Palestine: ‘I saw who paid the price’
Mahmud Darwish, one of the leading Palestinian poets of the 20th century, alongside Nazim Hikmet and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, wrote a remarkable heart-wrenching poem. A poem that expressed pain, sorrow and grief of those exiled in their own country that not only did it depicted the plight of the people of Palestine but expressed the agonizing suffering of the entire Global South turned into slaves in their countries under the yoke of metropolitan capital— sometimes called imperialism.
“I don’t know who sold our homeland” Mahmud writes, “but I saw who paid the price”. Trying to be humble, Mahmud Dervish, pretended to be naïve; otherwise who else could have known the traitors better than him. For more than half a century, he along with his people, endured the tyrannies of a brutal enemy that occupied his land.
Edward Said once stated, “1917 was the worst year of my life,” when Balfour — a staunch anti-Semite — issued the Declaration that cleaved Palestine, the only Arab country denied even the fake right of self-determination. Incidentally, it was the same year when the world proletariat was celebrating the Russian Revolution. This was no coincidence. The Western imperialism weary of rising communist power altered its colonial designs to suit its interests. Zionism screamed hoarse to fulfil them.
It wasn’t only Britain which sought to secure its multiple future interests— especially maintaining its absolute control on the Suez Canal, the US also found in Israel as its “aircraft carrier” in the Middle East. Once Nasser eclipsed the US overthrew the entire secular, semi-socialist and anti-Israeli Arab leadership. They were replaced with tin pot dictators and monarchs and the Arab question relating to its independence from the US hegemony became inextricably tied to the Palestinian question—a deviation from Ghassan Kanafani’s position, who argued it otherwise.
Today, the world is watching a live-streaming of genocide not only through........
© Business Recorder
