Dr. Walid Saif is considered one of the most prominent authors of historical drama in the Arab world (Al Jazeera)
Palestinian academic and dramatist Walid Seif believes that modern means of communication have made a great contribution to “breaking the barriers of the Zionist media and Zionists, reaching a broad base that was hidden from the facts and the Palestinian narrative, and governed by misleading stereotypes.”
The critic and writer - who is considered one of the most prominent authors of historical drama in the Arab world, with his great works “The Palestinian Westernization,” “Omar,” “Al-Khansa,” “Salah al-Din,” “Rabi’ of Cordoba,” “Saqr Quraish,” and others—believes that the modern communications revolution It has broken the barrier of the media and official monopoly on narratives, but we should, in his opinion, “build on this change with popular institutional work.”
In his interview with Al Jazeera Net, Saif rejects the comparison between historical blogging and literary blogging, but at the same time he believes that if the literary text rises to the desired global level, its impact is deeper and more lasting, then dialogue:
Does the Al-Aqsa operation represent a continuation of the Nakba and the alienation of Palestine or a change in its course, and how do you read the future of the Palestinian issue?
Since the Nakba, the Palestinian cause has been subjected to many fluctuations at the political and military levels, but what is certain is that the Palestinian people as a whole have not forgotten their cause, as the leaders of the Zionist movement bet, and their struggle and tireless moral and practical rejection of all attempts aimed at liquidating the cause and obliterating identity have not stopped.
Rather, he is now, 75 years after the Nakba, more committed to his legitimate national rights and more willing to sacrifice and fight for them and to develop tools of struggle and resistance.
The second constant, on the other hand, is the escalation of Zionist violence and extremism in political trends. The Palestinian response is commensurate with the escalation of the Zionist challenge.
The third constant is the official Western colonial complicity and unconditional strategic support for the Zionist entity.
The fourth constant is the continued official Arab impotence, which ranges between inaction and complicity. However, the recent barbaric aggression on Gaza has brought about an unprecedented change in the level of international popular sympathy for Palestinian national rights, and may have extended to some official bodies that have realized that aggressive Zionist policies have a high cost. On the international community, and on regional and international security together.
It also contributed greatly to breaking the monopoly of the biased Western media on the Zionist narrative, which led to expanding public awareness of the facts of the issue and the grave injustices to which the Palestinian people have been exposed over 75 years, and placing current events in their long historical context.
In addition, this barbaric and brutal aggression has returned the issue to its central position at the regional and international levels, and all of these are real gains that should not be underestimated.
If we invest and develop it well, it can lead to positive changes in the interest of the cause. In light of these considerations and readings, the issue has only one path, regardless of the minor fluctuations, and it is the path that leads to achieving justice and national and human rights for the Palestinian people.
What made the Palestinian novel break through the barriers of prevention and danger in the Arab and West? Is it because the Palestinian people were victims of global control or because they are resistant to it?
There is no doubt that modern means of communication have made a great contribution to breaking the barriers of the Zionist media and Zionists. It reached a broad base that was hidden from the facts and from the Palestinian narrative, and governed by misleading stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims in general and about the Palestinian people and their cause in particular.
In my opinion, the resulting picture truly combines the sufferings of the victim and the steadfastness of the resistance together in the face of the worst forms of Zionist violence. What calls a people to make all these costly sacrifices other than the set of sieges and injustices that leave them no choice but resistance: freedom, or death? Man, by nature, does not explode in resistance and sacrifice in the way the world witnessed except when he realizes that he has nothing to lose yet.
There is an Arab popular passion for the symbols of the Al-Aqsa Flood, which is matched by government movements in the West before the Arab world against this passion and spread. Can security and media control make the people forget the Al-Aqsa Flood and its effects?
