The Test of Betrayal

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Are you a traitor to the nation and the homeland? If you are an official or a leader, mark “yes” beside every item that matches your conduct, and “no” beside every item that does not. In the end you will see just how much betrayal you practice.

This test is for officials and leaders only.

First: tireless work to wreck the social and moral fabric of Palestinian society. How? The matter is exceedingly simple, requiring only a few measures that feed feelings of hatred and animosity among people and lead to the disintegration of society, so that the individual turns away from concern for public affairs in favor of personal interests that violate the public good. These measures include:

Surrounding yourself with a rotten inner circle skilled in embezzlement, charlatanry, hypocrisy, and lying, who cultivate their own private interests at people’s expense, and who drown themselves in pleasures — even if that means the enemy’s bars and brothels;

Not adopting competence as the first basis for obtaining a position, but rather clientship: “be with me and I’ll get you a job; otherwise, go find work for yourself somewhere you’ll have to toil and struggle.” This means intensifying the use of mediation and favoritism, which enslave people;

Stripping the weak of their rights in favor of the strong oppressor, building a judicial system that establishes injustice and spreads the rule of force, and bringing in judges who fear neither God nor conscience;

Not caring about the performance of duties — the “good” employee is the one who does not do his job and spreads corruption within his institution;

The “good” employee is the ignorant one who exploits his position and extorts others. His ugly conduct is the basis of his promotion, so long as it does not become too exposed; but if the scandal becomes common knowledge, there is no harm in “punishing” him by removing him from public view to take up another post somewhere new, complete with a promotion in rank;

If people complain to you, you hear them out, and then you forward their complaint to the very official they complained about, so that he can punish them;

You are a silent partner in people’s economic affairs, such that no factory is established without you or one of your cronies taking a cut, and no commercial agency exists without you being its greatest beneficiary — without contributing a thing to its costs;

You occasionally hold some of the weak to account and punish them for acts they have committed, so as to appear before the people as a man of principle and lofty morals;

The “loyal” assistant is the one whose hand is always the lower hand, coming to you seeking money for himself, and positions and gifts for his relatives, friends, and mistresses; as for the one who wants to serve the citizens and does not possess a base soul, you have no use for him;

The assistant you want is the one who agrees to become entangled in shameful acts that turn him into your slave, so that he never opposes you; whoever holds fast to religion, morals, or a living conscience has, in effect, condemned himself;

You spread your security agencies everywhere in order to suppress the people, so as to destroy trust among people and spread suspicion in their hearts.

On the security front, you proceed as follows:

You must pile on enthusiastic national rhetoric, brimming with resounding words that express a deep national commitment to the cause of liberation, the return of the refugees, and the establishment of the independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem the Noble as its capital. Do not let anyone outbid you with wild, surging revolutionary talk that inflames emotions and leads to applause and whistling;

You pile on dazzling slogans of bright glow and loud color, like “boy, nothing can pierce you” and “tree, reach for the cloud.” You constantly affirm the coming victory, always stressing that victory comes from God, who never disappoints the hopes of the faithful;

You speak against spies and collaborators, yet take no deterrent measures against them unless popular pressure builds to a point that justifies sacrificing some minor spy. You can always say that killing spies is impermissible because our society is tribal, marked by a spirit of blood vengeance. You can content yourself with having the spy declare his repentance and turn to God with two prostrations seeking forgiveness — this, if the spy is exposed by the people themselves; as for you, you will never trouble yourself hunting for spies, because they are one of the important tools for subjugating people and sowing seeds of doubt and division among them;

As for the collaborators who come from powerful, influential families, and from the wealthy holders of economic and social clout, they are close friends whom you always work to dress in a national face, so they may share in your tireless efforts toward liberating the homeland and achieving independence;

You pile on threats relayed by the media that always make you appear the patriot whose resolve never softens. For example, you can declare that the interests of the United States in the region are fair game, that the settlers should not sleep soundly in the nights to come, and that the people of Israel will pay in torrents of blood if their state carries out its threats, and that they should know our arms are long and our cells spread like a great octopus, ready to coil around the necks of the enemies at the right moment;

You create an impression among the masses that you possess sufficient weapons, that you hold arms the enemy knows nothing about, and that you are capable of waging a long guerrilla war that will wear the enemy down;

You always make sure your friends on the other side respond to your threats, so as to build for yourself an aura and a credibility before your own — not entirely real — people. I expect the American Secretary of State to stand before the cameras and brand you a terrorist and a bloodthirsty killer, and the Israeli Prime Minister to erupt, thundering and raging, calling on the world to lend a hand in fighting terrorism and the terrorists lying in wait for the poor, defenseless Jewish people. This is how you appear a hero, and the Palestinian masses come out to salute you, with the Arab and Muslim masses behind them;

You will work to make sure the military cells you form never reach the point of actually acting against Israel, and you will work to hand over information about them through the network of spies working for you, without its members knowing that you know — passing it to the enemy, who arrests the revolutionaries a day or two before the operation. But if a cell does manage to go out and carry out its operation, then you must have already passed the information to Israel in advance, so Israeli soldiers can set the appropriate ambush;

You always make sure cells are formed with your knowledge, so that no vital piece of security information escapes you that might end up causing harm to the Jews;

But you have no objection to the people going out in acts of protest against Israel — demonstrations, graffiti, distributing leaflets threatening the invaders — since these let off steam without inflicting any real harm on the Jews;

And when talk turns to peace, you hold back, careful not to leave any trace that would arouse suspicion. You must appear rigid and insistent on restoring the rights of the Palestinian people.

