Buying Off Palestinian Rights

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Western political circles and Western academics most often explain the phenomenon of joining underground military organizations by reference to economic and social factors. They say that poverty, and the resulting preoccupation of the head of the household with finding a livelihood, along with the mother’s search for supplementary work, together produce psychological and social problems and anxieties among young people, driving them toward ideas of violence and revenge against others, or toward drug abuse, prostitution, and joining gangs of theft, robbery, and murder. The conclusion usually drawn is that the way to eliminate the phenomenon of violence and deviance is to improve people’s economic and living conditions.

Over the long years of Palestinian suffering, it was difficult for a Western official to speak of Palestinian rights and the necessity of restoring them to their owners; talk instead centered on the search for some solution to the ongoing conflict. We might hear an official speak of the Palestinians’ suffering, of the poor health and living conditions in the camps, and perhaps hear him speak of the human rights of Palestinian refugees or of Palestinians under occupation, but it is very rare indeed to hear him speak of national rights. This is why we see the horizon of the official West, in its search for a solution to the ongoing conflict, mostly confined to the economic or livelihood dimension of people’s lives — on the assumption that the Palestinian condition has produced a phenomenon of violence that must be eliminated.

From the outset, Israel decided to confront the Palestinian resistance with counter-violence, but it did not achieve success despite its enormous destructive capacity. The resistance persisted and diversified its methods and means, to the point of reaching Jewish population centers and spreading panic and fear in Israeli hearts. Alongside violent confrontation, Israel and the Western governments that support it saw the necessity of working through money and the economy.

Taming Palestinians

The enemies of the Palestinian people adopted two complementary policies: a policy of despair, arising from setbacks and defeats, and a policy of incentives, built on money and status. I will not go into detail here about these two policies, but an observer can connect the defeat of the Palestinians in Lebanon in 1982 and the policy of undermining the 1987 intifada, on the one hand, with Israel’s policy of permitting the flow of money from abroad and manufacturing local Palestinian leaderships that do not support the idea of armed resistance, on the other.

The first step in the search for a financial solution to the Palestinian question took the form of establishing Palestinian centers and associations overseen by Palestinian academics and intellectuals who believed in economic solutions and in showcasing what is called the “civilized face” of the Palestinian people. The search for such academics and intellectuals began in the early 1980s at a low and very cautious pace, because the Palestinian national environment in the West Bank and Gaza was not yet ready to receive or tolerate activities of this kind. Palestinian intellectuals emerged calling for the necessity of addressing the West in the language it understands — the language of verbal persuasion, using the Palestinians’ suffering and exposing Israeli practices against them. In the 1980s they did not speak out against resistance, nor did they declare their readiness to recognize Israel, but they struck the note of improving economic conditions as a means of relieving some of the people’s suffering, and focused on the idea of establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. I myself was among those who were approached: the American consul in Jerusalem offered me cooperation in 1983, and the Israelis, in 1989, offered to make me into a Palestinian leader.

It was important at that time to shift Palestinian attention away from the right of return and the right to self-determination and toward establishing an independent Palestinian state, playing on the suffering of the people of the West Bank and Gaza in order to shrink Palestinian demands and shrink the Palestinian people down to the people of the West Bank and Gaza. In exchange, these intellectuals and academics received facilities from the occupation — travel and movement permits, opportunities to give lectures and attend conferences at an international level, and financial support. I recall here, for instance, the Palestinian Information Center, which found ample scope for its activities, including receiving money from the Palestine Liberation Organization without any serious objection from the occupation. I recall too that those in charge of such centers later emerged as Palestinian leaders, and that the occupation’s pursuit of most of them was nothing but cover, a device to manufacture leadership images.

As the years passed, beginning in 1988, the Palestinians accepted what had once been forbidden, and crossed every red line they had set for themselves in their struggle to reclaim their rights. They recognized Israel and Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, coordinated security matters with Israel, and arrested Palestinians on charges of resisting the occupation, and so on.

The Policy of Buying Rights

After the success of the policy of despair and incentives, America and Israel moved to bind the Palestinians further, through a financial policy that placed the Palestinians’ daily bread in their own hands, or in the hands of the Western states generally. The goal was, and remains, to place the Palestinians in the captivity of their daily loaf, so as to come between them and resistance, or between them and any focus on their rights, and to keep the Palestinian preoccupied with what he might eat today rather than with how to work toward the return of refugees or the liberation of Jerusalem. This policy intensified after the Oslo Accord and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, and now rests on three main pillars:

First: Salaries

After Oslo, America and Israel tied the funding of the Palestinians to the donor states, and the donor states tied the disbursement of money to the degree of progress the Palestinians made on the ground in implementing the agreements with Israel, particularly on security matters. America and Israel stripped the matter of financial support for the Palestinians away from Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Emirates, and placed it in the hands of the donor states, which do not act without the permission of the two states. This despite the fact that some Arab states continued to provide financial support, but as donor states, not as fraternal states that refrain from attaching security and normalization conditions.

