We Are Teenagers Amusing Ourselves

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

What has been happening in Palestine over the past few months, in the way of factional taunting and bickering, is shameful, and brings the Palestinian people nothing but disgrace, humiliation, and contempt. Palestine has been tossed into the basket of petty one-upmanship, for every holder of a private interest to use as a cover for his own political and security failings. We have not been on the moral, economic, cultural, scholarly, and social level the Palestinian cause deserves for many years now, but the deterioration is accelerating, with no brakes in sight.

We committed a crime to begin with when we accepted that our daily bread should lie in the hands of our enemies, the Europeans and Americans, and we committed a further crime when we deluded people into believing that we hold fast to what are called the Palestinian fixed principles, while every leadership knows perfectly well that the lower hand, bent low before the enemy, has neither rights nor fixed principles left to hold. We have lied to ourselves, and lied, and lied again, until we became a laughingstock our enemies amuse themselves by mocking.

A new government came in to face the cutoff of hostile funds, but it never moved to rebuild Palestinian production, which the Palestinian Authority itself had destroyed. And ever since, salaries have formed the greatest preoccupation in the Palestinian street, even though most of these employees ought never to have been government employees in the first place, but workers in agricultural, artisanal, and industrial production. A government stood by, helpless, with no programs and no purpose. As for the Fatah movement, it has not spared us near-daily actions aimed at undermining the government and recovering what it lost, in cooperation with non-Palestinian parties promising it abundant funds.

The employees are striking now, even though they know the government has no money. Those leading the strike now are the very same people who used to sabotage the teachers’ strikes in the past, back when Fatah was the government; and those obstructing the strike now are the very same people who used to support those earlier strikes. Fatah wants control over a government that expresses nothing but the farce of Palestinian politics, and Hamas had been waiting for its moment to seize power.

Fatah says that Hamas’s chiefs draw monthly payments, and Hamas says that Fatah’s chiefs draw monthly payments. Both sides receive money without which they could not carry on their own lethal, bigoted factionalism. As for the people, they are left to split apart in support of one side or the other. Fatah used to monopolize the jobs and cast the rest of the people’s sons aside, and Hamas now practices the very same thing, despite how few jobs there are.

The Palestinian arena is saturated with triviality, contempt for the Palestinian people, narrow-mindedness, quackery, lying, and deception. It is an arena manipulated by adolescent politicians who fear neither God nor hold any place in their hearts for this people, besieged as it is by sorrow.

Our Palestinian people must stand up in its own defense, and intellectuals and thinkers must rise to support this people in confronting this repugnant, bigoted factionalism, which knows nothing of the homeland except as a tool for propaganda.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “نحن مراهقون نتلهى” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.