The Future of the Palestinian Cause in Light of Arab Developments

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Palestinian cause is a pivotal cause, the most important among Arab causes, and it is affected by the changes and developments taking place on many stages, even if those stages are geographically distant. How much more so when great events are unfolding on Palestine’s very doorstep? What is happening on the Arab stage is a great earthquake, a historic development whose preconditions had long been ripening, and it will inevitably affect the political, social, and economic structures of the Arab homeland, with important repercussions for the various national and pan-Arab causes and concerns — foremost among them the cause of Palestine.

The movement of the Arab street is expected to be a vital and stirring subject for the Palestinian people and for the various Palestinian factions concerned with the future of Palestinian national rights, in the hope that this may help chart the steps that must be taken in order to turn what is happening to the advantage of these rights. Assessing the event, examining its causes, dimensions, and developments, and sketching out hypothetical scenarios of what it might yield or produce in the way of political, security, military, and unionist structures — all of this lies before the Palestinian people, in all its components, who must read closely what is happening and judge how to act so that opportunities capable of advancing Palestinian aspirations are not lost. For this reason it is necessary to proceed with deliberation without disengaging from the event, so that neither hasty action leading to regret, nor sluggishness leading to loss, occurs.

A New Historical Era

With the Tunisian revolution, the Arab homeland entered a new historical stage that has begun to feed on a historical era marked by backwardness, tyranny, and humiliation, extending since the end of the period of direct colonialism. The Arab lived through the stage of independence in interaction with his surroundings, defying the prevailing conditions, and achieved what he believed was an independence that would fulfill the great aspirations represented in that period by Arab unity, the liberation of Palestine, and the achievement of progress so that the nation might take its place among the rising nations. The Arab regimes, tribal and non-tribal alike, did not rise to the level of these ambitions, and the Arab homeland entered a phase of darkness in which it could neither keep pace with other nations nor uplift its people.

The threshold of the new historical stage, still in the process of forming and taking shape, is distinguished by numerous features, foremost among them:

First: The Arab revolution now is a revolution of peoples, and in this it differs entirely from the military coups witnessed by several Arab states in the previous historical era, and differs from the internal wars witnessed by non-Arab states, with the exception of Libya so far. And since it is the peoples who are in revolt, private interest is not the banner of demands but rather the public interest — according to each Arab revolution’s own definition of what it considers the public interest to be. That is, the peoples moved because of a shared suffering, and in order to achieve shared goals, and this is what allows us to judge that Arab causes will be at the top of these peoples’ concerns, and that matters will not be confined to purely national worries. The Arab peoples still possess a sense of partisanship toward, or belonging to, the nation, and there is no people that turns its back on the concerns of another people. The best evidence of this is that the revolutions erupted in near-simultaneous fashion or in overlapping succession, as though there were a single Arab revolution, and that most Arab peoples are living the Arab revolutions moment by moment through the media, hoping, for the most part, for the downfall of the rulers. In the end, a people possessing a free will enjoys a collective national belonging that overrides the will of a ruler trying to buy loyalty.

Second: It is noticeable that the revolutions began independent of parties and organizations, and that their leaderships have begun to take shape in the street, but without organizational structure. This means that partisan interests, too, are absent from the revolutions, and that unaligned general concerns — not tied to this or that party program — are the main banner. After the revolutions began, the parties tried to catch up and offered support to the youth movement, but no party dared to put forward its own program as a basis for leading or directing the street.

Third: The masses held fast to two vital slogans: freedom and national unity. Freedom is the foundation of conscious creativity, the strong cornerstone of construction and progress; and national unity is the guardian of freedoms and of achieving numerical equality among people and justice for all citizens without discrimination.

Fourth: It is clear that the Arab masses have grown weary of the divisions between Muslim and Christian, Sunni and Shia, Arab and Kurd, northerner and southerner, Palestinian and Jordanian. They have found that internal discord reflects on everyone, and that people cannot achieve their interests except by standing together in the face of tyranny.

Fifth: The Arab revolutions are distinguished by a lofty moral standard, in that the masses did not deliberately engage in sabotage and destruction, and insisted on the peacefulness of the demonstrations, preserving people’s lives and property. This reflects the moral dimension within which future developments may unfold.

