The Greatest Disgrace

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Which is more disgraceful and shameful: to be a party to internal fighting and strife, or to be a beggar, the owner of a lower hand? Answering requires broad philosophical knowledge, knowledge of psychology, and the ability to analyze the psyche of both the combatant and the beggar. I do not think any scholar or philosopher would sanction either kind of behavior, but one could distinguish between them to see which is more disgraceful and more productive of shame and infamy.

As for the combatant, there are several possible reasons behind his entry into the arena of internal fighting, whose outcome, as is well known, is loss for the fighting parties themselves and loss for the people each side claims to be defending. A combatant may enter the fight in self-defense, or in aggression against others, or as a reaction to others’ behavior, or in pursuit of personal or tribal interests, and so on. The reasons are many, and most of them point to baseness, meanness, vice, contempt, and narrowness of vision, though some among them may point to a kind of virtue, zeal, courage, or a desire to correct an existing situation.

The confusion in judging the combatant ends when strife (fitna) is a fundamental element in bringing about the fighting. Fitna means corruption and corrupting people, sowing hatred and enmity among them through every form of bias, devouring wealth, assaulting public and private property, violating people’s honor, and spreading injustice. It is of the one who sows fitna that God Almighty said, “And fitna is worse than killing.” The one who sows fitna kills all people, in effect, by spreading enmity among them, stripping away their security, and spreading terror and fear in their ranks. For this reason his punishment must be decisive, swift, and without hesitation. The psyche of the one who sows fitna cannot contain any virtue whatsoever; it is degraded, base, vile, spiteful, hateful, and accursed.

If fitna and armed fighting come together, the results are devastating, and no one escapes their harsh, difficult effects. Indeed, there may be those within society who react to the fitna, so that the fighting intensifies and blood is spilled, life becomes filled with evils and pains, the corrupt killers spread, and they drag people into ever greater humiliation and disgrace. Of course, a distinction must be made between the one who sows fitna and fights, and the one who tries to eliminate the fitna — though it should be noted that whoever tries to eliminate fitna may himself stray from the right path and may misjudge the situation.

We in Palestine have lived through phases of fitna marked by the plunder of public funds, bias in public appointments, and dealings with enemies, and so on, and we crowned all this with armed fighting that brought us disgrace and shame before ourselves and before all Arabs and Muslims.

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As for the beggar, the matter is entirely settled: he is the owner of the lazy, dependent, incapable lower hand, who lives parasitically off the bounty of others. The beggar is base and sees himself only beneath the hands of others, at their mercy, their compassion, and their pity; he subjects himself to others’ insults and curses, and even wishes for their spit in his face to prove his abasement, his surrender, and his submission.

The beggar is of no use to anyone, not even to those who place scraps in his hand, because there is no good in him for himself. He cannot even offer services, but he opens the door for every aggressor to toy with him and with his household however they see fit. They play with him however they wish and turn him left and right according to their own interests.

This is why, over past years, I have been very careful to convey this picture to the Palestinian people, warning with all my strength against placing our daily bread in the hands of our enemies. I have said that whoever depends on another for his daily bread is thereby entirely relinquishing his political will in favor of whoever grants him the loaf of bread, and that whoever cannot secure his own loaf of bread for himself does not deserve life, and cannot possibly have rights. Whoever cannot secure his own loaf of bread cannot bring the refugees back to Palestine, and cannot establish a real state expressing people’s hopes. I have illustrated this with examples from the history of other nations.

There was someone who stood up to tell the people that bread is more important than democracy, and I wrote a response at the time titled “Free Men Make Their Own Bread, Abbas.” It is a terrifying bolt of lightning that the leader of a state would abandon freedom in favor of a loaf of bread sent by the enemies to his own people.

The tragedy is now deepening in the strife between Fatah and Hamas, and the Palestinian presidency is trying to promise people milk and honey, because the people of the West have come to relish Palestinian fragmentation. We had hoped to hear a call urging the people to roll up their sleeves, take up axes, plow the land, and plant it, so that we might be free; instead the glad tidings that reached us were that we insist on remaining beggars at the hands of our enemies. Begging does not forge Palestinian unity, does not lead to freedom, and does not build a state.

Suppose the people of the West and Israel were united in supporting the Palestinian emergency government. Why this enthusiasm? Do these murderous scoundrels, who planted bombs and bullets in our heads and chests, feel any compassion for the Palestinian people, or do they want to buy Palestine with a poisoned loaf of bread? Britain, America, the Zionists, and most of the Western states conspired against us and expelled us from our homeland, and now they slip food into our bellies to intoxicate us, so that we abandon even the verbal demand for our rights. Had we any dignity, we would not have extended our hands to bloody murderers. May God grant us no blessing in this morsel.

Under these Palestinian leaderships, we are moving from a lesser disgrace to a greater disgrace, and the intellectuals of this people must cry out loudly, in the hope that their cry might impose new leaderships and new patterns of behavior in which there is freedom, honor, and pride.

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