The Palestinian Authority adopted the idea of increasing the number of government jobs, and began hiring tens of thousands of people who provide no real service to the Palestinian people. Tens of thousands of Palestinians obtained official positions, particularly in the Palestinian security apparatuses, with no work to do beyond collecting their salary at the end of the month. The donor states did not object to this unwise policy, and provided sufficient money to cover the salaries. It was clear that these states were not concerned with Palestinian production or with providing real services to the Palestinian people, but rather with tying as many Palestinian young people as possible to a salary coming from the West. And since the salary is tied to the Authority’s security policy and to Palestinians’ abstention from resistance, drawing the salary comes at the expense of resisting Israel, and in favor of continuing to negotiate with it.

It was noticeable that the money allocated for salaries did not come to the Palestinian Authority in a lump sum, but monthly, and in accordance with the steps the Palestinian Authority took against elements of the Palestinian resistance. Some Palestinians grew accustomed to the idea of arresting Palestinians accused of security activities against Israel, wrapping it in national justifications to dress it up for onlookers.

The world witnessed the depth of the financial captivity into which the Palestinians had cast themselves, following Hamas’s victory in the 2006 legislative elections. The Western states cut off salary funds and turned the Palestinian cause into a matter of the salaries of employees, most of whom do not work. The Palestinians found themselves accepting officials imposed on them by American-Israeli will, because without them the money would not flow. Because of the salaries, America and Israel are able to control the general policy of the Palestinian Authority completely.

Second: The Non-Governmental Organizations

In Palestine, there are non-governmental organizations that obtain their funding locally and from Arab sources, but most organizations obtain Western funding — from Italy, America, the Netherlands, Norway, France, and so on. Some of these organizations maintain normalization relations with Israel, while others refuse normalization and refuse to condemn what America calls terrorism. Despite these differences, the employees of these organizations, numbering in the tens of thousands, receive their salaries thanks to Western funding, and have no way out but to think of the importance of continuing to draw that salary.

Stability matters a great deal to these people, for the continuation of the social and humanitarian projects they carry out; and should resistance arise, or a bloody conflict develop, the continuity of their work hangs in the balance. In other words, the objective circumstances in which these employees work make them more inclined to read the West’s interest as lying in the disappearance or halting of Palestinian resistance. This is quite apart from the fact that there are non-governmental organizations that are actively hostile to the Palestinian resistance, whose officials carry out normalization activities with the Zionist enemy and adopt normalization programs.

The employee at one of these organizations must weigh Palestinian national rights against his own daily bread and that of his children, and the moment he enters into this internal reckoning, Israel and America have already achieved a great accomplishment.

Third: The Paris Economic Protocol

The 1994 Paris Economic Protocol brought the Palestinian trader and manufacturer into the fold of Israeli economic control, tying the Palestinian economy completely to the Israeli economy. No goods pass except through an Israeli trader, and Israel is entitled to deduct customs fees and set taxes, and so on. The capacity of the Palestinian trader, and the exporter in particular, is tied to Israeli will, and the customs revenues that are supposed to be paid to the Palestinian Authority remain subject to Israeli will. We saw how Israel withheld these funds after Hamas’s election victory, because Hamas’s policy did not conform to Zionist standards.

The Paris Protocol tied the Palestinian economic situation to the global situation in terms of free trade, and to the global financial system that monitors the movement of every dollar. The result was that Palestinian imports increased at the expense of local production, so that the farmer, the carpenter, and the craftsman lost out and became unemployed, while Israel and America came to monitor the flow of money from any source other than the donor states. In the past, the Palestinian could manage his affairs in various ways and obtain money, but the Paris Protocol placed him under strict financial surveillance.

The Paris Protocol also brought the Palestinian people economic leaderships tied to the global economic and financial systems, some of them accused of membership in the Masonic movement and of establishing supra-economic relations with Israel.

Habit, According to the Slogan

If a visitor were to come to the West Bank now, he would hear a great deal about the high cost of living, the difficulty of managing daily expenses, and rising prices, but he would hear little about Israel’s policies of settlement, land confiscation, arrest, and assassination. It is not easy to accuse people, but the policies of Israel and America, which found an echo among Palestinian political, economic, academic, and cultural leaderships, have brought the Palestinian people to a growing preoccupation with the cost of living, at the expense of national rights.

If economic pressure on the Palestinian people increases, and the daily life of the Palestinian people in the West Bank grows further entangled with Western money, then the shift from the national to the personal will no longer remain a mere passing or temporary matter, but will become a habit governing people’s concerns, so that instead of clinging to the refugees’ right of return, the priority becomes clinging to the salary. The meaning of this is that the ultimate goal is to buy off Palestinian rights at a price determined by those in charge of the policy, according to their own assessment of the evolution of the Palestinian psyche. Accordingly, all the current talk of peaceful solutions and Palestinian rights is nothing but a way of killing time until the Palestinian cause is fully dissolved into the monthly salary.

Will this policy ultimately succeed? There is no doubt that it is succeeding now, and that its success is advancing. But not the whole people draws a salary, and not the whole people is prepared to give up its rights for the sake of a salary.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “شراء الحقوق الفلسطينية” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.