The Tragedy of the Intellectuals

Anyone familiar with the intricacies of the Palestinian situation can see the enormity of the tragedy to which the Palestinian people are subjected, and the scale of the internal and external forces working against them and subjecting them to programs of many different kinds. It is a tragedy that goes beyond the prominent event and exceeds the drama of newspaper headlines concerning Palestine. It is a tragedy that digs into the Palestinian body, ultimately becoming a major landmark in the setbacks in the development of the Palestinian cause. It gnaws at the bones of the people of Palestine day after day, becoming a program laid out over a long period amid political developments that may appear sudden or like events without roots.

When most of Palestine fell in 1948, those distant from the event thought that the fall was nothing more than a defeat on the battlefield, and they did not extend their analysis to what had taken place before the fall. That is why, thirty years later, they were surprised to learn that Arab leaders had been coordinating with leaders of the Zionist movement, and that Palestinian leaders had been secretly selling land to Jews. In time, they concluded that the fall of Palestine was not caused solely by the conspiracy of external forces, but was also due to internal factors that were pushing toward the fall and loss of the country.

The issue of selling land to Jews rose to the forefront of Palestinian political and popular discussion after 1967, and attention to it intensified after the Oslo Agreement. Despite the importance of this matter, however, developments went beyond the issue of selling a piece of land. All of Mandatory Palestine is in Israel’s hands, and tens or hundreds of dunams no longer constitute a fundamental issue for Israel. What has come to dominate Israeli thinking is the confiscation or purchase of the human being in order to separate him from the land. For if the land is seized or bought, it remains a subject upon which a person can act; he may reclaim it or turn it into an enduring object of dispute. For this reason, what mattered to Israel and those who support it was to focus on eliminating the human being who could reclaim the land.

I do not want to go into here what the Palestine Liberation Organization did in this regard and what the Palestinian Authority is now doing directly, since I have previously discussed the Palestinian leadership’s methods of buying people. Rather, I will briefly discuss attempts to control the educated Palestinian elite and direct it in a way that removes the Palestinian cause from people’s hearts and places it within the framework of globalization emphasized by the global powers seeking to entrench the existing order. By the educated elite I mean university professors, writers, and intellectuals in general. These are the people who shape popular, and perhaps mass, culture in a way that crystallizes a set of values, goals, and aspirations. If they are directed in a particular way, they disseminate and theorize the values and goals constructed along those lines. If that direction runs counter to the liberation of the land or the establishment of a state, it produces values and goals far removed from Palestinian values and from the goals that took shape after the loss of the country.

For this reason, Western states that support Israel opened their coffers in order to influence the educated Palestinian elite and draw it toward a Western mode of thought that seeks to strip away the values of pride, national dignity, and loyalty to history from the hearts and minds of intellectuals and decision-makers in Third World countries generally and Arab countries in particular. These states adopted a policy of attracting intellectuals through programs presented under the cover of science, academic programming, and economic development. I refer here specifically to the United States, Britain, and Germany, and, to a lesser degree, Norway, Sweden, Spain, France, and Canada.

These countries brought their programs to the Palestinian people in the occupied territories of 1967 in a noticeable way during the 1980s, and intensified their efforts after the Oslo Agreement. They opened the door for Palestinians to participate in seminars, conferences, and workshops concerning various aspects of Palestinian life, using the power of money. Several countries allocated funds to finance scientific research and academic conferences on Palestinian affairs, and succeeded in obtaining extensive information about Palestinian society directly from its own people.

These countries, together with Israel, understand that scientific knowledge is the basis for sound decision-making and precise planning. Implementing particular objectives requires knowledge of the people upon whom the action will be taken from political, economic, cultural, social, and psychological perspectives. Through such knowledge, policymakers can identify the gaps through which they can enter, and determine which policies are likely to meet acceptance and response and which may encounter rejection or produce a counterreaction.

