16 May 2011

Al Awda & der Judenstaat

I made a post regarding the Nakba Day events yesterday. I explained in it why I avoid that topic. Not because I don’t have opinions, but because everyone does and everyone gets apopleptic about it.

I’ve lived in two countries, travelled in more, and everywhere I have been, the one thing that everyone appears to easily get worked up on is the Palestine issue. I’ve seen Americans who would have no problem understanding the right of an American to criticize and denounce the American president and who would never pull up the treason word to describe those who don’t agree firmly with whatever the current policy is begin practically frothing at the mouth when even the slightest criticism of the Israeli government is made. I’ve seen Syrian dissidents who will denounce Assad until the cows come home suddenly stop to be more concerned about what is happening in Gaza than what is happening here and suddenly beam with pride for Assad when he seems to take up the national cause.

I’ve also seen when someone posts anything on the internet on the subject that, no matter how calm and fair they are, things rapidly descend. It happened on this blog. It happens everywhere.

All Arabs are anti-Semites gets blurted, and any criticism of the Israeli government is Nazism, yeah yeah, seig heil and all that … and someone tosses up the idea that everyone in Syria supported Hitler in World War II …

And that is used to prove how Arabs are unfit for democracy (and possibly to share a planet with) without even stopping to consider that … well, the Germans were looking at a war with France and then defeating it. And if a French army was occupying your country and French policemen were molesting your granny and French politicians were trying to keep you forever in dependence, wouldn’t a German army marching down the Champs D’Elysee look pretty cool?
So you know how the French ‘celebrated’ the defeat of Nazi Germany? Here, they spent V-E Day in 1945 running bombing missions over Damascus. My house still has a scar from DeGaulle’s orders (elsewhere, another way spent celebrating was to riddle Algerian Arabs with bullets).

It’s only a statement of how awful Hitler truly was that he wasn’t a national hero here.

On the other side, the gnashing of teeth comes from those who say ‘how can you undermine Assad, how can you not support the ‘resistance’ of the hero Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah? How can you not support your brave leader who stands up against the evil Zionist spiders?’

And so what? Does mentioning these things mean that reality has to be ignored? Do we give a free pass to someone for such trivia?

I’d love it if there was some magic formula that I knew that, if implimented, would mean everyone, Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druzes, would be happy.

And, when I find it, I’ll go ahead and book my ticket to Oslo and prepare my Nobel Prize speech ...

But I don’t know it.

I don’t honestly see any real hope for peace and justice and everyone living together in perfect harmony, buying each other Cokes or whatever it is that you do then.

Like I said, I’ve traveled, I’ve met people, I’ve read, all of those a lot. I’ve been to Auschwitz and the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto. And I’ve been to Yarmouk and Bourj an Barajneh and Tel al Zaatar and Shatilla. I've talked to people who were driven at gunpoint from Ramle and people who staggered out of German camps. And I’m not going to make equivalencies but to say that from all that I have distilled something that makes me pretty sure that there’s no easy way out. Because I came to an understanding of two simple things: the Return and the Jewish State.

There’s one idea that drives the Palestinian struggle. It isn’t about killing Jews or Jihad or being inspired by Hitler or Stalin or Bin Laden or whatever the haters claim on Fox. And it isn’t about the Holy Cause of Islam or the Struggle of the Arab Nation or even the occupation like they say over on al Jazeera. Religion has nothing to do with it; nationalism has almost nothing to do with it. It’s all about the Return, al Awda as we say.

It’s about the refugees going home, not to a state called Palestine but home, to a particular house in a particular village, to gather olives or oranges from particular trees or live on the street in the town where their great great great grandfather was born. It’s about living as you want in your own small space where your ancestors died and breathing the air that they exhaled and knowing that your children’s children’s children will be looking after the same trees when you’re just remembered as jiddu’s jiddu’s abu or umm …

It’s simple but, maybe, you have to be a Levantine Arab to get this. It makes perfect sense to me; it makes perfect sense to my dad. He had a stroke last year in America and, as soon as he got out of the hospital, he started working to come back to Syria, to Damascus, to our neighborhood, to our house, to sleep in our walls … and to die a few meters from where he was born. Nothing more grand than that. And so, he will; I’ve promised him that much. Whether Assad is gone or not, it doesn’t matter; what matters is home. And I stayed on; we both did not to be heroic or resistant but because it is home, because our house has been our home since before the Ottomans, because we have dwelt in our city since the days of the Umayya and even then we are newcomers. Because it is home. When we leave, we dream of the Return. And we can. So when we regard the Palestinians, it makes sense: Al Awda is then a natural idea; an ordinary idea; the Idea that matters.

