Dear Progressive 'Freedom Fighters,' I'm a Palestinian Israeli. I Don't Need your 'Liberation' - Israel News - Haaretz.com
By: Loui Haj (Haaretz. com)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples have an unshakable right to a nation-state. So why are you chanting 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,' an annihilationist slogan, and not 'Palestine and Israel, side by side'?
Just before all you freedom fighters come to "free" me, the Palestinian Arab, the '48 Arab, or whatever you want to call it, I thought I would write you a brief letter, about the length of an average TikTok, as an Israeli citizen.
I thought I might include, for the sake of your protests, a number of slogans that rhyme nicely, that might roll off the tongue. A letter using a limited vocabulary that would neatly fit the size of the protest signs.
I thought that if the letter was long, I'd miss the mark, given the short attention span that your generation is known for. I thought it over, and then I decided not to make things so easy for you. It's time, by God, for you to read something substantial and to read it all the way through.
To stop with the shallow, instantaneous thinking that is manifested in all its wretchedness by the boiling down of all the vast complexity of our conflict, of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, into a single chilling slogan about the river and the sea.
I would so like to believe that you don't really understand the meaning of the chant "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," and be able to chalk it up to utter foolishness and nothing more. For if you do understand it, you are essentially calling for the annihilation of Israel, of my country.
The need for clarification could have been avoided had you instead been chanting something like: "Palestine and Israel, side by side." Because then I believe you would have found me right by your side, along with very many of my Jewish brethren here in Israel.
You are students from the best universities in the world. Among the tools these universities are meant to equip you with are in-depth, independent learning, research and study. So, if you have studied and researched and still you go on chanting "From the river to the sea," I must conclude once more that you knowingly and maliciously seek the destruction of the national home of the Jewish people.
I have to wonder - how are your souls, which are supposedly oh-so-sensitive to human injustices, able to blithely contemplate the ethnic cleansing of Jews from this land? And does this also include kidnapping them, murdering their children, their women, their elderly? Decapitating and burning them? Or would you make some grand humane gesture and make do with simply deporting them all?
If you were to do some very basic research, you would discover, for example, that your own countries were established on the basis of historic injustices and also contributed to and fueled the Jewish/Zionist-Arab/Palestinian tragedy. But I don't hear you calling for them to be eliminated as a result. This is what you call hypocrisy and a double standard.
It was your moral duty to demand that the Palestinians - my people - disavow and reject with disgust the sadistic slaughter of human beings, of civilians. To reject the culture of religious fanaticism and barbaric blood thirst that cannot go hand in hand with the progressivism, liberalism, and humanism that you so strongly espouse.
I do not discount in the slightest the Nakba of my people, the disaster that brought in its wake killing and destruction and the expulsion of my relatives. Nor do I ignore the pogroms and atrocities that members of my people committed against the Jews before and in the wake of the state's founding.
I do not forget for a second the fact that their Jewish-Zionist national dream was established on the ruins of my Arab-Palestinian national dream. Or that the fulfillment of one dream and shattering of the other led both peoples into an ongoing, violent nightmare that must be ended with a peaceful resolution and not with the transfer of either people.
You cannot correct one great injustice with an injustice of total destruction, as you are proposing. For the sake of our children's future, the children of both peoples, all the unbearably heavy baggage of the past, all the difficult, bloody history between us must be set aside.
This is not a simple thing to do, to put it mildly, but we mustn't lose hope. We must continue to reach out across the abyss that separates us, to strive tirelessly to find a peaceful solution, or at the very least to get the process moving and ensure it continues without letup.
Israel has an unshakable right to exist that does not require your approval. The Jewish people have a full, unapologetic right to a nation-state of their own, as owed to it by human ethics and history. And the same goes for the Palestinian people.
Two peoples side by side, not one at the expense of the other, not one in place of the other. Two peoples who are focused on the present and future and not on history, and who is more right.
Two peoples with a full and unshakable right to exist "from the river to the sea," who are not going anywhere aside from having to embark upon a long, winding road of healing, a road flanked by difficult compromises and painful concessions.
But there is no other choice. This bloody cycle has to be stopped. We must also save the lost generations of Palestinian children who are living in ignorance and poverty, without hopes or dreams, under a regime of violent terror on the inside and under the boot of occupation from outside.
This is what I would expect true freedom fighters to be shouting from every stage, every day of the year.
If you show up here in your liberation campaign, you will find me arm in arm with my Jewish brethren, fighting you and anyone else who dares to threaten the country's survival.
We will fight against you and against every barbaric organization that commits crimes against humanity, against the citizens of my country, Jews and Arabs, under the false cover of a so-called liberation movement that oppresses its own people, my people, and uses them as cannon fodder.
I assure you that the organizations of darkness that you, in your moral blindness, look upon as freedom fighters would, at the very first opportunity, forcibly convert, oppress and annihilate you as well, the moment after the "liberation" you so emphatically shout for.
And then, thanks to you, the fundamentalist darkness will extend from the river to a sea that is red with blood. That is, should they, God forbid, succeed in their evil plans. But they will never succeed.
For us Arab Israeli citizens, life is complicated and hard, but it is still incomparably preferable to life in any one of the surrounding countries. Together with our Jewish brethren, we will yet overcome the numerous challenges. We still have a lot of work to do and a lot of struggles to go through, but we will emerge from them strengthened.
We, Arabs and Jews in our country, the one that you seek to "liberate," bow our heads before the sorrow of our past, of ourselves, of our peoples, and yearn for the memory to never fade for us. In this way our hope, our salvation and our revival shall be here in Israel, our country, because neither one of us has another land and neither one has anywhere else to go.
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Excellent article John. Thank you for posting this.
Thanks for sharing this thoughtful, informed letter. I will be surprised if many read this and then think about. You did your part, let see if others that claim to be concerned do theirs.
WE might read it, but unfortunately the tens of thousands marching and protesting and shouting "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" and carrying signs that say "Free Palestine" and waving Palestinian and Hamas flags will not.
Very good article, hopefully, Bibi Netanyahu will read it and understand it as well as the Palestinian leadership.
It is a very passionate letter but even if the Palestinian leadership might read it I doubt they will act upon it. Bibi might not even bother to read it, let alone have it move him in any way. It is well known that Abbas has served(?) WAY beyond his mandate, and so for him and for Bibi I invoke the famous theme song of Andrea Bocelli: "It's Time to Say Goodbye".