The farcical downward slide continues.
In hierarchical order: Mahmoud Abbas attempts to bury the Goldstone report on the Gaza massacre; Salam Fayyad speaks at the Herzliya Conference, truly earning Akiva Eldar’s munificent praise; and a Fatah underling tries to make sleazy love in a sleazy video. I could have made this all up, and you would have believed me, but no need to. The party of Clinton and the clique of Obama never fails to hopelessly humiliate itself.
We, the Palestinians, suffer from an overabundance of big men; pirates, gangsters. They bark at you and insist that they know what’s what. So you’d better listen. There is always a female secretary, and a middle-aged refugee whose job is to serve tea and empty ashtrays (or sweep the floor if the ashtrays are out of reach). He is necessarily obsequious.
I don’t mean to reinforce stereotypes. You see this kind of self-aggrandizing character everywhere. In America, they tend to be pimps or Hollywood movie-star agents or government types, or, in the case of Thomas Friedman, world-renowned journalists. In the developing or autocratic world, they tend to be government types only.
Anyway, I had my own personal encounter with a member of the Palestinian vulture class – otherwise known as the Palestinian political class – several days ago. It was that encounter that inspired this post.
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I spent this past week in Egypt researching several stories for The Electronic Intifada, one of which is about the status of Palestinian refugees in Egypt. The Palestinian Authority (i.e., Fatah) maintains offices in Cairo – they call it an embassy – and I went there to hear the official line. Objective journalism may not exist, but one can’t be faulted for making an honest effort. My contact secured a meeting with a functionary whose last name is Al-Az’ar, loosely translated as “the hoodlum” (I told you, I could make this stuff up, but I don’t need to).
I was led into a smoky office where Al-Az’ar was seated behind a dilapidated desk.
“Ahmed, this is Dr. Al-Az’ar.”
“Who’s this?” the Dr. asked, casting his bloodshot eyes in my direction.
“This is the journalist who wanted to interview you.”
“OK. What about?”
I took a seat opposite Al-Az’ar, and started to explain why I was there.
“I’m not going to talk about this,” he interrupted.
“You’re not going to talk about the state of Palestinian refugees in Egypt?”
“No – I have nothing to say.”
“You have nothing to say about the Palestinian refugees in Egypt?”
And so on, until finally, “How did you get into the country?”
“On a tourist visa.”
“Well you’d better just go be a tourist. Don’t go fucking yourself and other people with you (Ma t-lubis halak wi naas ma’ak).”
The last phrase isn’t exactly a word-for-word translation, but I wanted to capture the essence of the exchange. I reconstructed the conversation from memory but the transliterated line is verbatim. In any case, it was good advice from someone who may know something about something, after all.
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I always struggle when I criticize Fatah or the Old Guard. Is my tone too strident? Is this line too cutting? Who am I to judge these men? And that’s the question that gets to the heart of the matter… Maybe it’s time for a change of tone.
Growing up, Abu Ammar [Arafat] was a heroic figure. He carried a gun, risked everything, and suffered a great deal for the cause. He embodied the PLO and the PLO taught us to that resistance was dignified. In those days, the PLO was thematically consonant. Things were clear to us. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
Some of our young men would go on to survive the fighting in Beirut, and the exile in Libya. Many of those would return to Palestine as older men with high hopes. Tragically, many of those would become fodder for the Oslo Meat-Grinder, the Soul-Shearer. Oslo was the supreme alchemist’s trick. Iron will and steely determination curdled into a foaming yellow-milky residue as you looked on. It took years and years, but it happened. We watched as blistering hope decayed, leaving that tungsten-cyanide alloy – cynicism (Incidentally, does hope have a half-life? I wonder what Barack Obama thinks).
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe none of our best men survived the fighting. Maybe the best of them dove headfirst into the Zionist’s Gaping Maw (they call it the IDF). But I don’t think so. I don’t think that Abu Mazen’s cupidity is congenital. Or Salam Fayyad’s venality constitutional (I may be wrong about Fayyad – he avoided life in the trenches). Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad are the very human product of life in a cesspit. Maybe more extraordinary men could have resisted the structural pressures brought to bear by the Oslo gang, but not these men. They are only human.
Oslo changed Palestine. Gone was our consonance. “Maybe it isn’t freedom right now, but soon…,” and then, “We’re in charge here, and we’ll negotiate for some more,” and finally, “We’ll build institutions and sue for our state later.” We allowed ourselves to be confused. We gave everything up for empty promises and Slick Willy’s slick grin. Oslo made us strangers in a native land – which is more like a strange land every day. Oslo made us strangers to armed resistance.
