National Pride and Overcoming the Siege

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

12 May 2007

Many Palestinians, particularly from Fatah and Hamas, are now complaining about the world for not having lifted the financial siege after the formation of the national unity government, which adopted a program partly in line with the demands of the Western states and Israel. Indeed, some Palestinians express surprise at this international position, which has still not lifted the siege. There are certainly those whose morale this development has struck a blow to, because political leaders and the media had filled them with the belief that a measure of Palestinian cleverness would soon channel Western money back onto its proper course, toward employees’ pockets.

As a writer who continually puts forward his opinion, I used to feel great discomfort whenever I told Palestinians that the national unity government would not lift the financial siege on the people, and I would sometimes hear improper remarks because I write the opposite of what people expect and consider within easy reach. Even some Palestinian media outlets, foremost among them Hamas’s own media, struck my name for a time from their list of commentators.

It must be affirmed here that political philosophy has a great deal to contribute to understanding political phenomena and events, and that it spares anyone who delves into it many mistakes, missteps, and forbidden errors. If someone ignorant of political philosophy imagines that he can run a state or manage public affairs, let him review the record of the Arab regimes in the various fields of life. There is a logic to politics closely resembling mathematical equations; there are political phenomena that in many cases are subject to scientific explanation; there are inputs and outputs. And if anyone imagines that politics is a matter of Arab “rallying-cry” solidarity or street cleverness, he is certainly leading his people toward the abyss.

Peoples move forward when they feel their pride (I do not mean their arrogance); their sons and daughters, individually and collectively, become enthused, and they acquire strength, courage, endurance, and a desire for collective work and mutual cooperation. Then you see sleeves rolled up over forearms, you see brows dripping with sweat, you hear the clatter of factories, you delight in the harvesting of fruit, and you come to love the glass of laboratories. But when a people is struck by frustration and feels weakness or humiliation, it relaxes into something like a stupor; forearms go slack, sites of production fall silent, and people turn to card games and dice and to sessions of narcotic oblivion, whiling away their time with honeyed talk and the wishful daydreams of the weak and incapable. It is no wonder, then, that societies of pride enjoy refinement, nobility of spirit, and mutual respect among their members, together with a determination to perform their duty and an insistence on securing their rights. But in societies of abasement, you see their members pouncing upon one another and tearing at each other’s flesh; values collapse, religion turns into mere ritual and sorcery, they breed thieves, swindlers, and hypocrites, con-men multiply among them, their lives are ruined for them, and they pile grief upon grief, made with their own hands.

If we, the people of Palestine, want solutions to our predicament, there is no escaping the need to first possess the mental capacity that forms the primary foundation for setting out toward action. This is a strange demand in a society that lacks any real engagement with the psychology of progress and collective construction. Many among us are those who reject philosophical and logical thinking, and the analysis of matters through a scientific method grounded in purely scientific findings on which scholars have spent enormous effort and long stretches of time; they turn away from reading the history of nations, and even turn away from reading our own history. We love improvisation, and our leaderships despise anyone who might know more than they do.

How can a nation meet the demands of a leadership that does not safeguard the political will of its own people? And how can the enemies’ view of a government be anything but contemptuous, when that government does not treat free political will as the very summit of its priorities?

These are questions at the very core of political philosophy, and they are not complicated ones, nor is their answer some kind of magic. The message has reached Palestinian officials again and again, and alternative proposals have reached them too, but it seems that the leaderships have grown accustomed to begging, and insist on entrenching a legacy of mendicancy that can never lead to freedom or to independence.

In Mecca, the Palestinians signed a document in which they agreed to remain beggars, and to halt an infighting they themselves had manufactured with their own hands. Can such a decision possibly produce national unity? National unity cannot be achieved through someone else’s will, and anyone who tries to arrange the affairs of his own house according to the will of his neighbors will find his house riddled with holes. National unity is achieved when the people of the house come together of their own free will and deliberate on the basis of their own particular covenants, agreed upon among themselves without outside interference, and arrive at what can lift them out of their ordeals, calamities, and worries — first and foremost through their own efforts, and only then with the help of relatives and friends.

Fatah and Hamas have given Israel and its Western friends a strong pretext to continue pressuring the Palestinian people. Had the Palestinians sat down together to discuss how to overcome the siege, and decided, for example, to develop a program of mutual solidarity and support along Islamic lines, or decided to curb consumerist habits and search for ways to increase local production, they would have set off real alarm within Israeli and Western political circles. The search for ways to overcome the siege frightens the enemy, and frightens the Western states, which have from the outset seen money as a means of bringing the Palestinian people to their knees. It was highly likely that Western states would send money to the Palestinian people, directly or indirectly through Arab states, precisely to forestall any serious Palestinian move toward self-reliance, and to avoid embarrassing the world in the face of a harsh economic situation leading to hunger or to a dangerous deterioration in health.

It would be deeply unsettling for the Arab nation to adopt a policy of self-reliance, and the West, together with Israel, would certainly feel threatened if the Palestinian people decided to change the policies that have exhausted its strength, and decided instead to pursue a policy affirming national pride, and sacrificing many worldly comforts for the sake of liberating the homeland and restoring its rights. For the people of the West, a policy of feeding the Palestinians is far preferable to leaving the Palestinians to their own devices, because in the latter lies the seed of an inner strength — and if that strength were to grow, Israel’s worries would only increase. This is why the Westerners will not stop offering financial assistance, but will do so in a manner that keeps the people under continuous pressure.

It is entirely legitimate to ask one of the Palestinian leaderships about the state that could possibly be built by the hands of those who go searching for their daily bread in the pockets of their enemies. It is astonishing that the leaders demand money from Western states, and then stand before television screens saying, “America must agree to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.” What is this state that this leader wants to force America to establish, while he himself cries out from hunger because it has not sent him his sack of flour?

I do not live in illusions, and what I am calling for will not be achieved except after severe and difficult hardships. So much work has been done on this people that the very question of national pride has become nothing more than media slogans concealing their own opposite beneath them.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الكبرياء الوطني والتغلب على الحصار” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.