The Road Map Is Balfour's Road

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 did not deprive the Palestinians of all their rights, and it acknowledged the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine. Britain promised to establish a national home for the Jews in a Palestine whose borders were not yet known, on the understanding that the others would be dealt with merely as communities, with no mention made of any political rights for them. In 1920, Churchill advised the Arabs to accept what Britain put before them, and that they had no escape but to accept or to face trouble.

Balfour assumed the land was without a people, and Churchill assumed that the Arabs would never one day be strong enough to wage a war to reclaim their rights. And this is how the Palestinians were treated at the United Nations. Those in charge of the international body overstepped its own charter and insisted on the partition, which never won the respect even of those who called for it, foremost among them the United States. The West clung to its positions across the long years of Palestinian suffering, and told us that the Arabs understand nothing, learn nothing from the past, and are stubbornly headstrong in a way that leads to pain and sorrow. Western politicians do not hide the tears they shed expressing sorrow at what has befallen the people of Palestine, but they lay the responsibility for what is happening on the people’s own leadership. They pass over the Zionist aims and the supporting Western policies, and cast the blame on the people’s leadership, which they describe as narrow-minded and foolish, and sometimes even as Hitlerian.

The Palestinians defended the idea of liberation, and the other side answered them with every means and method, so that blood continued to flow and suffering intensified. Defeats befell the Palestinian people and the Arab states, producing a current on the Arab scene that accommodated defeat and its requirements. The defeats did not drive the people into a corner of surrender, and popular insistence on continuing along the path persisted, but the leaderships, at both the Arab and Palestinian levels, lagged behind the caravan, calling instead for pitching camp wherever the enemies’ consent could be obtained. These leaderships began adopting the Zionist-Western interpretation of the history of the conflict, and began pointing the finger of blame for the continuation of the suffering at the Palestinians themselves, rather than at those who created the problem.

The Former Leadership

This leadership tendency was not without historical roots. The leaderships of Palestine before 1948, from the Council and the opposition alike, found cooperation with the English agreeable, and chose to save the country through dialogue, memoranda, statements, demonstrations, condemnation, and denunciation, at the expense of resistance. That leadership, at the time, never spoke of liberation, and contented itself with demanding independence, while a good many of its members went about looking for Jews to buy land from them, to secure the money needed to satisfy their appetites. Many leaders sold land in the coastal plain, in the Jezreel Valley, in Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Beisan. And despite all the services, intended and unintended, that they rendered to the Zionists, Zionism expelled them along with everyone else who was expelled in 1948.

These leaderships refused to commemorate the martyrdom of the three men in Acre’s al-Mazra’a prison, and asked the masses to content themselves with reciting verses from the wise Qur’an instead, refused to assist al-Qassam, and contributed to spoiling the revolt of 1936. The leadership did not wake up to itself until Britain put forward the first partition plan in 1937, at which point it realized that all its own approaches to achieving independence had brought nothing but calamity upon the Palestinian people. And in that experience was proof that the Palestinian people had outpaced its own leadership. The people offered sacrifices and stood ready to offer more, but the blood of the martyrs was not valued highly enough, so the leaderships bargained it away, and the sacrifices went to waste. That is to say, Palestinian sorrows were not the result of the Palestinian people being foolish or extremist or barely able to understand a word, but rather the result of the Zionist-British invasion and official Palestinian bargaining.

The Present Leadership

The leadership of the Palestinian people did not learn the lesson after 1967, or else it learned it and wanted to finish the journey it had begun. The people offered many sacrifices for the sake of lofty slogans concerning the liberation of the land and the right of return, but in the end the caravan came to rest at Oslo. It was Mr. Arafat who led the march to Oslo, with the help of a very small number of Palestinians. The people had no say in the matter and did not take part in the decision, and remained exposed to the influence of a large number of profiteers on the Palestinian scene, whom the Palestinian leadership had, over the years, supplied with money and media support. Palestine’s revolution is a very wealthy revolution, and it managed to draw in a great many supporters through money (which came to be known on the Arab scene as “fodder”), who in exchange formed the chorus that marches in every leadership procession. The slogans all vanished, except for the slogan “Oh mountain, no wind can shake you,” and the martyrs’ blood grew restless with no leadership to answer it. The strange thing is that the Palestinian leadership possessed abundant money, obtained from Arab states loyal to the United States and eager to establish relations with Israel. This leadership was described by Israel and America as terrorist, yet it was never subjected to a financial or media siege, and matters went so far that France put a radio station to work in its service. Why?

