Fleeing to Israel

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

What is happening on the Palestinian scene — fighting, internecine strife, bloodletting, and rash acts — is painful, difficult, harsh, and shameful, and brings nothing but disgrace upon the Palestinian people, but the flight to Israel crowned these historic farces that will be written in black letters. Dozens of Palestinians fled the battlefield in Shuja’iyya to the Zionist entity, which is supposed to be their foremost brutal enemy, and the enemy received them with every form of humiliation, disgrace, and contempt, stripping off their clothes, blindfolding their eyes, and displaying them on television barefoot and naked. As an Arab and a Palestinian, the bloody fighting that claimed hundreds of victims did not pain me as much as this hideous spectacle, which the enemy was so keen to broadcast so that the world would know our true measure as a Palestinian people — and so that we ourselves would learn the truth about ourselves.

The sight of those fleeing was crushing, devastating to the human spirit and to every national, religious, and human value, and I felt that history had shaken beneath my feet, as though the nation’s martyrs throughout its history were crying out, their rest in their graves disturbed by these events. One cannot stand unmoved before such horror, nor fail to be angry at ourselves and at all the values we have so long used to falsify history. The world watched this humiliating spectacle, and watched it through a commentator who said that Palestine is no more merciful to Palestine than Israel is.

We Have a Heritage of Cruelty

In 1971, the Jordanian army pursued Palestinian fedayeen in the Jordan Valley and attacked them with force, driving dozens of them to cross the river seeking protection from the occupation army. Some 150 Palestinian fighters crossed the river and surrendered themselves to the Zionist army, and the very same televised scene took place then. The occupation stopped them, hands raised in surrender, and displayed them on television screens and on the front pages of local and international newspapers. Jordanian television and Jordanian media have now forgotten what happened in the Jordan Valley, and remember only the present moment.

In Zionist prisons, Palestinians were forced to flee from among the ranks of detainees and take refuge with the prison administration because of the severity of the torment inflicted on them by their own comrades and fellow travelers on the path of liberation. A phase of intense suspicion, mixed with the work of informers, prevailed in the prisons, and detainees developed many anxieties that led them to suspect that every move made by a detainee was in fact a signal arranged with the prison administration, an act of espionage and betrayal. There were bouts of severe beating and torture in the prisons, overseen by the leaders of the sections and rooms, and there were executioners who specialized in torture. There is no doubt that Israel recruited spies, but it succeeded in creating the conditions for some of them to become detention leaders. These leaders, who fed factional bigotry in an acute way, drove many to flee to the prison administration and become spies and informants. We used to glorify, and still glorify, this kind of leadership, which is the Zionists’ own handiwork, and which works continuously to stoke the fires of strife within the Palestinian interior.

A number of Palestinians set up “bird cages” (spy cells) in the prisons after discovering that their own leaders had deceived them. Their leaders used to send them out on military activity against Israel, and would then send word to the Zionist army so it could finish them off.

Or factions that dishonored the honor of the gun, just as we ourselves dishonor it on the Palestinian internal scene in this fallen historical phase. There is an honor to arms: the defense of dignity, honor, and the safeguarding of religion, of women’s honor, and of the land — but most of our own weapons serve mere thuggery. There is honorable resistance weaponry, but it shrinks before the crowding mass of treacherous arms.

The Black Rancor

It is noticeable, from Arab behavior, that our hostility toward one another takes on a special flavor, different from our hostility toward the enemy. Our hostility against one another is marked by such intense rancor and hatred that we are prepared for internal wars stretching over long years, and always ready for hideous, vengeful fighting that respects no conscience, no ethics, no bond of humanity. We are prepared to practice the harshest kinds of torture and persecution, the ugliest forms of killing, and the worst kinds of mutilation. We carry a dark blackness in our hearts against one another; none of us can bear the superiority of others or their achievements, none respects their capacities, their talents, their giving, and we always crave to destroy and shatter one another.

It is clear that the Arabs are prepared to extend a hand to the external enemy, to come to an understanding with him and bow before him so that he may ride us, yet we extend the hand of internal reconciliation while our hearts do not speak what our tongues utter.

These are matters requiring thorough scientific study, and specialized, professional scientific teams, so that we may arrive at the truths of our social and human behavior. There is a great flaw from which we suffer, and if we are honest with ourselves, we must devote enormous effort to understanding it, and then to devising appropriate solutions.

The Steadfast Leaderships

The astonishing thing is that our leaderships possess an astonishing capacity for bluster, cunning, and the shirking of responsibility. Horrifying corruption occurred in Palestine, and no one came forward to resign on the grounds that he bore even partial responsibility for what was happening; we recognized Israel and paved the way for further Zionist measures to seize the land, and the leaderships kept talking about victories. Bloody fighting broke out among us, and no one dismounted from his own mangy wooden chair; security chaos spread and reckless weapons proliferated in the streets, and the leaderships carried on as though no one bore any responsibility at all. Of course, our leaderships never err and never commit crimes, and the occupation is always to blame. If only the occupation would withdraw temporarily from the land occupied in ‘67, so we could see how our angelic leaderships would behave. We want to see the paradise these leaderships would build once the occupation is gone.

I am confident that many of our leaderships wish for the occupation to remain, because they would find themselves out in the street, without titles and without chairs, were the occupation to disappear. And the occupation, for its part, certainly cannot afford to leave them to face their own fate, because its own interests would suffer great harm. For this reason, they will remain clinging to the occupation in practice, while rejecting it on television screens.

The Important Thing: Where Is the People?

Whoever answers me will jump to say that our people bear responsibility too, that it is a generous and great people. There is no people that does not give and contribute, but peoples who try to cover up their errors with history do not truly want to progress or be liberated. We have given, and we still give, but our cause has retreated sharply at the Palestinian level, and Zionism has managed to carry on with its programs, its own losses diminishing with time.

Our problem is that we see the errors and close our eyes: some of us practice hypocrisy and lying, marching alongside the ruler in his error and misguidance, while others of us withdraw, imagining ourselves among the geniuses who meddle in nothing. Many crimes have been committed against the Palestinian people by the Palestinian factions and leaderships, and the people did not stir, neither inside the universities nor outside them, neither at the level of the student movement nor at the level of academics. We are all watching, entertained, as the leaderships and factions do to us what they do.

Is there anyone who will answer? Is there anyone prepared to stand against all these disgraces? I extend my hand, certain that peoples build their own future with their own hands, and that if arms remain rolled up in their sleeves, the night of humiliation will only grow darker still.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الفرار إلى إسرائيل” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.