Palestine: Fully Fledged Reveries

The upheavals of the Arab revolutions have both influenced Palestine and been influenced by it.On an intellectual level, so to speak, the Palestinian cause has been engaged in dialectic conversation with the questions of freedom and democracy. On a concrete level, the position vis-à-vis the Palestinian cause has carried a strategic weight in the balance of regional alliances and in the deals struck between international conglomerates to trade off the revolutions. The Arab world has largely appeared as one bloc amidst a tempest of social movements seeking to shake the current political stagnation. Palestine, meanwhile,has appeared as a different, small and distant bloc on this map, suddenly separated from its origins. Palestine has been distanced in the Arab discourse, but it has not been forgotten nor sidelined. It has, however, been turned into a third-person pronoun referred to in discussions, at times cast aside and at times designated as a top priority. But does this depiction indeed reflect the real picture? Is there a genuine difference between what has been going on in Palestine and in Arab states during the same period? To assert the similarities among the two cases in this particular context, let us inspect the intersection of the social and the political....