A letter to President Bill Clinton
Bouthaina ShaabanBouthaina Shaaban
Source: Al Mayadeen English
4 Nov 2024 23:06
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As I watched you in complete disbelief giving your terribly miscalculated statement, which does not at all befit your statesmanship, you reminded me of the English Poet William Wordsworth…who tore up his best work later in his life.
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Dear President Clinton,
As you were bidding farewell to late President Hafez al-Assad at the door of the presidential palace in Damascus, you told him, “I regret having to leave without seeing the city of Damascus; this historical city that I dreamt of visiting since I was a kid.” Yesterday, Mr. President, “Israel” shelled the Lebanese city of Baalbek, which is like Damascus, a UNESCO World Heritage site that represents 9000 years of human history; its grand structures reflect Phoenician and Roman cultures. Israeli airstrikes recently struck Tyre in Lebanon and the historic Markets of Nabatieh, raising alarm about a deliberate attempt to erase the region’s past.
Dear Mr. President,
You were the custodian of many negotiation rounds both in Washington and in Shepherdstown and you saw how the Israelis didn’t even allow the border committee to meet. President Hafez al-Assad described you as the most even-handed American president, and the most serious in pursuing a peace deal between the Arabs and the Israelis. That is why I was so surprised to see you at the campaign of Kamala Harris shying away from facts and equating the murderer with the victim when you said, “I will do everything I can to convince people that they cannot murder their way out of this.” It is not people, Mr. President, who are murdering their way out of this, but the Israelis armed with American bombs and missiles who are murdering hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
You must have heard Netanyahu saying, “We want to finish the job,” describing this war as an existential war. What he meant by finishing the job is to kill as many Arabs as possible and to erase their culture, history, and identity as he has been doing daily in both Palestine and Lebanon for the last 14 months.
Dear Mr. President,
When you met with the late President Hafez al-Assad in Geneva, in January 1994, you both talked for hours about people in the region and the need to make peace, and in the closed meeting, you bonded with him beautifully, talking about your late mothers. I am sure you will be shocked to know that “Israel” has killed in the last year tens of thousands of mothers in Gaza, Palestine, and Lebanon, tens of thousands of infants and children, hundreds of journalists, and hundreds of medical doctors and staff and patients, not to mention the destruction they wrought on all hospitals in Gaza. I know that our narrative, i.e. the Arab narrative, does not reach you; so allow me to say that the atrocities “Israel” is perpetrating against us can only be compared to the genocide of Native Americans and the Aborigines amid a total collapse of the international system and international humanitarian law.
Dear Mr. President,
As I watched you in complete disbelief giving your terribly miscalculated statement, which does not at all befit your statesmanship, you reminded me of the English poet William Wordsworth, who at an advanced age tore up his best poems in a reevaluation of what he wrote, not knowing that he was destroying his best heritage and depriving himself of his most honorable legacy.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
Bill Clinton
Palestine
Lebanon
Gaza
Hafez Al-Assad
Syria
Damascus
Bouthaina Shaaban
Bouthaina Shaaban
Arab Intellectual
