The 'Thai' Palestinians

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The label “the Thais” has come into circulation in the city of Ramallah to describe the sons of the Palestinian people who work in the city’s various governmental and non-governmental institutions and who come from the northern West Bank, specifically from the areas of Nablus, Tulkarem, Jenin, and Qalqilya. It is a demeaning label implying that these outsiders come to Ramallah to plunder its riches and later send them off to their foreign families living in the northern provinces of the West Bank continent. It is a label that betrays a sick psyche and a debased racism, or a treacherous national culture, or an utter ignorance of the requirements of the unity of the people and the land.

We have already divided ourselves before into city-dweller, peasant, and refugee-camp resident, or into Gazan and West Banker and the so-called “Arabs of Israel,” whom some like to describe as “Arabs of the ‘48.” And now it is Ramallah-native and “Thai,” and we await some reckless name for those arriving in Ramallah from the provinces of Bethlehem, Hebron, and Jerusalem.

Perhaps some of us imagine that these names and labels are for amusement, carrying within them no racial dimension or complex of inferiority and psychological crisis, but my own assessment is that they carry within them moral shallowness, national frivolity, an erosion of national unity, brazen ignorance, and a service rendered to the Zionist enemy, who does not distinguish between a Thai, a Sri Lankan, and a Filipino. Were our national culture not shaken and struck at its very depth, such nonsense would never have arisen — nonsense that gnaws at our bones until it reduces the body to fragments. Our ruined national culture has bred fighting among the factions, has bred disputes among parties cooperating with Israel with which the people are kept distracted at the expense of the national cause, has bred dependence on others for the daily loaf of bread, and has bred crippled leaderships who believe that relief will come from banners and white doves launched from London and Washington.

[The text here is damaged in the original and resumes mid-sentence:] …stale, and they spread elements of corruption and gossip so that the Palestinian is turned into a mere person with private interests, having nothing to do with the interests of a people or the liberation of a homeland. Whatever your hand can reach is yours, and you need not ask what is forbidden or permitted, for nothing is forbidden except what is beyond your reach, and nothing is permitted except what is already yours. They have encouraged corruption in the country, spread mediation and favoritism through those who cooperate with them, deluded us with talk of freedom and the bliss of an independent state, and this serial drama still dominates our minds and our expectations.

Ramallah is a respectable city like every other Palestinian city, and its original inhabitants have nothing to do with this national collapse, but the Americans, Europeans, and Zionists wanted to transform the city culturally so that it would adopt European and Western culture generally, and become a magnet drawing in Palestinian youth, boring into their national disposition, and giving primacy to their carnal impulses at the expense of their Arab and Islamic dimensions. They wanted to strip away Arab and Islamic culture, and they are proceeding calmly, step by step, toward developing centers for this stripping-away, and they are succeeding now in Ramallah and Jericho. And they find many Palestinians cooperating toward this goal, whether from the factions, the political leaderships, or the leaders of many non-governmental organizations that receive funding from the people of the West and facilitation from the Zionist entity.

They plan, they stay up late, they toil, while we wander lost in our own delusion. They have leaderships fully aware of the weight of their responsibilities and the burden of the trust placed in them, while we have leaderships absorbed in gossip and rumor, competing over rotten carrion that spreads injustice, corruption, and disease through the body.

The people of Palestine are in need of a revolution against the self and for the sake of the self. We have no choice but to change what we are in, and whoever imagined that our present condition would lead us to anything other than disappointment and a wretched fate has already lost.

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