A State for All Its Citizens—One Palestinian’s Dream of Peace

A State for All Its Citizens—One Palestinian’s Dream of Peace

By Samah Jabr

For the past two years I have longed to be able to spend a Sunday in New York’s Central Park. I remember it as a place where people of every color, race and creed enjoy the blossom of pink spring flowers. The park’s wonderful configuration of elm trees provided shade for a diversity of people: Chinese giving backrubs; Africans selling their crafts on the sidewalks; a gorgeous black model in a flimsy dress sitting next to a young white man; an Eastern-looking scholar with a long beard and a short cloak leaning on the grass and enjoying his privacy; young boys with kippas playing competitively on their skateboards; sporty women in every possible outfit and hairstyle, looking after little kids, jogging or walking their dogs along the green grass. It is a diversity in which I revel.

South Africa, too, is a rainbow nation. After the defeat of constitutional prejudice and the barriers of apartheid, South Africa is on the right path for peace. Freedom was the first step—now the battle for advancement, and against crime and disease goes on.

I yearn for these places precisely because, just as the walls have come down in South Africa, they are being raised in my homeland. The most infamous of these is the huge wall being established on the illusory Green Line separating Israeli-inhabited areas from Palestinians and their homes. Those of us who live here know that walls do not reduce violence or stop Israeli tanks or Palestinian bombers. They do, however, separate those of us who are willing to meet each other. Walls emphasize stereotypes and deepen the sectarian hatred and animosity on both sides. Walls are being built here to shatter into pieces our dream of peace.

You may be surprised to know that I am speaking here not of a physical structure, but of the “two-state solution.” These days my ears are full of the region’s cries of war that grow ever louder with time. But the “peace” that the world and the Israeli left wish upon us is based on walls: a two-state proposal that is misleadingly or mistakenly being called a “solution.”

This “solution” will only maintain the exclusivity of occupation and propagate Zionism’s profound inequality in land proportion and resources, water, economy, advancement and—most importantly—military, between the two states. This is a “solution” that will reward the foreign occupiers by awarding them legal status and normal relationships in the Middle East, while giving us Palestinians bits and pieces of our homeland, cantons that are separated from each other by Jewish-only settlements and their safe roads.

This two-state “solution” advocates a demilitarized “Palestinian state” that has no direct borders with any of its Arab neighbors but instead is surrounded by the Middle East’s only nuclear power. A “transient state,” says the American administration, that will be bestowed on one condition: that we Palestinians behave and “elect” a “reformed” and “democratic” authority (by “Israeli-American” standards)—and that only after another three more years of occupation.

And so, while Israel continues bringing its 2,000-year “refugees” to this land, and extolling its war criminals as national heroes and electing them prime minister, we Palestinians are expected to give up the right of return to over 60 percent of the Palestinian nation, to abandon our political prisoners and to condemn our freedom fighters. Instead of the single infamous Jericho Casino, the new Palestinian Authority might build a dozen, and we’ll continue having no factories, no infrastructure and no basic elements of independence.

The two-state “solution” does not meet any minimal ambition of peace, freedom and a dignified future for Palestinians. It jeopardizes our basic human and national rights of self-sovereignty. Except for municipal matters like collecting our own garbage, our nation will be totally dependent on the state of Israel. And we will be expected to do something in return, like collecting the garbage of the “neighbors,” washing their dishes and continuing to provide cheap labor to our tormentors and oppressors.

For these reasons, the two-state “solution” has a very poor prognosis. Yes, it can impose a truce and temporary stability—but not a real peace. The profound inequality on which it is based will bring recurrent flare-ups of violence in the not-too-distant future.

Its poor chance of success is not the only reason to oppose it, however. I oppose it because it has no appeal to the average Palestinian. We all know that it is simply a less ugly mask of occupation that will make the Israelis look more beautiful to the world, while continuing to oppress us—to the world’s silence. This “solution” has been introduced as a means of making Palestinians bow to the inevitable.

