Régis Debray ...Or A Palestinian For One Day...
As-Safir, 23-12-2009
by Nasri Sayegh
Thank you Régis Debray because you reminded them of me:
You ought to be a bit Palestinian in order to learn how you do not exist. Should you exist at some level at all, it would be because no one has been found to place a tombstone eulogy on the resting place of your insignificant dreams.
You must have lived a harsh experience to be Palestinian, undergone an aggression on Gaza like that of a year ago. Or be a Maqdisian (Jerusalemite) surviving daily spatial traverses, to realize that your birth was in the wrong place, for Al-Quds (Jerusalem) is now a place to pray in from afar, and where Palestinian destruction is the ritual.
You have to be Palestinian even if only by theatric or film performances, to become familiar with larger Arab horizons, densely packed with human and leadership attendance, vacuumed clean of any Palestinian images.
You have to be Palestinian in a peaceful way, in order to witness that even your "surrender" is undesirable. You should learn that the best solution is the "final solution", not to exist at all.
Not to exist in the past and to become impossible to exist in the future.
You have to stand alone naked in this international arena, religious expanse, moral abyss, political syphilis and divine absence to ask: Why am I the curse of the times for a century now? Why am I the inferno, when without sin I succumbed to being this hellfire's fuel?
Because you will not be able to be Palestinian like Palestinians of today are. Because in his place you will shake your hands clean of your conscience, brainwash yourself away from your own language, and call upon God for a permanent rest, to rest in that restless place that gives you no rest?
So, let him speak.
Let him say 'I fought alive and dead, yet I found no way out of this cacophony. I rose up again enough time to have my bones broken again and again. Captured I was until my prison became my homeland of the stateless. Displaced I was, I lived in the open air, yet the sky did not recognize me. I lived in cities of rancidity, but my affliction and degradation was when among my "brothers": locked in slum camps; Palestine barred and busied from me in the cheap morality bazaars, for a handful of sleep and nightmares of returning home.
I did all any sane person would imagine me do.
Clean terrorism I practiced and hijacked aircrafts. Taking up arms I did, in legitimate and forbidden zones! Arrested by my brothers I was, their votes and polls were run on everything I own down to the clothes on my skin. They nearly annihilated me by my own massacres, yet because of the miracle I survived.
"Palestine the Mary" alone saved me, and said to me: Never die.
So I wore my stature on my feet and walked all capitals. I entered Oman where I was slaughtered. I entered Beirut delusional about my return or permanent residence... we were banned and like parcels and items we were deported by ships, to be dispersed in exile.
Only the sea knows our story, because it was more embracing than our countries that were once Arab-that's what the books have told us anyway.
We have done everything that is possible. We went to the United Nations and with bloodied feet we left that place. Texts in supportive statements quickly turned in our hands to water or guillotines.
We went behind the scenes, only to return from Oslo with what we have today ... a disaster.
Do we belong in this world? Or, is there anyone else living in this world like us?
Our insides have been vacuumed, yet it seems we must loose everything we have, to be crushed again, so that bitter bread is born from our shredded bodies.
Gaza, repeatedly slaughtered, destroyed rubble, the entire world appealed for its protection, and now it stands poised for its battle of strangulation... by her brother and its closest sister nations.
When they occupied the land, all the land, we were able to resist. When they occupied the water, all the water, we stood fast in the land. After they took the sea, all the sea, we managed to be patient. We kept our faith after they took God and recruited Him among their elite... Now, they dig the ground around us, in order to prevent tunnels reaching us.
We'll suffocate... However, Palestine will continue on, even without us.
What next?
You have to be Palestinian to find that a solution won't be given, until the world comes to live in Palestine. I the Palestinian, by suspicion, am not the one who made this proposal-suggested a while ago by the great writer Régis Debray.
His suggestion was to transfer the United Nations headquarters to Al-Quds (Jerusalem), and to establish its institutions in Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza. He suggested for the UN Secretary-General along with his aides and advisers to come and live in Palestine, to see how a Palestinian dies at checkpoints. How his home is demolished, how he is killed in cold blood. To see how he is barred from his home and orchard, and how a separation wall is built on his flesh and bones.
To witness how he is prevented from harvesting his olive trees, to know his heart wrenching sorrow for his relatives in captivity. How he becomes a "terrorist" and explodes himself in a bus, pub, crossing or school, and how he kills and lives through wars.
Debray says, these have to live in Palestine, as Palestinians, hide in shelters, evade the shelling in Gaza and raids in the West Bank. They must travel from home to camp and camp to cemetery to know that a Palestinian endures what humanity has no capacity to bear.
Debray puts to a challenge that the international greats, smoking cigars in their hotels and American homes, will be persistently searching for solutions before they have time to exhale that smoke, and find solutions they will, because it holds their cowardly salvation and along with them the salvation of the Palestinians.
The world must receive the baptism of Palestine, in order to have the blessing of solution bestowed upon it.
It is a kind of a dream .... Thank you Régis Debray.
As for filmmaker Michael Moore, who suggested for the Palestinians to give up "terrorism" and cover himself with what remains of earth's dust at night, and a hunger strike after strike. No stone or weapon.
Oh Michael, no one will come to our rescue, none will even see us, for when Ahmad al-Durra was killed, the Zionised Western media accused him of being the cause by asking: Why did he expose himself to the firing of bullets? Why does a Palestinian trade with the blood of his children?
What is required for a solution to come, is it to Arabise Palestine? Come on!
Or is to internationalise it? This has happened already.
What may possibly be required, is for some of the world to become Palestinian, even if it was for only one day.
Once again ... Thank you Régis.