Shalom or Salaam

Ariel Sharon can be my guest. As Indians, we are renowned for our hospitality. The West has not yet certified him a terrorist, so he can do just as he pleases. In fact, he can even announce, “We control America”. This is such a change from the former Prime Minister, the late Golda Meir, stating, “Israel is really a safeguard for the maintenance of American interests in the area, and the first line of defence for the American interests in the Mediterranean basin.” It is business as usual that matters. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is planning to have a nice huge meeting with him. Protest letters are being dashed off. Now these captains of industry honestly do not care about anyone “whose hands are drenched in blood”.

Personally, I am disappointed that it is largely Muslim groups, or those who want to cater to the Muslim vote-bank, that are protesting, for the Palestinian issue has little to do with Islam. The Palestinian movement was never a jihad. Besides, if the community is a part of the society, it must remember that political diplomacy has certain constraints and the government has every right to invite any head of state. (Never mind Brajesh Mishra’s silly pronouncement, “The US, India and Israel have to jointly face the same ugly face of modern day terrorism”.) Let us not forget that India was among the first countries to recognise Palestine and Yasser Arafat, who was labeled a terrorist long before the term became fashionable, was a valued guest of India.

Having said this, it is important to evaluate the rotten state of Israel. Let me clarify here that it is only when I got a first-hand account that I started speaking up for the Palestinian cause. The minute I saw the Palestinian embassy in Delhi, I knew that we were talking about a displaced people. Anyone who has passed through the diplomatic enclave will vouch for the plushy facades of the various consulates and embassies; not this one. It was a drab off-white structure with no armed guards. A few young men stood inside the reception area that consisted of a table and chair around which they gathered. They looked unkempt. However, they were most polite and within minutes I was ushered in to meet his Excellency, Dr. Khalid el Sheikh. He was a man in position, so his could have been the ‘official’ version.

But I have spent hours with Palestinian students in India, sitting with them over cups of bitter tea at their hostel canteens, and wondered how they could identity and feel so strongly about a land that they had never seen, whose history was wiped out by the razing of 480 villages. From Jordan and Lebanon, where most of their families live, how could they aspire for freedom and peace? But then Yasser Arafat too was born in Cairo, and did not even know that a place called Palestine existed in his early years.

Kihaf Tobasi, whose father was expelled, believes that Palestine is “still the best place. I may not have memories of it but I have to live with the burden of not having a land to call my own.” Dr. A. Sabri, a medical practitioner, who was an activist of the PLO, explained the frustrations of the common man: “Colleges get closed, we cannot open factories or banks because Israelis do not want us to be independent. I would not mind working free in a hospital there but I was kicked out. For the sake of peace we were willing to accept an inch of land then. Now if I am starving and you give me a cup of tea, I will take it, but it won’t satisfy my hunger. The Israelis are not fools that they occupied our land. They knew what was in it for them.”

The Israeli voice:

Moshe Dayan openly declared, “There is not a single Jewish village in this country that has not been built on the site of an Arab village.”

What is the historical perspective? Can the Holocaust be compared to the Palestinian diaspora? Can the Jews become the Nazis in the latter half of the same century and the beginnings of the new one? As Bertrand Russell wrote, “I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.” Even Einstein, a Jew, rued the terror of Zionism.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British called for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Under the UN resolution of 1947 Palestine was to be divided into Arab and Jewish states, with Israel being granted 57 per cent of the total land when that under their possession did not exceed six per cent, and they constituted only a third of the population. The Palestinians rejected the partition plan. But within six months, 78 per cent of the land had come under the Israelis, exceeding the UN stipulation, dispossessing its inhabitants and replacing them with Jews from Europe and other parts of the world. This is the only country created by the UN defying the UN. In 1967, the West Bank and Gaza were taken over and the inhabitants were under an oppressive military rule. They were treated as refugees

While the natives whose families lived on this land for thousands of years are not allowed to return, Jews from all over the world are welcome to instant citizenship. Even as peace talks are carried on, settlements come up, armed with the most sophisticated weapons. Negotiations are one-sided – Palestinians can have their municipalities but the borders, water, airspace, and anything else of importance remains an Israeli domain. Such gumption is made possible only because there is an American Israel Public Affairs Committee that can make all the forces of the world powerless against it, including the UN, as the American veto is there to block any condemnation of Israeli war crimes.

Some revered figures committed massacres and later became Prime Ministers. In 1948, Menachem Begin’s unit slaughtered the inhabitants of Deir Yassin. In 1953, Ariel Sharon led the slaughter of the inhabitants of Qibya, and in 1982 arranged for their allies to butcher around 2,000 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla.

He had once declared, “We must hit, hit and hit them incessantly…not by means of large-scale war. Suddenly someone disappears there, someone is found dead here and somewhere else someone is found stabbed to death in a European nightclub.”