Oslo is an expanded Balfour Declaration. What the Palestinian people got at Oslo is what Balfour had already given us when he spoke of preserving the rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The leadership of Palestine acknowledged at Oslo that Palestine is the national home of the Jews, and accepted running truncated civil and religious affairs of its own. For the first time, a leadership signed on behalf of the people to say that the homeland is not the homeland, and apologized, in written letters, for the Palestinian people’s struggle, disavowing what was called terrorism. And more importantly, Palestinians became guards over the kingdom of Israel, arresting those who tried to continue the struggle, or sometimes handing some of them over to Israel by various means. And worse still, these Palestinians justified their actions in the name of the higher Palestinian interest and preserving the lives of the detainees. Most of these detainees met their deaths during the current intifada.

And even though signing Oslo ought to call for a sense of shame and self-effacement, or perhaps for doing good works in search of forgiveness, many powerful figures within the Authority instead threw themselves into a vast and rapid campaign of corruption. In the space of a few years they accomplished a scale of corruption that dictatorships had failed to accomplish across decades. They proved themselves possessed of extraordinary skill and professionalism in forgery, fraud, theft, and deceit.

Oslo opened the door to further settlement construction, land confiscation, bypass roads, closures, and sieges. The people of Palestine cried out against the agreement, but the leadership was determined to press on, saying that Hamas and Islamic Jihad were spoiling the process and pushing Israel toward greater harshness because of the military actions they were carrying out. That may well have lain behind the sieges and the closures, but what about the continuation of settlement, the covetousness toward the holy sites, and the opening of bypass roads? It was clear that Israel continued carrying out the Zionist project, continuing to Judaize the land and cast its eyes toward the neighboring Arab countries. As for the Palestinian people, to Israel they were nothing more than a mass of people gathered together, whose daily needs it was important to meet, and whom it was useful to employ in building the Israeli economy. No one was spared the Zionist outlook toward others, to the point that even Mr. Arafat, who crossed so many of the red lines of the charter of the organization he led in pursuit of peace with Israel, was himself placed under siege.

Between Sacrifice and Bargaining

In short, every few years the Palestinian people offers up immense sacrifices. Martyrs fall, the wounded pile up, fighters are taken captive, homes are demolished, and tears pour ceaselessly from the eyes of widows, bereaved mothers, and orphans — only for someone to appear at the end and say to the people: “You are tired, and you need to rest.” The one who volunteers to defend the people’s rest in this way is precisely the one who offers no sacrifices himself, and who is tied to the enemy by financial, economic, social, or other interests — the very same person who steals the people’s money and bargains away the homeland. The people rise up against the occupation, and great slogans are raised, with the liberation of Palestine at their head in the days gone by, and the establishment of a state in the days now passing, while politicians, media figures, and advocates of rationality and calming-down busy themselves with bringing things back to how they were before, under a canopy of vague promises that are never fulfilled.

The leadership recognized Israel, abandoned the goal of liberation, accepted self-rule, and accepted Resolution 242, which makes no mention of the Palestinian people at all; it arrested the fighters, established normalized political, social, and economic relations with Israel, and began openly receiving money from those who established Israel and caused the sorrows of the Palestinian people and the nation as a whole. It came to seem like a tragedy — or a farce — that the Palestinian people offers sacrifices in order to accept concessions. It is therefore hard to blame an ordinary person who calls for an end to intifadas and revolutions and for accepting whatever Israel offers. If the yield of sacrifice is concession, then why should the people not simply make the concessions without the sacrifices? This, as I read the history of the conflict, is precisely the outcome the leadership wanted to arrive at — an outcome one of its own leaders expressed when he said that the leadership had worked, over the years, to tame the Palestinian people into accepting a peaceful solution with Israel.

In keeping with this, Israel never gave the Palestinians or the Arabs a chance to catch their breath, and continued carrying out its project with no regard for the advice urging it toward reason and sitting at the negotiating table. It waged a war against Egypt in 1956, diverted Arab waters in 1963, launched the June war, established settlements, and confiscated land, and so on. Israel wants the Palestinian people to achieve some of its goals through negotiation, at the very same time that it leaves nothing substantial, with American backing, that could actually be negotiated over. Meaning that the rationality demanded of the Palestinians by America and Israel means nothing but the Palestinian people relinquishing its various rights in exchange for being provided with food, clothing, shelter, schooling, and hospitals.

