West Bank Palestinians will not be bowed or cowed into submission

Imagine this: You live in your own homeland, which now is under military occupation, where you are obligated daily to go through sundry checkpoints manned by aggressive and trigger-happy foreign soldiers - before whom you're expected to evince humble rectitude when addressing them, lest they shoot you in the head.

You experience this on your way to work, to visit a friend, to see a doctor, to buy groceries, to pick up your kids from school and to conduct those other routine chores associated with quotidian life.

Also imagine, in addition to that, the harrowing image, in that homeland of yours, of illegal settlers storming villages - intent on setting fire to homes, cars, shops, orchards and, most reprehensible of all, olive trees that had been rooted to the land since Roman times.

Imagine house demolitions, arbitrary curfews, land expropriations, forced displacement, abusive detentions (including of children as young as 12 years old) and, well, the rest of it. In short, imagine an entrenched system of institutionalised repression.

And rampant sadism.

Rampant sadism because it is difficult for one to conceive of a bestiality, a lunacy of utter vindictiveness more stark than the spectacle caught on video last week of Israeli settlers attacking relief convoys passing through the occupied West Bank on their way to Gaza, with attackers ransacking and burning trucks, beating up Palestinian drivers (leaving several hospitalized), all in order to block food (food!) from reaching a population sinking deeper and deeper into famine.

This tableau of horrors is but an abstracted image of life lived under occupation in the West Bank.

The big picture

Now were we to step back from that image, much in the manner of a person stepping back from a painting in order to perceive it better, it is unlikely that we would fail to see mirrored in it fragments of elemental terror beyond all rational understanding - terrors felt by a choked collective psyche gasping for air, terrors inflicted on the geography of a people's national soul, terrors invoked by that famous quote from George Orwell's iconic novel 1984, "Imagine a boot stamping on your face - forever."

And imagine is all we, who don't live those terrors, can do.

Look, all that needs to be said and written about the West Bank, that little segment of historic Palestine left to its indigenous people after the dismemberment of their homeland in 1948, has already been said and written (by countless political commentators, human rights organisations, UN rapporteurs and others).

And repeatedly so, often to the point of litany, the point where we now have stopped turning away in nauseated disbelief at what we hear and what we learn. Evil of that kind, you see, has a way about it of declaring, in the words of Hannah Arendt, its own form of banality.

Sure, today our attention is focused, as it should be, on the unspeakable suffering inflicted on the people of Gaza. We forget that the suffering inflicted on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, also as we speak, is equally unspeakable - its pitilessness the same in degree though it may be different in kind.

So what's the end game for Palestinians?

Transformation

For Palestinians everywhere, the answer is now plain: It's time for a transformation of historic Palestine into a sovereign, pluralistic, secular and democratic state.

This should be in place of the ethno-nationalist, settler state that was grafted on it by the Zionist movement in 1948, one whose Jewish supremacist core was made even more explicit again in the jingoistic, unabashedly racist Nation-State law passed by the Israeli Knesset in 2018.

And if this transformation will take a lot of time, a lot of sacrifice, a lot of pain, then so be it.

That time, sacrifice and pain will be but a thimbleful when compared to that endured by other subjugated peoples around the world who have struggled to be free, such as the tenacious people of Ireland who had lived through more than half a millennium of misery before they liberated their Emerald Isle.

The so-called two-state solution is a fable, a vision suffused with the illogic of night dreams.

Gaza is a Cartagenenian wasteland and the West Bank is dotted, like a slice of Swiss cheese, with multiple illegal settlements inhabited by multitudes of colonists.

Today there are 144 of these settlements spread across the territory -- including 12 in the occupied East Jerusalem, as well as 104 "outposts," proto-settlements yet to be "designated" by the government as full-fledged settlements.

As many as 650,000 Israelis live there. That's a hell of a lot of land colonised by a whole lot of colonisers - all clearly in violation of international law, including the Geneva Conventions, which bar an occupying power from transferring its population to occupied territory.

Over the years, State Department spokespersons have consistently identified this frenzied colonisation project as merely being "not helpful to the peace process," and left it at that, a posture that renders the United States a co-conspirator in the crime.

So it's easy to see why this putative "separate Palestinian state" has, literally, nowhere to go.

Prevailing

Forget about it. Palestinians, an ancient people from an ancient land who are motivated by the teleological spirit of history, know in their hearts that the imperatives of that history dictate that there be a free Palestine in their land.

You wonder why, after close to seven decades of subjugation under a brutal occupation, Palestinians have not only refused to be cowed into submission but have actually grown, in time, more emboldened.

I too as a Palestinian, albeit a diaspora Palestinian, have wondered about this phenomenon.

I can tell you this: Whenever I tried in recent years to think through the oppressor-oppressed dialectic that defines the nature of interaction between Palestine and Israel, I was always reminded of that opening scene in Francis Ford Coppola's cinematic masterpiece, Apocalypse Now (1979).

US Army Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen) is sitting alone in his hotel room in Saigon, drunk and frustrated, waiting to be called for a mission in one of Vietnam's jungles and brokenly muttering to himself: "Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every time Charlie (a Vietnamese guerrilla fighter) squats in the bush, he gets stronger. And each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little."

As we all know, in the end, Charlie won the war. And Charlie did that because in a liberation struggle, the oppressed always, without fail, become ennobled by the spite of the oppressors. So equally true has it been for the people of Palestine.