Gaza slips further into chaos

Emperor Nero may have chosen to play the lyre while Rome burned, but Hamas leaders prefer instead to hurl slogans and pompous cliches at political rallies in Gaza while its people starved.

When we think of Gaza, the image evoked in our minds is of the biggest open air prison in the world. Open air prisons, like the Gulag and concentration camps, are meant to be relics of the past, a reprehensible enterprise that raises questions about how low the shape and motive of human conduct can descend.

As Israel withholds from the people from Gaza access to basics, including food, clean water, electrical power and gasoline, it forces us to wonder about why this entity feels it necessary to reduce a human community of one and a half million men, women and children to living in the manner of beasts.

Sadly, Israel's casual, routine, almost daily brutalities are now, well, so casual, routine and quotidian that we have long since opted simply to tune out the horror rather than destroy our hold on reality by pondering over the significance of profound evil in human affairs. That's what has been happening over the last four decades. And it's an ugly truth.

But there is another side to this story, and it is this: We have convinced ourselves that responsibility for the unspeakable suffering of the Palestinian people, not just since the advent of the occupation in 1967, but since the inception of the national struggle in the 1920s, lies solely with the Jewish agenda in Palestine, the British Mandate, perfidious Americans, even history and fate, not in any way with the Palestinians and their leadership.

Celebrations

This is why the spectacle in Gaza last Sunday of Hamas marshalling tens of thousands of supporters to a huge rally to "celebrate" 21 years since its founding, was phantasmagoric indeed. Speaker after speaker bellowed out defiant speech after defiant speech, bragging about the group's military exploits against the enemy, and the gathered mass of supportive Gazans, crowded into a dusty arena, spilling into nearby streets, echoed the sentiments.

What were these folks celebrating? Judging by the rhetoric, you would think the Palestinians have never had it so good, when in fact these Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, have never had it so bad.

Their national struggle, along with their society, is fragmented, divided and weak and their aspirations for independence and statehood have never appeared more mockingly remote. They can evade responsibility for the fate that has befallen them by blaming it all on others, but the blame is theirs to share.

Over the decades, they have been cursed by a leadership elite that knew little and cared less about good governance. In the days when Fatah, the leading faction in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, reigned supreme in the West Bank and Gaza soon after the signing of the Camp David agreement, corruption and abuse of power were the norm.

For Palestinian officials to live an affluent lifestyle, in villas, in the midst of rampant poverty, was neither considered a brazen act at the time, nor was the fact that 14 Palestinian activists had died under torture at the hands of thuggish interrogators, themselves fellow-Palestinians, within a year of Yasser Arafat's arrival in Palestine in 1994, considered an act of immense evil.

But then Hamas, chosen in a free election to lead the government, ended up back in Gaza after a US-engineered coup against it, where it ran the Strip like a fiefdom, and where its armed members took to breaking into homes of "suspects" drinking alcohol, and throwing hand-cuffed political opponents off the top of high-rise buildings.

Leaders

No doubt about it: Palestinians have had a penchant, since early in the first half of the 20th century, for being represented by leaders who were uninformed in the ways of the world and did not understand the dynamic that governs a people's place in the balance of power.

From the Peel Commission in 1936 to the White Paper in 1939, and from the Partition Plan in 1947 to the Oslo Accords in 1993, these leaders not only missed countless opportunities to right the wrongs committed against their people, but ended up having to retrench on their demands after every miss.

Look, I write all this with regret, even grief, for those of us, Palestinian democrats one and all, who had devoted the last four decades of their lives to promoting the Palestinian cause, now find themselves left by the wayside by cynical, bumbling politicos who couldn't run a soup kitchen, let alone a national struggle. The sad part of it all is that we failed too - we failed to get a mastering grip on our own culture, to impose on it the humane sobriety of our ideals.

Today, we are left with the humourlessness of a rigid and dogmatic Hamas in Gaza and the aimlessness of an inept and clueless Fatah in the West Bank, two groups whose inescapable sense of triviality and dissimulation are equivalent for dead weight. Meanwhile, the springs of life have almost run dry in Palestinian society.

And will someone please tell me what Hamas was celebrating last Sunday, while its pauperised people remain a hair short of utter destitution?

One can only hope that our next generation of leaders, when their time comes to lead, will not lose sight of what fate awaits those who do not learn from their history.

Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.