Kerry Our Darling, and Our Failed Negotiator

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

No sooner does Kerry, the American Secretary of State, leave us than he returns to us. He misses us so quickly, as though he were infatuated with us. And no sooner does he leave than we miss him too, for there is a homeland we have not yet finished selling, and whose brokerage fee we have not yet collected in full. So who is more infatuated? Certainly the one in need, the one with the lower hand.

Kerry comes and goes, and we do not know exactly why he came, why he left, or what he said. We know nothing of him and his activities except through media reports, some of which may be truthful and accurate, and some of which are mere analysis and speculation. So where is the truth, what is really happening, and what is the new deal that Kerry is trying to formulate?

The Palestinian negotiator is not honest with the Palestinian people. He meets, discusses, and issues statements, but does not give the people the truth of what happens in the meetings, nor does he provide us with minutes of sessions or documents about the proceedings. We did not learn some of what was happening until Al Jazeera aired its program exposing what was hidden, at which the negotiator flew into a rage. If the negotiator were honest, he would give the Palestinian people the full information, because the homeland belongs to the people, and is not the property of the Erekat family, or the Abbas family, or any other family. The people have every right to know the truth and to have the details made clear to them, so that no one is betrayed or stabbed in the back. Since 1988, the Palestinian leaderships have kept their activities and backroom dealings secret, and the people have not understood what was happening around them until the thick stakes had already been driven into their heads.

If the negotiator were honest, he would be forthright, and the absence of forthrightness and clarity is simply the other face of lying, deception, and betrayal. If the Palestinian negotiator were not ashamed of his words and deeds, he would not leave matters hidden under the table, and he would raise his head with pride to tell the people what concerns their fate and the fate of their homeland.

The failed negotiator makes the excuse that the art of negotiation requires secrecy, and that negotiations cannot succeed unless they are secret. This is largely true for the powerful, who care about threatening the weak in secret rather than in front of the media. The Western school of negotiation believes in the secrecy of negotiations because its practitioners are the powerful, who can overpower the weak with the money, weapons, and media they possess. They are also able to recruit negotiators as their agents through means of enticement and intimidation, especially through money and women — and how many Arab leaders have fallen, and dragged their nation into the abyss, through women’s thighs.

The art of negotiation on the part of the weak requires openness, so that there remain restraints on the greed of the strong — noting that the negotiations underway on the Palestinian question lack the foundations of sound negotiation, and the Palestinian negotiator has been negotiating for years without any cards to back him up. That is, he is at the table in order to surrender, not in order to secure rights.

One can understand one failed round of negotiations, or two, or three, but one cannot understand failed rounds stretching over twenty years, with the Palestinian negotiator still arrogantly and glibly persisting in his failure and his misconduct. If there were nothing hidden — and it must be something huge — he would not have continued reaping failures. No one keeps reaping failures unless he has an interest in doing so. So what is the negotiator’s interest? A person tries something once, twice, three times, but stops when he sees that failure keeps repeating, and so corrects his course, abandons it, or looks for other options. But the Palestinian negotiator finds this simple equation difficult to grasp. Why? My answer is that if he were truly Palestinian, he would not have grown so comfortable with the condition he is in.

Kerry and Israel’s Security

The biggest problem facing the Palestinian cause is its fragmentation into multiple separate headings, and consequently the fragmentation of Palestinian and Arab awareness of it. Israel and America have succeeded in turning the Palestinian cause into issues of land confiscation, settlement construction, land swaps, and the Judaization of Jerusalem. Instead of remaining the cause of an entire homeland and the cause of a displaced people, it has been turned into partial crumbs that require not the effort of liberation, but merely the art of failed negotiation.

In his rounds, Kerry focuses on Israel’s security, and exerts great effort discussing security arrangements that reassure Israel that the Palestinians and Arabs are merely agents and traitors who safeguard its security.

All the focus is on Israel’s security and protecting it from the Palestinians? Astonishing! Who is the aggressor, and who is it that suffers assaults every single day? Who is the displaced, oppressed people denied any say in its own affairs? The great problem is that not one of our swine has raised his voice calling for Palestinian security. We are the ones who want security and search for it. Israel possesses every kind of weapon, and we do not even possess bullets, yet security arrangements are supposed to be directed toward Palestinian security, not Israeli security. The Americans and Israelis talk about providing security for Israel, and our Palestinian Zionists nod their heads in agreement.

In all of Kerry’s rounds, we have not heard a word about the right of return, and we have not heard a single Palestinian broker insist on the right of return. The right of return has dropped out of all the media reports and official statements, as though the Palestinian cause were simply an investment opportunity for brokers and traitors. The cause of Palestine is not a cause of establishing a state; it is the cause of the displaced Palestinian refugees, the cause of millions, and there is no solution to it except through the return of the Palestinian refugees. Does Abbas have the courage to stand up and say that every project that does not stipulate the right of return of the Palestinian people is rejected? I challenge him to say this and hold to it. The greater tragedy is that the refugees themselves produce no reaction — they neither groan nor object. Indeed, many of the refugee leaderships in the camps support the Oslo Accords, meaning they have abandoned the right of return. Yet they never miss an opportunity in front of the media to boast of their adherence to the right of return. The right of return is not merely a media statement; it is a practice.

There are many ideas being floated regarding Kerry’s rounds, but all of them contradict the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. There are only two fixed Palestinian principles: the right of return and the right to self-determination. Kerry drops the right of return, and our brokers drop it with him; he also does away with the right to self-determination, from the angle of using us as Israel’s soldiers, stripping away the Jordan Valley, and keeping the settlement blocs, etc. There is nothing in Kerry’s ideas that speaks to the right of self-determination in accordance with the 1974 UN General Assembly resolution.

The rest of it is that the Americans have been toying with us since 1967, and by God, they are liars. They talk about peace while supplying Israel with every tool of killing and destruction. We must put an end to this foolishness we are living in. We all know that the Americans are not seeking justice or right, yet we know this and still deceive ourselves. We lie to ourselves with full prior awareness of the lie. But this is the art of losing homelands.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “كيري حبيبنا والمفاوض خائبنا” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.