On the economic front, you are expected to do the following:

Failing to develop agriculture and neglecting the farmers, in a way that makes farming the land pointless. The agricultural budget must approach zero percent of the general budget, because agriculture means the land, and the land means the homeland. If our conflict with the Jews is over the land, then you will do whatever pushes people away from farming and away from independent food security;

You are a silent partner, without contribution, in any investment, so as to repel the desire of Palestinian investors to invest, driving them and their money away from the homeland. As for whoever accepts the terms of this racket, he must turn himself into a swindler extorting money without regard for the standards of investment aimed at achieving reasonable profit and contributing to the country’s development;

If any investment does occur, it is best that it be in the field of consumption and entertainment rather than production. Focus must go to restaurants, parks, bars, and delicious cuisine;

You continue relying on others for financial and food support, because this reinforces the lower hand, laziness, and dependency. You certainly do not want people to go hungry for fear of revolution, and so your friends will rush to support you, either directly or through their friends among the Arab regimes. Notice here that you remain a terrorist in the media, while your friends will paint you as the merciful father, forever searching for financial sources to ease his people’s suffering;

You will not use the money that comes to you in ways that serve investment and production, but rather to pay the salaries of mercenary employees, most of whom do not deserve the positions they occupy, and to buy loyalties. That is, you will become a soup kitchen, or merely an Arab sheikh handing out gifts to hypocrites and charlatans. This is how your doors will grow crowded with seekers of gifts, whether in cash or in jobs;

Fodder is very important in humiliating people and teaching them baseness and abjection. You will feed people fodder in proportion to the money that comes your way, and you will find the well-fed the fiercest defenders of what you do and the greatest glorifiers of your person;

You give support money to those who do not need it, and withhold it from the farmers, workers, and craftsmen who actually produce. You are the enemy of production and the friend of the idle and of the well-connected, empty-headed, wide-mouthed elite.

On the housing front, you will do the following:

…because these are numerous and spread over a wide expanse of land. You are interested in fixing the geographic boundaries of Palestinian housing, not in its expansion. And if it happens that you do offer something, you will be exceedingly stingy;

Most housing support you give goes to the wealthy, who build lavish homes;

You will not undertake the infrastructure needed to build new villages, such as opening streets and laying water and electricity networks;

You will not ask the municipalities to ease the issuing of building permits or to reduce the cost of municipal fees. You will work to keep construction costs high, while insisting the Palestinian bear the expenses of the municipalities and village councils;

You will look upon Zionist settlement and feel your chest fill with joy, your tongue condemning it all the while; and you will look upon Palestinian housing as a tombstone weighing on your chest.

On the cultural front, you will do the following:

Trivial literature is the slogan of the age, and your favorite writers are those who flatter and glorify, with no connection to critical literature that sees points of weakness and corrects them, and points of strength and reinforces them;

You will not work to develop a cultural program that unites the Palestinian people wherever they may be, and you will be pleased to see Palestinians described as Palestinians-of-the-West-Bank, Palestinians-of-Syria, Palestinians-of-Lebanon, and so on. You will certainly be even happier when the people are reduced further still, into Gazans, Nabulsis, and Hebronites;

You work hard to sever the Palestinian people, culturally and politically, from their Arab and Islamic surroundings. Chauvinistic Palestinianism is the slogan of your era, and you will exert effort to spread a culture of hatred and grudges between Palestinians and their closest kin — the people of Bilad al-Sham, Jordanians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and the people of Egypt. You will work hard to make sure the culture of enmity with the enemy is redirected toward Bilad al-Sham instead of toward Israel;

You will not pursue a policy of cultural advancement for the nation, and you will leave the cultural heritage built on chauvinism and tribalism to gnaw away at its own children. You will fight the spirit of cooperation between factions and parties and spread a spirit of partisan chauvinism among them, and you will place the sons of influential families above the necks of the people;

Accordingly, your surveillance will extend to newspapers, magazines, Friday sermons, seminars, and lectures, and will reach even into private gatherings, and you will plant your eyes — watchmen and spies — everywhere. Under your rule, a culture will prevail in which the walls have ears, and in which “whoever marries my mother is my uncle.”

As for education, you take care to do the following:

Keep the teacher, male or female, under the pressure of financial hardship, so that he or she never approaches teaching with enthusiasm or energy. You will exhaust them with an excess of teaching hours and with overcrowded classrooms and with assignments that are nearly useless. You will set the student against the teacher under the pretext of modern educational theories. Your duty compels you to destroy the generation, and you are a master of this task;

The offices of education will grow crowded with ignorant teachers who damage the educational and pedagogical process — naturally, because you run a school of clientship aimed at bringing the people to their knees. For this reason, mediation proliferates in the appointment of teachers, male and female;

You will not allocate sufficient funds to build schools, in order to preserve overcrowding and evening shifts. This deprives the student of a good educational opportunity and crushes his spirit.

