Let Us Not Fall Silent Before the Nakba

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

On May 15, 2008, Palestinian factions and leaderships will hold celebrations of lies, deceit, hollow slogans, and empty phrases. Tomorrow is the day of the lying charlatans who broker Palestine in the markets of slave-trading and commerce, their throats set loose to denounce the invasion and the aggression, threatening the enemies with retribution and revenge. Tomorrow is the day vast Palestinian crowds will stand mocking the speakers, shaking their heads in denunciation of this counterfeit spectacle, poking fun at the speakers’ dancing mustaches. Tomorrow our Nakba is embodied in these very people who insist on visiting nakba after nakba upon the Palestinian people.

Sixty years after the Nakba, we still insist on the Nakba, and on defeat, as though every fiber of us had relaxed into comfort with humiliation and insult. It seems we content ourselves with cursing the barbaric, savage, odious enemy on whose head the prophets poured curses, sparing ourselves the toil of building and acquiring strength. Sixty years on, our condition is as follows:

1. We are penetrated on security matters, the enemy nesting with its spies and agents in our homes, our institutions, our neighborhoods, and every one of our alleys. We have not learned a single security lesson that would let us protect our fighters and our sons, and we still wage a fierce struggle against a heavily armed enemy — from television screens, dressed in peacock feathers.

2. We recognize the enemy, recognize his state, befriend him, kiss his women, and normalize with him — while in return we growl, in rusty voices, about establishing a viable Palestinian state with holy Jerusalem as its capital.

3. Our daily bread now lies mostly in the hands of our enemies. Our enemy supplies us food, and we hold ceremonies of wailing and lamentation if he stops supplying us.

4. We are prisoners of salaries the Arabs pay to the donor states, so that Israel and America can decide how and when they are disbursed. We are prisoners of salaries, most of which are paid to security services required to defend Israeli security, not Palestinian security.

5. The Palestinian now arrests the Palestinian, tortures him, kills him, searches his home, and pursues him even in his daily bread.

6. Palestinians now stand guard at the gates of the kingdom of Israel.

7. Our moral condition has deteriorated to the point that it is fit for nothing but defeat. The ethics of pride, construction, and progress have gone, and what remains is the ethics of justification, excommunication, scheming, plotting, treachery, and betrayal. I do not mean everyone, but I speak of the prevailing general pattern.

8. Sixty years after the Nakba, we still buy the enemy’s goods, most of which we could easily live without. We buy from the enemy items such as french fries, watermelon, chocolate, and orange juice.

9. We are the ones destroying our own economy with our own hands. We have dealt devastating blows to the farmers, craftsmen, and workers who ought to be the pillars of the homeland. The farmer is the land itself — what remains of the homeland if the farmer abandons the field?

10. The Americans — enemies of Arabs and Muslims, who kill them and inflict grievous wounds upon them — are, to us, rulers and points of reference, and we rush to them, crying out for their help.

11. The streets of Palestine have witnessed bloody internal fighting, an extension of the many bouts of infighting that have occurred among numerous Palestinian factions in Jordan and Lebanon. We fight each other — for what? Because some of us embrace the enemy.

12. Corruption eats away at our institutions, and favoritism, nepotism, and bribery are the headlines of our administrative practices.

13. Our leaderships are bywords for smuggling, theft, factionalism, lying, and moral decay, and they are the very tools through which the enemy mocks the Palestinian people.

14. As a people, we watch abominations being committed against us and fall silent, and the “brave” among us is the one who tells those crying out to be quiet, so that harm from the authority and the security services does not reach him.

15. Our educational institutions, universities especially, have become farms for the Palestinian and non-Palestinian security services, and these institutions have come to resemble the Arab university institutions elsewhere.

16. As for mutual solidarity and support, there is no end to what could be said. The martyr lies before me, and I am holding a wedding celebration for dancers upon his blood.

The list goes on. We commit abominations, conspire against our own people and its rights, achieve wealth on the shoulders of orphans, martyrs, widows, and the destitute, and at the end of the day heap insults on the enemy. We are liars. Many among us adore the enemy, want the enemy — were it not for the enemy, they would have no share of betrayal at all. The enemy is contemptible, murderous, bloody, base, vile, greedy, degenerate, mean, spiteful, and a dog many times over — but among us are those who are even more dog-like than he is, and were it not for them, he could never have held us down all these years.

Someone will step forward to tell us the leaderships have achieved great accomplishments for us, the Palestinian Authority foremost among them. To these I say: the Palestinian Authority is an old Israeli demand, and the village leagues, under Mustafa Dudin’s leadership, could have produced an authority far better than the one now in place. Enough of this bravado. The years pass, Israel presses further into its policies, and the Palestinian negotiator carries on boasting of the Palestinian state.

It is time, on this painful anniversary, that we change our own condition. We must revolt against ourselves and against these leaderships that turn the rights of the destitute into a vehicle for investment, wealth, and status. We must stop appeasing the lying charlatans and swindlers, and we must shake off what has accumulated on us over time. Wailing and lamentation accomplish nothing.

There is no path before us but the path of building strength, and our first step must be rebuilding Palestinian society. With a society and ethics like these, the only path open before us is the path of defeats and empty one-upmanship.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “لٍ نخرس أمام النكبة” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.