Yahya Sinwar hero of freedom struggle

Donald Trump’s reelection as American president has sparked delirious euphoria among Israelis and pro-Israeli Americans. And it has spawned despair among most Palestinians and supporters of their cause.

It reminded me of a caveat I got years ago from Saeb Erekat, Palestinians’ chief negotiator for their peace talks with Israel. “The Palestinian state has to be earned by us [the Palestinians] through our struggle,” he said. “It won’t come as a gift from the Israelis or the Americans.”

Erekat had arrived in Washington to participate in Palestinian-Israeli peace talks, which would be held in Annapolis, Maryland, on Nov. 27, 2007. I had read in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would be offering to return the West Bank and part of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians to allow them to create an independent state.

“I will believe it when I see it,” Erekat said.

 Soon, the Israeli right-wing and evangelical Christians in the United States launched virulent attacks on Olmert’s proposal, scuttling it.

Erekat’s prediction that a Palestinian state would be born of a Palestinian struggle doesn’t jibe with the excitement among Israelis and many Americans feel about Trump letting Israel gobble up all or most Palestinian territories. On Oct. 7, 2023, Yahya Sinwar launched what is perhaps the final phase of the Palestinian struggle for freedom by sending hundreds of Hamas militants into Israel. The tragic episode led to the killing of 1,200 Israelis and the abduction of nearly 250 others. It was a catastrophe for Israel, which can’t be defended or condoned.

Unfortunately, no colonial power has ever relinquished its occupation of other people’s lands through peaceful persuasion. British colonialists didn’t leave America, Palestine, or my native India voluntarily. They branded native freedom fighters everywhere as “terrorists.” On my visits to Israel, I asked my Israeli friends what they would call Menachem Begin’s Irgun guerrillas or Yitzhak Shamir’s Stern Gang, who used to ambush the British colonial forces in Palestine. None branded them terrorists, although the British always did. Begin had bombed the British colonial headquarters at King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 people, mostly civilians, as part of what Israelis consider their anti-colonial struggle.

In America, the Massachusetts Minutemen ambushed British colonialists during the American Revolutionary War. Americans honor them as their freedom fighters. So do they call American privateers who, during the same war, used to attack British ships with encouragement from the Continental Congress.

My parents’ generation in “British India” began its struggle against British colonialists by attacking and often killing them. Among them were Khudiram Bose and many others whom our colonial masters branded “terrorists” and often hanged. On a visit to the Victoria Museum in Kolkata in 1982, my wife and I followed other visitors in bowing our heads before pictures of Khudiram and other icons of India’s anti-colonial movement, including Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India. I remembered singing in my boyhood a song about Khudiram’s martyrdom:

“Come, say goodbye to me, Mother, as I go on my eternal sojourn,” the Bengalee freedom fighter was supposed to have chanted as he was leaving home to be hanged. Khudiran Bose had bombed a horse-driven carriage that was expected to be carrying a British judge who had sentenced several anti-colonialist militants to death. Judge Douglas Kingsford wasn’t in it. Two British women who were got killed.

The British never thought of leaving “their” Indian Empire until, I am sorry to say, Adolf Hitler crushed their military and economic might during World War II, leaving them incapable of holding down our freedom fighters and their “terrorists.”

Whether Donald Trump will give away Palestinian lands to Israeli colonialists, Palestinians will, as Saeb Erekat predicted, continue their struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation. And one day, they will bow before Yahya Sinwar’s picture in the museums of an independent Palestinian state.

• Mustafa Malik, the host of the blog mustafamalik.com, worked as a reporter, editor and columnist for the Hartford Courant, Washington Times, Glasgow Herald and other newspapers. He also conducted fieldwork in four Arab countries and Israel as a research associate for the University of Chicago Middle East Center.