The Resistance's Own Security Failures Are Costing Us

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

During the current intifada, Israel has succeeded in wiping out numerous groups among our sons — whether they belonged to resistance factions, to the Authority’s own security apparatuses, or to neither. Barely a day goes by in which Israel does not score some achievement in arresting or killing resistance fighters and commanders, until it sometimes seems to a person as though the Palestinian people were simply offering up sacrificial victims.

There is a heavy price we are paying, and the reason is, fundamentally, poor organization and poor planning. Palestinian resistance work still suffers from being conducted in the open, from display and showmanship, and from mixing into and interfering with civilian life. This is a country riddled with security flaws and espionage mines, and the resistance factions ought to be arranging their security affairs in a way that keeps young men from falling as easy prey into the enemy’s hands. Our security customs are unsound; they suit an election campaign or a rally full of speeches, but they are utterly unsuited to facing an enemy that possesses every means to assassinate us. There is no need to brand a person with a particular faction, and it is neither wise nor courageous for a man with jihadi intentions to announce them; nor is it heroic to carry a weapon openly. Under our circumstances, carrying weapons openly expresses, at best, sheer ignorance, and at worst, a hidden intention to toy with people’s lives and their blood.

It is a matter of patriotism, and of the concern to preserve the safety of the homeland and its citizens, that the resistance fighters reconsider their calculations — and so should the factions to which they belong. We are not in a show-off race for one faction to prove that its rifles outnumber another faction’s rifles. A person’s strength, in the end, lies in the secrecy of his work and in his wisdom in carrying out his intentions. Openness is a weakness — not only for the faction, but for the Palestinian people as a whole. Palestinian struggle does not succeed by way of television screens, nor by brandishing weapons in front of people and firing shots into the air on festive occasions.

Let us keep our heads about us, and let our planning be the product of our own minds.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الشهداء بكثرة يتتابعون” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.