Academics Falling

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Marxists were not wrong when they described intellectuals, or some of them, as faint-hearted, not to be relied upon to change conditions and lift injustice from people. Such people care about their own private interests, even at the expense of homelands and the poor and the destitute, and they always look upward toward the more materially fortunate classes, hoping to obtain some share of comfort that might improve their own material circumstances. These people cannot be relied upon in the course of change — indeed, they may very well become tools of the ruler or the authority for suppressing change and cementing the status quo.

In our contemporary Palestinian history, from the beginning of the Zionist invasion until now, it appears that many academics and intellectuals have played faint-hearted roles that have negatively affected the course of the Palestinian struggle against the Zionist occupation, and some of them cooperated with the Zionists and the Zionists’ patrons among global and local powers in order to secure private gains. Nothing demonstrates this better than the positions many of them now take regarding the agreements with the Zionist entity, security coordination with it, normalization, support for the pursuit of Palestinian by Palestinian in defense of Zionist security, and their readiness to go along with corruption and cover for those who practice it.

If we look at the human map of the Palestinian people and its relationship to supporting and entrenching the Zionist entity at the expense of the fixed national rights of the Palestinian people, we will not find a single farmer, carpenter, blacksmith, tailor, or worker of any kind who scrambled to go to the negotiating table with the Zionist entity. All of these are too great to turn the homeland into material for bargaining, and you find them watching, from a distance, what intellectuals and university professors do, their hearts filled with sorrow. As for the academics and many senior Palestinian intellectuals, they came forward, competing and struggling among themselves to advance to the front ranks of the homeland’s brokers.

At the outset, at the Madrid negotiating conference, many intellectuals competed to attend, and some grew angry at their own faction or organization for not nominating them, or not asking them to contribute to the betrayal of the homeland and its citizens. The leaders of the organizations were cautious about participating, given the embarrassments they might face with their own rank and file. Academics did take part in the Madrid conference, and some continued negotiating right through to the end — that is, until they heard through the media that an agreement between the Liberation Organization and the Zionist entity had been reached. And some of these academics have continued negotiating to this very day, fully aware and certain that they are failed negotiators, incapable of wresting anything from Israel’s fangs.

There are, without doubt, academic agents and spies working in Israel’s service — I confirmed this myself through the cycles of arrest I went through, since some of the charges leveled against me could only have been known by academics with whom I sat every day discussing various national issues. But most of those scrambling to betray the homeland are driven simply by a love of finding a place and a political role that sets them apart before the public. For the sake of prestige, boastfulness, and social standing — even if illusory — the academic is prepared to bargain over the homeland, or at least to lend a helping hand to those who broker it, because it is they who hold the decision, they who decide how positions in the Palestinian Authority are filled. Beyond the standing a falling academic can achieve, he also secures material gains — salary, pension, allowances, a private driver, and so on. In the end, the academic asks himself: which is better — clinging to national standards and facing scrutiny, arrest, and arbitrary measures, or taking part in the brokering and reaping the gains? For many academics, the answer is to secure the gains. Academics have made themselves into mounts for corrupt politicians who chose to betray the homeland and the citizen.

What if the academic is a professor of political science, one who has spoken to his students time and again about the standards of democracy and legitimacy, and about the importance of national identity and sincere national belonging? In Palestine today, as before, no one possesses the legitimacy to lead the Palestinian people — we have already discussed this matter in a previous article on the “Arabi21” website. How can a teacher of political science accept, for himself, to negotiate in the name of the Palestinian people while knowing in advance that his very presence in the negotiator’s seat is illegitimate? How can a teacher of political science accept membership in an illegitimate government, while knowing in advance, as everyone else knows, that the government he belongs to is illegitimate? And what reaction might students have when they come to realize that their teacher was lying to them, that legitimacy is not an important matter when personal gain is on the line? The teacher would speak of principles, values, and foundations in the classroom, painting a fine picture of a successful political system, yet he collapses easily the moment he is tested. It is clear that it is not only the schoolteacher who strays from principle to protect his salary — the university professor does the same, not to protect his salary, but out of greed for additional gains. The greater tragedy is that academics speak to their students of the virtues of democracy, telling them that Arabs will not succeed unless they embrace democracy, while at the very same time serving despots, drawn by the favors the despot showers upon them.

This is not a tragedy unique to Palestinians but a tragedy of all Arabs. One can easily see, on screen, an academic defending despotic Arab regimes that make Arabs taste the bitterness of torture, in the very same breath in which he praises democracy. This is no surprise — intellectuals usually fall at the feet of the powerful. The academic is always searching for justifications for his own fall, but the farmer and the worker need no such thing, for each of them was nursed on dignity and pride, and neither eats anything but the bread of his own brow’s sweat.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “أكاديميون يتساقطون” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.