Betrayal in Palestine, In Plain Sight

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

It is no longer strange to see a Palestinian traitor stand before the television cameras, shaking hands with a Zionist who is seizing the land and displacing the people, and there is no longer anything in calling for recognition of Israel that inspires concealment or shame. In plain sight, right before your eyes, Palestinians stand before the cameras and declare, before the media, that Hamas must recognize Israel if it wishes to provide the Palestinian people with their daily bread. These Palestinians now cooperate directly with Israel and the United States, take part in the siege of the Palestinian people, and exploit the people’s financial need in order to bring them further to their knees and topple the Hamas government.

Hamas does not dare call the traitor a traitor, and agrees to the Document of National Accord, which, in several ways, amounts to indirect recognition of Israel. As for the people, they know that treason is practiced in broad daylight, and they know that there are those who trade in their pain and grief, but they are also aware that they must pay the price of their own silence over all the sins committed over the long years. The leadership has placed the people’s daily bread in the enemy’s hand, the people have bowed their heads, and people have rushed after government jobs while knowing full well that the salaries come from an enemy who demands political concessions in exchange.

There are Palestinian leaders now steeped in corruption and treason, who claim to belong to the Fatah movement — the very people who brought the movement its electoral defeat and brought the people ruin — conspiring against the Palestinian people and exploiting the employees’ need. There is money that was promised to be paid to the employees and was never paid; it is being withheld in order to raise the pace of pressure on Hamas, so that the government resigns. These people are burdened by their absence from power, having lost their status and their sources of theft and embezzlement; and they know that their masters in Israel and America will throw them in the trash if they fail to bring down the government.

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…in positions of decision-making as much as they can manage, and the other factions are complicit in what is happening, because they deal with the very heads of treason as though they were national leaders. Those factions have tied themselves to the traitors until their interests became deeply entangled with theirs.

It is a disgrace for the Palestinian people, who have made sacrifices for a hundred years, to remain silent about this treason, or to make peace with it and coexist with it. Palestine is not a loaf of bread, and the blood of those who were martyred for liberation and freedom is not so cheap as that. We are capable of carrying one another through programs of mutual support and solidarity, not through European and American money. There is no good in us if a Palestinian does not want to carry his Palestinian brother, and there is no good in us if we rely on pleading and begging.

We must stand boldly and courageously against this treason, and declare plainly and clearly that everyone who wallows in American and Israeli embraces is a traitor. The forces of “September 13th” have worked hard and diligently to liquidate the Palestinian cause ever since they shook hands with the Zionists and decided to tie the hungry people’s loaf of bread to American and Israeli will. These forces are dragging the people into emptiness, degradation, and baseness, and all of us must rise up for ourselves and defend our honor, the sanctity of the land, and the truth. There is no good in us if these forces continue to roam free, as though the Palestinian people had become mere mercenaries waiting for fodder from the people of the West. And the Hamas government must break out of this isolation to engage with the people in the search for solutions.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الخيانة في فلسطين عينك عينك” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.