To be sure, Palestine has no need of arms today – the strategic and tactical environment has shifted – but we should have retained the right to use all forms of resistance as we saw fit. This is our fight. “We will abandon the armed struggle at a time of our choosing.” That’s what they should have said. The AK-47’s astronomical symbolic value inspired generations of Palestinians and others (when I was in Vietnam, people mimicked rifle-shooting when I told them I was from Palestine). “They have Apaches and Merkavas but we resist!” Think of how inspiring it would have been to see Arafat refuse the Nobel Peace Prize; “I am not a man of Peace! I am a man of Justice!”
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I could say something about how crucial the pre-Oslo resistance was for us today. We stand on the shoulders of giants, etc… But, it would be more accurate to say that we only see as far as we do by standing on the stacks of documented mistakes they’ve made. So what have we learned?
1. Never concede anything. Freedom is all-or-nothing. No half measures here, please.
2. Grassroots. Grassroots. Grassroots. Discard the tangled extension cord and plug right into the crackling socket!
Maybe we too are in a position to teach them something; they are not beyond redemption.
They can:
1. Reconcile with Hamas at all costs. Let’s get our house in order. They asked the Begins and Reagans for forgiveness – they can ask their brothers for forgiveness.
2. Abandon America and Israel (and Tony Blair) and agitate for individual rights in Palestine/Israel.
I didn’t write this as an assault on Fatah and the old PLO guard, but on their ossified hearts and rigid minds. They committed to the erroneous track almost two decades ago and can’t seem to look left and right and jump off. The interminable march of history is on, and Palestine will be free, just not in the way they thought it would. It is up to them to cleave the past from the present to liberate the future. Or they can stay behind while we do.
wow, brilliant. masterful writing.
Brilliant! Thank you! See the link below and please help me get it out there!
link to kickstarter.com
Thank you for writing this Ahmed. For those of us born in the last 20, 25 years, the PLO and Fatah have been nothing but uninspiring, illogical and out of touch with us and with the reality we endure. I hope you’re right about there still being a chance for redemption, but I fear something else: as even that old guard becomes increasingly irrelevant, they’re being replaced by a character-Salam Fayyad- even more seperated from the reality of those yearning for freedom.
Ahmed never disappoints. Fantastic piece, brilliant narrative.
Thanks you Ahmed Moor; you did convey the mood it has come to (and it’s enemy, the likes of Al-Az’ar, the hoodlum in influential position). I can’t help but feel there is an echo of this mood in the USA across the land. Your land has been taken. Over here, we have our land, but our government has been hijacked.
I agree with the Palestinian poet Mahoud Darwish, who resigned from the P.L.O. executive committee to protest the Oslo accords, not because he rejected peace with Israel but because, he said:
“… there was no clear link between the interim period and the final status, and no clear commitment to withdraw from the occupied territories. I felt Oslo would pave the way for escalation. I hoped I was wrong. I’m very sad that I was right.”
Yes more creative outside-of-the-stinking-old-box is needed – and it’s slowly happening. The old box though is tired because it’s been a long long and dirty fucking fight!
here’s a link to a Mahmoud Darwish interview if anyone’s interested:
link to mahmouddarwish.com
I agree with Akiva Eldar
There is an, many, ironies with Ahmed’s post.
The biggest irony is that the comments on Oslo are EXACTLY what the right-wing Zionists assert, that I fight with daily as well.
That Oslo was a collosal betrayal, and that anyone that supports the hope in retrospect or in the present, is a spineless quisling.
Its a youthful urge, the honoring, encouragement, and support of warriors rather than the honoring of peace-makers.
If you would accept compromise, then war could be avoided. Otherwise, we have either/or.
“Should’s” yeild to “we’s” in war.
Yeah, nothing like trying to build a Palestinian state while being under Israeli occupation, and despite it. If you were really for the ultimate moderate Palestinian,
you wouldn’t diss any attempts to effectively bring the occupation reality to the attention of the American masses who get spoon fed hasbara, and never hear the Palestinian side.
The hoodlum seems content in his Cairo office, safe, away from all the hunger, bombing and shooting. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets his salary from Mubarak.
Avi,
All the Fatah leadership spent their earlier lives in the trenches – never quite took off that hat when they got an office job later in life. The people of Palestine appreciate what Fatah has done for Palestine – but it’s just been a down-hill performance for Fatah since the Oslo Accords began.
All of the Fatah leadership did nor spend their earlier lives in the trenches. Has they done so, in fact, things would be different today. Ahmed is, unfortunately, correct in his conclusions and I say that from my experiences in Lebanon and Jordan in 1970, in Lebanon in 1983 and as an active participant in the Palestine solidarity movement for close to 40 years , that movement which remains an unindicted enabler in this sad scenario because its leaders and many of its members knew about Arafat and Fatah’s corruption and yet remained silent or looked the other way.
