I am not alone. There are a host of other Palestinians today who are not altogether enthused about the emergence of a Palestinian state any time in the near future.
This notion, that engaged Palestinians are alienated from the heroic narrative in their modern history, is difficult to explain, for it will give rise to misunderstanding, however cautiously it is put. But here's the painful truth: an independent Palestine, as envisioned by the current leadership — a handful of men with a powerful security force whose intrusion into citizens' daily lives and violent repression of these citizens' right to free speech is well-documented — will more than likely pan out as a police state.
We are all familiar by now with the Palestinian National Authority's encroachment on independent opinion in the media and heretical thought in academia, as we are equally familiar with its relentless pursuit of individuals espousing adversarial voices, its hysterical fear of the free flow of ideas — which are central to the health of the body politic — and the rest of it.
Now, consider this latest outrage: the PNA's Minister of Religious Affairs, Mahmoud Habbash, has in recent months been sending e-mail missives to the 1,800 mosques across the West Bank dictating, word for word, the Friday sermon that every imam should deliver to his congregation.
The policy is enforced in a grotesquely authoritarian manner — recalcitrant imams are either incarcerated or terminated. Shaikh Hamid Bitawi, a noted Islamic scholar who had delivered sermons in the Nablus area for well over four decades, was unceremoniously fired recently.
Reportedly, dozens of other, though lesser known preachers have met a similar fate, prevented from ever again mounting the pulpits of their mosques to address their congregations.
Code of the bully
The goal of this Stalinist policy — for what other word could one use here? — is not only to regiment social and cultural life, or even to cement the PNA's control in the West Bank by banishing any residue of Hamas support there, but to meet Israel's preconditions for peace talks. At any rate, whatever reason or reasons are advanced here to justify such a policy, the fact is that leaders of the PNA are contributing to the larger decay in Palestinian society, on top of that wreaked upon it by the code of the bully and the hoodlum that has defined the practices of Israeli occupiers all these years.
"The mosque policy was orchestrated by Habbash, who, after his appointment as minister of religious affairs in May 2009, placed all of the West Bank's mosques under his supervision," wrote Janine Zacharia, Washington Post correspondent, in a report earlier this month filed from Al Birah. "After taking control of the mosques, Habbash ordered the mandatory sermons. ‘An imam can add to the sermon', Habbash said, ‘but of course he has to report on this'."
So this is what we have descended to now? Is this how the Palestinian dream for freedom, independence and statehood has gone to hell in a handbasket? Could this be the terminus of a cause that three generations of Palestinians have lived and sacrificed for all these years — a cause that represented for millions of people in the Arab world, and far beyond it, a vision of human possibility rich in moral demand?
For old geezers like ourselves, who as children had made the trek in the refugee exodus of 1948 (whose searing memories still bounce around in our heads like jugglers' weights), and lived the hellish life of deracines in whatever host state would tolerate our presence (always placing us close to the door for easy eviction), the world of Palestine as we knew it and lived it in exile was one imbued with ideals, ideals that were bruised but forever alive. Today, the old values of that world, the old certainties in which our individual existence had anchored its meaning, are battered, beyond recognition, possibly beyond redemption.
In the West Bank, our political destiny has been left to semi-literate government officials who couldn't run a lunch counter, haven't read half a dozen decent books in their lives, and do not know of those charities of the imagination that are essential to literate minds.
And in Gaza, a pauperised strip of land reduced to becoming a kind of placeless place, left adrift by an equally clueless leadership, life is defined by the hazy utopianism of political Islam, a political Islam mockingly remote from citizens' immediate needs.
It is all sad, but it is all true.
In his interview with the Washington Post, Habbash, a man who clearly wouldn't know irony if it hit him on the head, told the reporter, by way of justifying his crackdown on mosques: "[We do it] to prevent ideological thought control".
Here's an e-mail message to Habbash, who himself is busy sending e-mails to imams around the West Bank telling them how to go about doing their job. As we say in that neck of the woods in Arlington, Virginia, where I have lived for several years and where we often resort to an earthy way to express ourselves:
"Sir, if you wanna be seen, stand up. If you wanna be heard, speak up. If you wanna be appreciated, shut up".
- Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
