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A person may be unable to do something due to advanced age or lack of experience or ability, but this may be a characteristic closely related to a nation or people. Thus, it acquires a mental and emotional meaning. Freedom from disability is a cognitive process that combines awareness, feeling, and will, redefines the limits of material power, and defines the roles of structures and structures.
It seems that the modern Arab state – with its institutions, people, ideology, and regional and international alliances – was based on spreading impotence, and in order to ensure the continuation of hegemony, it must leak to the entirety of its people. The imposition of culture, language, social customs and traditions, law and institutions was the driving force behind achieving this state. The impotence of peoples was a comprehensive process – like colonialism – that made the victims of disability not see in themselves the strengths to overcome it.
Ending incapacity – from which the Messenger of God – may God bless him and grant him peace – used to seek refuge morning and evening: “O God, I seek refuge in You from inability and laziness” – means ending the occupation of the minds, feelings (conscience), and will. Disability has become a general human meaning that does not concern Arabs and Muslims only, but is spread by those who are privileged in the world, those who possess power, authority, and wealth, and create institutions, traditions, and structures for it that guarantee its continuation.
Hence the importance of the uprising model – as proposed by the Al-Aqsa flood – in liberating us from this state of helplessness. It acquires its common human extension, in addition to its Palestinian and Arab specificity.
Man, process and justice
The writer of these lines previously presented the uprising model of the Arab Spring revolutions on the occasion of their decade, and returned to it with the Battle of Saif al-Quds 2021 to enrich it and add to it elements that were questioned by the event. The opportunity was renewed with the “Al-Aqsa Flood” to review the concept again, and to explain what was new that this event added.
The advantage of the concept – as we learned its formulation from our professor Abdul Wahab Al-Mesiri, may God have mercy on him, in his book on the 1987 uprising – is that it has an explanatory ability for what is happening, and creates a predictive possibility for what will happen in the future, and most importantly, it is able – from the details and facts – to extract the essence and the overall meaning, It allows accumulation and continuation. Every uprising model has its limits in the ability to change, which will be our next article, God willing, provided that this article focuses on three of its characteristics:
The process does not only mean a temporal dimension, but extends to broader contexts. The battle of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” – in my estimation – is one of the waves of the Arab Spring that began at the beginning of the last decade, and is still continuing. At the same time, it is part of the global struggles searching for the meaning of justice in contemporary times.
First: The person into whom God Almighty breathed His spirit
This manifests itself in three complementary phenomena:
- The inability to predict his behavior and actions, and his possession of abilities and capabilities that he cannot imagine (inability and miracle share the same linguistic root). According to this perception; Small actions by a large number of people can lead to big qualitative results.
- The complexity of the motives and driving factors that cannot be explained in a materialistic manner only, and at the same time, the material aspects of them cannot be ignored.
- finally; Concern with the privacy of the human being as a human being, with his unique and complex dimensions, and with the specificity of the context in which he lives. The specificity of man and the difference in his contexts give phenomena – even if they are similar in motives and forms – distinction and differences in experiences and paths, and historical formations, the path of state building, the formations of society and the economy, and the necessities of political geography, become among the many determinants that draw the paths of resistance action and its differentiation from one country to another.
This does not mean, in any case, that there are no commonalities and lessons that can be exchanged with the region or the world around us.
According to this perception, it is possible to understand the reason for stripping the Palestinians of their humanity, which is not a new phenomenon, but it is a model in Zionist thought. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy spoke several years ago in Washington about three principles that Israelis believe in, and that make them inflexible regarding their conflict with the Palestinians:
- First: The belief that the Israelis are the “chosen people.”
- Second: The belief that Israelis are always the victims.
- Third: The belief that Palestinians are less than human compared to Israelis.
The battle of dehumanization does not concern the Palestinians alone; Rather, it extends to include many categories and elements, such as: (Blacks – indigenous people – Arabs – immigrants… etc.). Dehumanization is the necessary precursor to the practice of violation, whatever its degree and form.
I realized this early from my prison experience: Israeli brutality – as we are witnessing now, and the violations against detainees, or what I called permissibility – lies in the dehumanization; In preparation for withdrawing legal legitimacy – that is, being a human being without rights – facilitating torture, genocide, or ethnic cleansing; Because then it would be morally and legally justified.
Second: The process
It is a governing formula for the entire act of resistance to helplessness, so explaining the long-term effects of the flood – and every act of resistance similar to it – is premature, and it can only be understood in an extended historical context.
The Qur’anic distinction between conquest and victory makes the meaning clearer. Conquest – as in the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah – achieves long-term strategic results – even if its facts seem otherwise, while victory and defeat are merely battles whose impact is limited to their time.
The concept of resistance to military victory is about achieving long-term political results. The resistance does not see victory in one year or five years, but rather by engaging in decades of struggle that increases Palestinian solidarity and increases Israel’s isolation.
The process of resistance does not find its meaning in historical extension only; Rather, they are continuous struggles that fade from time to time, but soon return to insurrectionary action in new forms. It is important to think of the flood as part of the struggle of the Palestinian people over a century or more, and the struggles of the Arab peoples towards liberation from powerlessness, and it cannot be viewed as an event that can either fail or succeed. Understanding the time dimension is crucial in this regard; As the realization of the impact of facts on the overall process of liberation, it is written retrospectively.
The process does not only mean a temporal dimension, but extends to broader contexts. The battle of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” – in my estimation – is one of the waves of the Arab Spring that began at the beginning of the last decade, and is still continuing. At the same time, it is part of the global struggles searching for the meaning of justice in contemporary times. .
The historical reading of the Arab Spring uprisings is that we are facing a reshaping of all history in the region. We are facing decisive historical transformations, and the flood is one of its milestones.
