How can anyone blame any Palestinian for expressing cynicism after 40 years of occupation and land confiscation and 60 years of ethnic cleansing. No one. So too, no one blames Amal A, a progressive Palestinian woman known for her blog, Improvisations: Arab Woman Progressive Voice, for giving voice to similar sentiments. The anger sometimes rises above the hospitable Palestinian temperment, where it is no longer possible to let Israeli hypocracy or its brutality go unspoken.
Let Amal speak for herself:
The New York Times has a glowing review of Sari Nuseibeh’s memoir, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life. This book is bound to be controversial because Nuseibeh can be controversial. But since I haven’t read it yet, I won’t comment on it.
What I can comment on is the way the reviewer present Nuseibeh as practically the only Palestinian on the planet who does not “hate” Israel and the Israelis. So unlike the rest of the Palestinians, Nuseibeh is admired for his exceptionalism. “If only the Palestinians could stop hating poor Israel, things will become swell” is the moral of this review.
One reason that it is not easy for Palestinians to engage in public criticism of themselves is that there are always those waiting to use these criticisms to further dismiss the Palestinians and question the justness of their cause.
Once again we are told that Israel commits what the reviewer calls “blunders” such as the settlement movement in the West Bank and Gaza or the “sowing of the Southern Lebanon of cluster bombs in the final hour of last summer’s war.” But the Palestinians don’t “blunder”; they commit suicide every time they make a mistake because their mistake becomes just another argument that negates them and Israel’s responsibility for their tragedy. So if Arafat is autocratic, this means that the Palestinians are not worthy. If they shoot at each other, that means they are not fit to rule themselves. If they drown in sewage, that’s divine proof that they are getting what they deserve.
The Palestinians, last time I checked, were no angels. They have never claimed that lofty status anyway. In fact, they have set their eyes on a more humble position: they’ve been clamoring to be treated as humans. Like all humans, they make mistakes, they disagree amongst themselves, they–gasp–blunder! But their blunders pale in the face of Israeli systematic policies of ethnic cleansing, occupation, and apartheid.
The fact that Arafat was autocratic does not negate the fact that the Palestinians were displaced from their land and made into refugees. The fact that some Palestinians are shooting at each other does not negate the fact that the occupation and the settlements are illegal and have to go. Palestinian mistakes, in other words, do not a pretty Israel make. Israel should stick with the Bikini squad (pretty, partially clad babes) to make itself look better.
A final word: I find it ironic, although predictable, that in a review celebrating finding supposedly the one Palestinian alive who is expressing “sympathy for the other,” as the title of the review announces, there is not one iota, not one drop, not one speck of sympathy expressed by the reviewer for the Palestinians.
I guess he’s not in that business.
Thanks Amal. The New York Times has been called out before for its support of Palestinian occupation, by its failure to even mention this illegal and deadly situation or its purpose: to screw the Palestinians of their land and their lives.
http://www.arabwomanprogressivevoice.blogspot.com/