The Elections are Coming!

It is a sad commentary on the state of the Palestinians and their struggle for freedom that articles written more than thirty-five years ago are just as relevant and applicable to their plight today as they were the day they were written. In the November/December 1983 issue of Palestine Perspectives, Muhammad Hallaj wrote the following commentary:

It is often said that the presidential election season is a time of paralysis for American foreign policy. This may be true in some areas of U.S. foreign policy, but certainly not in the Middle East. American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict does not suffer from paralysis, but instead becomes gripped with a fit of epilepsy.

This pathetic seasonal phenomenon has already made its appearance in preparation for the coming elections. The various contestants, whether they are guarding their jobs or grabbing for them, have already begun to pay homage to Greater Israel. Although we have become somewhat accustomed to this irresponsible ritual, occasionally we are still shocked by how far some candidates go in sacrificing America's interests and integrity in their chase after votes and campaign money. 

This piece was written in response to a speech by Senator John Glenn to the Foreign Policy Association in New York. Dr Hallaj summarized the main thrust of the speech as "an attack on the concept of 'evenhandedness' in U.S. Middle East Policy. He [Senator Glenn] charged that evenhandedness means a 'tilt away from Israel,' as if that were a self-evident evil."

Those words were penned as the nation prepared for the 1984 elections. Today we are preparing for the 2020 elections. Decades have passed, yet in the midst of it all, American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict suffers another seizure. The new Middle East Peace Plan is introduced by none other than Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. It is a plan tilted so far toward Israel that even The New York Times cannot ignore the tilt.

Mr. Trump vowed at the start of his presidency that he would negotiate a “bigger and better deal” to broker peace than anyone could imagine. Three years later, experts say that the plan, developed under the supervision of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, falls remarkably short of that goal and is unlikely ever to become the basis for a peace agreement. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/world/middleeast/trump-peace-plan-explained.html 

 What is that saying? The more things change, the more they remain the same.

The phrase was coined by French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Peace Process Revisited

Muhammad Hallaj wrote the following in his editorial in the November/December 1983 issue of Palestine Perspectives. Unfortunately, his words are just as true and applicable today, more than 35 years later, as it was when he wrote it.

For the first time in recorded history, the world community committed itself in the twentieth century to the ideal of universalizing self-government and economic well-being. Self-determination an development became primary objectives of contemporary human civilization.

The transformation of Palestine into Israel in 1948 and in subsequent years deprived the Palestinian people of the opportunity to share this human dream. They have been denied self-government, and their lives have been disrupted and harassed. 

Granted, the vision of universalizing self-government and development has been only partially and imperfectly achieved. Hundreds of millions of people around the world continue to suffer from hunger, disease and ignorance. And in many countries decolonization has not brought liberty and justice to their peoples. The struggle has not yet been consummated everywhere. But nowhere in the world, except in Palestine, has the deprivation been so deliberate, conscious and determined. 

In other places, the problem has been a failure of the dream, a failure to benefit from an opportunity which has been granted. In Palestine, it has been a failure to grant the opportunity and to share the dream. And that is the rationale and the nobility of the Palestinian struggle... 

The struggle in Palestine is not about the location of boundaries, the confiscation of land, the dissolution of municipalities or political imprisonment, although it concerns all of this and much more. It is fundamentally about the inadmissibility of singling out the Palestinian people for denial of access to the contemporary dream. 

All efforts and initiatives made in the name of peace in the Middle East which fail to take this fact as their underlying premise are doomed to fail and deserve to fail. They are doomed to fail because they do not address the issue, and they deserve to fail because they make a mockery of a universally cherished human vision.

And so it is that we begin one more decade with one more mockery of justice.