Palestine's Youth Revolution: A Coming March

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Palestine’s youth no longer have room to wait, hoping that relief might come from here or there — there is no relief except through the arms of Palestine’s youth, and the youth of the Arab and Islamic nation. Treacherous, criminal hands have killed us, bargained away the rights of our people and of all Arab peoples, and inflicted upon us humiliation, disgrace, and repeated defeats. They have even worked continuously to tame the youth, turning them into docile beasts of burden with no opinion, no role, and no worth, and have worked to distract them with whims and trivialities so that the field would be left clear for them to conspire, lie, and mislead however they pleased.

The occupation is visible — an open enemy that occupies the land, displaces the people, builds settlements, and strips people of every source of strength it can. But many Palestinian and Arab leaderships have worked, over long years, to kill an entire nation, not merely to abandon Palestine and recognize Israel. The occupation imposes upon us the duty of liberation, a sacred duty, in order to recover our rights in full, without diminishment, foremost among them the right of return, and the leaderships impose upon us the duty of revolting against them, so that we can rid ourselves of the great obstacle standing between us and confronting the occupation. Many Arab and Palestinian leaderships have devoted themselves to defending the Zionist entity, and have worked over the years to mislead the people under illusions of peaceful solutions, negotiations, and feeble popular resistance.

Arab youth are now revolting against their tyrant rulers, who have exhausted and ruined the nation, squandered its wealth, and bent it to the goals of Israel and the United States, and it is the duty of Palestine’s youth to revolt against the occupation, bypassing all these failed factional leaderships that drag the Palestinian people from one failure to the next, from one defeat to the next, from one illusion to the next. Thousands of our martyrs have fallen for Palestine, and the leaderships of the factions do nothing but sing the praises of their pure blood, in order to justify their own recognition of the enemy and their insistence on keeping the people dependent for their daily bread on enemies who control it. These leaderships have turned the Palestinian cause into a matter of salaries for their own members, who find pleasure in living off the betrayal of their homeland.

What is required of Palestine’s youth, inside Palestine and outside it, in the cities, villages, and camps, in the West Bank, Gaza, the land occupied in [19]48, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and every corner of the earth, is:

To restore to the Palestinian cause its true standing in people’s minds, hearts, feelings, senses, and consciousness, so that it remains always at the top of the priorities of the Arab and Islamic nation;

To insist on liberation — the liberation of Palestine — as a national, religious, pan-Arab, historical, and human duty. The idea of liberation has largely disappeared, to the point that some Palestinians have come to think that Palestine consists only of the West Bank and Gaza, and the homeland has vanished from some people’s minds to the point that they imagine the martyrs fell so that they could receive a salary from the donor states;

…the two [constants] for Palestinians in any deliberations that may take place at the global or Arab level, namely the right of return and the right of self-determination, and to consider any initiative that does not clearly and explicitly include these two rights non-negotiable;

The slogan “Palestine is ours” must be raised clearly and in broad daylight. Some of us have become ashamed to raise this slogan, for fear of being accused of extremism, absurdity, and irrationality — a shame produced by the Palestinian factions that drowned themselves and the people in so-called diplomacy, and by the fallen Arab regimes. This land is our land, an inseparable part of this vast Arab land stretching from the ocean to the gulf;

Turning our backs on the Palestinian factions that have traded in national slogans and, in the end, handed the Zionists our very necks. The factions have become a burden on the Palestinian people, a stumbling block on the road to liberation. Let the factions kill one another, hurl mutual accusations, and cooperate with international corridors — let us instead attend to our duty toward liberation and the recovery of our fixed national rights. These are factions that will shrink into extinction if we cast them behind our backs;

Drafting a Palestinian charter that affirms the duty of liberation and Palestinian rights, the Arab and Islamic character of the Palestinian cause, and the various methods and means of media, cultural, social, economic, political, educational, security, and military activity that will ultimately bring us to our goals.

Is it not shameful to hear a young Palestinian reject the right of return on the grounds that the Jews have no other place but Palestine? And is it not shameful to hear a young Palestinian woman say that recognizing Israel is a national duty leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state? Is it not shameful for a Palestinian to defend the betrayal of security coordination with the Zionists in order to obtain donor-state funds? A great deal of shame is being practiced on the Palestinian scene now, and a great deal of historic disgrace has been manufactured for us by leaderships fashioned from outside, or without our free Palestinian will.

Tunisian, Egyptian, Yemeni, Libyan, Syrian, and Lebanese youth are raising the banner of Palestine, while there are some among Palestine’s own youth who want to raise the banner of negotiation and coordination with the Zionists. This is a disgrace the people of Palestine must not bear, and must not stay silent about. The Palestinian factions have failed Palestine’s youth, and now it is the turn of this youth to shake off the illusions that have accumulated on their consciousness over the years, to prove to themselves, to their people, to their nation, and to the whole world that the rights of the Palestinian people will not be lost in salons and hotel corridors, or in the brothels of leaderships driven by money and lust.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “ثورة شباب فلسطين: زحف قادم” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.