The Palestinians are a cosmopolitan nation, however. We are the descendants of a mixture of cultures and civilizations that have lived in this land since the Stone Age. We have Canaanite, Semite, Aramaic, Arab, Turkish, African and European blood in our veins. Here we were born, and here our forefathers have lived. A common history, a common passion for the one homeland and the same bleeding wound unite us.

We are not xenophobic or exclusive. We are Muslims, Christians, indigenous Jews, Baha’is and Druze. Over the centuries our doors were open to foreigners. The Armenians fleeing genocide found shelter among Palestinians, Africans came to Palestine as pilgrims, were caught by the magic of Jerusalem and have stayed here ever since. The early Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution were accepted within the Palestinian community, worked with Palestinians, lived in their towns, and intermarried with them. According to the Palestinian National Charter, the document that lays out our national principles, Jews who immigrated to Palestine before the1948 Nakba are still considered Palestinians.

Unlike the Armenian refugees, however, the European Zionist Jews brought with them their guns and a vile colonialist agenda. They came to claim Palestinian land as their territory and to shove the Palestinians away to create room for more and more occupiers. The international community shamelessly supported the occupation to rid itself of their own “Jewish problem” at home.

Our rejection of the Zionist project is based on the rejection of foreign occupation, the unjust partition plan and the theft of our homeland and resources—not to mention the human crimes that have been committed to realize the Jewish dream of an exclusive state.

Although any nation would demand that foreign occupiers take their guns and luggage and go home, I do acknowledge that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very complex. The emergence of two generations of Israelis born in the land their forefathers occupied makes thing infinitely more confused. It means that this conflict will not be solved until we recognize the presence and the humanity of the other, rectify the wounds of the past, acknowledge the wrong that has been done to Palestinians and then undo those wrongs as best we can.

As the human crisis in occupied Palestine haunts me, and a humanistic, just solution to it puzzles me, I recall the joy of diversity and peace in Central Park and South Africa. Hope for me lies in a multi-national, multi-ethnic pluralistic democratic state of historic Palestine for all its citizens. Palestinians who were born in Palestine, the descendants of those dispossessed and expelled by military force, those Israelis born in the land, and the Jews who arrived here before the Israeli occupation, rather than the immigrant occupiers, all have the moral right to live in a free, democratic Palestine as equal citizens; in which one person equals one vote.

Zionists and their friends will say that what I am proposing means their extermination. “You are asking us to commit mass suicide,” one Israeli “peacemaker” told me. In fact, I’m calling for their moral and ethical liberation from the sin of occupation, for their freedom from pathological fear and the neurosis of security, all the while restoring their human rights as equal citizens in a free country.

Fundamental Palestinian Demands

The right of return should be restored to our refugees—it is up to them whether they exercise it or not. Freedom to all our political prisoners is a cardinal pillar to peace in the region. War criminals should be tried and punished for their actions. As for the occupiers and their collaborators in the Palestinian community, a workable solution based on respect for human rights and international law should be negotiated.

While this is not an easy solution, it is the closest there is to earthly justice. It must be implemented slowly but surely (as opposed to just slowly), to prepare the Palestinians to accept their oppressors as equal citizens, and to prepare the Israelis for shedding their privileges that rest on exploitation in order to earn their acceptance as equal citizens.

This is not my fantasy of peace—it is my hope of peace. The undoing of colonization has been achieved throughout history. South Africa is a living example of the triumph of hope and reconciliation over oppression and prejudice. Palestine can be the latest such inspiration.

I’m not every Palestinian, but neither am I alone among Palestinians. I’m a voice of hope willing to speak out when other voices are caught up in fear and despair. My call is a call of humanity and freedom that has not been silenced through intimidation or temptation, and never will be. Even when I am denied many of my very basic human rights, I choose to exercise the right to hope for and dream of a better future for a home and a people I so dearly love.

Samah Jabr is a medical intern in her native city of Jerusalem.