Time & Perspective Quote by Mahmoud Abbas

Abbas is doing two things at once: staking a moral claim and drafting a diplomatic credential. The opening, "I say", has the cadence of a formal declaration, less personal confession than courtroom summation. Then comes the carefully stacked indictment - "decades of displacement and colonial occupation and ceaseless suffering" - a triad engineered to sound historical, structural, and ongoing. "Displacement" invokes 1948 without naming it; "colonial occupation" reframes a nationalist conflict as an anti-imperial one; "ceaseless suffering" supplies the human cost that makes the politics feel nonnegotiable.

The phrase "courageous and proud people" is not mere flattery. Its subtext is political discipline: a leader reminding an audience that endurance is identity, and identity is leverage. Abbas is also addressing outsiders who prefer Palestinians as either victims or militants; "courageous and proud" insists on agency without sounding belligerent.

The pivot - "to live like other peoples of the earth" - is the rhetorical masterstroke. It normalizes Palestinian statehood by making it boring, almost procedural: not revenge, not exceptionalism, just membership. That line quietly pressures the international community: if you believe in a rules-based order, you should want a people to "live like other peoples". It's a universalist appeal that doubles as a rebuke to the exceptional legal status imposed by occupation.

Finally, "free in a sovereign and independent homeland" is redundant by design. Sovereign, independent, free: three locks on the same door, signaling that partial autonomy, fragmented cantons, or indefinite "process" won't satisfy the demand. In the context of stalled negotiations and contested legitimacy, Abbas is carving out the maximal baseline - dignity framed as statehood, not charity.