Many Palestinians were skeptical of the prospect that President Obama would somehow help end our tragedy. Some like myself were optimistic, perhaps he understands the urgency of our plight. No one hoped that he will help us carve a small state in our land where Palestinians can live in dignity sovereignty and pray in their temple without hindrance. At the very least, the optimists argued, he will stop the land theft. You could sometimes see a faint hope in even the skeptics when we optimists happened to advocate for Obama's mission. But in the typical conversation they charged that we are utterly absurd.
Yesterday even the skeptics among us were disappointed by President Obama.
We are a weak helpless people, a majority in our lands from river to sea even though most of us live in the refugee camps that we were herded into beyond Palestine. In Palestine we experience intergenerational oppression and racism, from one generation to another we are denied even the basic right of citizenship in our land.
As though only two third human, the majority of us are resigned to horrendous existence. We do not resist. Our lands from day to day are devoured, stolen, and eventually there will be nothing left but our ghettos encircled by fences aimed at protecting those who are citizens from our stench.
Even in the midst of our crowded cities they plant the privileged citizens protected by tanks. We have a tank for a neighbor and an iron wall of bullets as a fence. Somehow God ordered that we be registered as beasts in their population registries and that those protected by armies be registered as free and citizens.
The state's citizens, the privileged ones, are protected by powerful armies. Protected from... what? The fear that somehow the original inhabitants who are denied their civil rights such as citizenship and denied even recognition that they have civil rights will one day turn human.
The skeptics say that no one will help us unless we become strong and have tanks like our oppressors. The optimists have resigned themselves to an eternity of oppression, because our argument that somehow a leader such as Obama will empathize with our plight and take pity on us now rings hollow.
But I remain an optimist. One day Jewish history, its humanism and its liberalism, will scream: give these people their rights. For God's sake give them citizenship in their homeland, in Israel. You see our freedom is not in the hands of the likes of Obama, pfft..., not in our hands, we are too weak and will remain so, but the key is firmly grasped by the inheritors of Jewish humanism. It may take a few generations but it is inevitable that one day the inheritors of this extraordinary tradition will champion our freedom not for Israel's sake, it doesn't need their help, but despite Israel, against Israel, in opposition to Israel, and for the sake of Palestinians. That is something that I am sure of. The momentum of Jewish history is firmly and undoubtably on the side of the dispossessed Palestinians.
But we have to wait until history catches up to sensibilities.