Arab Oppression of the Palestinian Cause

The morals of the Arab regimes and the Palestinian leaderships have not been at the level of the challenge posed by the Palestinian cause and the various Arab causes. Every nation has aspirations that face challenges, and what is required is the development of capacities and capabilities so that the nation may rise to the level of the challenge and achieve its goals. Since the recording of independence, Arab leaderships have faced many challenges, but all of them required a moral elevation that would allow for the mobilization of energies and capabilities, and that would raise the level of individual freedom, thereby paving the way toward strengthening a sense of belonging — which is considered a basic prerequisite for elevating the level of collective work and mutual cooperation. Arab leaderships busied themselves with tribal, status-conscious, arrogant, and self-indulgent values that took them far from the logic of conscious construction and the drive toward achievement. For this reason the nation failed to achieve Arab unity, failed to expel colonialism, and failed to liberate Palestine. It failed to leave behind educational, scientific, and pedagogical backwardness, etc., to the point that national unity in most countries began to disintegrate.

The cause of Palestine requires this moral dimension in which a person emerges affirming himself through achievement, not through boasting, extravagance, and excess. Arab leaderships, including the Palestinian leadership, occupied themselves with a great deal of resounding rhetoric and beautiful phrases, and turned their backs on the values of sacrificing time, effort, and money, and on the values of preparedness and taking the necessary means, until Palestine became a sack of flour or boxes of aspirin. Indeed, Arab and Palestinian leaderships cooperated with the Zionist entity under the banner of liberating Palestine.

Is it possible that the current Arab revolutions will hold fast to moral values different from those that came before? I am certain they will, because they are a movement of peoples against a deep moral failing that produced policies inflicting great harm on the nation and on peoples individually; it is a popular movement aiming to remove the morality of injustice, enslavement, and tyranny, and to establish a morality of participation, justice, and freedom. Awareness of what must be done is clear, and it is different from the awareness that accompanied the era of expelling colonialism, because this generation is now aware of the sites of internal decline and will work to change them. If the moral level rises, the level of commitment among the nation will rise, and consequently the level of performance will rise at all political, economic, and social levels — and, more importantly, at the level of the nation’s causes. That is, the cause of Palestine will begin to take its rightful place in practice — a place it has not occupied until now except theoretically, and also within a scattered resistance that had largely been morally adrift.

The Counter-Forces

They will find themselves before a new popular reality marked by intelligence and a search for truth, and this must inevitably be reflected across the entire Arab political environment.

The two states [America and Israel] supported the tyranny and moral decay that characterize the Arab regimes, because this provided them with the atmosphere they needed to run these regimes according to their own designs. The self-indulgent and repressive behavior of the Arab regimes served to sustain the dominance of these two states and to contain the forces of progress and change in the Arab homeland. This situation is now under very grave threat, and it is quite possible that tyranny will gradually collapse, giving rise to an atmosphere of dignity and pride entirely at odds with the atmosphere of humiliation and submission that had provided Israel with additional strength and success. This new atmosphere is liable to threaten Israel’s Arab strategic depth, which over the course of decades constituted the best strategic depth that enabled Israel to record repeated victories over the Arabs.

Accordingly, the two states are now trying to enter into the Arab revolutions with the aim of sabotaging them from within. It is difficult to know exactly what Israel is doing now, especially since it has an abundance of agents and spies in various Arab countries, through whom it can foment chaos by way of assassinations, random gunfire, sabotage, and the like. But America is working to support its traditional allies, and is trying to intervene in the affairs of the interim governments in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as in the affairs of Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. It is trying to twist the arm of the forces of change, and to support traditional forces that hide behind the banner of change and freedom.

Will Israel and America succeed in their attempts to pollute the course of change in the Arab homeland? I doubt they will achieve any great success, but they will create an atmosphere of confusion so that people come to long nostalgically for bygone days. The two states will not achieve a major success capable of diverting the course of the revolutions from their goals of freedom and independence, because the logic of history is stronger than the logic of force can erase. The logic of history is a logic of power because it rests on the will of peoples, and it is logical and rational because it expresses a historical dialectic tied to the negation of the existing situation in favor of a new one. However much the two states try to halt the movement of history, they will only be able to obstruct it.

