Introduction

This book discusses the reasons behind the retreat of Palestinian positions in the face of Zionist and Israeli ambitions — a retreat that ultimately led to acquiescence in Israel’s existence on Palestinian land. It does not address external causes such as the strength of the Zionist movement, the Western support it received, or the failure of some Arab regimes and their subservience to British and American policy. Instead, the book confines its subject to internal causes, speaking with complete clarity about the policies pursued by Palestinians across the decades, and the practical steps that accompanied them, which led to defeat, retreat, and surrender to Israel’s demands. This book examines the taboos that Palestinian writers have generally tried to ignore and avoid, for fear of defamation, doubt, and attacks from Palestinian quarters, and it works to expose the negligence and failure of some Palestinian officials and leaders, and their cooperation with hostile parties. The author does not attempt here to conceal anything or to look away from internal flaws, factors of impotence, and acts of betrayal; rather, he calls things by their names and states them as they are, without a single pulse of fear or hesitation entering his heart.

This book does not aim, in any way or under any formulation, at defamation or — as the saying goes — at airing dirty laundry; rather, it aims at a clear expression of the internal flaws that have led to the Palestinians’ defeat thus far, and to their acknowledgment of their enemy and of its right to exist on their land. For in knowing one’s flaws and diagnosing one’s ailments lies a great step toward treating them and moving to a more advanced stage, marked by a better ability to confront enemies. Among the ugliest acts of failure and disappointment is concealing one’s own flaws and creating illusions about one’s own energies and capacities — for this obscures the truth and creates a mental and psychological state in which a person believes he is capable of achieving what he wants and of foiling the enemy’s plans. Herein lie terrible psychological shocks, especially when a person discovers that his assumptions were far from the truth, that his dreams of victory were nothing but confused illusions, and when he sees that his enemy has triumphed and achieved what it wanted.

For a person to be balanced in his thinking, and for his actions to be in step with his ideas, it is important that he know himself. It is important that he know his energies and capacities, the gaps he suffers from, and the flaws that hinder his progress, and so on. Then he can take steps that match his stature, and utter words that match his thoughts. But when a person harbors illusions about himself and credits himself with more than he deserves, and his mouth becomes far wider than what he can accomplish, he turns into a boastful, hollow figure, or remains within a primitive, naive mentality — easy to defeat, to control, and to manipulate emotionally. Over the years of the conflict, the Palestinian people fell into a state of imbalance: they blamed others, or external enemies, more than they focused on their own internal conditions in order to learn from past mistakes and correct the course of the future. And so they fell captive to festivals, speeches, and resounding statements that excelled at describing Palestinian might and the illusory victories achieved against the enemy. Anyone who examines some Palestinian writings, or the speeches of leaders, or the statements of factions, can easily sense the extent of the illusion nesting among the ranks of the people. People — especially the leaderships among them — kept weaving illusions of victory, while Israel continued swallowing land, building settlements, and expanding its capabilities on every level.

And so this book comes. It is an attempt to put a finger on the wound, however harsh that may be in many places. Its underlying message is that unless an internal Palestinian revolution takes place to change many of the prevailing concepts, organizational methods, and means of action, the Palestinian situation will continue to deteriorate, and Israel will remain secure in its continuous assault on the people’s rights and hopes. In describing the psychological, social, and political conditions, this book does not single out the Palestinian people apart from the Arab peoples, because these peoples resemble the Palestinian people in many of their conditions. Arab defeats have continued for the very same fundamental reasons that led to Palestinian setbacks. If the Palestinian people are distinguished from other Arab peoples, it is only in the singularity of their cause — not in the tragedies of their backwardness or the inclinations of their leaderships.

What compels the writing of this book all the more is that the Palestinian people have not slept through their worries and pains, nor neglected their causes; rather, they have done a great deal to save their homeland. Yet their hopes and sorrows have accumulated over time without a single ray of light toward a breakthrough emerging. Why?

The Palestinian people have struggled and striven for more than eighty years to fend off the Zionist danger and save their country. Palestinian blood has flowed profusely through the stages of the Palestinian cause’s development; tens of thousands of martyrs have fallen, and multiples of tens of thousands more have been wounded. The Palestinian people have borne all the pains and sorrows of demolished homes, destroyed crops, burned trees, arrests, torture, assaults on their honor, displacement and dispersal; they have endured the severing of their land and its confiscation, and suffered hunger, dire poverty, and disease. They ate grass, made the ground their bed and the sky their cover, and bore the pains of rejection, humiliation, distortion, and persecution.

The Palestinian people paid a heavy price for their homeland, both before 1948 and after. They were not sparing with anything, and gave everything they had, including their lives. If a comparison were to be made between what they gave and what other peoples who struggled for freedom and independence gave, the Palestinian people will not be found to have given less — if not more — whether measured by the scale of their suffering or by that scale relative to their population. But other peoples achieved their goals, or part of them, while the Palestinian people reaped nothing but further suffering and did not advance a single step forward. The sacrifices they offered produced the opposite result, such that the people’s condition deteriorated as events and days passed.

