Summer Readings. We continue our Summer Readings with the first of two lectures delivered at this year’s Mut zur Ethik conference in German-speaking Switzerland. — P. L. 14 SEPTEMBER—I write from the Swiss village of Bazenheid, 60 kilometers east of Zürich. Ten days ago I delivered a talk to the Mut zur Ethik audience in the neighboring town of Sirnach. The theme of this year’s conference was “Living in Dignity.” There could be no more appropriate topic at this fraught and frightening moment in human history. Mut zur Ethik translates roughly as “the courage to take a moral stand.” My talk, titled “Peace ‘between the sword and the neck,’” addresses the current situation in the West Bank. I publish it in full and as it was delivered. —C. M. ■ Sirnach, Switzerland.In Palestine we see the preeminent struggles of our time: The clash of cultures, East and West, of ideology, Zionist imperialism, racism, apartheid versus the most fundamental human aspirations for dignity and freedom. Palestine is where power is expressed in its most totalized, all encompassing, and sadistic forms, wielded against unarmed civilians. Palestine is where new forms of domination and control, surveillance and weaponry, are tested and deployed and exported back to the West. In the West, these take the form of ever increasing authoritarianism, ever more Zionist influence in what remains of our post-democracies, militarized I.D.F.-trained police, expanding technologies of surveillance in virtual and lived space, take over of media and public institutions, loss of civil liberties. Our understanding of Palestine and its history, our awareness of what is happening there, the priority we give to it, and especially the language we use to talk about it—all of this shows us, as if we look into a mirror, where we stand and how we position ourselves vis a vis power. Human dignity is ineluctably entwined with power. Power bears upon how dignity is expresses or represses, ennobled or corrupted. Human dignity is not immutable. We may be born with dignity by virtue of our humanity but it can be lost to us, undermined from without or destroyed from within. As adults we are the stewards of our dignity. The quality of any person’s dignity, or lack thereof, is an _expression_ of his or her awareness of and response to power and its abuses. In 1970, Australian journalist Richard Carleton interviewed Ghassan Kanafani, who was even then well-known for his novels and short stories about Palestinian life, respected across the Arab world for his political writing. Kanafani was a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP was committed to violent resistance to the Zionist regime and took as their models the Algerian and Vietnamese struggles for freedom—ultimately won, we do well to remember, through violence. In this interview, Carleton referred to the hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians as a “conflict”—a word frequently use today. Kanafani corrected him saying, “It’s not a conflict. It’s a liberation movement fighting for justice.” Carlton then asked why the PFLP would not engage in peace talks with Israeli leaders. Kanafani’s reply, is now famous: “That’s the kind of conversation between the sword and the neck.” Kanafani understood power: Power never relinquishes anything to the people it oppresses—not liberty, or freedom, or sovereignty, or justice, and not peace. Kanafani understood, as do all Palestinians today, that his enemies were empire, colonialism, and Zionism. NOT Jews or Judaism. He understood also the unique power of language. Language itself was a source of his immense dignity. He used words to clarify the Palestinian experience and to articulate the Palestinian struggle for freedom. This made him dangerous. He was assassinated, along with his niece, by the Mossad in 1972 in a car bombing in Beirut. He was 36 years old. ■ I want to contrast Ghassan Kanafani—his seriousness, his clarity, his understanding of power, altogether his dignity—to Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Robinson traveled to the West Bank in July of this year in her capacity as a member of The Elders—a group of elder statesmen and women formed by Nelson Mandela in 2007, ostensibly to advance peace and human rights. A report of Robinson’s trip is available on their website. This, in a sentence, is her summary: “The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aims to make Palestine disappear physically, economically, culturally, and politically.” Palestine is indeed disappearing in all the ways Robinson noted. Because eradicating Palestinian presence on the land has always been the goal of Zionism, a word Robinson never uses, and because a majority of Israeli so-called Jews support this goal. These are the very people who have kept Netanyahu in office, and who if he’s replaced, will replace him with someone else who continues the same policies. While she was in Israel Robinson met with Isaac Herzog. This is an outrage. An obscenity. It is an insult to human dignity that Mary Robinson dignified, legitimized a genocidal regime by paying a visit to its president, a man who is a genocidaire. Nelson Mandela must have been howling from beyond. Mandela, we do well to remember, was not a pacifist. He understood the necessity of revolutionary violence when non-violent means failed. He supported armed resistance against a murderous apartheid regime that looks like the Boy Scouts of America when compared with Zionist Israel. The violence that Ghassan Kanafani and Nelson Mandela advocated did not introduce violence where there was none before. Violent resistance movements are almost always a responses to incessant violence from imperial or colonial powers and repressive governments. And here’s my point: We all want peace. But you can only advance peace and human rights if you clearly and correctly understand power, its machinations, its abuses. You cannot advance peace by placating power, or shielding power, or legitimizing power, or pretending power doesn’t