2 - 8 May 2002
Issue No.584
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 May 2002 Issue No.584 |
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Reflections
Solidarity
"Mail Storage Quota Warning: Hello Hani Shukrallah! You have exceeded your quota of 10.0 Megabytes (MB) of storage by a very large amount...Your account has been disabled from sending and receiving additional e-mail..."
Since Sharon and the rest of the military hooligans ruling Israel figured that the time was ripe to finish the 1948 "War of Independence" this has become the daily greeting from my Yahoo e-mail providers. I don't take it personally. It's just a computer doing its job.
This is no sudden leap in personal popularity. Indeed, I'd consider myself lucky if the huge batch of mail I receive electronically contained one or two personal notes from (real-space) friends. The messages are invariably expressions of solidarity activism and sentiments of an amazingly diverse nature, addressed to me, along with dozens of others by, for the most part, people I don't know.
I do not know Yitzhak Laor but I received a message from him, addressed to "Dear friends", urging us to "Please hurry up. The colonial war might become in less than three months a real nightmare. Villages and towns along the old border are facing hunger. People who try to get out to get food are being shot like dogs. There is no curfew, but they are all surrounded. Please do something." Other than a Jewish sounding name I know nothing of Yitzhak. In virtual space, though, we count each other friends.
A sample of recent correspondents: International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) Coalition, informing me, and many others, of the largest ever Palestine solidarity demonstration in the US; Egypt's Popular Committee for Solidarity with the Intifada -- statements and activity announcements are, naturally, a prominent presence in my e-mail account; Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace group; the list goes on and on. Daily, I find forwarded articles, personal accounts of the horrors in the Palestinian territories; daily I am asked to sign petitions, and then forward them on.
There are, though, two major culprits in the continual disabling of my Yahoo account: M and Y. M is a friend from the early 1970s student movement. Now he has a high-powered job in the state sector and I see him extremely rarely. Y is an Israeli woman I've never met, and about whom I know very little, other than that, like M, she is a highly-trained professional.
Since Sharon's bloody incursion into the West Bank, M and Y must have spent hours before their computer screens, reporting on solidarity actions, announcing others, engaging in debates, forwarding appeals, information, relevant articles and personal accounts -- anything that will help awaken people's consciences and expose the horror of Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people and its devastation of their lives. Both have been showering my e-mail account with their produce. I'm not complaining.
If there is one thing that the latest stage of Israel's bloody 'war of independence' from the Palestinians has made clear it is that solidarity can no longer be side-lined in the Palestinians' struggle for liberation. It must lie at its very heart. The strategic and tactical implications are great, but let me, in this space, focus on one aspect of the latest wave of Palestine solidarity activism; and that with respect to the Egyptian and Arab variant.
There is something wholly new in the solidarity sentiment on the Egyptian, and I hazard, Arab "street". The scale and intensity of such sentiment has been reported and commented on often enough; what I find interesting, however, relates to its nature. The Arab masses, for the first time since the Nakba, seem more motivated by empathy with the Palestinian people, than by the invocation of the Palestinian cause. This disarticulation -- in people's consciousness -- of Palestinian suffering and resistance from some grand discourse of Arab/Islamic awakening, revival, development, etc, suggests an historic rupture with the past that could have enormous implications for the future. It remains, as yet, a suggestion only because the Arab intelligentsia and political class (from Islamists to Trotskyists) have yet to break with the ideological shackles of a degenerate pan-Arab nationalism, so degenerate as to make occasional heroes of the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. The shift in popular sentiment has yet to be appropriated in political thought, though it has reflected on the forms of solidarity action, both spontaneous and organised.
Many commentators have noted the effects of satellite television; how the graphic, daily repeated images of heroism, and suffering, have created a much deeper sense of identification with the Palestinians than ever. But there is much more to it than that: one need recall only how, in the late '70s, Egyptian public opinion was such easy prey for the "they-left-of-their-own-accord/if-only-we-had-accepted-the-partition-of-Palestine-resolution" Zionist version of Arab-Israeli history zealously promoted by Sadat and his reconstructed "Arab Socialist" publicists. This, despite three wars and two decades of feverish pan-Arabism and national liberation. The reason is obvious: real Palestinians, dispossessed of real homes and fields and small businesses, had been ideologically subsumed out of existence. Israel was the "thorn in the Arab nation's heart", Palestine merely a symbol.
The shift is not a result of Al-Jazeera's often dubious efforts. Rather, it is a function of the rediscovery, by the Arab masses, of the Palestinian cause on wholly new terrain, terrain defined on one hand by the independent -- for a great many years, wholly isolated -- struggle of the Palestinians themselves, on the other by the long-term disintegration of pan-Arab nationalism, though this latter has yet to penetrate the pathological denial that afflicts large sections of the Arab intelligentsia. Nor has the Islamist "alternative" convinced: it is, at heart, nothing but a rehashed version of the same degenerate Arab nationalist project. Were it not that we are so blinded by internalised Orientalist rubbish worked up in post-modern guise the political and ideological flirtation between the two trends would have made their confluence starkly obvious.
Rub the outer ideological shell (provided curtsey of the intellectual and political elite) from the sentiments of ordinary Egyptians and Arabs and you get something I can only describe as wholesome: genuine solidarity. We identify with Palestinian oppression and resistance to it because they are an extreme condensation of our own. The fact that Palestinians also speak Arabic, have dark complexions and their children look very much like our own, makes the process of identification and empathy that much more direct.
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