Palestine needs a better leadership

Do Palestinian leaders, along with the people they lead, carry within them the germ of preordained failure?

As soon as we put the question this way, its crudity becomes apparent. But, as God is my witness, these leaders, instead of shepherding their people to the clearing, have only succeeded in taking them from one diplomatic disaster to another and one act of social grief to another.

Now this leadership is spent, having long since lost its swagger. So what now?

Time for Palestinians to engage in open debate over why their struggle for national independence has reached a nadir — a nadir truly unparalleled in their modern history — with their leaders not achieving much in five decades or so.

When they came to Palestine in pursuit of their Zionist ambitions, following the release of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Zionists did not resort to mendacities. They told us the truth, up front. We are here, they said, to kill, expel and rob. And what are you gonna do about it?

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Time for Palestinians to be outspoken and, like Plutarch, the Greek philosopher who coined the phrase, to call a spade a spade, not a garden tool. And it is time for this one Palestinians here to tell it like it is.

Alienation of Palestinians

Consider how alienated Palestinians in the West Bank, who have grown up protesting Israel’s military occupation like they have grown up with their own skin, responded in recent weeks when the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) sent out calls to them to take to the streets to protest the imminent annexation of a large chunk of territory in their ancestral homeland by the Israeli government.

The calls were largely ignored, and they were ignored not because Palestinians have become apathetic — you never become apathetic when you have an occupier’s boot over your neck — but because they no longer trust their leaders’ ability to lead.

It pains one to admit it has come to that, but one cannot deny that reality is real.

Soon after the PA set up shop in 1994, the group’s first order of business was to pursue those figures regarded by any civilised society as central to the health of the body politic. Newspaper editors were silenced, recalcitrant labour unionists were sometimes imprisoned and innovative intellectuals were beaten.

Fate of dissenters

A worse fate awaited political dissenters. And to squelch critical thinking is not only an act that impoverishes society but renders it dumb-mute, unable to grow and thrust itself beyond its fixed meaning.

Look, Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, was no philosopher, but he proved that he was, albeit teleologically, tuned in to Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s “social contract” and Emanuel Kant’s “examined life” when he declared, “Here in America we descended from the blood and spirit of revolutionaries and rebels, men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrines, [and] as their heirs, may never confuse dissent with disloyal subversion”. Dissent, in short, is a high form patriotism.

Meanwhile, as Yasser Arafat began his reign in the autonomous zones in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel went on a manic, unrestrained spree expanding its colonies there and building a Jews-only system of roads that connected them — all, of course, in violation of the Oslo agreement, not mention international law.

And Yasser Arafat continued to talk about “the peace of the brave” between Israelis and Palestinians.

When the founding father of the Palestinian movement died in November 2004, his successor, the current president, Mahmoud Abbas, carried on the tradition.

The extent of our sorrowful dissent knew no bounds. Yet, we the people, under occupation or in exile, did nothing as this elite appropriated our dignity.

Venomous an ideology though Zionism may be, I do not hold its adherents to account. One doesn’t, after all, blame the beast of prey for being a beast of prey.

When they came to Palestine in pursuit of their Zionist ambitions, following the release of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Zionists did not resort to mendacities. They told us the truth, up front. We are here, they said, to kill, expel and rob. And what are you gonna do about it?

What the PLO did about it was to become, in 1993, the only national liberation movement in the history of the planet to turn tail. 

Let the next generation of Palestinians, learning from their history lest they repeat it, remember Confucius’s observation about how the glory of a people engaged in a struggle for freedom is not in never falling, but in rising every time they fall.

— Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.