The Palestinian voice:

A little boy asked his leader in a small voice, “Can we defeat the enemy?” Tough question, for on their side they had a lordly number of 297 fighters, many of them children. As commander he had to be honest. Later he told an interviewer, “I tried to laugh, but really I wanted to cry.” Yasser Arafat appealed to the army like a father to his children. They flung themselves on the army tanks, and swung the Karameh attack in their favour. And thus Arafat became their undisputed leader.

Today, in bigtime political warfare, you do not fight your own battles; the superpowers do it. There have been attempts to even justify the existence of Israel by harking back to Biblical times. But Dr. Khalid el Sheikh had explained to me, “The Jews of today are mostly converts to Judaism and had no racial links with the Israelites or Hebrews who lived in Palestine at or before the time of Christ. This in fact raises the controversy about Judaism being a religion or a race. Since there can be an American, Indian, European or an Arab Jew like in Christianity and Islam, how then these conglomerations of people from different races could form a nation?”

And a respected nation it is, even succeeding in dividing Palestinian political thought with threats: No peace talks with Arafat. Deport him. No, let him remain here so that he can be watched…

What will he do now? He is undoubtedly a media-created monster and so, quite legitimately, he devours the very creature that gave him birth, and a dubious reputation. He is not a dictator, for then the struggle would not have continued. As he pragmatically stated, “Israel is the superpower of the region and we are resisting it with the equivalent of bows and arrows.” Israel has the fourth largest army in the world, with nuclear weapons.

Arafat is a product of this terror. That is the reason some of his own people are against him. They felt at one time that his refusal to execute traitors had been the major cause of internal strife. Then they have complained that he was selling out. What they do not realise is that had he given in to consensus leadership, Palestine may today have been able to boast of a palace with a titular head who would be a puppet of America. This did not happen.

Because of one man. Take Arafat out of the Palestinian movement and you have splintered glass, not a windowpane. The West, that has successfully made most Arab societies into stooges, has had to wring its hands in despair, for not only did Palestine not toe its lines, it has even refused to be relegated to the backwoods. Its people constitute the highest number of graduates and professionals in the region and their literacy rate exceeds 96 per cent. This did not happen overnight. It wasn’t merely the bullets that pierced, but also the vituperative words hurtled with unwarranted force. Yitzhak Shamir, the former premier, had stated with characteristic vicious glee, “It is unacceptable that nations made up of people who have only just come down from the trees should take themselves for world leaders…how can such primitive beings have an opinion of their own?”

The only thing primitive about Arafat is his intuitive form of leadership. But he has proved to be a good diplomat, even asking his people to settle for 30 per cent of their own land. He said, “No more this silly talk of driving the Jews into the sea. Today my people are prepared to live with the Jews as neighbours in a mini-state of their own. It is a miracle!” And then in 1982 Beirut happened. 88 days of hard shelling.

It is not that Arafat had not grasped the message. At 17, he was smuggling weapons from Egypt to Palestine and meeting despair at every turn. When three-fourths of his people became refugees in their own land, he threw up his hands. He told his biographer, Alan Hart (‘Terrorist or Peacemaker?’), “If you want to know a secret, I made an application for a visa to go to America!”

Meanwhile, he started a magazine called, ‘Our Palestine’ that shoved propaganda down people’s throats. As he was to recall, “It was this appearance of power – a power that we did not in fact have at that time – that enabled us to form more cells and build the wide base for our organisation.”

His paranoia seemed justified much later when Golda Meir told the BBC interviewer in ‘Panorama’, “The Palestinians do not exist.” This made up his mind for him. Al Fatah was formed with seven trained fighters, five rifles and a cheque for 1000 pounds, that could not be encashed for a couple of months because there was no money in the account.
Abu Jihad had stated, “Arafat is not just a political symbol. We know that he is living all our fears, all of our dreams and all of our sufferings.”

He is aware that he is alone, which is why he is willing to stick his neck out and take risks. These have borne fruit. There is a grudging acceptance, which in a way is victory itself. To his devout followers he is the god that never fails and, if he does, they can always haul him up for it. To the West, he is just a militant confused about his identity. This makes one wonder why, despite such Occidental conviction, it is always setting out to unmask the man.

But what we must understand is that in post 9/11 times, his is often the lone rising-above-the-din voice against Zionism and its ugly side. The Palestinian struggle is what stands out as a silent testimony against the Israelis. The West is at a loose end; there is no emir they can install as puppet, no coherent ‘nation’ they can suppress. In 1974 he declared in the UN general assembly, “I have come to you with an olive branch in one hand, and a gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” Unfortunately, peace in the Middle East is like a chameleon that never reveals its true colours.

As the poet said, “I did not shrink, I did not strive/the deep peace burnt me alive.”