Palestine: To be or not to be

“Courage is a heavy gift to carry, Francisca Albanese UN Special Repertoire says, “but not as heavy as 13,000 small coffins weighing on our conscience”. Do the colonizers with settler-colonial project in mind have any conscience? However, for the colonized the question poses itself differently. When “to be or not to be” is the choice, “It is nobler,” says Shakespeare, “not to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” but “to take arms against a sea of troubles” by mustering all the strength and courage the colonized have.

Pushed to the wall the Palestinians fought back. Had it been possible, by now they would have been thrown into the sea to be drowned and perished. Unlike the Zionists, the Palestinians decided to die fighting gracefully on their land rather than accepting Haavara to flee or accepting “Bakshish”, the amount of charitable money that Roosevelt wrongly assumed and suggested to Weizman to offer them. After meeting with Abdul Aziz on Quincy, with his goats and concubines, Roosevelt developed an imaginary conception of Arabs. For the Western world, the Hashemites have helped to maintain the illusory stereotypical image of Arabs even today, which Palestinians have proven wrong.

Resistance is contagious. Once it starts at a certain place, it spreads like wildfire. An objective analyst who watched the armed struggle unfolding in Algeria, Vietnam, and lately in Palestine can see why Rosa Luxemburg was convinced that “The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process…They are rocks on which the final victory of the revolution will be built”.

Wherever resistance against oppression rears its head and solidifies by inflicting painful blows to the oppressor, through the frontal attack the bourgeois intellectual or Gramsci’s organic intellectuals engage themselves in condemning the violence and supporting a dialogue or negotiations to solve the unsolvable conflict. How can there be a negotiation between an oppressor who knows no other language but that of violence, and the oppressed tired of receiving lashes on its back? There cannot be any negotiations between a sword and a neck, Ghassan Kanafani succinctly replies.

The word negotiation always comes into play when the balance of force begins to tilt in favour of the oppressed. No word is neutral, and so is negotiation, which is normally offered by the hegemonic class from the position of weakness to delay the upsurge of an armed class struggle initiated and sometimes dominated by the subaltern/oppressed. When the hegemony through consent and coercion is falling apart, it gives a breathing space to the dominant power, hence a clever ploy for the latter.

History is witness to the fact that from the French Revolution to the Bolshevik one, and from the Algerian War to the Vietnam conflict or even Afghan humiliation to the ceasefire in Gaza, the outright defeat of the Imperial power paved the way for ending the conflict. The final negotiations were mere window dressing to provide the colonists a way to retreat to save their blushes.

Gaza is a historic example. Despite the genocide that continued for over fifteen months with the US and Europeans supplied bombs that left Hiroshima and Nagasaki far behind while taking the lives of more than 200,000 innocent civilians largely children it was the astounding resistance that forced the US-Israeli nexus to stop the genocide. Time and again, the Qatari initiative and negotiations failed to make a mark on the apartheid entity.

The alleged terror attacks carried out by a few psychotics Saudi-Muslims on 9/11, a highly dubious adventure which now appears to be a hoax was meant to invade seven dissident Arab states – alluded to by General Wesley Clark – especially Iraq on the behest of Israel as expressed by Mearsheimer in “The Israel Lobby and US foreign Policy” a book co-authored by him. The hype of Islamophobia, another creation of US Israel nexus gave the US a lever to realize its stagnant capital and to impose Israel on the entire Middle East as the only dominant power with the help of Saudi-Qatari-UAE money to counter the Road and Belt project launched by the People’s Republic.

Muslims, especially, the Palestinians, became terrorists and pariahs. Edward Said succinctly pointed out, “Say the word ‘terror’ and a man wearing a keffiyeh and mask and carrying a Kalashnikov immediately leaps before one’s eyes. To a degree, the image of a helpless, miserable-looking refugee has been replaced by this menacing one as the veritable icon of ‘Palestinian’.”

