Abdel-Qader Yassine* asks whether Israelis and Palestinians will ever be able to find each other in friendship amid the echoes and blows of history and occupation The recipient of this letter, Yael Lotan, is an activist in the Israeli peace movement. Lotan and the writer met at an international writers' conference in Brussels. The following letter was sent to Lotan earlier this year. Dear Yael, Thank you very much for your kind letter that I received two days ago. Although three years have passed, the memory of our first meeting in Brussels is still vivid. We agreed on nothing, except that the stereotype image we have developed of each other is false. The aim of our group was clear enough. We were all against the occupation and wanted to campaign for freedom of expression. We met and met again. There was a morbid fascination in these encounters, as if we were two Roman wrestlers moving around in a circle, sizing each other up. In our last meeting you said: "I understand now that we have met and talked. I understand a lot more about your people and about mine ... " We discovered that our goal was clear enough. You were against the Israeli occupation. I do not really believe in the possibility of co-existence and mutual respect between our two nations after 58 years of war and hatred. I am just like any other Palestinian who has only witnessed the ugly face of the Israeli occupation (is there a "humane" occupation?). We see the Israeli army in our towns, villages and refugee camps where they treat us with hate and brutality. Their sole intention is to insult and provoke us. In the "Promised Land", the Palestinian is always suspected until proven innocent. Israeli Jews can beat Palestinians without being legally sanctioned, but if a Palestinian reacts to an insult he or she is brutally punished. Have you seen the Palestinian villages near the Jewish settlements? Don't they remind you of the "National Park" where the "Red Indians" lived in the USA? We are the "Red Indians" ... We are the "dirty Arabs". Three weeks ago, I received a letter from our mutual friend, Ibrahim Al-Najjar, in which he describes what happened to him in Jerusalem. He parked his car on Allenby Street and when he returned the windshield was smashed. He went to the police station to report the case. The officer in charge, he found out later, was a settler from Qiryat Arba. On realising that Ibrahim was a Palestinian, the officer hesitated. "When do you think peace will prevail in this region?" he asked. "When you leave our country," Ibrahim replied. The officer said, "This is the Eretz Yisrael (Greater Israel) and we will never leave. You Arabs are a backward people. We Jews are civilised." Two weeks later Ibrahim was visiting his parents in Beit Hanina, a suburb of Jerusalem. A Jewish settler parked his car nearby. Carrying a machine gun and a club he walked towards a Palestinian peasant who was selling vegetables and started beating him. Then he smashed the vegetables with his boots. After that he retreated to his car pointing his machine-gun at passers-by, and left. When Ibrahim saw this he remembered the settler's so-called civilisation and thanked God that he was not civilised like him. In Jenin, The Jerusalem Post reported that six Israeli soldiers ordered an old Palestinian water-carrier off his donkey and rode on his back, "just for fun". I sincerely want Israelis and Palestinians to understand each other. However, it is not enough that we just "understand" each other. Two months ago an Israeli writer asked me if I "would have the courage to invite Israelis" to my home. I said that when the Palestinians regain their inalienable rights and a sovereign independent state is established, and if Israelis were willing to come, I had no objection whatsoever. Two generations of Palestinians have been born, have lived, grown up and acquired a consciousness without a homeland. It is an appalling contradiction because to my generation of Palestinians, exiled for 58 years, the concept of a homeland has become nearly incomprehensible. Our destiny has forced us to come to terms with the idea that homelessness is the homeland. Like an existential thirst, we keep our shared moral and cultural notion of "Palestinianness", even as we wander the globe all these years wearing our sense of "otherness". Being stateless is the only "state" we belong to, and we have long since developed an aboriginal sense about how to live in this peculiar condition. It is tragically ironic that the Jews had to uproot another people from theirs to achieve their "Promised Land". After 58 years of encounters with diverse societies around the world, the Palestinians have come to feel that they belong to a nation much larger than territorial Palestine, a nation that is diversely rich, cogent and genuine, even if political configurations seem to make it otherwise. It is interesting to consider how Israel, established as a centre for the rejuvenation of Judaic heritage, has become the heart of the crisis within it. But as Palestinians, we are constantly afflicted by our people's dreams for normal statehood, our endurably pitiful search for a place to escape the terrors of our history. Dreams of this kind are more intense than material fact. They become a focus for the emotions -- more real than reality itself. Palestinians have suffered the institutionalised humiliation of Israeli occupation, the helplessness of statelessness, the horror of massacres. We have suffered degradation from the code of bullying embraced by Jewish settlers. Yet in the very excesses of our suffering lies our continual claim to dignity and rebirth. We have become ennobled by the vengeful spite of our enemies. Even if others do not see us so, it is our own self-image that the future calls. Although this suffering has not nearly come to an end, there is hope. For when it finishes, we will be there. We will be there not only to rejoice in the resurrection of our national existence, but because at last, we will have realised a desperate need -- to live in a country where we will have our own government to assail; our own politicians, bureaucrats and elected officials to ridicule; our own future to debate. No one realises how formidably exquisite a thought it is to a Palestinian writer like myself, raised in a refugee camp, stateless all his life, to be able to dream thus. As you can see, the Palestinians are yearning for peace more than the Israelis, because we are more harmed by its absence. The jeeps driving down the streets in Nablus, Gaza and Jerusalem will not be filled with Israeli occupation soldiers. There will not be a knock on the door in the middle of the night by an Israeli policeman with a preventive detention warrant. The papers we carry on us will not be a "stateless travel document", but an innocuous driver's license. The men standing on the kerb will be carrying bricklayer tools to build a house, not Israeli soldiers carrying explosives to blow houses up. When a Palestinian fills in a form, he or she will not agonise over the blank space requiring one to state one's nationality. And finally, wherever a Palestinian may opt to live in the world, he or she will know that, in a moment of crisis, in a moment of helplessness, he or she has somewhere to go. He can return. Until that happens, however -- until a Palestinian can regain what almost every Israeli takes for granted -- he lives in a void. He caresses thoughts. He merely sees the redness in the blood of vision. He has nothing to squander. Absolutely Nothing. I do not doubt that you share with me the same belief that Palestinians and Israelis can co-exist in one state. But the obstinacy, repression and cruelty of Israeli leaders have destroyed this hope. And so, we must keep on trying. We must introduce our children to a much better dream. Palestine, the cradle of civilisation, if given peace, can again become an earthy Garden of Eden. If I did not believe that this will happen, sooner or later, I would despair -- and I refuse to despair. Sincerely, Abdel-Qader Yassine * The writer is a Palestinian social scientist.
