Budgets for submission: what Israel’s opposition offers Palestinian citizens
Waseem Hosary writes in +972on 21 September 2026:
In the spring of 1944, Jerusalem educator and intellectual Khalil Al-Sakakini opened an essay in the Palestinian newspaper Falastin with a joke. Titled “Mutual Understanding,” the piece responded to a declaration by David Ben-Gurion, who four years later would become Israel’s first prime minister, that “there is not a single Jew in the world who does not want an understanding with the Arab nation.” Sakakini took this purported offer of partnership and subjected it to a characteristically sharp examination.
He told the story of a priest who offered a penny to any student who could answer a simple question: “Who is the person one should love completely?” One after another, the children answered “father,” “mother,” “brother,” or “sister,” and failed the test. The last child, more cunning than the others, understood what was being asked of him. “I love Jesus,” he replied. Delighted, the priest handed him the coin and asked his name. The boy answered with a name that was unmistakably Jewish: “Mordechai.”
For Sakakini, the Jewish community in Palestine resembled the priest. “They ask, but they want the answer to be what suits their wishes, not what reason accepts, and not what justice approves, or at least what can be arrived at,” he wrote. The answer they wanted from the Arabs was already scripted: “Palestine is your country. It is time for you to return to it after your long absence. During your absence, we were nothing more than keepers of the fields. Take it as we received it from you.”
In Sakakini’s eyes, the Zionist establishment’s language of “understanding” and “partnership” thus concealed a fundamentally one-sided proposition. The Arab side was expected to surrender its own narrative, adapt itself to what the Jewish side was prepared to accept, and only then receive the penny.