For this reason, these countries worked to establish research centers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, provided them with the necessary funding, and lavished money on researchers. They succeeded in recruiting a considerable number of Palestinians to oversee these centers and attracted writers and researchers, especially university professors, writers, and activists from factions, organizations, and political parties. These countries did not try to exclude anyone; rather, they sought to attract those traditionally known for admiring Western patterns as well as those known for opposing the West and its policies in the region, those known for rejecting peace agreements with Israel and those known for accepting them.

Naturally, these countries did not try to conduct their activities in a clandestine, espionage-like manner. Instead, they carried them out openly through their consulates, nongovernmental organizations, and cultural centers. They approached people in the name of concern for the Palestinian interest and the development of Palestinian society and the economy. They appeared to be interested in alleviating some of the suffering of the Palestinian people, who had tasted the bitterness of war, displacement, and deprivation. Yet in the course of their work they sought to entrench Western values in the way centers were run and managed, even in the meals served during conferences and academic workshops. The most important of these values was neutrality, which proceeds from present reality without relying on history. For example, it was considered important for a researcher to focus on how to adapt to Israel’s existence and resolve the refugee problem, not by investigating the history of displacement and British Mandate policy, but by focusing on the facts existing on the ground today. Or it was considered important to focus on the Oslo Agreement as a basis for international legitimacy rather than on United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947.

It was not surprising that these countries were able to attract a large number of intellectuals, nor was it surprising that intellectuals competed to get a share of the pie. I have previously shown how the Palestine Liberation Organization used money to attract political support, thereby helping to prepare the ground that provided intellectuals with an environment in which they could be targeted and recruited. A culture of paying the price or sacrificing for the higher objective did not take shape among a large number of intellectuals in Palestine; instead, a culture of receiving the price took shape. Of course, this cultural policy did not succeed with every intellectual, but it penetrated the minds of the broader sector of them. In other words, what the Palestine Liberation Organization planted fit perfectly with what the Western states wanted to see exist.

Intellectuals and researchers competed to conduct funded research and participate in various programs. Academics competed for positions out of desire for the money offered or for academic courses abroad. Universities competed for external support until their research centers appeared almost like agents for the research projects of Western states. Even intellectuals from opposition factions such as the Popular Front and the Democratic Front cooperated in such projects, and intellectuals among the communists, known for their ideological contradiction with capitalism, did not hesitate to cooperate. The fever even spread to intellectuals known for their affiliation with the Islamic movement.

The result was that our scholars and academics provided extensive information about the homeland and its people, factions and parties, and their methods of operation and decision-making. The Western states, together with Israel, were thus able to learn precise details about Palestinian life, the factors affecting the psychology of the Palestinian people, how they received different policies, their reactions to them, and the extent to which they accepted or rejected them. With this flood of information, it became possible to design policies that benefited Israel without provoking Palestinian emotions or creating impulses toward rejection. It then became possible to design policies that bypassed Palestinians’ historical feelings toward Israel and went beyond examining Palestinian demands, legitimate rights, and legitimacy, in favor of policies leading to acceptance of Israel, normalization of relations with it, and its integration into the region without requiring it to pay a real price to the Palestinian people.

Years ago, it was impossible for a Palestinian to accept recognition of Israel without linking it to the right of self-determination. Yet now we find Palestinians who once passionately defended the necessity of recognizing Palestinian rights in advance as a condition for a peaceful settlement with Israel transformed into enthusiastic defenders of agreements that honored no legitimate Palestinian right. We also find those who championed the development of an independent Palestinian economy separate from Israel’s economy defending the necessity of opening Israeli factories and farms to Palestinian workers. It is no longer hidden from anyone that yesterday’s fedayeen fighter who wanted to liberate Palestine from the sea to the river now arrests Palestinians who attack Israel.

