The Biggest Rip-off

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Let me first apologize to readers for the crudeness of the title, but I found it hard to come up with a title befitting the “biggest” craze the Palestinian Authority has embraced. The Authority, and the Prime Minister’s office in particular, is preoccupied a great deal with the biggest tray of knafeh, the biggest plate of tabbouleh, the biggest loaf of musakhan, and perhaps, in the future, the biggest pot of ma’ftoul or the biggest platter of mansaf. It is quite possible that the biggest rip-off of the Palestinian people is being prepared right now, one destined to earn its own special category in the Guinness Book of Records.

It is well understood that your body has a claim upon you, your own self has a claim upon you, and your homeland has a claim upon you. To keep the activities of life in balance, one must attend to the coherence of the human psyche; and for a person to be able to sustain his work and his giving, he must allow himself some measure of leisure and recreation from time to time. Recreation is important for the ease of the nerves and for supporting sound thinking, and for perseverance, patience, and staying the course, and it matters for everyone — from the farm laborer to the merchant and the university professor, to the soldier and the fighter striving in the way of God, and so on. But an excess of recreation deadens the heart and breeds laziness, over-reliance on others, loss of balance, and loss of purpose.

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…the continuation of security coordination with Israel, and Israel’s continuation of its traditional aggressive policies, and because of this focus on actions that do not appear to fall within any real liberation strategy, I believe there is someone working to divert Palestinians’ attention toward simple-minded, perhaps trivial, matters, so that conspiracies can slip past underneath them without their even realizing it.

Many of the activities currently taking place have a negative effect on Palestinian awareness and on the level of its commitment to its own causes, and it seems to me that this is deliberate and programmed.

What the Palestinian people need right now is to search for a way to free themselves from bondage to their daily bread, to learn self-reliance as much as possible; they need to develop their educational institutions, to search out sources of strength for confronting the enemy, to reclaim land, build homes, contain settlement expansion, and safeguard Jerusalem, and so on. The people do not need hollow speeches at official occasions, or activities designed to numb their national awareness — what they need is someone to reassess the whole state of affairs and pull them out of the condition things have come to, a condition that may well turn out to be the biggest rip-off of all.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “أكبر خازوق” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.