The West Bank Deserves Gaza's Relief First

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Gaza has a claim on every Arab and Muslim, not merely for relief but for confronting Israel with full force and might, and it has a claim on every free person in the world, but its claim rests first with the people of Palestine, the West Bank especially. There is no doubt diaspora Palestinians exert great efforts to relieve Gaza, and if the matter were in their hands, they would have mobilized for Gaza and offered it every kind of sacrifice, and there is no doubt Palestinians in the territory occupied in ‘48 offer what they can within the harsh conditions they live under occupation.

People rush to Gaza’s rescue from Latin America to Japan — everywhere except the West Bank, which drowns itself in searching for trivial justifications for disgraceful acts. Instead of taking useful action, national steps toward ridding itself of the terrible decline it has fallen into, it busies itself with failed attempts to philosophize its own decline, dress it up, justify it, and, for some, imaginatively escape it. Lines of people flee toward deceiving themselves into believing they are performing immortal national acts that even the ancients and the moderns failed to achieve, and if you listen to them, you would think the great, shining patriotism had stopped with them alone, no one else.

The criminal circles around his own crime, and whoever commits a disgraceful act never tires of searching for methods and means to cover his deed, and whoever fails never despairs of blaming others, finding in others nothing but a peg to hang his own failure on. The West Bank is very busy dressing up security coordination with Israel, claiming the matter is not a defense of Israeli security but a defense of Palestinian security, busy justifying Dayton’s presence and elaborating on the virtues his team offers for Palestinians’ security and comfort, and busy justifying the infiltration of American intelligence agents into Palestinian society, focusing on Jericho to make it a base of sabotage for them and their allies in the region. And the dressing-up intensifies with every handful of dollars given, or every shipment of cars sent.

The world these days has been preoccupied with the anniversary of the war on Gaza, and with the Viva Palestina convoy, while the West Bank still searches for argumentative elements to prove Gaza was defeated in the Al-Furqan War, or the Cast Lead War, and that Israel won because the rockets launched from Gaza have stopped. The West Bank is busy rejecting the statements of some Zionist leaders that the war’s goal was to change the political situation in Gaza, and that its goal was limited only to stopping the rocket fire — a goal Israel achieved. It is the West Bank that decides the goals of Israel’s war on Gaza, and it alone that decides Gaza was defeated. This, even though everyone now knows America is building the steel wall in Sinai because the Palestinian resistance managed to smuggle considerable quantities of rockets and other combat equipment, and because Gaza has proven resistant to the siege.

The West Bank has now lost its historical role — my conviction is that this loss is temporary. It has now turned into a burden on the Palestinian march toward liberation, and plays roles alien to this people’s history, and the Palestinian has nothing to do but shrink before the farces being committed, and the services being rendered to the enemy.

And if His Excellency Dr. Selim al-Hoss can partially restore the West Bank’s presence, as head of the international committee to break the siege on Gaza, he could involve volunteers from the West Bank in the next relief convoy.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الضفة أولى بإغاثة غزة” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.