice but to resist, writes
Mahmoud Darwish 
 
This is a war for war's sake, since it has no other
aim than its self-perpetuation. Everyone knows this;
and, once again, the sword will prove incapable of
crushing the spirit. The Arabs have offered Israel a
collective peace in return for Israeli withdrawal from
a fifth of our historical homeland. Israel's answer to
this generous offer was to declare all-out war against
the Palestinian people, and against the Arabs' very
imagination. 

Once again, we will prove that we occupy the moral
high ground -- nothing remaining to us now but this
proof. Those who control the international balance of
power will continue to shape events without respect
for intellectual or legal argument until we awake to
the realisation that, just as they have proved
themselves incapable of ensuring deterrence -- though
there is no option other than peace -- they have also
shown themselves incapable of ensuring peace. 

In every corner crimes are being committed. On every
street lie the bodies of the murdered. On every wall
is blood. The living are deprived of the basic right
to life, and the martyrs are denied graves in which to
rest in peace. Above all, however, what we are now
seeing is the expression of the will of a people that
has no choice but to resist. Between one beat of a
wounded heart and the next we ask: how long will we
carry on cheering as Christ ascends to Golgotha? 

Is the Palestinian side all that is left of the famous
"Arab-Israeli struggle"? Does this account for such
neutral incapacity before so lurid a black and red
scene? How we fear now that Yasser Arafat's cries will
be pinned forever to a wooden cross: present events
contain enough of the aesthetics of martyrdom to make
a whole nation's mourning superfluous on an endless
Good Friday. Tears purify the soul, cleansing the body
even as they sting with salt, and tearful spectators
now await live coverage of the moment when the tragic
hero is crowned with an appropriate end, making the
tightly wrought elements of the story into myth, the
hero ending, as Arafat has put it, "a martyr, a
martyr, a martyr." 

But no. The Palestinians do not need such feelings of
solitude or uniqueness. They do not need to play the
part of sacrificial offerings any more than they
already have done. Palestinians want to live outside
of metaphors, in the place where they were born. They
want to liberate their country from the heavy weight
of mythology, from the barbarity of occupation and
from the mirage of a peace that promises nothing but
destruction. 

Yet, Israeli forces, armed to the teeth with racist
superstitions and military hardware, are besieging the
Palestinians' right to live ordinary lives, albeit
lives lived on a margin narrower than dreams, and
wider than nightmares. This right is also under siege
from a world under American control, a world set on
the horns of a raging bull that has abolished the
conjunction, the "and," that used to fall between
America and Israel. The Palestinians are besieged by a
condition of dependency that has robbed the Arab
political establishment of the eloquence even to beg,
and of the ability to placate a populace that is angry
at everything. 

How many times must the Palestinians be besieged
before the Arab world realises that it, too, is under
siege? How many times before it realises that it too
is a hostage, even though it does not resist?
Television has made it unnecessary for us to explain
ourselves: now our blood is shed in every home and is
on every conscience. From this day on, he who does not
become Palestinian in his heart will never understand
his true moral identity. This is not only because the
unfashionable values that lay hidden beneath daily
talk of a "peace process" empty of justice and freedom
have now been brought back to life. It is also because
the will has now been liberated from the simplistic
calculation of profit and loss and from a debilitating
intellectual pessimism. This has liberated the only
real meaning human existence has: freedom. 

The Palestinians have no other choice. In the face of
the political genocide being offered by the American-
funded Israeli occupation of their land, they offer
their steadfast resistance no matter what the cost.
Backs against the wall, their eyes fixed upon hope,
they show a strength of spirit for which there can be
no facile explanation. 

Israel's all-out war on the Palestinians has flung the
doors wide open to every kind of question. The most
important of these is the question of future
Arab-Israeli and Arab-American relations. Israel has
been quick to declare that this war is a "struggle for
Israel's existence" and that the war to found the
Israeli state has not been finished yet. This can only
mean that the elimination of the Palestinian national
movement remains on Israel's agenda despite the peace
process, and that the Palestinians' existence, not the
Israelis', is threatened with destruction. 

Israel has invited us to take the struggle back to its
very beginning and, ironically, to review all the
stages through which we have passed, during which our
concept of struggle changed. Israel has declared war
on the very idea of peace. What is it that threatens
"Israel's existence," this existence it defends with
such aggression? Is it the war the Arabs have not
declared on Israel? Or is it the peace the Arabs are
offering? 

The lie that is Israel's current war is necessary for
Israeli society, so that it can cohere around its
founding myths. If occupation is the condition and
essence of Israeli existence, as seems to be the case,
then this is an issue not amenable to resolution. 

What concerns us is the defence of our national and
human existence -- even if our backs are up against
the wall. We have absolutely no other option. 




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