Domestic policy and local issues have always played the primary role of bringing political parties to power. But no Palestinian organization has ever promised internal reform and won except Hamas. The struggle of Palestinians remains as a conflict with an external enemy in the first degree. Israel has made its policy of survival dependent on the methodical annihilation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. The Palestinians can talk all they want amongst themselves, conduct mock elections as if they are a free people, and have a so-called democracy but all that does not change the aim of their enemy.
All this internal fighting between Fatah, Hamas and the zillions of other factions has only served to strengthen the ruthless hand of their enemy. Since the death of Arafat, two years ago, the Palestinians have been engaged in an internal power struggle to replace him or to divide all that power that was concentrated in one person. Israel has taken advantage of their infighting by creating conditions on the ground that make it impossible for an independent Palestinian state to be established. Israel is toying with Palestinians like scientists experiment with mice in a laboratory. It feeds them for a day and starves them for a month. It imprisons them in a big camp and draws a maze for their leaders to follow. They jump through hoops and loops to please the master and when they reach that point Israel had already devised a new game plan.
Peace processes, wars, elections, international conferences, UN resolutions and many ridiculous ploys have all come and gone while Israel’s aim remained constant. The Palestinians are tired of being defeated by Israel. Collectively, they are incapable of fighting Israel and so they should do what they did back in 1948 and surrender their cause to the Arab League.
Hamas promised internal reforms when it came to power back in March. It has not delivered anything to the Palestinian people except economic sanctions. It has created more reasons for internal strife by hiring 6,000 Hamas fighters and making them part of the security force. It promised to create an army that can defend its people and instead it created another faction in the fragmented security apparatus. It promised things it could not deliver. The only thing it keeps talking about is resistance, fighting the occupation, denying Israel’s existence and renouncing all forms of negotiations with the enemy. I am sure they will remain faithful to their principles for hundreds of years. That is the nature of Arabs. Their leaders have made enormous personal sacrifices but they just don’t have the know-how to fight or to confront their enemy.
Since their election in January, many Hamas leaders have been either imprisoned or assassinated by Israel. Hamas had good intentions but in the arena of politics and governance it proved to be utterly incompetent, just like the neo-conservatives of the Bush administration. They have a lot of religious fervor and faith-based ideologies but they can not manage a grocery store. Politics is a secular business of managing power and wealth in the most pragmatic way. It is built on coalitions and compromises between conflicting interests.
Hamas has proven that it can not manage internal conflict and so it can not possibly manage the greater conflict with Israel. The Palestinian people are in dire straits and they can not find any food to eat because of the severe sanctions. No one in the world can stand up to Israel and break the financial blockade. Palestinians have no choice but to sit down and talk with their enemy.
The Arab League declared this week that it was going to break the financial blockade against Hamas and Amer Mousa urged Arab banks to start dealing with Hamas. British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, urged the US to re-engage Israel in a peace process. Spain is championing an initiative to hold an international peace conference to bring the Arabs and the Israelis back to the negotiating table. Hamas said that it would attend a peace conference if organized by the Arab League. Israel said it would not attend such a conference.
A new Palestinian government will be formed in a matter of short weeks and Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, agreed to relinquish his position. The power struggle between President Mahmoud Abbas and the prime minister has been decided in favor of Abbas. The Hamas government collapsed because it could not pay the salaries of its employees for the past eight months. Instead of delivering economic prosperity Hamas brought ruin to the Palestinian economy.
Hamas was not ready to govern. It should have stayed as an opposition party and kept its principles and agenda unexposed to such a superior enemy. Now, the idea of resistance has been ridiculed and Hamas will have nothing to offer to its people. Palestinians don’t want to create a Muslim state and they don’t want religious zealots ruling over them. They want peace, prosperity, an end to humiliation, an ability to go to other countries and visit with their relatives, and most importantly they are looking for a dignified livelihood to feed their families.
They are tired of being defeated, massacred, starved, humiliated and imprisoned by Israel. They don’t care what Hamas or any Palestinian government has to say to Israel to achieve this goal. The world has proven that it has no authority over the state of Israel and nobody can force it to do anything it does not want to do, except Hizbullah. In the past three months, the incompetence of Palestinian leaders has squandered much of the moral victory achieved by Hizbullah.
Palestinians have proven that they would rather fight with each other over ministries and seats of power instead of fighting with their enemy. They allow young men to fire primitive rockets into a small settlement inside Israel called Sederot. The destiny of the Arab-Israeli conflict now rests in the hands of a bunch of 19-year olds from Gaza. They call this “resistanceâ€ÂÂ. Somebody has to stop these kids from firing these fireworks that they call “rocketsâ€ÂÂ. If Palestinians do not have real weapons to fight with they should not be staging such symbolic acts that only bring harm to their own people.
Israel retaliates by killing 25 Palestinians for each rocket that lands in Sederot. The Palestinian government has no control over the numerous pockets of “resistance†groups that sprang up in the past five years. Palestinian society is fragmenting just like the Iraqi society. Poor Palestinians are attacking the rich and stealing from them. The middle class has almost disappeared. Any rich Palestinian who wants power is hiring a bunch of kids with guns and he patrols his neighborhood and declares himself as a Chieftain.
The Palestinian people as a collective have proven that they can no longer be the spearhead of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is time for them to reverse what Arafat had done in the seventies when he made all Arab states recognize the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians. The PLO, the Palestinian Authority, and this generation of Palestinian leaders have all failed. They have delivered defeat upon defeat to their people. The ideologies of defeatism, self-enrichment, self service instead of public service, fake idealism instead of realism, and feebleness have all become ingrained in their approach.
They should nullify their corrupt Palestinian Authority, cancel the Oslo Agreement, hand their guns to Israel, and wave the white flag of surrender. Most of their rich leaders will end up in Paris and London where their families live in great big palaces. Hand the Palestinian cause to the Arab League and Iran. Let President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Sayed Hassan Nasrallah speak on behalf of the Palestinian cause.
Neal AbuNab is a Michigan-based author of “The War on Terror and Democracyâ€ÂÂ- available at Amazon.com. He is a commentator on Arab and Muslim affairs and his weekly column appears in the Arab American News. He can be reached at: www.IslamPalestineBlogger.com