TheIsraeli and American Jewish “peace movements,” such as they were, also promoted Arafat as the virtuous leader of the Palestinian people. no doubt pushed to do so by Zionist agents in their ranks.
The late Edward Said always regretted that he, too, had remained silent after seeing in Lebanon what I had, the .massive corruption of the Fatah led PLO which had alienated the Shia population and made Israel’s sweep through the country all the more easy in 1982. When Said did speak out, what was the result?
Arafat banned his books from being sold in the West Bank and Gaza. Only a the book store on Saladin street in East Jerusalem, out of Arafat’s reach, could you find them. Was there a word of protest from the solidarity movement? We know the answer. In the early 90s, maybe 93, an editorial appeared in the English language edition of Al-Fajr, Fatah’s newspaper, asking for readers to report stories of PLO corruption, Arafat promptly closed the paper down and it never reappeared. Was there a word of protest from the movement? We know the answer.
The first intifada was directed against Arafat and the PLO in Tunis almost as much as it was against Israel and he did everything he could to subvert it, finally succeeding with Oslo which was later compared by Shlomo Gazit, one of Israel’s negotiators, with the Munich sell-out of the Czechs with the Israelis being the Germans.
At the time of Oslo Arafat’s standing within the West Bank and Gaza was so low that Israel became worried and one of it by-products if not direct intents, was to preserve him as head of the PLO since he was the only one who could get away with signing away the Palestinians’ patrimony. A cartoon in the Jerusalem Post at the time summed up the situation perfectly. It showed Arafat sitting up on a stretcher giving the “V” sign. The stretcher beareres were Rabin and Peres.
That Arafat is still honored by a sizeable segment of the Palestinian people is because they were never told the truth–by our side as well as theirs.
When Palestinian voters went to the polls to throw out corrupt Fatah and elect Hamas in its place, the US and Israel immediately began to subvert the election by force, with the eager collaboration of thugs like Mohammad Dahlan.
And now Israel and the US keep Abbas on life-support because he has taken Arafat’s place as the only one who can sign away the Palestinian patrimony – this being the reason for the urgency to resume “negotiations.”
Jeffrey
I would be interested in your perspective on Uri Avnery’s defense of Arafat.
A lot of what you cite about the old guard is yes, true. But there were some very honorable and extremely intelligent people around the PLO too, for instance, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish and Shafiq Al Hout, to name several off the top of my head. It wasn’t all just bearded riffle-men in the resistance, there was also a vibrant collective of Palestinian intellectuals in the mix, discussing and trying to shape a shared vision of Palestinian nationhood. One by one, these intellectuals have either been assassinated, died of natural causes or resigned from their positions because of the corruption worm that had rooted itself into the PLO, especially after Oslo.
People accuse Arafat and his outfit of corruption this and thievery that and they’re right for the most part. But what people usually forget is that Arafat, in his own eccentric way, was the tireless guy who kept the torch and name of Palestine burning on the international arena in the 60′s and 70′s – this at a time when the whole world, including the Arab world, had just about forgotten the 1948 Palestinians were still in refugee camps. You could say to his people, Arafat was the first one to SHOUT out to the world for justice for Palestinians. This means something to these people regardless of the glaring inconsistencies of Arafat, the armed town-crier.
He’s a symbol. And symbols affect people.
I doubt many Palestinian youths would want to emulate him anymore, as indeed the 1970′s Palestinian youths once did.
Yes, ultimately from the US taxpayers. As you know the Egypt regime’s long peace with Israel has been bought and paid for by the US. The Egyptian on the Street knows it, but of course the man on the Street in the USA does not. Neither man counts at all in the matter. Should be interesting as Egypt’s Mr M can’t live forever…
I think Abbas would single-handedly drag a Trojan Horse full of IDF through the gates of Gaza, he is so obsessed with doing anything that will destroy Hamas.
Thank you Ahmed, I tend to forget the daily discouragement of the Oslo debacle. I mostly think of the ongoing situation in territories. There will be generations who don’t have your grasp of the situation and how it has regressed over time. I have compassion for the PLO guy in Cairo. How do we measure despair?
Kick-ass piece, Ahmed.
the heartache was palpable in the piece but we are dealing with an entrenched political class that is now feeding at the trough of bribery … these old guard leaders are taking the money and this has compromised them … non-violence is the approach now so perhaps they are irrelevant and can be forgotten – younger generations can bridge the gap of Fatah/Hamas perhaps
radii,
I don’t think you can cancel the armed branch of the resistance with a brutal enemy like the IDF at your tail 24/7. The armed struggle has it’s place. As indeed does the diplomatic arm.
