Our Nakba Lies Within Ourselves

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Tomorrow, 15/May/2008, Palestinian factions and leaderships will hold celebrations of lies, deception, hollow slogans, and empty phrases. Tomorrow is the day of the liars and charlatans who broker Palestine in the slave markets of trade, whose throats will burst forth denouncing invasion and aggression, promising the enemies violence and vengeance. And tomorrow is the day when great Palestinian crowds will stand mocking the orators, shaking their heads in denunciation of the counterfeit procession, and jesting at the dancing mustaches of the speakers. Tomorrow our Nakba will be embodied in these very people who insist on inflicting a Nakba on the Palestinian people.

Sixty years after the Nakba, we still insist on the Nakba and on defeat, as though every part of us has relaxed comfortably into humiliation and disgrace. It seems we content ourselves with cursing the savage, barbaric, hateful enemy on whose head the prophets poured curses, and thereby spare ourselves the toils of building and acquiring strength. Sixty years on, this is our condition:

We are penetrated on the security level, and the enemy nests with its spies and agents in our homes, our institutions, our neighborhoods, and every one of our alleyways. We have not learned a single security lesson by which to protect our resistance fighters and our children, and we are still waging a fierce struggle against an enemy fully armed—on our television screens, and with peacock feathers;

We recognize the enemy, recognize its state, befriend it, kiss its women, and normalize relations with it, while in return we growl in rusted voices about establishing a viable Palestinian state with holy Jerusalem as its capital;

Our daily bread is now, for the most part, in the hands of our enemies. Our enemy provides us with food, and we hold ceremonies of wailing and lamentation if it stops supplying us;

We are prisoners of salaries paid by Arabs to the donor states, so that Israel and America decide how and when they are disbursed. We are prisoners of salaries, most of which are paid to security apparatuses required to defend Israeli security rather than Palestinian security;

The Palestinian now arrests the Palestinian, tortures him, kills him, searches his home, and hounds him even in his daily bread;

Palestinians now stand as guards at the gates of the kingdom of Israel;

Our moral condition has deteriorated to the point that it is fit only for defeat. The morals of dignity, building, and progress have gone, and what remains are the morals of self-justification, dispossession, plotting, conspiracy, treachery, and betrayal. I do not mean everyone, but I am speaking of the prevailing general pattern;

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 things like fried potatoes, watermelon, chocolate, and orange juice;

It is we who destroy our own economy with our own hands. We have dealt crushing blows to the farmers, craftsmen, and workers who ought to be the pillars of the homeland. The farmer is the land itself, and what remains of the homeland if the farmer abandons the field?

The Americans, enemies of the Arabs and Muslims who kill them and inflict deep wounds upon them, are, to us, rulers and points of reference, and we rush to them seeking rescue;

We have witnessed bloody internal fighting, an extension of many episodes of infighting that occurred between numerous Palestinian factions in Jordan and Lebanon. Fighting each other, for what? Because some of us embrace the enemy.

Corruption eats away at our institutions, and mediation, favoritism, and bribery are the hallmarks of our administrative practices;

Our leaderships are synonymous with smuggling, theft, factionalism, lies, and moral decay, and are tools through which the enemy mocks the Palestinian people;

As a people, we watch abominations being committed against us and remain silent, and the “brave” man is the one who tells those who cry out to be quiet, so that the harm of the authority and the security apparatuses does not reach him;

Our educational institutions, universities in particular, have become farms for Palestinian and non-Palestinian security apparatuses, and these institutions have come to resemble Arab university institutions;

As for solidarity and cohesion, do not even ask. The martyr lies before me while I hold a wedding celebration for dancers upon blood.

The list goes on. We commit abominations and conspire against our own people and their rights, we amass wealth on the shoulders of orphans, martyrs, widows, and the destitute, and at the end of the day we heap abuse on the enemy. We lie. Many among us love the enemy, want the enemy, and were it not for the enemy they would have had no share of treachery. The enemy is vile, murderous, bloody, contemptible, base, greedy, degenerate, mean, and spiteful—more of a cur than a dog’s own pup—but among us are some even more dog-like than he is, and were it not for them, he would not have been able to overpower us all these years.

Someone will now come along to say that the leaderships have achieved great accomplishments for us, foremost among them the Palestinian Authority. I say to such people: the Palestinian Authority is nothing but an old Israeli demand, and the village leagues under Mustafa Dudin’s leadership could have produced an authority far better than the one that exists today. Enough of this bragging. The years pass, Israel presses on with its policies, and the Palestinian negotiator prattles on about the Palestinian state.

It is time, on this painful anniversary, for us to change our condition. We must rise up against ourselves and against these leaderships that treat the rights of the destitute as a means to investment, wealth, and status. We must stop appeasing the liars, the charlatans, the swindlers, and we must shake off what has accumulated upon us over time. Wailing and breast-beating avail nothing.

There is no way before us except the way of building strength, and our first step must be to rebuild Palestinian society. With such a society and such morals, the only path open before us is the path of defeats and empty bidding wars.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “نكبتنا في أنفسنا” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.