The Lords of Thuggery

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Many believe that the chaos sweeping Gaza and the West Bank is caused by a handful of thugs who know no meaning of national interest and are restrained by no moral conscience. And many are those who try to fix the situation by treating the alarming, destructive acts committed on the ground in the moment. Reform committees spring into action, factions mobilize with their statements, and the Authority intensifies its promises to pursue corruption and the corrupt — yet the sabotage continues, the thugs grow bolder still, and corruption spreads unchecked.

The problem is not these thugs who storm offices, fire on people, extort, plunder, and traffic in stolen goods. The problem lies with the lords of thuggery — the leaders who adopted, as a matter of policy, the sabotage of Palestinian society and spread corruption within it deliberately and with premeditation, according to a strategy with clear features and plain objectives. These lords have been digging graves for the Palestinian people since the days they called themselves revolutionaries in Jordan and Lebanon, and I warned repeatedly in my writings about the tragedy awaiting the Palestinian people because of their actions.

The sabotage that has been unfolding in an organized, programmed manner over the years — specifically since 1994 — amounts to a school. It is a school that relies on the cult of personality and the pursuit of status, money, and pleasure. It is a school that regards corruption as the best path toward destroying the moral and social fabric of the Palestinian people. It is a school with its own origins, roots, philosophy, administration, teachers, and the fledglings its teachers have raised. It began with a small number, but it has now expanded through its many graduates, who were schooled in fraud, cunning, deception, theft, and contempt for religious and national values. There is a hatchery for the corrupt.

This is a school that has mastered the manufacture of patriotic slogans and improvised revolutionary posturing, and it does not hesitate to exploit the homeland and its citizens to justify its own misdeeds. Nor does it ever hesitate to hurl accusations at others and brand them with the vilest labels in order to silence them. And if the Palestinian people are to fix the situation and rise toward a new state of affairs, this school must be eliminated. It must be dismantled and those responsible for it referred to the courts — though only after the current judges and public prosecutors have been replaced, and a respectable judicial system put in place.

This is a school that always finds funding, and its money has not run dry across the decades. America eased the matter of financing for it, and Israel eased the transfer of the funds. There are leaders now, and power centers backed by America and Israel, who nurture the chaos, recklessness, and abuse of people in pursuit of their own personal interests, achieved through Palestinian self-destruction.

The people bear a great share of responsibility, and so do the Palestinian factions that never dealt seriously with the matter, content instead to issue statements that, more often than not, held no appeal for the public.

Those who wrote the statement carried a banner reading: “Sedition slumbers — God curse whoever wakes it.” As for one of the lords of corruption, he described us on television screens as “the misguided faction that has lost its national compass.” That same man was later shot in a dispute among his own kind, and he now stands accused, in public statements, of receiving money from America.

My car was burned, and I read in the newspapers statements of condemnation issued by the factions, yet I did not receive a single phone call from a leader denouncing what had happened. It seems the statements of condemnation are programmed into a computer, discharging their duty automatically. Recently, I issued a statement about the worsening phenomenon of weapons at An-Najah University, and my colleagues among the faculty aligned with the Authority responded only by issuing a statement against me, claiming I was working to stir sedition. As for the head of the guard aligned with the armed national current — the one whose weapons the occupation never pursues — he sent me a verbal message calling me a spy, and to assert his authority within the university he repeated the message in the hearing of university officials.

The media have not held back from playing their own destructive role. Most of our newspapers and radio stations are hypocritical, practicing deception and lies. They lie without shame, echo whatever the corrupt say, and back it with force. Articles critical of the situation, describing a way out, are sent to them and go unpublished; but an article of yours might be published if it serves deception and hypocrisy, or if it happens to be about conditions in Zimbabwe. A number of media officials in our beloved homeland take their orders from the lords of corruption.

I offer these examples from my own experience to say that the lords of corruption, who form terrifying power centers, are not in truth the only ones who bear responsibility. The non-corrupt person who chose the path of personal safety bears responsibility, and the one who seethes with resentment in his heart bears responsibility. The greater number of us chose our personal interests until harm reached all of us and all our interests together. The ignorant do not grasp the danger of corruption and the corrupt until the fire reaches their own insides.

The world’s media now carry news of the chaos spreading across the West Bank and Gaza, and there are certainly those who take pleasure in it. We have wronged ourselves, and we have left our future in the hands of a handful of power-brokers who set the thugs in motion whenever they please. The harvest is of the same kind as the seed, and the ignorant pay the price of their own ignorance.

We are a people who have endured for a hundred years, and neither the occupation nor the powers allied with it have managed to humiliate us, dissolve us, force us to abandon resistance, or diminish our determination to reclaim our rights — yet we have let the woodworm gnaw away inside us. We have been through very many trials, and it seems they have taught us little. The internal defect is dangerous, and may well be more dangerous than the external threat. We must raise our voices and sharpen our resolve to correct these grave internal conditions, and the greatest responsibility falls on the Palestinian factions that claim liberation and resistance as their cause.

Setting aside his political position on peace with Israel, I would guess that Mr. Mahmoud Abbas is not comfortable with what is happening; but my assessment is that he is unable to make decisions and carry them out. My belief is that he is besieged by the power centers and the lords of corruption, and does not possess the strength to check them and hold them to their limits — and he will never be able to do so as long as he confines himself within their midst.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “أمراء الزعرنة” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.