We keep dragging broken promises. When, after the Ottoman defeat in the First World War, Great Britain and France took possession of their Arab territories, the complicated question of the Orient began. Despite the international agreements then adopted, two peoples, the Armenian and the Palestinian, were left without the promised independent administration.
We continue to drag exiles. My life as a correspondent began in Black September of 1970, when King Hussein's army defeated the splinter Palestinian organizations, which had imposed their force on the Hashemite kingdom, defying Western-reinforced authority. Yasser Arafat's Al-Fatah and other rival Marxist-leaning groups then prevailed in weak Lebanon until, in 1982, they were driven out by the Israeli army. Arafat had to go into exile in Tunisia, until thanks to the Oslo accords with Israel, which Hamas continues to stubbornly ignore, the historic Palestinian leader won a moderate victory with his conditional return to the promised land.
Arafat's death, never fully clarified, broke the difficult relationship between the Palestinian world of Gaza and that of Ramallah, more contemporaneous with the Jewish occupiers. And the distance and division between the two territories has been a failure for the docile resistance of a subjugated people towards their freedom.
During the hopeful and secular decades of the sixties and seventies, the Palestinian resistance brought together organizations of various ideologies, among which the Democratic and Popular Front (of more or less Marxist ideology) of George Habache and Nayef Hawatmeh also stood out. They aspired to the possibility that their national struggle was also a hope for social reforms. Their difficulties in popular adaptation and the collapse of the USSR left them fatherless and motherless.
Meanwhile, in the isolated and impoverished Gaza, the Islamist tendency of Hamas, which aspired to extend its influence beyond its tiny territory, became the undisputed power of the strip, both because of the indisputable success of its justly won elections against the corruption of Al-Fatah – although it no longer called the polls again – as for the success of its Islamic radicalism.
His Islamizing power exceeded the nationalist pretensions of the divided Palestinian resistance born decades earlier in Kuwait with men like Arafat and expressed since the 1960s in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria.
Both Habache and Hawatmeh had studied in the progressive and revolutionary atmosphere that then existed in Beirut, the time of the great illusion of the Palestinian revolution sung by poets such as Mahmud Darwish, winning the hearts of the European left and the his illusions of changing the world: that Paris of 1968, imagination in power. That year was also the time of great hope for the liberation of Palestine. There is almost nothing left of those illusions. From Jean Genet to Juan Goytisolo, they sang the attractive and heroic figure of the fedaí against the power of the Jewish State.
The scandalous war in Gaza has inflamed the Middle East when most were speculating about a new era of moderation following the Abraham agreements between Israel and some oil monarchies of the Gulf, agreements negotiated with the son-in-law of ex-president Trump. It was speculated that, in some Arab countries, a new generation less and less tempted by war had emerged, eager to live without the Arab echo of decades of so many frustrations and military defeats.
If the peace between Egypt and Israel was so difficult - the leaders who tried the hardest to achieve it, President Anwar al-Sadat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, were killed by fanatics from both countries - it is not seen now no way in which the governments of Israel and the heads of Hamas are willing to negotiate any form of armistice.
The Palestinian question has re-emerged impetuously and has provoked an irritation of opinion around the world, a tumult of popular emotions that further disturbs the unequal confrontation. The issue of Palestine has once again prevailed over all the Middle East conflicts of these decades, such as the wars in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, the confrontation between Sunnis and Shiites, the years of terror of Al- Qaida or the Islamic Emirate or the mirages of the unfortunate Arab springs.
From Marx to God, Palestine is once again at the heart of conflicts in the Middle East.