There are many similarities between the flood and the uprisings: it is an expression of the ownership of the initiative by peoples and non-state actors, as opposed to incapable governments. The flood, like the uprisings, suffered from the weakness and fragility of politics. It relies on practice and learns from what actually happens. The resistance has been unable – so far – to present a Palestinian national discourse that brings together the Palestinian diaspora and their organizations on one level.
The use of religious symbols in mobilization is understandable, but for the Palestinians it raises the necessity of forming a broad national mix that allows for a creative formulation of the components of the issue, combining the religious, the national, the human rights, and the fight against apartheid and neoliberalism in one fabric, ensuring broad national consensus and Arab, Islamic and international support from a legal and values perspective. Human and economic.
Normalization with the Zionist entity progressed when the Arab uprisings were broken or collapsed, and public solidarity with the Palestinian uprisings – early in this millennium – was one of the first motivations for the Arab movement. The flood is now paying a heavy price for weak Arab popular support. As a result of the exhaustion generated in the post-uprisings period.
Arab governments and their regional and international supporters see the flood – as well as the uprisings – as an existential threat to their survival. What is required is to completely eliminate this model of resistance to disability, and to make its human and material costs on people and quarantine prohibitive so that it does not inspire new generations.
There is another dimension, which is the relationship between the counter-revolutionary coalition of international, regional and local parties and the essence of its neoliberal project, and the issue of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is not only an issue of national liberation; But it must also be understood within the framework of neoliberal policies with their regional, international and national extensions, thus gaining a broader horizon for struggle. Normalization was not a gateway to restoring the Islamic civilizational social model of coexistence between religions and ethnicities. Rather, it is a path to further alliances between international capitalism and the financial surpluses of Gulf oil.
Peoples are not afraid of the new colonial attack, despite their lack of political and military assessments, but governments – because they have armies of strategic experts – have a fear of replicating this model. The people are neither in a state of awe nor more afraid, even as American aircraft carriers lie at anchor ready to intervene. Large sectors of the population of Arab countries feel helpless mixed with anger, but they are moving to boycott companies and products coming from America and Israel as it is the weakest of faith.
The Arab demonstrators said; In addition to a deep sense of shared Arab and Islamic identity, they saw links between Palestinian liberation and their freedom from political oppression and poor distribution of wealth. They realize the rulers’ responsibility for their poor living conditions, and they also realize the failure of the same rulers to support their Palestinian brothers. Authoritarian leaders balanced public opinion dissatisfied with Israel against the economic and security benefits of the relationship and the concessions they could extract from the United States, Israel’s largest ally.
Third: The centrality of the concept of justice
The interconnectedness of the world nurtures cross-border forms of solidarity, or so it should do, but more importantly, it has multiple roles and functions, the most important of which are: learning from each other, linking our struggles to each other, and being alert to the way in which liberation movements in countries of the South and North alike have been exposed to aggression or polarization. Or domestication.
Throughout the Global South and in the cities of the West, Palestine now occupies a symbolic place as the embodiment of rebellion against Western hypocrisy and the unjust post-colonial order; That is, against the deficit that is intended to be widespread.
Global interconnectedness in the insurrectionary model does not concern a people, a nationality, a minority, or a marginalized group. It has an extended global horizon. Inverting this model is a value-based bias towards justice that opposes apartheid, genocide, and all forms of discrimination based on race, origin, gender or wealth.
With justice you side with life, as life must be protected for everyone. Divine honor was for all human beings and not for one race at the expense of another.
The essence of justice is value consistency; It applies to you and others. Value consistency requires apology, review, and self-correction if there is a transgression against others, and it does not mean absolute support, but rather complex and complex positions. October 7th is an act of resistance to an occupier, but transgression against civilians is unacceptable. Welcoming the Houthis’ support for the Palestinians does not mean that we must support their position on the conflict in Yemen. Supporting and supporting Hezbollah does not mean forgiving its position in Syria.
Severity of complexity
One of the distinctive characteristics of the twenty-first century is the intensity of complexity, which leads to the interaction of multiple factors, both material and value-based, with each other, and increased communication between millions of people, as everyone is affected by the actions of others in the context of a permanent dynamic process, so change and modification continue.
In complex systems, a simple action or a single individual (Mohamed Bouazizi or a Merkava tank bomber) can change the system as a whole. In other words, the action of a single individual or small group in an increasingly interconnected complex system can affect the entire system very quickly.
With great complexity; A single action can trigger a comprehensive change movement for the system as a whole, in addition to being difficult to predict. Phenomena are ever-changing. Any event, no matter how big or small, is bound to unfold as an extremely complex mixture of effects, causes, and results. All of them are conditioned by, influenced by and dependent on each other.
Value violations and moral inconsistency become more harmful when they are routine, accepted and normalized.
The twisted moral compass is based on the idea of exception; The exception is for the white man, for the man versus the woman, for the Germans at the expense of other races, for the Jew versus the Palestinian, and the Muslim versus followers of other religions.
The Qur’anic concept of martyrdom: “That you may be witnesses over the people and that the Messenger may be a witness over you…” is based on moral consistency and not exception for followers of the religion of Muhammad – peace be upon him – even if they are not ethically committed. In the end, the Messenger – may God bless him and grant him peace – remains a witness to them, and God is sufficient as a witness to the extent of commitment and consistency of values.
Exception, by definition, does not allow for a single universal standard, but rather for differential standards. Some people become more worthy human beings, others less worthy, and some unworthy.
This logic shuts down rational dialogue and weakens moral awareness. It builds a cognitive barrier that prevents us from seeing the suffering of others, which hinders empathy – according to the researcher Asif Bayat – a specialist in regional affairs – in his response to the famous German thinker Habermas, who contradicted his ideas about the public sphere when he wanted to define a position on the flood.
