Corruption and Occupation Against Khaled al-Susu

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Khaled al-Susu is a young Palestinian man living in the Austrian Quarter next to the city of Khan Younis. He is a writer and journalist trying to carve out his path toward a promising professional future. He is committed to professional values, chief among them truthfulness in reporting the news and conveying it to people without shame or fear. From his home he watches Israeli tanks shell Khan Younis and its refugee camp morning and evening. Khaled and his family did not escape Israeli shelling, when Israeli forces bombarded the Austrian Quarter from the neighboring Neve Dekalim settlement and struck his house along with other houses that were hit.

Khaled lost a great many of his household possessions, and he has no choice now but to buy furniture that provides his family the bare minimum of comfortable sleep. But with what money? He is a government employee and is supposed to receive a salary, but the Palestinian Authority has withheld his dues for five months now. It does this because he wrote against corruption and criticized the corrupt. Al-Susu said in his article that the Palestinian people’s money is being plundered by deviants, and instead of the Authority going after these deviants to hold them accountable, it worked instead to pursue al-Susu and what he had written. The Authority followed up its steps by confiscating his personal identity card. What does the Authority want from him? It wants him to stop writing, and it offered him, in exchange for that, according to his own account, the position of director-general.

Khaled al-Susu is caught between the jaws of a pincer, so where are the champions of human rights and the defenders of democracy? Our country teems with centers for the defense of human rights, democracy, love, and peace, and scarcely a day passes without some activity from these centers in the form of lectures and seminars. The Palestinian people want to see some benefit reach them through these centers. This vast number of center directors, employees, and lavished funds means nothing unless it is translated into practice. The defense of human rights does not happen behind closed doors, nor in corridors, but through fieldwork that stands up to the oppressor and works to wrest people’s rights back. Khaled al-Susu needs a courageous stand taken with him, so that he may benefit from the values that the champions of democracy claim to hold, so that his monthly salary is restored to him, and so that the ruin the occupation inflicted on his house is repaired.

The matter does not stop at the centers; what is required is that the stand be a popular, mass one, in defense of human freedom and the right to expression and to addressing people. The public ought to reject practices of repression and insist on those values that help the Palestinian stand up against enslavement and occupation. Repression breeds servility and produces nothing but deformed, cowardly people incapable of freeing themselves, whereas a life of freedom produces only people of honor, dignity, and pride who refuse humiliation and disgrace.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الفساد والاحتلال ضد خالد السوسو” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.