As I mentioned earlier, the modern communications revolution has broken the barrier of the media and official monopoly on narratives, but we should, in my opinion, build on this change with popular institutional work that cuts across the boundaries of societies to maintain the momentum of popular support and develop it into an effective political force that accumulates pressure on the official institution as it grows. Awareness that Zionist policies also threaten the strategic and security interests of the entire world, and that the Western peoples themselves pay an important part of their material, political and security costs. In any case, the struggle of the Palestinian people since the Nakba until now is enough to ignite memory so that the world will not forget until we forget, and we will not forget.
What has caught your attention about the flood process so far, and that you think should be written about and preserved?
All of it encourages thinking, contemplation, activity, interaction, and writing on the emotional, human, political, and even philosophical levels as well. The position does not allow here to review all of them, but one of the important matters related to the topic is to raise awareness and thinking about the entirety of Western civilization and its vision of the different other, and the violent tendencies it entails and the duality between declared universal human principles and values and practical practices, and the idea of Western centrality that sees the other as less governed. Humanity of white European man.
Whereas these were philosophical intellectual questions limited to the cultural and intellectual elites, the scope of thinking about them, criticizing them, and deconstructing them has now expanded. It led to the embarrassment of a large segment of the neoliberal class in our Arab world, who are the Westernizers who have seized the Western center and who promote subordination to it and the embodiment of its social culture as a condition for progress.
If the current events have expanded awareness of the Palestinian issue and the rights of its people, they have also expanded awareness of the Western colonial reality, its discourses, and the conditional relationship between it and the Zionist entity, which it sees as an extension of it in a different civilizational space accused of backwardness, terrorism, and hostility to Western civilizational values, to which the Western center places an absolute universal value. On the other hand, recent events have also highlighted the conditional relationship between the demand for Palestinian liberation and the demand for Arab liberation and advancement, and thus the idea of the Arab-Islamic depth of the Palestinian issue has been re-established as the central issue upon which other Arab demands are united.
I repeat here what I said in more than one place, occasion, and text: The tyrants were always the police of the invaders, and the one who tied the hands of the Palestinian people during the Nakba and its aftermath is the one who tied the hands of the Arabs, and has continued to bind them ever since. This is not an abstract intellectual slogan, but rather a fact confirmed by history. The issue and the modern history of the Arabs in the era of direct colonialism and beyond, but it must be noted that the West is not a single entity. There are intellectual elites and popular forces on its side who side with human rights, and constitute a true ally of the oppressed, the oppressed, and the marginalized inside and outside their societies. We should not be led away by Western positions. Official and public relations have so far led to slipping into the idea of a clash of civilizations, an idea that the official West is working on to camouflage the legal aspects of the conflict.
If you were to write a script for a Western film about what happened during the months of the Al-Aqsa Flood, what would you convey to the Western viewer? Which eyes are more influential and lasting in conveying what happened: the historian’s eye or the writer’s eye?
The Palestinian issue is an inexhaustible source of literary and dramatic works in which sophisticated treatment can move from the specific circumstantial to the general humanitarian, touching on the human condition in different places and times. This is a distinctive feature of arts and literature, and I cannot make specific choices. In literature and the arts, the dimensions and aspects are intertwined between the deep emotional that touches the human conscience, the intellectual, the political, and the historical, and at its center is the human being himself.
As for the comparison between historical blogging and literary blogging, I do not see it as appropriate. Each has conditions, goals, and functions, even if they are intertwined in many aspects, but I can say that if a literary text rises to the desired global level, it has a deeper and more lasting impact, and addresses a broader base of recipients. It addresses the mind, conscience, and artistic taste together, and is more capable of inserting the recipient into his inner world. It would transform dry historical material into personalized human material.
The history of conflicts is not just history, numbers, and general incidents, but rather translates into human tragedies, into human beings of flesh and blood, dreams, hopes, pain, existential questions, and varying responses between despair, hope, withdrawal, and resistance, and all of these may come together in the biography of a single person.
Will you be showing dramatic works during the coming month of Ramadan or the following?
I have completed writing a dramatic text, and I am now working on another text that will be a huge historical work, God willing. I hope to work on implementing them so that they will be presented during Ramadan the following year.
Source: Al Jazeera