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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Elections Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Travel Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The people of the land
By Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri *
The Zionist state is based on a strange assumption: that Palestine is actually Eretz Yisrael, a land holy to the Jews who are somehow organically related to it since time immemorial, and that it is therefore a land without a people. Reality, however, tells a story of resistance and struggle by a people not supposed to exist, resulting in an "endless cycle of resistance and oppression" (which the Western media levels into a "cycle of violence").
The Zionist settlers are caught in that cycle. If they were to see the land they occupy as "Palestine," not "Israel," and understand the simple fact that Palestine is populated with Palestinians, in other words, a "land with a people," they would inevitably see themselves as intruders, colonisers and usurpers of the land. And who has the courage to question the legitimising myth of his existence, if he has been promised this land by the Lord of Hosts, then by Lord Balfour?
But those Palestinians keep on hurling stones, in one Intifada after the other. The stone hurts the body, but also creates cognitive distance.
Given this untenable situation, the settlers send in tanks and soldiers to delete the Palestinians so that Israel can become a land without a people, or at least with a completely domesticated people living under the rule of a completely emasculated PA. Deep down, however, they know that it is to no avail. Jacob Talmon, the Israeli historian, has written of "the impotence of victory." The Israeli poet Chaim Guri bitterly observes that "this soil [the land without a people?] is insatiable, ever crying for more graves and more coffins, as if Eretz Yisrael were not a piece of land, a territory, but rather an obscene goddess of vengeance."
Why sink into nihilistic mythologising? Why not be a little more prosaic and think of implementing the UN resolutions that Israel, fully supported by the US, has for so long ignored? Why not be a little more civilised and humane?
* This week's Soapbox speaker is author of The Encyclopaedia of the Jews, Judaism, and Zionism: A New Explanatory Paradigm.© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
