Jerusalem Will Not Be Liberated by Tears

What Israel is doing in Palestine demands a serious and firm stand. Yet there are many reasonable, wise people who will immediately urge restraint, insisting that “this is the best that could have been,” or “the door from which the wind blows, shut it and rest,” and other such phrases sculpted by time onto the walls of humiliation, disgrace, and meekness. There are also many simple-minded dreamers who will flip through their yellowed papers to summon a genie to avenge them against their enemies and scatter them, or who will attribute everything to fate and destiny, which one must endure without objection—taking the blows on the back of the neck and thanking God for still being alive. But is this a life??

More than a billion Muslims sit among the rest of the world’s billions in the seats of spectators. It is true that some of them purse their lips in disapproval, and some shed copious tears at night. But it is certain that the majority hold in their anger only to unleash it upon their women and children… The matter truly requires psychological analysis to understand the condition in which more than a billion Muslims live as they watch this callous violation of what they hold most sacred.

Reading reality, and some lessons of history, confirms beyond dispute that a policy of blind power and arrogance will eventually turn against its practitioners. Yet it seems that blindness has reached such a degree that reading or understanding has become impossible. Israel, backed by America, has succeeded in generating an unprecedented state of hostility. I believe that thousands of schools in the villages and cities of the Third World are now absorbing the lesson that these mighty powers have sought to teach the world: that right is to possess power and exercise it; wrong is to be weak. Perhaps al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan have ended, and perhaps Hamas and Islamic Jihad will disappear from Palestinian soil. But what is being sown today with bombs and spilled blood will certainly grow with every sunrise in the lands of the oppressed, producing forests of hatred before which the operations of al-Qaeda or Hamas will pale. And I hasten to say that those organizations could never have succeeded in marketing their cause with the same effectiveness achieved by these massacres—massacres that have affirmed the prevailing logic: the logic of power and its excesses.

What consolation can we now offer to the families of the victims of Israel and America, when the bodies of our own victims still lie torn in the open? What peace can anyone dare speak of, when that peace has become synonymous with humiliation and surrender? Israel has spoken of a “peace of strength,” which for Palestinians means a peace of weakness. America has spoken of “world peace,” by which it means the world’s submission to its desires and whims. It is enough that only two people in the world now beat the drums of war with joy: the American president and the Israeli prime minister.

The greatest wager that the strategic planners in Washington and Tel Aviv rely upon is the humiliation and passivity of the silent majority of the peoples under oppression. Their greatest wager is that this majority will remain stunned, mesmerized, vacant, seated in the stands as spectators. This was the same wager made by planners during the Vietnam War and in the moments before the October War. Such a gamble may yield small gains at first, but in the end it is a guaranteed loss, for it is a wager on the unknown—and this unknown is well known to those who understand the lessons of history and who know that volcanoes that appear dormant do not issue press releases before unleashing their fire and fury.
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By: Maassoum Marzouk