A Message to the Villages

The new year looks in upon us while the Arab world, from one end to the other, is passing through the greatest ordeal it has known in its long history. It therefore greets the opening of this year with a lump in its throat, resentment in its breast, and doubt in its thought and mind.

And the Arab world has every right to greet this new year as it now greets it: with a lump in the throat, with resentment, and with doubt. Did it not witness the triumph of falsehood over right in the greatest of international institutions — one whose existence has no justification whatever except its defense of right against falsehood? Did it not witness the suicide of conscience, of moral sense, and of the higher values in a group of nations that used to claim — and it believed them, or very nearly did — that they live or die for the sake of conscience, moral sense, and the higher values all together?

How much the Arab world would have preferred to lose Palestine rather than lose its faith in a world — or in the possibility of a world — in which right triumphs over falsehood, conscience holds itself above charlatanry, the moral sense is kept safe from corruption, and the higher values are preserved from the danger of doubting their very existence.

Yes — and how much the Arab world would have preferred to lose Palestine, indeed more than Palestine, rather than lose its faith in right and not force, in justice and not brute power, in reason and not passion and interest, in liberty and not imposition and tyranny.

The West has betrayed its own cause. And we, who hold it responsible for the human civilization standing today and guardian over it, declare it before history a criminal against the very thing for which it has been responsible and over which it has stood guardian for generations. And we, who distinguish between the counterfeit political West — which has conspired and goes on conspiring every day and every hour, not against Palestine alone, but against every right in the world — and the authentic civilizational West — which labors earnestly and sincerely every day and every hour to develop man's civilization and to strengthen its lofty principles and its true, immortal values — I say: we, who distinguish between these two contradictory, contending Wests, will not fall into the error of confusing them and rejecting both without making this distinction. We are fully confident that the authentic civilizational West — in which alone we believe, to which alone we offer our respect, and from which alone we draw the foundations of our renaissance — is not for a single moment content with the betrayal of its cause and the crime against its responsibility that the counterfeit political West is committing. It is therefore its duty to rise up against it and rebel — and it does in fact rise up and rebel — just as it is our own duty to make contact with it and to join with it, all together, in this revolt and this rebellion. And it will not be long before the authentic civilizational West triumphs — and we with it, for we are of it — and the masses of mankind recover their faith in goodness, right, and justice.

As for Palestine, she holds, in the keeping of every woman citizen and every man citizen in these Arab nations, a firm pledge: that she shall never be given up, and never be forgotten.