Incoherence and beyond: Dignity under Oppression

Amid the fire and the bloodshed, there remains a need, a pressing need to evaluate the situation. Our gains and losses. As there are no gains with bloodshed, it is our injuries that we need to evaluate.

However, there seems to be something strange about my people, where there is a sense of victory that we insist on raising. Funny enough, it comes with every martyr that ascends. While something inside me aspires a real ascendance, somehow an aspiration for justice that may be up and above this earth.

There is yet this very individual, and personal victory that I assume lies in the state of resilience that comprises what a Palestinian is about. But amid all this, I confess that I cannot see any gains, even within the fact that this very Palestinian resilience is still there. One important point in my no hopes or profits seeing in knowing the past of this situation. No matter how painful the price we pay, it always turns for the benefit of Israel. Today as an adult, who still tries to find the truth in its all aspects with its hideous, deceitful and defeat-full sides, each Palestinian intifada ended up with an Israeli more compelling situation, even though, each time Palestinians proved that they are ready to sacrifice their very own lives for the sake of this country and their dignity. A feeling that Israeli oppression definitely drives so hard to make a Palestinian individual lose any interest or value for life inside a life that the very basic sense of humanity is wiped away.

Since the beginning of the creeping of the Zionist movement into this land and with every such intifada the Palestinians did in resistance to an upcoming injustice that became part of what a Palestinian life is, the Palestinian leadership managed to make the gains to the benefit of Israel, non-intentionally of course, because the enemy for them has always been a closer opponent than Zionism. It has always been the other faction that always has been of more enmity than that of the real enemy.

Seeing it today, is nothing but a continuous reflection of the past, with different names and maybe factions, but it is definitely the same attitude. This whole concept of a gap between the Palestinians on the ground and the Palestinian leadership has been and still remain the problem of that Palestinian people. Hence, one cannot get into a good connection mantling or dismantle this equation realizing that the leadership is at the end of the day part of the people.

What the solution is is something that I am clueless about. In a situation where reality is about a conflict that turned from that of territorial to one of injustice and fundamental rights, it makes me only think of the importance of the Palestinian human himself. I firmly believe today that the Palestinian leadership regarding an authority should be resolved. I am not sure when the Palestinian people will realize this. At the end our focus has always been on Israel as the only source and reason for our misery which is very genuine and correct, but, in-between, the reality of the failure of our leadership that continued to bring the Palestinian cause into a state of defeat is as problematic and disastrous on the Palestinian people as the Israeli occupation and its ongoing oppression.

But thinking of what do we want from this uprising? Why did it take place? And where are we going from it? Doesn’t seem to be on our real discussions. Everyone is counting victims and in a state of screaming and anguish with no real sense of what is really going on.

Are we in a real intifada? I insist that an intifada under Abbas will never take place. First, he said it hundreds of times. The man is committed to every word of his international and Israeli commitments. In a standard time, this made some sense. After all, living in a state of continuous threat and oppressive procedures is not the right way to live. The current uprising has been triggered as a result of many things, on top of them, what has been happening in Jerusalem in terms with al-Aqsa for the whole last year and has been only escalating with the Jewish religious holidays, as with every year, has always been a serious issue. Al Aqsa serves as the heart of the city, for its entire people. It is something that is so closely related to the very own and personal pride of every Palestinian. It has nothing to do with religious or secular, Christians or atheists in this city. It is about that sense of ownership that is as close to each Jerusalemites as his very own heart. The amount of frustration that the people felt, being totally ignored by the Arabs and the Palestinian leadership exposed the nakedness of all. The people kept feeling that they are there on their very own while Israelis are raping their very own closest to the heart and soul place. In every single Palestinian mind and heart, allowing incursions to the Aqsa is exactly like watching your own daughter\ sister raped.

By this very moment, almost 20 Palestinians have been killed all nearly twenty years old and less, and all killed brutally with execution styles with no hesitation. Some of those were involved in clashes throwing stones, and some attempted or actually stabbed Israeli soldiers \settlers, and somewhere killed with pure cold blood with not a single reason that cameras exposed. The fact that the dead is all younger than Oslo. A whole generation that was raised and bred on the education of Oslo proves for the million times that it is oppression and injustice that triggers people’s reactions, not imaginary peace education that is based on a pedagogy of the oppressor not the oppressed.

Need to such an explosion has been there for the last at least five years. But together to what has been happening in al-Aqsa and the killing of young Palestinians in the last month, mentioning the burning of Ali Dawabsheh and his family, and the killing of Fadel Khalidi, Hadeel Hashlamon, Diya’ Talahmeh and others, only brought Palestinian youth closer to a confrontation. In a world of social media, these young people are no strangers to one another. Brutality came closer to every Palestinian home, it is not an aggression on the other side of the Palestinian “region” of Gaza that is in an impossible to reach situation.

As someone who grew up inside the passion of the first intifada and new life from the perspective of resistance as a teenager, I watch these youngsters and think of how a determination of a life with justice is what drives such a generation.

The difference between my aspirations as a teenager and theirs is what do we want to achieve. I remember that right feeling of a liberation of Palestine that aroused with the first intifada. What do these young people expect, when Palestine today is nothing but those borderlines of their cities and villages surrounded by borders and walls and Palestinian security forces and Israeli occupation forces?

What do they mean when they say we want the liberation of Palestine? The Palestine my generation wanted is not the dame Palestine that this generation knows. Maybe this is why, it is my generation who is encouraging this intifada, not those who came with Oslo. It is the aspiration for freedom, a liberation that is driven by the sense of injustice, coercion, brutality and racism that joins all of us today.

Somehow the only positive thing in this occurrence is the prove that the Palestinian blood is served with a desire to live with dignity and continue to seek freedom. …. Even when the land is gone, but the Palestinian human is still alive.

What remains an upcoming dangerous encounter is the moment when the current Palestinian authority is forced to make a move. A confrontation will be done at some point that is inescapable when the leadership should make a decision of interference when the Palestinian security forces will be forced to the streets, would they fight Israeli forces or the people?

The coming days will unfold another bitter reality …

The real business and role of the Palestinian Authority, and the true racist face of Israel, that continues to prove that a good Arab is a dead Arab.

Within all this, one fact is beyond doubts valid, that all bets on creating a Palestinian nation that would live under a notion of a consuming lifestyle that provides some luxuries of material aspects on different levels, could have succeeded in tempting poor old hearts , but alive young hearts continue to live within the pulse of what life should be about … a life that is triggered with dignity … dignity under injustice and oppression cannot breathe.