8 - 14 March 2001
Issue No.524
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 March 2001 Issue No.524 |
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Reflections:
In search of meaning
"With you till eternity, and after eternity."
This offence to logic and language was not the outcome of a teenager's fumbling attempt at an over-amorous Valentine's Day card. In fact, I came across this particular travesty while on a short visit to Lebanon a few years ago -- painted in bold letters underneath a massive billboard portrait of President Hafez Al-Assad. I was reminded of it this week as Sharon put the final touches on his national unity government, and as Israel prepared to escalate levels of slaughter and devastation in the occupied territories. The Israelis have been talking strategy. It may be immoral, monstrous and ultimately self-defeating, but it is strategy. The Arabs, for the most part, seemed to insist on talking nonsense.
Ma'ak ila al-abad wa ba'd al-abad sounds even worse in Arabic than in my English rendering of it above. Yet the ignominious billboard went virtually unnoticed by my Lebanese friends, whose education system, unlike Egypt's, continues to produce people who are more or less literate in their mother tongue. We've become immune to nonsense -- the manipulation of language into an instrument of equivocation, ambiguity and sheer mumbo-jumbo.
I was struck by this piece of illiterate groveling simply because, as a visitor, I was looking from the outside in. In context, however, I, no less than my Lebanese friends, have stopped expecting to make any sense out of the greater part of the barrage of official, semi-official and oppositional words to which we are exposed day and night, on the streets and through the media. Language, in this case, has become an increasingly impenetrable code, a series of subtexts that have to be deciphered. You look for messages, rather than meaning. And this, as even the least educated Egyptian will tell you, applies just as much to the weather forecast as to the prime minister's statements on the state of the economy. And so well trained have we, as a people, become in this art that on occasion the hidden message is understood as the exact opposite of the outward meaning. Thus, for instance, when an official pronounces Egypt free of mad cow disease, Egyptians immediately start stocking their freezers with poultry.
The Israelis are talking of widening the scale of "liquidations" of leading Palestinian political figures, tightening and perpetuating the starvation siege of Palestinian towns and villages, re-occupying parts of the self-rule areas and generally escalating the level of armed violence against the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza. We, on the other hand, seem intractably bound -- "till eternity, and beyond" -- to prevarication, ambiguity and mumbo-jumbo. Behind all the bombast, empty rhetoric, the gnashing of teeth and the inevitable whining, however, we can identify two equally futile and squalid categories of response: those who are excited by suicide bombings and Saddam Hussein's "Jerusalem Brigades," and those who would cynically try to use them as bargaining cards.
The one group would have us believe, without the least attempt at rational elucidation, that killing two or three old men and women in a Tel Aviv suburb and transforming Palestinian youths into walking bombs will somehow liberate Palestine. The other, despite enormous evidence to the contrary, and again without the least attempt at explanation, would have us believe that the Americans and Israelis are sufficiently frightened by the "threat" of Hamas, Jihad and Saddam that they will somehow awaken to the realisation that they must offer a less humiliating deal to the moderates of the PA, and keep Yasser Arafat alive.
Both camps exhibit a total disregard for Palestinian lives and suffering. And both fall on two sides of a more basic if no less vacuous divide: the "peace is a strategic option" camp versus the sira' wugud wa laisa hudud ('a struggle of existence and not borders') camp. The very meaninglessness of these two fundamental, and allegedly opposing, slogans is exemplified by the fact that nothing that pertains to a coherent strategy can be inferred from them. They serve, in fact, as pretexts to persistently dodge the task of elaborating such a strategy.
"Glory to the martyrs" and "long live the Intifada" may express legitimate feelings of solidarity with the Palestinians and anger at Israeli oppression and brutality. But they remain little more than hollow sentiments unless we are also willing to discuss the fact that aimless martyrdom is just death, and that the Intifada is, in fact, dissipating -- as popular resistance gives way to armed attacks by individual guerrillas; armed attacks on military targets give way to attacks on non-combatants and trained guerrilla fighters give way to bungling human bombs.
Suicide bombings are sordid. Armed attacks on non-combatants are immoral. And the story of the Biblical Samson is more farce than tragedy.
We fight to win, not to kill and be killed (in far greater numbers). The Palestinians' greatest strength is the morality and fundamental humanity of their cause; Israel's is its military might. We need to fight on a terrain of our choosing, not theirs.
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