A letter from an Arab nationalist to Netanyahu

When the knock comes: There will come a time—and history demonstrates this with cruel predictability—that the barricades will come crashing down, the slogans will fade, and the engines of oppression will go mute. It will not come with fireworks or victory marches. It will come with a knock. Silence. It will come.

And when that knock finally arrives, Mr Netanyahu, do not be afraid.

The Palestinians at the door will not be what you have trained your people to imagine. They will not come to slaughter families or recreate the crimes that have been committed against them. They will come heavy with the weight of exhaustion, the weight of the dead they have not buried for generations, their steps driven only by the fact that their roads are all that have been left.

By that time, the charm of invincibility will have worn off. Armies do not have to be destroyed to be beaten. They have to be discredited. The world will have already started lowering its flag. Allies, who until then will have been mouthing excuses, will be mumbling doubts. “There is nothing more that we can do,” they will claim — before abandoning the scene.

Empires always retreat not with thunder, but with side glances.

The only thing left is the question that every settler enterprise inevitably will have to ask: What do we do with those who believed the promise?

What happens to the millions who were recruited for the political fantasy of historic destiny, the men and women who traversed the oceans to settle on the land of another people, imagining themselves the restorers, not the replacements? Those who fought, settled, and brought forth children, built on the lie of dispossession?

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Nobody is coming to take them away.

When the Zionist dream melts like salt in the sea foam, and the structure of fervid ambition tumbles to dust, what shelter will there be for those with hands that bear the crimson stain?

For those immersed in the dark vintage of war, where is the haven? Who will part their gates to the blood-soaked?

Shall they become the homeless fleet, sailing without a shore, 

Like the latter-day Odysseuses, wandering and homeless, 

Doomed to wander the wide, impassive blue. A lost generation of seafarers, yearning for the Ithaca that spurns them?

But the desert landscapes have their own truth: The Arabs will offer their ancient hospitality once again to the Children of Abraham, the Jew, but the constructors of dispersion, the Zionist, will not find shelter among them. They are the ghost ships that bear only the weight of their own history.

America will not take them. Europe, the continent that has expelled Jewish communities for so long — from England, through Spain, France, and on to Germany — is not suddenly a land of refugee shelter. It is Europe that excelled at bloodshed in Jerusalem in 1099, killing Muslim and Jewish civilians indiscriminately, bearing the banners of the Crusaders, which today calls for humanitarian moderation and declines moral accountability. The doors that selectively creaked open during the 20th century are already closing.

This time, the refugees will not be Jewish.

They will be Zionists.

And that is the earthquake that your ideology never prepared for.

Because what history reveals, quietly, infuriatingly, is that the ultimate haven may be the very people you taught your population to fear.

The Arabs

Those whose cities were once home to ancient Jewish communities, well before the Zionists picked and chose their identity. Those whose historical narratives contain the names of Cairo, of Baghdad—cities where Jewish families resided, not conquerors, but neighbors. Of a man like Moshe, who could trace his family tree back through a paternal grandfather named Elhanan, who every summer night slept on a Baghdad rooftop, calling out to a Muslim neighbor called Salem to turn up the radio so he could hear Um Kalthoum.

Rather, non-coexistence, not as myth, but as memory.

Your project taught Israelis that sanctuary can only come through supremacy. Our history taught us something else: that true dignity lies in safeguarding the vulnerable, including former antagonists.

When Salah al-Din recaptured Jerusalem in 1187, he did not respond to the massacre with a massacre. He provided safe passage. Christians survived. Jews returned. The city remained a testament to the fact that restraint will last where fanaticism fails.

Do you understand the difference between civilizational confidence and civilizational insanity?

Your movement, bred not of the ancient Jewish ethical tradition but of a fever dream of nationalist fantasy in late Europe, promised shelter through domination. Theodor Herzl penned the foundational fiction of your movement over cups of coffee in distant cafes, out of the lives his project would destroy. President Truman subscribed to that fiction over the objection of his own secretary of state, the wise George C. Marshall, who predicted that the imposition of a state upon the unwilling native population would plant the seeds of endless troubles. History validated him, again and again.

The Middle East has been bailing blood for generations to disprove your argument.

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Was the dream worth the price?

Was it worth the gaslighting of the worldwide Jewish community, persuading them that their very survival hung in the balance of the expulsion of the Palestinians? Was it worth the translation of a rich spiritual heritage into a political engine of encirclement, torture, exile, and eradication? Was it worth the missions, like the infamous Operation Lavon Affair, where Israeli espionage targeted and murdered Jews overseas, simply for the purpose of inducing fear and precipitating migration? This cruelty knows no bounds.

There is no place left to go

The moral frontiers are long closed. The diplomatic frontiers are closed now. The only thing left is the accountability settlers will never prepare for: existing without dominance.

But when the knock eventually comes, it will not bring news of the execution of your exceptional rights. It will get news that is much harder and more lasting: the end of outstanding entitlement.

History will not inquire about how strongly you, or I, opposed it. History will ask about how much blood was shed to defer the irrevocable truth that no people can be rendered permanent by declaring another person dispensable.

When Palestinians stand at the door, remember that they do not come to erase you.

They come to reclaim themselves.

The world has witnessed enough beliefs go up in flames.

The time has come for you to decide whether yours will follow the same path or whether you will write the coda with less blood on it than the chapters.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.