Rote learning suits your purposes; you will prevent creativity and will never reward the creative;

You will use male and female students for political purposes, to welcome you and welcome your cronies, and to use their numbers to paper over the people’s failure to answer your calls to come out for false chanting;

On the front of councils, parties, and factions, you will work to:

Guarantee a majority, in your favor under all circumstances, in the councils and committees responsible for decision-making — and if you sense the majority is not attainable, you simply will not convene the required meeting. You will maneuver by every possible means, including bribery, threats, and intimidation, or by reconstituting the committee or council and adjusting its membership in whatever way secures you the majority;

Guarantee that no organization emerges to rival your own — one that might form a majority overwhelming you and your followers — through the following policies:

Increasing the quantity of fodder at your disposal, through the Arab regimes and with undeclared Israeli-American approval, in order to buy the loyalty of more people in your support;

Cutting off funds from other organizations and pressuring the various parties trying to finance them, so they stop paying out money;

Opening fire on rival organizations with the aim of weakening and containing them;

Splitting organizations apart, using the abundant funds at your disposal, and splitting the splits themselves;

Spreading a culture of division, corruption, and strife among the organizations, so as to prevent their mutual cooperation, leaving you as the arbiter between them;

You will work to finance organizations, especially the weaker ones. These are organizations incapable of disturbing the existing balance of power in the enemy’s favor, while at the same time giving you the face of the democrat who not only coexists with his opponents but even extends them financial support. This grants you the title of paternal figure and hero of national unity. As for rival organizations, your stick will be as thick as possible in their face;

If a rival to you emerges from within the ranks of your own organization, or the ranks of other organizations, or from among the people themselves, you will not hesitate to use every possible method to get rid of him, including killing.

As for religious matters and the holy sites, you will do the following:

You will intensify your talk about Jerusalem in enthusiastic phrases, even though your knowledge of Jerusalem’s history is nearly nonexistent, and you will constantly remind the people that you are committed to liberating the holy sites;

You will memorize a few Quranic verses and prophetic sayings to recite in people’s hearing, so that your leadership takes on a touch of Napoleonic piety;

You will draw on men of religion who neither fear God nor truly know Him, chasing instead after their own private interests;

Your men of religion are weak in the Arabic language, in the philosophy of religion, and in their own characters, precisely so that they can easily be ridden, and so that they never form an independent religious leadership for society;

You take special care to pray on public occasions, appearing on television screens looking as though you are about to collapse from the intensity of your devotion;

It is not necessary that you fast Ramadan, but it is important that you make a point of hosting iftar banquets.

When to advance, and when to hold back:

You will not meet Israeli demands immediately, because that would expose you and ruin your and Israel’s shared plans; instead, you work to wear down the Palestinian people morally, ethically, economically, socially, and culturally. You will work to drag everything on the Palestinian scene toward degradation, and you will spare no effort in undermining the neighboring Arab peoples as well, sowing division and corruption between them and the Palestinian people. But this will not be enough for you, and you will reinforce it by inflicting continuous defeats on the Palestinian people on every front.

You will offer gradual concessions to Israel whenever you sense that despair has crept into the people’s bones, and you will refrain from doing so when you feel the people’s morale is high. Despair leads you toward concession, under the banner of the national interest and of cleverness in handling the demands and requirements of circumstance; and the people’s fortitude pushes you toward holding fast to rights, because the national interest, too, requires that. You use “the national interest” as a rag fit for wiping under any and all circumstances.

What matters is that your pockets stay full of money, and the Israelis and Americans will never fail you there — they are always pressuring their client Arab regimes to provide appropriate support; and that the media stay with you: some of it will attack you, like Israel Radio and the White House, and some of it will support you, like the outlets broadcasting from Monte Carlo, Qatar, and a number of Arab countries.

After death:

You certainly do not want your mission to end with your death, so if you cannot manufacture a successor to take your place, you will work to keep the Palestinians in a state of chaos after your eternal absence. You must create rival power centers, primed for the infighting that tears the people apart. You leave these power centers to compete in a shameful manner, and you allow the formation of armed groups that act as mercenaries for these power centers. And, naturally, you will have tied each power center, one way or another, to Israel. On top of that, you create such immense ruin that the process of reform becomes an exceedingly difficult task.

You want to die at peace, knowing you have brought the Palestinian to the point of disbelief in his own homeland and his own people, and to declaring, mouth full, that Israel is better than the Arabs.

If you have read carefully and found that you carry out ten percent of the items above, then you are not merely a traitor — you are the founder of a school in which the giants of betrayal have been trained. You are not merely a wretched spy; your very clay has been kneaded through and through with betrayal, and your soul has drowned in the depths of collaboration and the darkness of baseness.

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