Might reading fiction help us see better into the future than analysing current events trends?
It’s a question I raised in a seminar hosted by Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper to mark its 20th anniversary. With the future of Palestine and the Arab region as its theme, the event was attended by Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, Abdel-Wahab Badrakhan, former deputy editor-in-chief of Al-Hayat newspaper, and Ambassador Nabil Fahmy, former Egyptian minister of Foreign Affairs.
Towards the end of the seminar, I asked the participants what they thought the situation in the region would be when we celebrated the newspaper’s 40th anniversary. Charbel responded that only a creative writer would ask such a question, since 20 years is too long a timeframe in the science of political analysis. The Lebanese journalist had a point. With events happening so rapidly that the world seems to change by the day, if not by the hour, it is barely possible to keep pace with the present, let alone foresee the future.
Still, my question had a rationale. I was not seeking analysis, but rather a visualisation of the future of Palestine in particular. As Charbel mentioned, many writers formulated such future visions. Perhaps the most famous is the British novelist George Orwell’s novel 1984. It was published in 1949, meaning that he was looking 35 years into the future, as opposed to the 20 I proposed. It portrays a dystopian world in which the state had become so pervasive and invasive that it controlled every aspect of people’s lives. One of the most widely read books in history, 1984 has been translated into 65 languages and has sold more than 30 million copies. It is one of the most frequently cited works in political commentary on our times.
I believe that whatever becomes of Palestine 20 years from now will be felt throughout the entire region. By Palestine, I refer to historic Palestine, meaning the West Bank, occupied Jerusalem, Gaza and the territory that has become the state of Israel. That land has always constituted an organic and interconnected whole geographically, historically and in terms of urban and cultural continuity. Therefore, the attempt to arbitrarily divide and dismember it by means of the UN partition resolution of 1947 was doomed to fail from day one. It fell short of Zionist territorial aspirations, and it failed to safeguard Palestinian rights. Less than a year after the resolution was adopted, the newly established Jewish state forcibly expanded its boundaries, annexing territories that had been designated part of the Palestinian state. Twenty years later, in 1967, Israel forcibly seized and occupied the rest of historic Palestine. Today it is trying to forcibly expel millions of Palestinians from the occupied territories and seize more land in flagrant violation of international prohibitions against the seizure of the lands by force.
Given how contemporary and ancient history prove that historic Palestine is an organic whole, it is little wonder that the cry “from the river to the sea” is proclaimed by both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. They understand that Palestine is indivisible, and each side wants it for itself as each has religious and historical ties to the land.
Egypt’s Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz wrote a short story called “My lot and my fate” about a mother who gave birth to conjoined twins. She wished they could be separated so they could live independent lives and do whatever they wanted and go wherever they wanted without their twin tagging along all the time. Since that proved impossible, she named one of the twins “My Lot” and the other “My Fate.” The fate of Palestine during the next two decades will not be so different. The two-state solution, to which everyone has been paying lip service for years, has become a formula for exoneration from responsibility, not a plan for practical implementation. Even if that solution could be imposed on Israel by dint of immense international pressure, it would still require the absence of Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government. And, even if it could be implemented, it would be temporary or extremely fragile because of ongoing hostilities between the two states, while the proposed disarmament of one while the other retains its nuclear weapons would perpetuate the sense of injustice and fuel the dynamics of antagonism. In short, the prospects for a durable peace would remain weak.
In any event, Israel as conceived by the Zionist project will not relinquish its drive to encompass the whole of so-called Eretz Israël which, according to its Biblically inspired definition, comprises the entire territory of historic Palestine, and turn that into an exclusively Jewish state. So far, successive Israeli governments have not been able to achieve that. The twins are still conjoined, sharing the same land. This does not apply historic Palestine alone but also to the interior of Israel itself. Among the seven million citizens who make up the current population of Israel, over two million are Arabs. As the Arab population is increasing at a faster pace than the Jewish population, the next twenty years could bring about an entirely new demographic situation. Instead of the usual threat the Israeli occupation force is meant to deal with, Israel will have a different force to contend with: Palestinian numerical parity or superiority. That presence will automatically strip Israel of its Jewish character and put paid to the vision of an ethnically pure state, which is the type of concept that has become anathema to humanitarian thought since the defeat of the Nazis in World War II.
The Portuguese writer and Nobel laureate José Saramago, who was an outspoken critic of Israel and its crimes against the Palestinians, wrote a wonderful novel called The Stone Raft. Published at the time that Portugal was negotiating its accession into the European Union, the novel portrays the Iberian Peninsula as having suddenly broken off from the Europe continent, so its collective Spanish and Portuguese population wake up to find themselves adrift in the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually the landmass wends its way southwestward and attaches itself to South America, where people have closer historical, cultural and linguistic ties than they do with Europe. Will something similar happen to Palestine? Will it eventually return to its historic unity as a single undivided land inhabited by Muslims, Jews, and Christians living side by side, free from Zionism’s abhorrent intolerance and fanaticism? Perhaps that vision is not so farfetched. At present, Zionist ideology appears to be crumbling beneath the weight of mounting international condemnation. Perhaps in twenty years’ time, it will have faded from existence, just as the Nazi theory of Aryan superiority did before it.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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