The Palestinian people rose up repeatedly to confront their enemies: sometimes in the form of protest actions such as demonstrations, strikes, and rallies, and sometimes in the form of uprisings and fighting, as happened in 1936 and in the period directly following 1967. In every phase in which they rose up, they bore the harshest forms of suffering and the bitterest of days, and yet they did not succeed in achieving their goals, whether independence or the liberation of any part of the land. The preludes came at a heavy price, and the results were subsidence and reliance on promises and hopes that were never fulfilled.

The Palestinian people nearly achieved their aspirations in 1936, when Britain found itself in a severe predicament, but the balance soon shifted. The people declared independence in 1948 in the city of Gaza, but the government soon collapsed and its members were forcibly taken to Cairo. The Palestinian people achieved a great accomplishment — at least in form — after the 1967 war, in gaining the support of Arab peoples everywhere, who showed a readiness to offer support in every form. But matters soon turned, and the rallying around the Palestinian “revolution” began to recede until it drowned in a sea of conflicts within Arab states. The people then produced a sweeping uprising that made their enemies stand on tiptoe, but it was not long before it began to suffer from internal corruption and turned into a burden on its own people.

Why do the peoples of the earth make sacrifices and achieve victories and goals, or some of them, while the Palestinian people give what is most precious and dear and reap nothing but setbacks and frustration? Why do peoples advance toward resolving their causes and removing their worries, while the causes of the Palestinian people are lost in corridors, taverns, and alleyways, and their worries and pains swell? What have other peoples succeeded in offering for the sake of victory that the Palestinian people have failed to offer? And what is the missing — or present and fatal — link that has led the Palestinian people to reap thorns and regret?

Of course, the Palestinian situation has particularities that make it different from many other situations that experienced colonialism and resistance to it. Many nations ganged up on Palestine and its people, foremost among them great powers that extended their influence and control over wide parts of the world, such as Britain, France, and the United States, and worked with full force to establish the Jewish national home in Palestine, offering various kinds of support to the Zionist movement and to Israel. Those nations gave the Zionists money, weapons, and support in international forums, organizations, and conferences, and supplied Israel with the most advanced weapons of destruction and combat, including the nuclear reactor for producing atomic bombs, and opened to it their markets and their economic, agricultural, and technical expertise, so that it would remain the dominant, controlling power in the Arab region.

In the face of this support for Zionism and Israel, the Palestinian people faced various forms of siege and constraint from many nations and states. Many states worked to strike at the sources of Palestinian strength, to wear the Palestinians down, and to undermine the factors of their unity and their readiness to confront their enemies. Even most Arab leaders, who continuously affirmed their concern for saving Palestine and the Palestinians, were not serious in their pursuit — if they were not, for many long years, mere pawns in the hands of the colonial powers that supported Zionism and established Israel.

But the matter goes beyond the strength and might of the enemies and the extent of their siege of the Arabs and Palestinians, to touch on the Arabs’ and Palestinians’ own capacities, the firmness of their will to act, and their ability to mobilize their energies and organize their efforts. The strength of the enemy is not a justification for defeat, nor an excuse, nor a reason to overlook or make allowances for the defeated party — because the logic of conflict requires every party to it to prepare, to make ready, and to mobilize the sources of strength in order to achieve its goal. If one party loses, it is not because the other party prepared and made ready, but because the loser did not do what the logic of conflict required of it. Blaming the enemy’s strength, on the part of the defeated, implicitly assumes that the enemy ought to restrain itself and remain in a state of weakness while awaiting the other side’s attacks — and this expresses a great incapacity suffered by the defeated party, a clear failure in its moral fabric, and a flaw in its mental ability to see matters as they truly are.

This book addresses a number of internal factors that led to defeat, and which will lead to future defeats if they persist. They are factors related to various levels of responsibility within Palestinian society and its various segments, though they vary in their importance and their role in dragging the Palestinian people toward repeated defeats. The existence of these factors, and their effect on the people’s ability to confront and achieve victory, constitutes an easy and simple recipe for taking the road to defeat and becoming mired in it — and these are factors capable of defeating not only the Palestinian people, but any other people on earth, should they run through its veins and characterize its life’s course in its various aspects.

These factors are neither hidden nor secret, nor is it difficult to put a finger on them. They are factors plainly visible, which people constantly discuss in their private gatherings and secret conversations, in their whispers and in the dialogue of their conscience. Nor are they factors exclusive to the Palestinian people; every Arab people suffering from oppression and humiliation shares in them. People speak of them in every village and city, on every corner and street, in every institution, center, and gathering.

