My Name Is Mahmoud, And I Like To Cosplay As Indigenous

by Mahmoud Abbas, President, Palestinian National Authority; Chairman, Fatah; Chairman, Palestine Liberation Organization

Credit: Kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons

Ramallah, February 1 – Nice to meet you all! My name is Mahmoud, and my favorite pastime involves assuming the trappings of an ancient people with unique cultural ties to this land, when in fact the vast majority of my would-be nation boasts ancestry with little connection to this geographical entity. But it’s fun to pretend!

If you like, you may call me Abu Mazen – “father of Mazen.” I had a son, unfortunately deceased, and that kind of honorific developed in Arab culture long ago. You know, the people who swept out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries of the Common Era and conquered vast territory, colonizing it all up the wazoo and imposing Islam and the Arabic language wherever they went. Still, I have a good time playing make-believe with my people’s indigeneity to “Palestine,” a term even we Arabs and Muslims didn’t use to refer to the Holy Land until the twentieth century. It’s a foreign term – but that’s OK, because we’re just pretending!

Sometimes, though, we pretend a little too hard, and convince even ourselves that the pretense reflects reality, and that’s when we get into all sorts of trouble. Our make-believe is so compelling that we don’t even believe the real indigenous people when they claim ancient attachment to the land! We get violent and throw tantrums and make tons and tons of noise. Mine! All mine! You can’t have any! Go away!

That worked a little bit, but they kept coming anyway, even when powerful forces such as the British Empire stopped them from coming in large numbers while the Germans and their local collaborators tried to get rid of those pesky folks. By that time we’d thoroughly convinced enough people that we didn’t need to share. But the trouble continued! It turns out those other people, the actual indigenous people, felt it so important to reassert their belonging to, and in, the land, that they didn’t stop trying to rebuild their own society here after thousands of years of exile even while we attacked them, killed their children, burned down their communities, and just generally behaved like the spoiled children we’d become. Mine!

This game is so addictive, though. It’s brought us only misery, but we can’t help it. It was bad enough in 1948 that we and our strong buddies from all around failed to push those other people into the sea, as promised, but lost control of even more territory; in 1967, after years of continued attacks against them, we lost even bigger.

And you know what? We’re going to keep doing this, because it’s just so much fun to cosplay.

Also it helps us take our minds off the shame of having nothing positive at all to contribute to culture or history. But mostly the fun thing.

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