Anne Lamott, an American novelist and nonfiction writer, has a meaningful quotation that adorns the final scene of Sam Esmail’s hard-to-decipher movie “Leave the World Behind": “Hope begins in the dark.”
Anne Lamott, author of the movie’s script, is a progressive political activist and has delivered several speeches on the injustice Palestinians have been subjected to for decades. Lamott’s writings, marked by their self-deprecating humor and openness, cover such subjects as alcoholism, single motherhood, depression and Christianity.
While almost all of the Middle East was engulfed in a deep pessimism and about to lose all hope in all matters in 2016, Esmail, born to Egyptian immigrant parents in Hoboken, New Jersey, winning the Drama Golden Globe award had brought the region pride and hope. Beginning in 2015, to enforce severe and discriminatory restrictions on Palestinians’ human rights, Israel began to build unlawful settlements in and facilitate the transfer of Israeli civilians to the occupied West Bank. There was a sharp rise in killings and injuries related to Israeli-Palestinian hostilities continuing since 2016. Overall, Israeli security forces killed at least 120 protestors and injured at least 11,953 Palestinian civilians in West Bank and Gaza.
In those days, 120 deaths was an enormous number. Sam Esmail and many other Arab-descent U.S. producers and movie makers were speaking against Israeli atrocities, talking about their plans to make movies and documentaries about the issue. They were asking then-President Barack Obama to get into action and stop Israeli massacres.
Almost a decade passed, and the number of Israel’s victims increased by a hundredfold; they are killing babies and young children by the thousands. The movie makers, university professors, students, workers’ unions and almost all people are in an uproar in the Western Hemisphere, but the presidents and prime ministers seem to have become tongue-tied, other than whispering a timid but friendly request to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet to “slow down” in their massacres of the innocent. The whole media was exultantly cheering President Biden’s warning to Netanyahu that he might lose the popular support in the West.
Bracketing even those friendly words with reminders that he is still a Zionist and his administration is 100% behind the Israeli government’s mass killings, Biden, himself, is losing the popular support in his own country. The Zionism he proudly professes is, in reality, what Shahd Hammouri, a professor of international law at the University of Kent, calls “the Israeli settler-colonialism.”
It started with Palestinians’ death and destruction of their homeland in 1917 and thanks to Biden’s predecessor since then, the Zionist war has been continuing. Netanyahu announced on Oct. 7 that his country was “at war” following an attack on southern towns occupied by Israel and opened to illegal settlements.
Two days later, his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced a full blockade of Gaza. But Israel has been at war and blockading Gaza and West Bank towns since 1967.
Professor Hammouri reminds us that everything that is happening in Israel and Palestine has been taking place within the context of colonization, occupation and apartheid. If the world had not left its humanity behind, it could have remembered that there were such things as international law and what the Israeli colonizers were doing to the indigenous population was illegal. The Muslim Palestinians, the Arab Christians, Greek Orthodox city-dwellers, as well as Armenians who had fled from Anatolia during World War I, and the Egyptian Copts, the Druze in the Galilee and Carmel area of Palestine for almost a thousand years. They spoke their own dialect of Arabic, and the population of Palestine in 1914 was around 690,000, of whom only 8% were Jewish. In 1948, the number of Palestinians in Palestine exceeded 2 million, and the Jewish population increased to 31.5%.
Mr. Biden, the Zionist, should also remember that the government he unconditionally supports in Israel is kept with only three votes in the parliament by Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), a far-right political party that calls itself shamelessly the continuation of the “Jewish Agency,” the main terror organization that started the illegal colonization of Palestine. The man who put the word “Zioinst” into the mouth of Mr. Biden and his ilk, Mr. Ayel Weizman, was the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s “Zionist project” and the main architect of “colonization of Palestine.”
The U.N. General Assembly, whose resolutions Biden keeps refusing lately, has compared the situation in Pales to the other colonization efforts and condemned Israel in the same resolution with African nations. In its 1973 resolution, the U.N. General Assembly clearly declared that, “It condemns all governments which do not recognize the right to self-determination and independence of peoples, notably the peoples of Africa still under colonial domination and the Palestinian people.” After the 1967 war, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights; and the U.N. Security Council condemned Israel because of “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and called for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”
Now, despite the futile U.S. efforts to block the global condemnation of the Israeli government at the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli artists, lobbyists, scientists, traders and investors are being boycotted, canceled and isolated. Even the Haaretz columnists Itamar Katzir and Ofir Hovav are predicting that Israel is becoming the pariah of humanity. They think that the global pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel sentiment is “tinged with anti-Semitism.”
No, gentlemen, it is not tinged with anti-Semitism, but it definitely is shaped by anti-Zionism, as it is understood by Ayel Weizman, Netanyahu and Biden: The scourge of humanity since it was given free reign by the U.K. and U.S. governments since 1917.
Israel is destroying Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with one aim: Creating a Jewish-only country in Palestine with a colonial attitude. As Professor Hammouri calls it, Israel is now “settler colonialism” or as Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan names it “a state of thieves,” Israel is going to achieve nothing. The people have not left humanity behind; and “hope begins in the dark.”
