The Palestinians Are Victims of Betrayal

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

We went out to demonstrate in protest at a shortage of money; we did not go out for the homeland, or against the corruption of the homeland, or against security coordination, or normalization, or the cultural and economic invasion. Consumerist values stand above the values of the homeland. They — the people of the West and Israel — solve our financial problems for us every time we grow angry at the Authority. But do we know why they give us the money? Yes, we know: it is the price of our homeland, the price of our martyrs’ blood, our children’s moans, our mothers’ sighs, the pain of our wounded, and the suffering of our prisoners. And what if they decided not to give us the money? Would we end up with neither money nor homeland? They will only stop giving us the money once they are assured that our dispute is the last one.

Let no one be angry when others accuse us of betraying our homeland and our people, because we truly are betraying it, and betrayal has so gorged us that it now spills out of our heads. We are demonstrating now not in defense of the homeland or in rejection of some betrayal, but for salaries whose money comes mostly from Israel and from those who established it and drove the people of Palestine into exile. And so the Zionists and the Americans watch us from their palaces, their faces brightening with joy at their great achievement in destroying the national spirit of the Palestinians, in exchange for paltry sums they take, quite simply, from the wealth of the Arabs.

Oslo is the great betrayal, and upon it were built terrifying agreements that drove hundreds of thousands of people, like a herd, into the pen of the pursuit of material interest — a pursuit whose banner is begging, supplication, hypocrisy, and theft carried out on the backs of the poor and destitute — and pushed them toward security coordination with the Zionists, which means one thing and one thing only: defending Israel’s security against the people of Palestine, the land of Palestine, and the sanctities of Palestine. The Paris Protocol came as the embodiment of the great betrayal, the Taba Agreement as the embodiment of the greater betrayal, and then came the Zionist conferences attended by Palestinian intellectuals, officials, and politicians, contributing to the drafting of a policy for preserving Israel from its enemies and from the vicissitudes of time.

Betrayal is eating away at our limbs and our bones, and we see it, and we practice it, and we try to convince ourselves that we are defending a homeland. One of us sells al-Aqsa and Jerusalem and feels no shame standing before the television defending the fixed national principles, the right of return, and the right to self-determination. By God, he is a liar. The agreements with Israel are treasonous, their texts are clear and leave no room for doubt, and even a cub could read in them the betrayal of the homeland and the people. Their texts require no philosophers or geniuses to see the Palestinian tragedy embodied in them. There are those who accepted them out of ignorance, those who never read them yet defended them because their tribe demanded it, and those who are steeped in betrayal up to their ears. One crime may be greater than another, but the crime remains bound up with these agreements all the same.

…-malization and the recognition of Israel, and spying in its service, secretly or openly. He should also revisit the PLO’s revolutionary law, which stipulates the execution of everyone who draws close to Zionism and its entity. And before he attacks others, he ought to look into how many death sentences would fall on him once we apply the laws and resolutions of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

If the agreements with Israel are not betrayal, then what is betrayal? I ask the geniuses of Oslo to define for us the meaning of betrayal. This is addressed in particular to those intellectuals and academics who sold their conscience, their pens, and their minds for a filthy handful of money they receive from Western states.

We have addressed the people ever since Oslo and up to now, explaining the consequences expected to befall the Palestinian people. We told them that the cities would be sealed off with a single truckload of dirt, that the Palestinian people would be turned into beggars pleading for money from their enemies, that the idea of self-reliance would be destroyed, that what remained of the Palestinian economy would be destroyed, that the way would be opened for more settlement and more measures to Judaize Jerusalem and the West Bank, that more land would be confiscated, and that the West Bank would be torn apart. We told the people that we would fight one another, that our blood would run in the streets, that we would quarrel, and that our internal conflict would overpower our conflict with the Zionists. We told them that we would become guards over the kingdom of Israel, that people would forget the refugees, that Palestine would shrink into the West Bank and Gaza, that Israeli goods would become the source of our pride and the object of our consumption, and that peoples and states would shake us off, and so on. All of this happened, because the harvest is of the same kind as the seed. Sow betrayal, and you reap baseness.

So what now? Two paths lie before us: either we continue as we are, drawing our salaries while the homeland is lost and future generations are cast further into displacement, or we come back to our senses, make sacrifices, pay a heavy price of sleepless nights and toil, and save our homeland and future generations. Either we continue as we are and lose both worlds — this one and the next — or we set ourselves straight and save ourselves from the claws of betrayal, abasement, humiliation, and degradation. Either we go hungry and do not bow down, or we bow down and do not go hungry — and either way, the generations remain disappointed, without a homeland and without bread.

We must rid ourselves of the agreements with Israel; we have no other choice before us. We will pay a price for that, and they will tighten the noose around us, but our history is full of sacrifice and we are worthy of it, and we must not remain broken before a small band of hired traitors who have mortgaged themselves in defense of the occupiers. And if we are unwilling to pay the price now, then we have no homeland at all.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الفلسطينيون ضحايا الخيانة” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.