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.” Had he lived longer instead of committing suicide allegedly because of the CIA’s constant psychological torture inflicted on him, he must have attributed this sentence to the Palestinians who in Ghassan Kanafani’s words are walking in spite of themselves in their funerals. They did and are doing “the insoluble task, as Adorno states, to let neither the power of others nor their own powerlessness, stupefy them”.

The outcome of the Palestinian resistance will not only decide the fate of the Middle East but of all oppressed people of the global South and maybe of the North. It has already exposed the Orwellian nature of Western civilization. The entire Western civilization has become an archetype of conformity. Obey or lose your livelihood. McCarthyism is not new to the planet America, and so is its national Alzheimer. Despite the naked barbarism of the state, the younger generation of the US, especially the students of almost all universities, Jews or Palestinians alike are prepared to sacrifice their futures to smash the mythological shells of freedom and democracy that entitle the genocidal Zionists only.

The uprising hasn’t spared Europe. The crackdown on the pro-Palestinian groups for not surrendering to the power of the status quo continues. Their peaceful protests are labeled as violence against the law, which permits these peaceful protests. Violence, Herbert Marcuse says, is not applied to the actions of police, including the state institutions, but is strictly meant for the actions of the rebels. No matter how justified their actions are.

“The proposition that end justifies means is intolerable”, Marcuse says, “but so its negation”. For ends are contradictory and in collision with the interests of the established reality/ruling class which simultaneously controls the means and can juggle with them. Hence it judges the ends on its terms which are incommensurate with the interests of the majority. For instance, if people want to stop the Palestinians’ genocide and the means to the end lead to protests, strikes, and sit-ins, declaring a lawful right illegal the ruling class uses its means to coerce the dissidents into conformity which is against the end – stopping the genocide – demanded by the majority.

“Law and order”, he says, “have the ominous sound. The entire necessity and the entire horror of legitimate force are condensed, and sanctioned, in this phrase”. Such horror leads to violence hence violence cannot be condemned per se. Condemning it when the oppressed are prepared to break their fetters would mean supporting the status quo and the forces behind it.

The ruling classes of many countries are going through these upheavals. The frustrated people carrying the mutilated cadavers of their loved ones are following the path lit by the Palestinians. Believing that one cannot expect empathy from those who cause their tragedy, they have given up believing in their gimmickry.

The French revolutionary, Auguste Vaillant, said, “It takes an explosion to make the deaf hear.” Our own martyr, Bhagat Singh, said, “If the deaf is to hear, the sound has to be very loud”. On October 7, the deaf in the occupied land of Palestine heard the explosion and went berserk with rage. Hamas did not intend to start a war but wanted as many hostages as possible to exchange them with thousands of innocent Palestinian captives incarcerated in inhuman conditions by the Zionists. The occupier found an excuse to destroy and annihilate Gaza forever, but history was smiling at him, who was digging his grave.

Gaza has been razed to the ground, but not the people of Gaza who are standing and fighting not only against imperialism but thirst, hunger, and inclement weather. For the powerful of the world, it’s a lesson not to consider the enemy that has nothing to lose, weak. Simultaneously, it has raised the bar for the oppressed of the world seeking freedom. The latter have to be prepared to make sacrifices more or less equal to Palestinians while maintaining their humanity. Once the Palestinians release their hostages, some of them kiss the Palestinians not because they suffer from Stockholm syndrome but because the Palestinian “fighters’ humanity has become their weapon” (Fanon).

Back home, our country is going through an identical process, and the ruling class is not prepared to hear the symphony of sorrow played by those protesting to regain their basic rights, including the possibility of living a dignified life. One can condemn their abhorrent action of targeting innocent civilians, but every action is a question and an answer at the same time. Finkelstein must have recalled Nat Turner’s revolt. He and his comrades killed all whites indiscriminately, but historians did not condemn them. They only said. “Didn’t we tell you”.

“People want the natives to be objective”, Fanon says,” But for the natives, objectivity is always directed against them”. Sartre wrote, “France was once the name of a country; be careful lest it becomes the name of a neurosis”. By replacing the name of France, we can draw our conclusions. But are we prepared for it?