Palestinians Liberate a Dream : Words Are Plagiarized From an Israel Now Short on Vision

November has a deadly charm in the Middle East. Seventy-one years after the Nov. 2 Balfour declaration, and 41 years after the Nov. 29 United Nations partition resolution, the Palestine National Council convened in Algiers and came out with the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. On the very same day, the entire Israeli government was attending the 15th annual memorial service for David Ben-Gurion.

Some years ago Israeli television produced a thrilling series, “Pillar of Fire,” narrating the history of Zionism from the standpoint of those who made it. One of the most moving scenes showed Ben-Gurion pensively but resolutely ascending the stairs leading to the People’s Council meeting in Tel Aviv, where he was to read one of his best texts, Israel’s Declaration of Independence, and the narrator commented: “His life was but a pilgrimage toward this moment.” That is what every Palestinian should have felt on hearing the news from Algiers last Tuesday. However, the people of the intifada, whose dreams were to culminate in the declaration, were caught asleep when it was read by Yasser Arafat in the wee Algerian hours of Nov. 15.

Bassam Abu Sharif, adviser to Arafat, wrote in a position paper last June: “Time, sometimes the great healer, is often the great spoiler.” This time, apparently, was no exception. But then again, the people who were flung out of their Place 40 years ago were also flung out of what we might call the national universal coordinated Time. The Palestinian Time was lost and jumbled when the Jewish one was regained in 1948. And now that the Palestinians are determined to set their watch of independence, and “to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do” (as the American declaration’s text goes), it seems that they have managed eventually to catch up with the unrelenting Mideastern Time.

The timing of the declaration’s reading, some might contend, was not the only bad timing on the Palestinian part during the last year. Procrastination seemed to prevail among the Palestinian leadership, some would say; translating the intifada into a significant political move was once and again pushed to the back burner, while postponing plans to convene the PNC could have prevented the grim results of the Israeli elections (a dubious alibi).

Be that as it may, the PLO is also notorious for being the lightning-rod of the Middle East. No matter what happens in Israel, the PLO is always put in the dock, is always to blame. While the Israeli scene is darkened, to say the least, by the results of the most gruesome elections in Israel’s history; and while the Israeli leadership, Likud and Labor alike, adamantly refuses to admit even the existence of the Palestinan problem, let alone the Palestinians’ right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not to mention the right to a state of their own; and while Palestinians are persecuted and shot in the occupied territories on a daily basis, a thing that has become by now a mere background buzzing, the PLO, of all parties, is called on to face the ambiguous music of its declarations in Algiers. The United Nations’ Resolution 242 (which speaks only of a “refugee problem”) is in itself a masterpiece of ambiguity; nevertheless, its acceptance by the PNC, we are told by the U.S. State Department spokesman, “is ambiguous, both in its placement in the text and its meaning.” Ambiguity, it seems, is a privilege granted only to states, not to stateless refugees.

Even before the PNC voted, the spokesman for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had called “meaningless” the PLO proposal to accept 242. The morning after, Shamir called the PNC resolution to that effect “one more step in the war of terrorists against Israel.” The newly defeated Shimon Peres bitterly added an afterthought: “They (the Palestinians) have engaged in an evasive sort of resolutions, which in real terms are meaningless.”

Last August, when Abu Iyad, the second-highest PLO official, in an interview in the French Journal du Dimanche, uttered the most meaningful, unequivocal PLO announcement in years (“the mutual recognition of Israel and Palestine . . . the creation of two states . . .”) all that Peres had to say was that the statement was a “crossword puzzle.” So, a month later Abu Iyad repeated the gist of his announcement to the Los Angeles Times and added: “We want to take a bold and courageous step, but not a leap into an abyss.” He should have known that no matter what the Palestinians say, the abyss of ambiguity is always lurking there, waiting to suck in their words and make them utterly void of meaning.

And then, in the morning after Algiers, there came the coup de grace from Peres’ Foreign Ministry. “Once again,” a spokesman said reflectively, “the organization that claims to represent the Palestinian people proves unable or unwilling to recognize reality.” The Israelis, for years the absolute masters of Palestinian reality and fate, can afford playing with words and blaming yet another one of their failures on the Palestinians. While the leadership of the Labor Party is blindly engaged in sniffing around for positions of power in Shamir’s government, bringing the country back to the deadly Square One that preceded the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the same leadership is accusing the PLO of being unable or unwilling to recognize reality.

Two months ago Peres was asked by a young Israeli writer in the newspaper Haaretz: Do you dream of political subjects? “No,” Peres answered, “I have very few dreams. I sleep little but deep.” Two weeks ago Dahn Ben-Amots, a famous journalist in Israel, a writer and civil-rights activist whose mentor as a young emigrant from Poland was Peres himself, told the weekly Koteret Rasheet: “I’m afraid the Zionist experiment is striding self-assuredly toward catastrophe . . . It was nice, but soon it will be over.” Leaving Israel has become a possibility for him.

Rumor has it that Mahmoud Darwish, the leading Palestinian poet, was the one who wrote the declaration (or its first draft at least, in Arabic), while consulting the one written 40 years ago by Ben-Gurion. Whoever the author was, he should have relied more on the Ben-Gurion text; some of its genuine, lean grandeur might have come through his version; and some of its concinnity, its concise linguistic approach, might have shortened his version by a (redundant) third, or 500 words. Too little butter spread on too large a pita.

Stylistic reservations aside, Palestinians should rejoice with what they have: Now their right to dream is legitimate. And that is exactly what vexes the Jewish Israelis, who are running out of dreams and visions. They would read the opening of the Palestinian declaration: “Palestine, the land of the three monotheistic faiths, is where the Palestinian Arab people was born, on which it grew, developed and excelled,” and they would immediately recognize the origin in Ben-Gurion’s text: “Eretz Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped.” And later the sentence, “Now by virtue of natural, historical and legal rights . . . ,” would echo the Israeli origin: “By virtue of our natural and historic right. . . . “ This might also explain, to a great extent, why Israel is so ruthlessly thumbing down the intifada ; the frustrated, disappointed ex-dreamers cannot bear to see their dreams from 1948 being vigorously plagiarized, so to speak, by young Palestinians across the Green Line.

One of the most captivating phrases in the American Declaration of Independence is “the pursuit of happiness” being an “unalienable right.” I looked for this word in both the Palestinian declaration and in the Israeli one. Happiness is not mentioned in either. People in the Middle East would settle for a plot of land; happiness for them remains a yet another distant dream.