And we thought so because, by 1988, the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel were nine years old, Yasser Arafat and the PLO were all but spent, an overstretched and very tarnished Israel was already struggling in its occupation of Southern Lebanon, and the Intifada was signaling that the internal Palestinian arena and non-violent resistance were replacing the external one.
In other words, on the matter of Palestine, we were upon the era of let bygones be bygones. For my generation, which came of political age in that decade, the mood was of a piece with the pragmatism and love of the piecemeal that had overtaken the political zeal and pipe dreams of yesteryear. It all kind of dovetailed inside and out.
As we marched, we did so to the chorus of the West, of course. When I say the West, I mean its officialdom and institutional representatives across spectrums. Many of us in the ranks of the liberal Arab elites who had studied there, lived its ways, imbibed its culture, spoke its language, and considered axiomatic its unmatched sway in our region, became its natural interlocutors–we assumed as equals, it has to be said.
There was nothing naïve about such an aspiration, nothing sentimental or trusting. We knew well the West’s hypocrisy and double standards, we knew even better its colonizing history and complicity in Palestinian dispossession. The fault was in the logic. We thought that if we let bygones be bygones, we would be able to transition from losers to protagonists. The times were evolving and if, indeed, the past and its injustices were helping inform the West’s present approach towards us, then the past and its grievances wouldn’t blind our attitude towards it. New order, new rules, new paths for engagement, notwithstanding the inevitable biases that intrude on all relationships.
And so, we transitioned. We launched a thousand conversations and offered a million nods. We explained and educated and listened and compromised in the name of a shared humanity and in the hope that with open dialogue and concessions comes a wiser policy. And then we discovered that the West had never meant to make the transition itself. For it, we were losers then, we are losers now. And towards losers, every exception to every Western rule may apply with little consideration or consequence.
If Israel’s rain of horrors on the Palestinians of Gaza since October 7 with the US and Europe’s full-throated endorsement says anything to us, it says precisely this.
It was the fate of Israel, ever since its creation in 1948, to be the litmus test of Western faithfulness to its lofty ideals and principles. Because in the origins of this state and in its conduct since, the West has had to confront its worst sins: culpability in centuries-long pogroms against its Jewish minorities and complicity in supporting a solution built on never ending Zionist recompense at the expense of another people.
It’s been 35 years since that night on April 26, 1988. Koppel is long retired, Nightlight is long gone, but tragically, Ashrawi is still making the rounds, pounding away about the plight of the Palestinians. Today, however, she has to add yet another three decades of Palestinian privation, during which Israel, under the very thin cover of the 1993 Oslo Accords, proceeded to eat into the little that remained of Palestine, puncture it with 750,000 settlers on hundreds of settlements, place Gaza in an iron cage, and establish itself in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as an apartheid state. And it did all this with European and American knowledge and consent. In the meantime, every method of Palestinian resistance has been condemned by them, as if to tell this people that the only protest acceptable is the faint whisper before death.