And on the other side of Jebel Shaikh, another single idea drives everything. And it is not because of some crazy secret teaching of the Talmud or the Learned Elders, not because of racism or wanting to be a master race, or colonialist conspiracies or whatever they are saying.

It is about autonomy and having a Jewish State; der Judenstaat in Herzl’s title, a state where Jews collectively would have control of their own destiny and set their own standards, where they’d have a refuge and a flag and a seat at the table … a state, an independent state, as Jewish as England is English was the phrase I recall.

And that doesn’t mean an autonomous region in a bigger country or a non-sectarian secular
democratic unified state or a self-governing millet.

Golda Meir explained it to Emir Abdallah: “We didn’t come all this way just to sit in your parliement.”

No, they didn’t.
And they didn't come to rob the Palestinians of their patrimony either.
They came for solid, reasonable, intelligent and understandable reasons.

To be free. To escape persecution. To be masters of their own destinies. To flourish just like anyone else.

And even now, while the idea of a two state solution or peace between states is conceivable as being something that could be done, it doesn’t resolve this tension between al Awda and der Judenstaat:

The Palestinians return … and the Jewish State gets a Muslim majority; for there to be a Jewish State, there can be no return and for there to be a Return, there can be no Jewish state.
No matter how smoothly and peacefully everything is handled, one idea cancels the other. And knowing Jewish history, knowing Arab history, the idea of either group letting go the big idea is even less likely than making them both work.

So, I come to the conclusion that there’s no easy solution, no way out.

All that can be achieved is what they call in other fields ‘harm reduction’, to make wars and killings and violence, injustice and oppression less likely, less painful. Treaties can be signed between Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon. The Israelis can evacuate the West Bank and Gaza and there can be a Palestinian state. All of that is possible.

But without squaring der Judenstaat and al Awda, there can be no permanent solution.

(Flame away!)

Why We Fight

Torture.

It isn’t a small thing or something to be laughed off and shrugged aside.

It’s real.

And this regime uses it.

They don’t use it sparingly, they don’t use it in ticking timebomb situations, they don’t use it for the perpetrators of awful crimes.

They use it for every day purposes. A run-in with the police means a probable beating. For small things. It is routine, it is normal.

It is what all of us expect. It is why we keep our nails as short as possible so they can’t be pulled off. It is why we were slow to come out into the streets. It is why there’s little crime here. It is why you don’t see so many women in the protests.

What do you think happens to women who get picked up?

This clip shows some protesters – not leaders, not organizers, just ordinary Syrians who went out in the street and asserted the unity of the Syrian people and their desire for a freer society – who were taken and released. This is the minimal one can expect:

That is Banias.

We all know this; it is how it has always been. The ones who stuck their heads up got hammered down. My uncle way back in 1976 spoke out about the regime, wrote a few things, spoke too publicly. They took him away. Beat him savagely. He returned with broken bones. They took him again to Tadmor the second time. He was gone longer and came back with only one eye. He left the other one with them and thanked God he was one of the lucky ones for he did get released and did see his children again.

He fled to the USA and we followed.

I remember sleeping in the same house as him and waking up to hear screaming; my cousins telling me to go back to sleep, dad does that sometimes when he dreams he’s back there.

And they knew that their father was a lucky one who could have strings pulled on his behalf and live to breathe another day.

Our whole country is full of people with uncles like mine. We know what waits. And knowing that is why we need for it to end.

We have all seen them, the broken men who are the lucky ones, the ones with scars and limps who scream in the night. And there are the ones who never have been released and maybe died long ago, Or maybe they still live.

Why?

The regime lives on fear. I am only half-joking when I wonder whether years ago they found al Hazred’s lost manuscript and, following the Kitab al Azif, must inflict pain to rouse their black god in subterranean temples beneath lost cities …

It would make more sense.

I am lucky; I have never been tortured. Yet. They have arrested close to 10,000 so far … and those that come back bear the marks of the torturer.

They mean it as a warning.

A warning to us.

But it is also a reminder to us of why we fight.

We want to see an end to this, an end to hearing screams in the night. And we cannot stop until we win because this is what awaits us all.