In the Short Term

Some observers say that the slogans of the Arab revolutions do not focus on the Palestinian cause, which raises doubts about the future commitment of Arab peoples to the Palestinian cause. There is some truth in this, but the cause has not been entirely absent, at least from the angle of rebuking Israel. Egypt’s revolutionaries spoke about Mubarak’s poor policy in agreeing to the siege of Gaza and closing the Rafah crossing, about Israeli aggression, and about the agreement to export Egyptian gas. Egyptian crowds staged a demonstration in front of the Israeli embassy denouncing Israel and the embassy’s presence in Egypt. It was clear that the Egyptian public held a national vision toward the Palestinian cause that embraced the defense of Palestinian rights. The Egyptian masses proved their commitment to the Palestinian cause on Friday, May 13, 2011, which was a victory for Egyptian national unity and for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. In Tunisia, the masses spoke of Zine El Abidine’s cooperation with Israel, and of the services he and his aides provided to Israeli security. In Libya, the revolutionaries accuse Israel of supplying Gaddafi with weapons. In Yemen, they see that the ruling regime remained a toy in American hands, and that liberation from American will is a basic popular goal.

Despite the initial signals given by Arab peoples, it is not required now that these peoples place the cause at the top of their priorities, because the internal problem and ridding themselves of the regime require effort, sacrifice, and sleepless vigilance. Arab peoples are not now preoccupied with the concerns of the nation, nor with foreign policy, but rather with changing the situation at home and bringing the revolution to maturity — and this is precisely wisdom.

As for the two governments that emerged from the revolution in Tunisia and Egypt, they are interim and cannot chart policy or make decisions related to high politics. These two governments are managing affairs until elections are held that bring in governments representing the two peoples, after which we can speak of policies at the regional and global levels. My assessment is that the policies expected will not be sharply hostile to Israel, but will be softened, taking a gradual course toward insisting on Palestinian rights.

For this reason it is expected that Egypt will ease its siege on Gaza, and will begin adopting positions less cooperative with Israel — not toward abrogating the Camp David agreement, but toward a gradual disengagement from security commitments toward Israel, and building a new vision for how to corner Israel without losing political balance at the international level.

Palestinian Politics

There is no single Palestinian policy among the Palestinians now; there are at least two policies, led respectively by Fatah and Hamas. Regardless of the program of either party, Palestinians ought to recognize that the agreements with Israel arose from a particular local, regional, and international political environment, and that this environment no longer exists, and that what suits one environment does not suit a different one. The environment of the agreements was marked by a general Arab collapse, by Palestinian faltering, by a dangerous imbalance in the global and regional balance of power, and by the absence of Arab peoples from the stage of events and influence. This environment has been undergoing radical and major change since 2006, and it is now subject to further change. It appears that the two movements have recognized the developments taking place on the Arab stage and have decided to sign a reconciliation agreement awaiting actual implementation.

The wise person is one who does not shoulder a rock heavier than his strength, nor leave a stone in his path if he is able to move it. There are now elements of military strength represented by the resistance in southern Lebanon and in Gaza, and another force taking shape in Arab countries represented by the popular will, and it is not expected that the Palestinian will hide from these two facts as if history were standing still. History is changing, and it is vital for those who hold the Palestinian cause to be aware of this if they wish to move from a stage of weakness to a stage of strength. If awareness and strategic assessment of the transformations underway are present, then Palestinian demands for rights are expected to take a new direction that does not rely on the strength of the weak supplicant. My assessment is that Hamas will be more aware than Fatah of the dialectic of these developments, and will benefit from them, while the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah will lag considerably, to the point that it may find itself gradually fading away before the momentum of events.

Signs of the impact on Arab engagement with the Palestinian cause have already appeared on the anniversary of the Nakba, when modest demonstrations broke out in a number of Arab countries, and it is expected that vast crowds will set out on the day of the march, May 16, 2011, toward the hypothetical borders between Palestine and neighboring Arab countries. One can easily sense a shift now in the psyche and morale of the Palestinian, and hear from him words expressing greater confidence in the masses of the Arab nation.

The Bottom Line

In the end, and though pessimism marks my assessment, I see the following:

First: the level of Arab regimes’ dishonesty regarding the Palestinian cause will decrease considerably, and these regimes will commit to a degree of transparency that was previously lacking;

Second: Egypt will gradually disengage from certain clauses of the Camp David agreement, and will try to extend its sovereignty over Sinai;

Third: the Arab summit may gradually distance itself from the Arab Peace Initiative;

Fourth: the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance will find new supporters, and it is likely that peoples will press to volunteer for resistance factions;

Fifth: a new security vigilance will develop in a number of Arab countries to pursue agents of Israel and the United States;

Sixth: developments on the Arab stage will tilt in favor of Hamas’s program at the expense of the Fatah movement’s program.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “مستقبل القضية الفلسطينية في ضوء التطورات العربية” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.