2014 - International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People

The year 2014 has been declared by the General Assembly of the UN to be the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. While there are a number of individual Palestinians that will always be my friends, my love for the Palestinian people as a national entity is very much in line with that expressed by the late Jean Genet.

I defend the Palestinians wholeheartedly and automatically. They are in the right because I love them. But would I love them if injustice had not turned them into a wandering people?

The answer to that question for me is probably not. Had Palestine achieved independence within the borders of the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948 and not suffered the Nakba I would regard the Palestinians very differently. Then they would have been just a normal state with normal problems and not a people unjustly deprived of their homeland and engaged in a permanent revolution to undue this injustice.

Source:  Jean Genet, "Four Hours in Shatila," Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 12, no. 3 (spring 1983), 13.