From Project Muse:
75 (Volume 21, Number 2), Summer 2003
E-ISSN: 1527-1951 Print ISSN: 0164-2472
Mitchell, Timothy, 1955-
Prakash, Gyan, 1952-
Shohat, Ella, 1959-
Introduction: Palestine in a Transnational Context
Social Text – 75 (Volume 21, Number 2), Summer 2003, pp. 1-5
Duke University Press
Introduction: Palestine in a Transnational Context – Social Text 21:2 Social Text 21.2 (2003) 1-5 Introduction Palestine In A Transnational Context Timothy Mitchell, Gyan Prakash, and Ella Shohat In the three years since the outbreak of the second Intifada in October 2000, the policy making of the U.S. government has been haunted by the question of Palestine. The Intifada made briefly visible the consequences of Israel’s continued occupation and expanded colonization of the West Bank and Gaza, an expansion facilitated by the Oslo accords of 1993 and disguised under the name of “the peace process.” Within a year, however, the launching of the worldwide war on terror provided Washington with a new way to misrepresent the nature of Israel’s war against the Palestinians. A century-long history of dispossession, expulsion, occupation, and resistance was reduced, once again, to a series of Palestinian acts of terror. A people’s loss of their homes and homeland, of their freedom of movement and human dignity, of their personal security and political future, could instead be framed as a battle of civilization against terror, of democracy against hatred, of the West against Islam. Under the banner of the war on terror, the United States then announced its plans for a war against Iraq as the cornerstone of an unapologetic project to remake the political order of the Middle East. Yet the question of Palestine refused to disappear. From the protests of up to half…
Next up, the actual war on Iran, during which, Israel will boot out the remaining Palestinians while the USA goes even farther down the tubes defending rogue Israel under the notion
that’s in the USA’s, Israel’s, the World’s interest.
It’s no coincidence that apartheid S Africa and Israel were both born in 1948:
link to socialtext.dukejournals.org
Describing social and economic problems facing the Palestine refugees, WAJIH AHMAD ATALLAH, Secretary, Union of Youth Activity Centres in the West Bank and Gaza, said the 60 years that had passed since the Nakba had seen numerous, varied and changing laws that had had far-reaching effects on every Palestinian. Palestinians had lived under the law of the British mandate and then the law of the Israeli occupation. They had been subject to refugee laws of host countries in addition to the rules of UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority. The Israeli occupation had stretched the bonds of Palestinian society socially and economically. The social fabric had been damaged as the families had been broken apart.
Giving examples, he said the laws and practices of the occupying Power had nullified development programmes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and hampered private-sector investment and reconstruction. More than 1,800 military laws issued between 1967 and the signing of the Oslo Accords had covered land use, water resources, the movement of people, and other aspects in the social, economic and political spheres. Today, those laws were exemplified by the siege, collective punishment, extrajudicial killings, control of water and productive resources, confiscation of land, isolation, separation and arrests. That had pushed the Palestinian refugees into a state of permanent anxiety and depression about their future. They were tired of constantly hearing about international law, human rights and hopes for peace. They had internalized the conviction that everything going on around them was meant to cheat and subjugate them, even the activities of UNRWA which were perceived as being hostage to political manipulation by outside Powers.
link to unispal.un.org
Can’t help but think of the Shrub era neocon conviction that you can criticize all you want, but we will continue to make up and enforce our own version of reality; when you carp, we will have already moved on, doing our thing as it were. Does that not mirror Jewish activity in Palestine since 1947?
Ahmed, that was a superb essay. Thankyou very much for your insight into the total corruption of Fatah and the old PLO.
I went to Jordan just after Oslo; the hope was palpable. Things went very sour when, after Rabin’s murder, first Peres, and the Netanyahu took over Israel. Then, the hope died, and I left Jordan in 1996. Since then, I haven’t followed the details, but over the 14 years since, I’ve seen the descent of the PLO/Fatah/PA into utter uselessness, ensconced inside their ‘village’ of Ramallah, which now has new supermarkets, cinemas etc; enough to keep a corrupt elite going, with a huge cash flow from the outside (mostly Europe).
Hamas is the only hope, but they are ‘terrorists’, and nobody will speak to them. Your friend, the PLO functionary, whose last name is Al-Az’ar, is obviously thoroughly ‘Egyptianised’, and disgusting. But Mubarak is now very old, and will not last forever. There will be some changes there, and maybe his son will not take over automatically. The change-over will be fun to watch.