or separable from it only by abstraction. Our struggle for statehood, for freedom, for self-definition was, in effect, our window on life. We knew that if the Palestinian Revolution lost any of this energy, every Palestinian would, in a vital and central way, become less Palestinian.
This process of renewal seemed active wherever we chose to pitch our metaphorical tents, not only in Lebanon, but elsewhere.
Then, a walk through the Arab University district, where the Movement’s offices and institutions were located, quickly proved—to a native son who had grown up in the streets of Beirut—that beyond the outward circumstance of anarchy lay a greater reality of revolutionary dreams. And the streets teemed with Iranian revolutionaries out to topple the Shah, Turkish leftists training to form a native underground, Egyptian Communists organizing to overthrow Sadat, Sudanese poets hiding from Numeiri’s repressive regime, Nicaraguan Sandinistas out to liberate their society from Somoza, Arab Marxists who believed that armed struggle was the only instrument of liberation in the Arab world, Tunisian intellectuals coming to grips with their inability to write a coherent theory of the “Arab nation,” plus European Trotskyists, U.S. pacifists, English ideologues, East German labor unionists—they were all there, not to mention all manner of Arab-American hucksters who had a readymade formula to “turn American public opinion” in our favor in return for this amount of money, or to put out a publication or open a “lobbying office” for that amount.
Though at times shrill and naive, our political values and the subversive energy of our outsidedness as a nation-in-exile had thrown their shadow across the entire Arab world, the third world, the Islamic world, and the socialist world.
Here in Algiers today, however, no one knows that our objective reality, along with these same political values, has already turned on its hinges.
To these Palestinians, and others like them around the world who follow the ten-day proceedings from afar, this is just another Palestine National Council session. A very important one to be sure, since it has been called to reassemble our political ethos and redefine our tactical direction in the wake of war, but nevertheless just another gathering of our parliament-in-exile. With a long catalog of ruin stretching behind us, all the way from the dismemberment of our homeland in 1948 to the siege of Beirut just eight months before, and with death sweeping over our history with such cruel frequency, we have thought that the 1982 war was just another firestorm, from which we will emerge intact, even purified. None suspect that each one of us (for in national struggle history is Everyman’s affair) is destined to suffer, however uniquely, some part of the tragedy and dislocation that followed the siege of Beirut. None suspect that the fall of movements, or causes, from grace could be accompanied by a festive mood such as the one characterizing this sixteenth session of the PNC. None suspect that the arrow of revolt we had shot twenty years before has started its downward flight. And none understand that, whether we like it or not, whether under duress or in agreement, we will have to hand over the leadership of this national struggle—a struggle that has become so ingrained in our daily lives—to another generation of Palestinians.
No. Made haughty by our grief over Sabra/Shatila and arrogant by our ritual of resistance in Beirut, we remain unchanged, unyielding, unmoved in our repose of illusion. A generation of Palestinians that, in its impudence, expected, as we have become accustomed to expecting, that the Arab world, and maybe the world beyond, owes us a living. And support. And respect. And here we are, five thousand of us, to reenact our private anguish on a public stage, unaware that the last authority of reason in everything we had built and struggled for is shattered. We strut about as if we still occupy center stage in the international arena as heroes of a national struggle supported by a consensus of humanity at all its international forums.
At the airport, I sit in the VIP lounge—for where else would men and women who had conducted daily transactions with history sit?—and clutch my Australian passport as other Palestinians arriving on the plane with me clutch their equally hollow travel documents. The man sitting next to me is Mahmoud Darwish, one of our national poets and a friend of many years. He confides that surely there will be trouble soon with the Algerians, a confrontation of sorts with some Palestinian or other. This is an airport, for God’s sake, isn’t it? Where have Palestinians been more wounded at the core than at airports, refused entry, detained, expelled, questioned, humiliated, and so on, because of their travel documents, their national identity, and their revolutionary reputation? I respond that this has happened more often at airports in the Arab world than in the Western world. For this and other reasons, I add, we have become elitists, looking down our noses on Arabs in general, not just on their governments.
Indeed, Palestinians have traditionally considered themselves the most outstanding theoreticians, ideologues, novelists, belle lettrists, bankers, and engineers in the Arab world. They have believed that they were chosen, if not by God, certainly by history, to be the vanguard of the Arab renaissance and to fall into the garb and glove left to them by the Vietnamese after their victory in 1975. Somehow Palestinians have believed all these myths and tried to lay them on people everywhere. And though they have not, after two decades of struggle, liberated any part of the homeland, they have carried within them no germ of preordained failure. It is the world that has failed, not them.
For ten days and nights, we wander around attending General Assembly sessions and various closed-door meetings in the spacious halls of the Palais de Nations by the shore of the Mediterranean. All the well-known heavies of the Revolution are here, striding around the hallways, talking animatedly, gesticulating, and giving speeches, trying to find an idiom of struggle, a political paradigm, to correspond to the new realities of our times. None of them betrays a hint of unease, uncertainty, about our condition. Perhaps it is a statement about us as a people and a nation in struggle that they do not.
Instead there is an incredible flow of energy, even pride. It is, after all, a major accomplishment for the Palestinians not only to be holding a parliamentary session so soon after the devastating events of the 1982 war, but to be holding a parliamentary session at all. For a nation severed from its native ground, with its people fragmented around the world or living under occupation, with its movement, cadres, and leaders constantly hunted down by enemies from within and without the Arab world, to have its own parliament and convene it yearly is no mean accomplishment.
Moreover, to establish the Palestine National Council, a forum for democratic discourse that adopts resolutions then acted upon by the Movement’s executive branch, in a part of the world where institutions of this kind are seen as a threat, is no less than heroic.
And the people who have made it all happen are right here, having converged on Algiers from diverse locales around the Middle East.
In my nihilistic mood today, I see intimations of doom everywhere. Are these men capable, still capable, of comprehending, indeed mastering, the workings of our historical destiny? Whom does one blame—our leaders, ourselves, history, God—for allowing the enemy to chase our fedayeen to the four corners of the Arab world and for allowing the women and children they left behind to be chased to their mass graves in Sabra and Shatila? Whom does one blame for allowing the numbing image to enter our consciousness of the evening sun casting vacant shadows on the fly-covered bodies of our men, women, and children as they lay slaughtered like sheep in the muddy lanes of our refugee camps?
I observe that I am not completely alone in my gloom. The calamitous nature of our condition today, and the swift descent of our movement from center stage, is written on the faces of a great many of our leaders.
But not on Yasser Arafat’s. What is it about this man? Why is it that he does not at least appear to grow old in years, slow in gait, pessimistic in mood? What makes him able to emerge from each upheaval in our national life with renewed vigor, to rebuild, to start all over again? Why have Palestinians rallied around him all these years, these long arduous years, although he has not brought them anything for their labor and sacrifice?
Unlike other Palestinian leaders, whose pronouncements on our condition have always somehow retained a feel of conscious acquisition, Arafat has an intuitive, aboriginal grasp of the Palestinian psyche. His métier as a revolutionary derives from a sense of tenancy, an ability to work from within, the national heart. He operates from a popular, historically based