exist, or aligning yourself with power, or making excuses for power. You cannot advance peace and human dignity absent a clear analysis of power and clear language. ■ On the morning of 7 June, residents of the Palestinian village of Beitillu woke to a new catastrophe. Overnight a group of settlers had established an outpost on a small mountain near the village, in the very heart of their farmland. This is a rich agricultural area known as Wadi al-Zarqa, with more than 100 natural springs, and the breadbasket of the Ramallah governorate. Wadi al–Zarqa is now a war zone with daily attacks on farmers and violent incursions into all of the surrounding villages. Trees have been uprooted, greenhouses destroyed, farm equipment stolen or destroyed, water pumps stolen or destroyed, irrigation lines cut, solar panels that generate electricity for water pumps have been smashed and destroyed, fences have been cut enabling wild boars to enter fields. Entire crops have been destroyed, purposefully run over by all terrain vehicles. Financial losses run into hundreds of thousands of shekels. Farmers have been hospitalized with concussions, broken bones, lacerations requiring stitches. Every Palestinian community is surrounded by numerous expanding settlements. In the past few weeks to months, in a new tactic, rural villages have been encircled by outposts: crude encampments from which settler militias, equipped with U.S.–made assault rifles and all terrain vehicles, stage their attacks. While settlers concentrate on driving Palestinians from their villages, occupation forces are focused on destroying refugee camps and expelling their populations. All of this is coordinated. What is the Palestinian response? I’ll read what my friend in Beitillu shared in a series of texts. This woman, the daughter and granddaughter of farmers, going back generations, shares Kanafani’s revolutionary spirit. As do many Palestinians I have met. This land is not simply a source of livelihood. The land is not simply property or territory. It is who we are. It is our identity, our history, and our collective memory. We are the people of this land. For us, it is a struggle for survival, dignity, and existence. This is why farmers continue to go to their land every day. They leave before dawn, they work the soil, they harvest, and they remain there despite the attacks, because abandoning the land is not an option. And that is precisely why they are being targeted so aggressively: because as long as the farmer remains on the land, the land remains Palestinian. Thousands upon thousands of Palestinians have lost their lives defending this land. So when people ask why we don’t leave, or why we keep going back despite the danger, it’s because leaving is not just about moving somewhere else. For us it mean abandoning everything that generations before us lived and died to protect. Palestinian struggle is at bottom about human dignity. A month ago I asked this same friend about peaceful coexistence with Israel. She texted back paraphrasing Kanafani: “This is peace between the sword and the neck.” Speaking for myself, I find the very idea that Palestinians should be asked or expected to live side by side in peace with the people who have been slaughtering them for a century abhorrent in the extreme. As I would have found the same idea post–World War II. Absent a war crimes tribunal, absent reparations, absent the right of return, absent the dismantling of settlements—absent the dismantling of Israel as currently constituted—this is not a dignified position. ■ Two years ago I sat with the head of al–Mughayyir’s village council. I had come to inspect the progress of the kindergarten playground we were then building—a kindergarten named after Ghassan Kanafani . We drank coffee on his patio as I listened to his account of increasingly frequent and increasingly violent attacks by settlers and occupation forces. Two weeks ago, the village council issued the following statement: In Al-Mughayyir, unarmed Palestinian civilians face an organized machinery of oppression equipped with every instrument of power and protection, while the village’s residents are left to confront siege, raids, arrests, assaults, and intimidation with resources that are barely sufficient for survival. Let this be clear to everyone: the struggle of Al-Mughayyir is not the struggle of its residents alone. If they succeed in breaking Al-Mughayyir and forcibly displacing its people, it will not end at the village’s borders, and no one will be safe from what comes next. The forced displacement of one village opens a door that will not easily be closed. Al-Mughayyir has paid the price of its steadfastness with the blood of its people, its land, its trees, and the safety, homes, and dignity of its residents. We say this loudly and unequivocally: We will not forget those who stood with us, and we will not forget those who left us alone. The day will come when everyone will be asked: What did you do when Al-Mughayyir was under siege? What did you do when its people were arrested and terrorized? What did you do when its land was seized and its people driven from their homes? We will hold you all to account before God. May mercy be upon our righteous martyrs, a swift recovery to our wounded, freedom for our prisoners, and steadfastness for our resilient people. And then these, the final words of their statement, and a more powerful _expression_ of human dignity you will not find: Al-Mughayyir will not bow… ■ Published previously at Winter Wheat and West Bank Alerts. All of my writing is freely available. If you appreciate what you read, please consider supporting this work. You can become a paid subscriber by clicking on the button below. You can “buy me a coffee.” You can send a one-time, monthly, or yearly donation via PayPal. Or you can support me on Patreon. Please share this commentary. Thank you. You're currently a free subscriber to The Floutist. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. © 2026 Patrick Lawrence |