The Art of Manufacturing a Crisis

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Palestinian people has experience with manufacturing crises, the most recent of which was the Al-Aqsa Mosque episode.

My view, expressed in various media outlets, has been that the Palestinian people can achieve its goal in confronting the Zionists if it can manufacture a crisis that draws the attention of the media and, from there, the attention of the world — provided the people remain resolved in its movement, with escalating force, to corner its enemy. There have been other experiences in which the people was unable to sustain the momentum, and its hopes were dashed, such as the 1987 uprising and the Al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000. The failure in both cases was mostly due to the compromising positions of the Palestinian leaderships, not to any flagging of the people’s resolve.

After all these long years since 1917, the Palestinian people ought to have learned to rely on itself outside the official leadership framework, without rejecting the outside help others might offer without conditions. In other words, popular planning should always rest on the principle of self-reliance, not be tied to external aid. There is no harm in receiving external aid, but all the harm occurs if the Palestinian struggle becomes tied to whatever money, advice, and condemnations others choose to offer. The good lies in the arms of the people’s own sons, and there is no objection to supplementing this good with additional, non-essential good.

But the problem remains that the popular level is not organized, nor even sufficiently bound by solidarity, to automatically push people to work together. To this day, people hesitate a great deal to participate in confronting challenges, and most of them now find no inner drive that shakes them to the core and casts them into human gatherings insistent on achieving particular goals. For this to happen, the leadership must develop the means and methods that raise society up collectively and cultivate within it a spirit and psychology of collectivity and collective action.

To this day, the Palestinian people has not enjoyed a leadership of this kind — on the contrary, the Palestinian people has been afflicted with leaderships that constantly work to buy off individuals’ loyalties in order to secure political support for this person or that. For this reason, it is required that the cultural and academic elites develop popular capacities for organization and mobilization.

A crisis places the other side before its responsibilities and shakes it morally and politically, embarrassing it before world public opinion and embarrassing everyone who helps and supports it. And if the crisis develops, the media, at all its levels, cannot escape covering it, given the events and breaking news a crisis generates. And if the media engages with the matter, world and regional public opinion will engage with it too, which in turn moves governments, heads of state, and international organizations, foremost among them the United Nations. But it is important and necessary that the maker of the crisis be in the right, and that his demands not stray from the universal moral values upheld by all peoples and religions. The maker of the crisis must not slander any party, state, or person, but must instead be convincing in his demands and capable of drawing support and bringing disrepute upon the other side.

Manufacturing a crisis requires knowing the other side’s points of weakness, and knowing exactly where it hurts. The maker of the crisis must grip the other side by the hand that pains it most, in order to be able to throw it to the ground. In the Palestinian case, there is enough experience for Palestinians to know how to throw the Zionists to the ground. For example, the stone is more painful to the Zionists than a thousand years of negotiations. The stone drives them into hiding, and forces them to reconsider, again and again, before venturing out onto the roads and streets of the West Bank, while Palestinian negotiators have never been able to move freely through the streets of the West Bank. The Zionist entity is prepared to negotiate for a thousand years without growing weary or bored, but it cannot bear a single stone, and stones have previously forced curfews on settlers in the West Bank.

The Zionist entity is also very weak when it comes to its internal security — it is an entity built fundamentally on security, and it will not be convincing to the Jews of the world if it cannot provide a secure life for its immigrants. And the Zionist entity is pained whenever the Palestinian cause escapes its Palestinian cage into the international arena, because international resolutions grant Palestinians more than they ask for.

Threatening the Arab regimes also pains the Zionists. If Palestinians have the means to manufacture a crisis for Arab rulers, the Zionist entity is pained and bows its head. The survival of the Arab rulers constitutes a strategic guarantee for the survival of the Zionist entity — if these rulers are exposed to danger, the entity itself will be in danger. And we observe how the entity allies itself with Arab governments threatened with collapse, and how these governments scramble to establish good relations with it.

There are shared security interests whose disruption would break the entity’s neck. But the maker of the crisis must not push matters to the edge where he himself is harmed. A crisis may lead to war, and the maker of the crisis must first ask himself about his own capabilities, and about the point at which his own capacity to withstand it runs out. If he lacks the means, he must choose the path of truce and patience, and if he trusts in his capabilities, he must not hesitate to confront. Harm occurs in every case, and the capacity to endure remains the decisive factor in the matter.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “فن صناعة الأزمة” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.