Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2001, page 18

The Double Tragedy: A Palestinian’s Point of View

By Samah Jabr With Betsy Mayfield

To any sane, civilized person of conscience, the symbolic and very real attack on America’s economic and defense system and the mass killing of innocent people is a horrible human tragedy. To many Americans, the object of the Sept. 11 attacks was their Western way of life, civilization’s progress, and human potential. As one American columnist wrote, “They are fighting against individualism, pluralism, freedom and secularism.”

As a Muslim Palestinian, I can think of no justifiable motive for such an immoral, inhuman action. But I also believe that these violators of humanity seem to care as little for those of us living in poverty and oppression as they do for those enjoying the benefits of Western civilization.

To call their actions cowardly, however, is to misuse the word. In these tremulous times, we need to carefully consider the subtle connotations of the words we use. These warring madmen do not display cowardly fear or timidity in their attacks, nor are their actions “senseless.” Flying a plane into a building is not the act of a coward. Acts obviously thought out, over a period of months, if not years, clearly are not senseless.

What is wrong, simply, is that their actions display a total disrespect for God and for human beings. Their actions are an affront to Islam and the compassion taught in the Qur’an. The use of such violence to advance ideology is an outrage as well to every other compassion-based religion. Islam means to bow before God’s greatness, to treasure human life, not to use religion to bring harm to God’s children, regardless of the spiritual or cultural path these children choose.

For Palestinians, particularly those of us who are Muslim, the attack on America represents a double tragedy. It harms civilians like ourselves, and it sets us aside as likely suspects without regard to who we are and how little we want to participate in such evil, let alone stimulate a war. Not having met us as individuals, it’s understandable that many Americans believe the propaganda that we are all uncivilized, uneducated, religious fanatics willing to blow ourselves up for salvation. Many in the West fail to see Palestinians as people, much less individuals. They accept the rhetoric that we do not exist and fail to see that we, like any other national group, have our own gentle, good-natured, thoughtful people, as well as our radicals.

Palestinians are an historic Middle Eastern community of Arabs, both Christian and Muslim. Because, however, of our constant effort to maintain our nation in spite of the state-sponsored terrorism leveled at us, during this era, by the Israeli government and Zionist settlers who believe they are doing God’s will by trying to destroy us, we are perceived as “the” Arabs, to be suspected whenever an ugly, evil event takes place. As in the case of the Oklahoma City tragedy, “we” may later be absolved of the crime. Nevertheless, fingers quickly are pointed at us, as if we really were the demons our oppressors like to label us, venomously. “If it weren’t for those Palestinians,” some Americans say whenever they hear news of violence.

Let me say here and now that very few of us Palestinians would sanction, in any way whatsoever, such violence as Timothy McVeigh’s or the Sept. 11 tragedy. On the contrary, when we go to America, we sense the magnificence of freedom—not to do anything one wants, but to be willing to cooperate for the good of all and to value the exemplary enterprise of democracy.

In their grief and sorrow, however, I wonder how many Americans read the accounts of Israel’s refusal to sit and talk with our Palestinian leaders about a just peace. On the back pages of newspapers are accounts of Colin Powell appealing to Ariel Sharon to, please, meet with the Palestinians. Here on the occupied West Bank, we see that the world’s attention, focused on the World Trade Center violence, encourages those who would attack us, as Sharon steps up his own brand of terrorism. Before we could bow our heads in sadness, 25 more Palestinians were murdered. Few around the world had the energy to express dismay.

Here in Palestine, we know what happens when innocent citizens become targets. I work in our hospitals, where Palestinian children are brought in with bones broken by Israeli soldiers; teenagers come holding their hands over eyes wiped out by rubber-coated steel bullets; aid workers from other parts of the world enter our hospitals bleeding and broken. We Palestinians know the horror of being trapped, unable to escape.

The World Trade Center victims were trapped, too, regardless of their nationalities or systems of belief. People from as far away from America as Australia died in this very humanly construed, ungodly destruction. Evidently, it mattered not to those carrying out the devastation whether they murdered Muslims, Jews or Buddhists, Asians, Africans or Caucasians. Their only concern was to advance their own ideology, without respect for the moral values, secularly or religiously taught, of others.

With regard to the issue of televised coverage of Palestinians expressing joy over America’s sorrow, we know how that hurts, too. Many of our people remember watching 1967 television accounts of Americans in 17 states celebrating Israel’s victory over us. Israel’s success in 1967 made it possible for that state, with American support, to take more and more of our land, leaving us in an increasingly desperate condition. Still fresh in our minds is the devastation made possible by the country whose support and military might and U.N. vetoes and denial of the daily realities of occupation has crushed so many of us.

Understandably, then, if not rightly, the feeling of resentment toward America boiled over in a few Palestinians, particularly at a time when they were unusually tense with fear of the violence surrounding us. Watching the Sept. 11 catastrophe, some Palestinians reacted with raw emotion, revealing their deepest agony, but quite inappropriately expressed in reaction to someone else’s tragedy. They simply laughed when they should have cried.

When the dust began to clear from the streets of Manhattan and from the confusion in our minds, however, it was not destruction of the symbols of globalization and the most powerful war machine on earth that captured our hearts. It was what we know of dying and of the killing of the innocent. We face this every day. We know the intensity of feeling Americans are experiencing, perhaps for the first time in their lives. So, like people in America and around the world, we light candles and lay out branches from our remaining olive trees. We pray that the victims will know peace and that their families will be able to cope with loss. Just as we connected with people from every segment of the globe to celebrate the year 2000 with joyful song, we join with those expressing the world’s sadness. We know that, in our humanity, we belong to one another.

Now, as we watch the unfolding of reaction, we see that there are those in America and elsewhere who call for retribution: more violence, more fear, more hate. America’s religious pundits and radio hosts denounce terrorism as if that term denotes the actions of only one side in this struggle. Others see terrorism as the new foxhole, the venue of modern warfare, and realize that a war, now, will mean the deaths of the innocent everywhere, not only in places like desperate Afghanistan, but in America, too.

There is yet another side speaking out, however. Contradicting the strident, coercive voices in America and elsewhere, thoughtful people speak of establishing a genuinely strong international court of law to bring real justice to those who would destroy us all.

Finally, I am amazed at the capacity of people everywhere to pray. In contrast to the destruction of the World Trade Center is the sight of people holding vigils, singing songs of love and holding hands, united in their determination to silence the beasts who long for war. What happened on Sept. 11 was not God’s will. Our response to it, however, shall reflect the will of human beings.

Samah Jabr is a medical student and lifelong resident of Jerusalem. This piece was written with Betsy Mayfield of Ames, Iowa.

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