The Israelization of Palestinian Thinking

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Anyone following Palestinian internal affairs might assume that the financial and administrative corruption practiced by the Palestinian Authority is the gravest danger to the Palestinian cause, given that it feeds on Palestinian morale and spreads hatred and enmity among people and thwarts every attempt at achieving national unity. But this assumption evaporates the moment one confronts the Authority’s policy of Israelizing Palestinian thought — that is, of manufacturing a Palestinian mindset that defends Israeli proposals for resolving the Palestinian cause. There are Palestinians whose thinking has been molded in such a way that their ideas for a solution to the cause now begin exactly where the Israelis’ own ideas leave off.

…whether he believed in supporting Arafat financially, and he answered in the affirmative. I also asked him whether the Palestinian people had managed their own finances in earlier periods, before Western financial support existed, and he answered yes. Faced with his own contradiction, all he could do was say that things had become the reality now, and that we must respect what Israel wants if we want to receive our salary at the end of the month.

Another told me I would isolate the Palestinians internationally if I won, on account of my insistence on the refugees’ right of return, since Israel considers this position extremism and terrorism. He remained unconvinced, throughout our argument, that Palestinians must insist on implementing the international covenants — written by the very people of the West themselves — concerning the refugee’s return to his home and his property, or on implementing the UN General Assembly resolution specifically concerning the return of refugees; he said these matters simply do not apply to Palestinians. Nor was he convinced that we ought to engage the world on this very basis, especially since it concerns a humanitarian condition and feeds directly into the subject of human rights, which the West itself sometimes uses as a means of attacking governments and challenging their legitimacy. At that point a third man interjected, saying we must deal with reality and must not raise anything that complicates negotiations with Israel. And when I countered that it is Israel that complicates matters, one of them shouted angrily that it is Izz ad-Din al-Qassam who complicates matters, not Israel. I asked him to fear God in what he was saying, and he replied that those who attack Israel nowadays are the ones who do not know God.

The strange thing is that the two men who argued against the refugees’ return were themselves refugees, who had been taught that the establishment of a nominal Palestinian state matters more than the cause of five million Palestinian refugees, and that whoever loves his homeland must sacrifice the refugee cause. But these two do not represent isolated cases, since there is an official Palestinian program of indoctrination teaching people to adopt the Israeli position in the name of the Palestinian interest. My one consolation is that one of them called me after I had left and apologized for what he had said, admitting that drawing his salary depended on his falling into line.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “أسرلة التفكير الفلسطيني” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.