I do not exclude here the other factors that play a role in shaping Palestinian public opinion and make it susceptible to shifting rapidly from one position to its opposite. But I assume these factors remain constant in the face of the changing variable of Western policy, which reinforced the role of the other factors, including tribal thinking and the dependent education pursued by the Palestine Liberation Organization and the various Palestinian factions. Western policy penetrated the Palestinian mentality and developed concepts of moderation, wisdom, and reasonableness according to the Western interpretation of them. Arab courage, under the Western concept of moderation, became cowardice. Palestinians became convinced that they could be wise without dignity or dignified without strength, and a concept of reasonableness linked to reality developed among them. Thus the Palestinian cause was transformed from a national cause requiring the mobilization of energies and efforts into a diplomatic issue, with all the relaxation, weakness, passivity, and reliance on unfriendly or hostile forces to the Palestinian people that accompany it.

The Palestine Liberation Organization played a major role in dragging the Palestinian people toward this situation, but intellectuals and academics played the role of brokers who cared nothing about the victim in pursuit of their personal gains. They adapted their abilities and energies to Western intellectual appetite, thereby exposing the Palestinian people to political manipulation aimed at turning them away from their legitimate rights. The Western conspiratorial mind was able to penetrate Palestinian thinking in an age when intellectuals multiplied more deeply than it had in an age of ignorance. It has been demonstrated that the simple peasant was more capable of preserving his homeland and national identity than the academic scholar and the writer. The peasant was ashamed of normalizing relations with Israel, would avoid public view if forced to shake an Israeli’s hand, and refused to bargain over the homeland. The intellectual, by contrast, cast off every garment in the name of realism and rationality, only to wear transparent clothing and turn the homeland into exposed nakedness.

Some intellectuals, academics, and writers argue that they are not spies and cannot become spies merely by attending a conference or writing a paper, and that they can always protect themselves by being aware of the enemies’ plans. This is true if espionage means seeking news about citizens and writing direct personal reports about individuals and groups. But in reality they engage in activities far more dangerous than those of an informant or someone monitoring activities. They transmit vital information to states whose objectives differ from, and indeed are hostile to, the objectives of the Palestinian people, openly and under the banner of knowledge for all, freedom of scientific research, and the free flow of information. They did not merely transmit information about Palestinian society as a whole; they also transmitted information about the various factions and how they operated, including Fatah, Hamas, and the various fronts.

They argue that the information contained in their research and academic papers is published and belongs to no one exclusively, and that any party can benefit from it. Thus, they say, they use Western money to conduct research that benefits the Palestinian side in making decisions that enable it to preserve its rights. This argument is unconvincing, because the Palestinian side, for the most part, does not read academic research and bases its decisions on the authoritarian personality that claims to know everything, while the other side—Israel and the Western states—possesses the material and human resources to implement policies based on the information available to it.

These intellectuals have inflicted enormous damage on the country, greater than that inflicted by land brokers. The land broker tries to sell a piece of land to Jews, but the intellectual employed by foreign interests tries to sell the human being. Land without the human being has no value, and land that is lost can only be recovered by the human being. If the human being is lost or absent, no one remains to recover the land. The land brokers conspired against the homeland, while the knowledge brokers conspired against the people of the homeland. The result is what we see before our eyes today: Israel rules over Palestine, and the people of Palestine must stand guard over its security and safety.

Many Palestinians, foremost among them members of the educated elite, blame the Arabs for their poor circumstances and hold them responsible for what has become of the Palestinian situation. It is true that the Arabs cannot be absolved of responsibility, but Palestinians bear the greater share of it. Many Arab writers, intellectuals, and academics stand firmly against Israel and normalization with it, while an Arab writers’ union is forced to freeze the membership of the Palestinian Writers’ Union for reasons related to normalization with Israel. A young Lebanese woman stands proudly in Madrid, refusing to shake hands with Israelis, while Palestinians do so to prove that they are peaceful. The people of Egypt refuse to deal with occupying Zionists, while Palestinian intellectuals hold receptions for those who occupied their country.

This is what took place on Palestinian soil with the blessing of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and what is now taking place with the active participation of members of the self-rule authority.