The roadmap is an extension of the past. It is the Oslo Accord, the Tenet initiative, and the Mitchell Report. It is even less than the Balfour Declaration, because it promises civil rights and makes no mention of religious rights at all, though it dresses up the idea of establishing an entity enslaved to Israel with the description of a “state.” It is, at its core, a security initiative, calling on the parties to return conditions to what they were before the current intifada and to return to the negotiating table. It insists on the necessity of the Palestinians meeting Israel’s security requirements, without addressing a single one of the important issues facing the Palestinian people. The roadmap is a reaffirmation of the Zionist project, which certainly negates the Palestinian aspiration and works to kill it.

Two Choices Before Us

The Palestinian people faces two choices: either it decides to lay down its arms, accepts Churchill’s 1920 advice, and applies it in 2003, contenting itself with whatever the Zionists give it, or it continues its struggle while working on the international stage to influence world public opinion. The first choice is the Zionist choice, which takes the land of Palestine and its holy sites and looks northward and eastward for more. The second choice is the road of suffering, sorrow, and pain. It is the choice that provokes a harsh Israeli response. The first choice grants us the chance to be servants to Israel, and the second is a chance for liberation. History bears witness that the first choice is the road to disappearance or extinction, while the second is the road to victory. The first is the road of continuous abasement through defeat, and the second is the road of suffering, without which no victory is ever achieved. In any case, there is no victory through relaxation, no state is ever built at the negotiating table, and there is no resistance without harsh Israeli measures.

The People’s Suffering

From 1920 until now, the Palestinian leadership has used the people’s pain to justify its own appeasement of the enemies. And although the enemies are a principal and powerful cause of the pain and the sorrow, the leaderships have also been a contributing factor, through their bargaining, their exploitation of the people, and their disregard for the people’s interests in the service of their own. The country was lost, the people were struck by calamity, and false tears continued to be shed over the national interest and the interests of the citizens.

A revolution or resistance that does not attend to the people’s concerns and interests cannot succeed, because the people themselves are its reserve, its depth, and its backbone. For this reason it is important to do the following:

First: it is necessary to assess the situation from time to time, so that the factions and parties can sense the people’s needs and program their actions and their intensity accordingly. It may be possible to take a step forward if there is a driving force among the people, and it may be necessary to take a step back if the people themselves pull back. But it is never permissible for the factions to isolate themselves from the public, casting the public’s opinion and requirements aside.

Second: the Palestinian leadership has failed, since the beginning of the conflict, to put in place the various economic, educational, cultural, and social programs needed to meet both ordinary and emergency circumstances. The people pass through critical periods, and there ought to be steps in place to address the resulting problems. This intifada arose, and we still do not know how to keep the needy from starving, or care for those who have lost their jobs and no longer have enough money to cover even the minimum cost of living. It is therefore not strange that, across the stages of the conflict, we find among the people some who are killed by excess and, at the very same time, others who are killed by hunger. Those in charge of affairs plead the occupation as their excuse, but it is no secret that the occupation is sometimes used to justify incapacity and failure. And whoever exploits the occupation for private gain does not want to see the occupation end.

If the leadership does not bear its responsibility and refrains from developing the necessary programs, then the opposition bears the responsibility instead. It is true that public resources lie in the hands of the Authority, and that it is best placed to develop and implement programs, but this does not absolve the opposition or the factions of their own responsibilities. Here I recall the Statement of the Twenty, which attacked corruption and called for a stand against it. The only demonstration that took to the streets afterward was a demonstration in Ramallah in support of corruption, organized by the Authority itself, while the opposition, apart from a few modest actions, occupied itself instead with questioning who these people who issued the statement were, as though the matter were a question of status.

In any case, those who engage in corruption and disregard the people’s interests want neither a state nor a homeland. Their true political place, therefore, is in Balfour’s crucible. The roadmap is an extension of Balfour, and Balfour is the wellspring of the tragedy, and I do not believe the Balfourians are the least bit concerned with a people’s interest that stands in contradiction to the Zionist project.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “خريطة الطريق هي طريق بلفور” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.