Either Unity or Coordination with Israel

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Coordination with Israel is the opposite of unity, the opposite of the Palestinian people, the opposite of the Palestinian people’s fixed national rights, and the opposite of independence and freedom. Security coordination with Israel is a moral, national, religious, historical, psychological, and emotional drain on the Palestinian people, at home and abroad, and it is a foul stain of shame on the people’s forehead — if any forehead is left. We have placed security coordination with the enemy that displaced our people and seized our land in a historic disgrace before ourselves and before the nations, and turned ourselves into a laughingstock, an object of mockery and derision. Who else in history has stood at the doors of their own executioners, killers, and violators, guarding them as they commit adultery and violation, other than the Palestinian partisans of security coordination? And it does not appear that any appeal to shame is of use anymore.

Is it possible, then, for Palestinian ranks to unite on the ground of security coordination with Israel? We stand before two paths: either we unite on the basis of recognizing Israel and serving it security-wise, or we unite on the basis of working to restore our rights. Perhaps someone will say that coordinating with Israel leads us to our fixed rights — but let him answer this: how can a wronged person recover his right by serving the one who wronged him? Perhaps the oppressor will take a little pity on him and give him something, but the oppressor ceases to be an oppressor only when he restores rights to their rightful owners. The partisans of security coordination have tried this for nearly twenty years now, and they have seen that Israel’s security demands never end, and that Israel is not looking to restore rights but to enslave the Palestinian, turning him into a security guard in its service and under its supervision, in exchange for scraps of money handed out by donor states with Israel’s own permission. Even the daily bread of those who imagine they will establish a state remains at Israel’s mercy, and they ought to have learned that Palestine has been reduced, for some of its leaders, to a salary, a car, and personal pleasures, and that the fixed rights they sing about are nothing but empty media slogans with no value whatsoever.

…unity with one’s own people, or service to the enemy of whoever that people may be. Whoever shakes the enemy’s hand does not shake the people’s hand; whoever hunts down a Palestinian fighter’s rifle cannot claim to be defending the people’s security; and whoever colludes with the enemy hides himself away whenever talk turns to the homeland and to patriotism.

To resolve this crisis, we must distinguish between civil security and national security. Civil security must be in the hands of the police, with the need for a fundamental change in its structure and management. National security, however, cannot be achieved through public, declared security services, because they do not possess sufficient strength to confront a regular army like Israel’s. National security must be in the hands of the resistance, which must be developed in a way that avoids the mistakes of the past, the infiltration of its ranks, and haphazard action. It is therefore necessary to dissolve the security agencies currently in existence — intelligence, general intelligence, preventive security, and the rest — and to absorb their personnel into civilian institutions and facilities. We do not need people who chase after us, write reports on us, throw us out of our jobs, and wage war on our daily bread. We need people who will stand with us in confronting Israel.

For this reason, Hamas is required to stop demanding the reform of the security services, since in doing so it is really saying that it wants to be a partner in managing and controlling them. We do not need these services in the West Bank at all, and they must be dissolved. What is required is developing the resistance on scientific and professional foundations, establishing a unified, secret leadership for it in a secret location somewhere in this world, and abandoning both openness in our work and swagger in the use of arms. I believe everyone by now is certain that publicly displayed weapons under occupation belong either to a traitor or to a fool. And if the reconciliation and unity talks are to be genuine, then Hamas and Fatah are required to entrust the matter to independent Palestinian experts, to think through the optimal arrangement for the Palestinian people, and to draft a new charter to which everyone commits.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “إما الوحدة أو التنسيق مع إسرائيل” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.