You Will Return to Jerusalem as Conquerors

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

If the Zionist entity imprisons you, deports you, kills you, tortures you, expels you, demolishes your house, or refuses to give you a permit; if it obstructs your path, deprives you, prevents you, starves you, restrains you, or pursues you through every detail of your life — then be assured that you are walking the right path: the path of strength, of building, and of reclaiming rights. But if it pampers and indulges you, grants you privileges, houses you next door to itself, gives you VIP treatment, and grants you facilitations, then you are wretched and miserable, in this world and the next, walking a path of religious and national sin. If the Zionists and the Americans are pleased with you, you are among the losers; and if they are angry with you, you are, God willing, among the victors. So do not despair, you representatives and leaders of Jerusalem, and do not lose hope; do not weaken, and do not grieve, for you are the ones who stand highest. Simply compare what you face — policies of expulsion and banishment from the Holy City — with the welcome the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister receives when he takes up residence in Beit Hanina. You are in the right; had you not been so, both nationally and religiously, your enemy would not have caused you such pain, and had others not been in the wrong, our enemy would not have honored them the way it does.

Do you want to be among those who merely sit and wait? Do you want a false prestige, a fading authority, cheap privileges? Because you do not want any of that, and because you took care to preserve your dignity and your pride, you provoked every apparatus belonging to the enemy of God and our enemy, and the apparatuses of all who take his side — and so a calamity befell you that history and generations to come will record on bright, eternal pages of memory. Others refused this dignity and this pride, and so they wallowed instead in the enemy’s cheap favors.

History does not follow a reckless course, and there is no escaping the ripening of its stages; in the end, things must be set right. Israel has passed through long stretches of pride and arrogance, has transgressed and corrupted upon the earth, has gone to great lengths in killing Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims generally, has rampaged and roamed and held festivals of dominance and triumph. Its ascendancy was not built on its muscle and intellect alone, but rested, at its foundation, on its agents among Arabs and Muslims, whom colonialism installed as leaders — men who insisted on humbling the nation into being a mount for whoever chose to ride it, and turning its land into a stage for the debauched and the greedy. The wheel no longer turns now as it once turned before, for its gears have been damaged, and formidable men and noble women have risen to confront it.

The movement of Arab and Islamic awareness is accelerating, expressing itself in great transformations and changes across the Arab and Islamic region as a whole — in resistance movements, in demonstrations, and in states that refuse subordination and insist on independence. Israel today is no longer capable of the kind of aggression it once carried out; America has not managed to build the Middle East it once dreamed of; nor has the whole Arab public remained mere rabble and fools. America’s pride has been broken in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Lebanon, and the Zionist army has retreated in defeat in the wars of July [2006] and of the winters [Gaza]. Those easy, effortless victories are gone, and gone forever; the age of defeats has come upon them.

The enemies of the nation are suffering from panic, and do not know what to do. They threaten one moment and hesitate the next; they roar and rage at times, and show gentleness at others; they flex their muscles and display their latest military hardware, but soon find themselves speaking instead of their enemies’ achievements in the fields of technology and combat tactics. In the past, they used to strike and kill before they ever spoke; today they chatter endlessly, while their actual deeds amount to little more than snatching up the defenseless. Yesterday they longed for confrontation and rejoiced over defeated Arab soldiers before them; today they doubt the steadfastness of their own soldiers, even when those soldiers sit inside fortified strongholds or armored tanks. A person stricken with panic is dangerous, for he has lost his balance, is obsessed in his mind, agitated in his nerves and emotions, and no longer knows how to attack or how to flee, nor can he, in the end, achieve any goal. The measures currently underway to expel Jerusalemites express exactly this kind of reckless agitation on the part of the Israeli leadership. Their panic has reached the point of deporting elected, unarmed people from an already tense area — which will only add more tension to the situation and bring them nothing but further trouble.

Israel is floundering, believing that every action it takes will strengthen the safety net it is so keen to build, and the siege of Gaza was a shining example of this. Israel believed that hurting and afflicting ordinary people would achieve results it had failed to achieve by other means. It believed the Palestinian resistance would become consumed by its internal enemies, and would collapse before the people’s hunger, their sicknesses, and the closing off of every path before them. That did not work for it, so it tested its military muscle in cooperation with Arab states, and still did not succeed in changing conditions in Gaza. And it still believes that measures to Judaize Jerusalem will bring the Palestinians to their knees, submissive — not realizing that the movement of defiance now being born in the region only breeds a still greater defiance.

If someone had asked you nine years ago about the outcome of an Israeli war on Gaza, you would have said Israel would swallow Gaza whole within a single day. And if someone had told you then that Gaza would hold out for twenty-three days without Israel managing to enter it, you would have accused him of fabrication. So what if I told you now, gentlemen — Mohammad Abu Tir, Mohammad Totah, Khaled Abu Arafeh, and Ahmad Attoun — that you will return to Jerusalem as conquerors, God willing, before too long? Deportation is hard, and it is a painful chapter in the history of the Palestinian people, but in the end it is nothing but a rope winding around Israel’s own neck. Through its very actions, Israel is raising the tempo of defiance, which is the true fuel of history’s cycle of change. The one who wields domineering power is a fool, and he is at his most foolish precisely when he senses that his power is under threat. Israel’s hegemony no longer stands, and its own actions are hastening its downfall. We have endured for tens of years, and in the end, victory belongs to the one who does not open his mouth to groan.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “ستعودون للقدس فاتحين” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.