For this reason, this book does not contain causes and factors that no one has heard of before, or that have not already been arrived at or spoken of. The book merely moves beyond whispering and private conversation to speak openly and clearly, to place the finger squarely before the people and before those responsible for the sites of the bleeding, and to bring out the truth, as the author sees it, exactly as it is, without evasion, obfuscation, or circumlocution.

To convey this information in a smooth and orderly manner, this book is divided into several chapters. The first chapter focuses on the Palestinian situation directly after 1967, in terms of the development of the Palestinian resistance movement and the factors that led to its expansion or negatively affected it. This chapter lays the groundwork that governed the later developments of the Palestinian cause and its evolution on the internal front. The book then moves to the second chapter, which focuses on the development of the Palestinian position on the cause itself and the political proposals put forward over the years. This chapter discusses the gradual lowering of the ceiling of Palestinian demands, down to the Oslo Accords.

The third chapter discusses the inevitability of the Oslo Accords and the events and developments on the Palestinian scene that led to them. The chapter summarizes the actions and policies that were inevitably leading toward recognition of Israel and reconciliation with it. The fourth chapter discusses the Oslo Accords and what resulted from them, namely the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and its practices on various levels. This chapter links the post-Oslo developments to the pre-Oslo practices discussed in the first and second chapters. The fifth chapter focuses on Yasser Arafat as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and as the guiding hand of Palestinian policy for more than thirty years. The substance of this chapter is that Arafat bears responsibility for the various developments on the Palestinian scene, because he led the movement in an individual, one-man manner. The sixth chapter takes us to the occupied territories of ‘67 after Oslo, and to the development of daily life there, and the extent of the Palestinian Authority’s ability to build a Palestinian life imbued with hope and optimism.

The seventh chapter deals with the Palestinian opposition and holds it responsible for its failure to offer alternatives and for its negligence in seizing the initiative. The intellectuals bear their share of responsibility in the eighth chapter, which recounts the ability of Western states to draw in a large number of intellectuals and to recruit them indirectly to serve Western goals in Palestine. This chapter is completed by the ninth, which discusses our educational and moral shortcomings. The tenth chapter tells the story of the Palestinian pursuit of the United States, which in the end imposed its own vision for a solution in the region upon us.

If the reader is searching for an alternative, he will find one proposed in the final chapter.

I try here to anticipate the response of one who will accuse me of overlooking the sacrifices made against the Zionist enemy, and of trying to diminish their value and importance. Palestinian fighters, across the various eras and in the various places where they were present, and setting out from them, offered continuous sacrifices and unique, distinguished, and varied acts of heroism. There was the Battle of Karameh, the battles of the Jordan Valley and southern Lebanon, the epic of Beirut, the raid on the coast and the Savoy operation, and so on. Of course, I do not deny any of this. The Palestinian fighter is a hero and courageous, and has continually been marked by a spirit of sacrifice and self-giving so that the homeland may live. This fighter has written eternal chapters in defense of the homeland and the future of its generations, and has fought valiantly in attempting to repel invaders and covetous enemies, and to protect the holy places, the plains, the mountains, and the valleys. Palestinian blood has flowed profusely in Lydda and Jaffa, on the slopes of Mount Carmel, in the plains of Beisan, in the villages and towns of the Triangle, on the mountains of Hebron, the hills of Tulkarm, and the valleys of the Jordan Valley.

Palestine is the land of martyrs and of free fedayeen, ever ready for self-sacrifice and defense in the face of enemies. On Palestinian soil have fallen heroes such as Fuad Hijazi, Ata al-Zir, Sheikh al-Qassam, Abd al-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad, Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud, Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, Lina al-Nabulsi, Hatem al-Sisi, Khaled Akr, Ibrahim al-Aklik, Adnan Harb, Qasim al-Ja’bari, Hajj Ramadan al-Banna, Ahmad Dahdoul, Nassar al-Huwaytat, Bassam al-Samoudi, Idris Nawfal, Mikhail Lazarou, Qandil Alwan, Sabri Abd Rabbo, Dalal al-Mughrabi, Shadia Abu Ghazala, Imad Akel, Khaled Nazzal, Ayman al-Rizzi, Mufid al-Ghazawi, and Yahya Ayyash.

What I want to convey to this hero is that his sacrifices became lost in the mazes of private interests, backstabbing in the dark, deal-making, and halls of entertainment and pleasure. It is difficult for me to be this blunt, but it is important to break out of the circles of obfuscation, deception, and hollow rhetorical flourishes of self-justification. The Palestinian hero fought only to find, in the end, that the harvest was not of the kind of seed that was sown. The leadership was not equal to its responsibility; Palestinian blood was cheap to it, as were people’s pains, orphans’ tears, and widows’ groans — and so it squandered the eloquence of the sword and the bullet on the talk of back rooms and the flourish of statements.