By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine
With fanfare, fireworks, military parades and a lot of rhetorical overindulgence, the American-backed Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has been celebrating the 20th anniversary of the so-called “Independence Day.”In 1988, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who, too, had a hard time distinguishing reality from fiction, declared Palestine “an independent state,” although he knew well, as did the rest of the world, that a country thoroughly occupied and savaged by a Nazi-like foreign power can’t be truly independent, let alone sovereign, until it is fully liberated from the Jaws and claws of the foreign occupiers.
That was the same Arafat who in the mid 1990s toured the West Bank using his Egyptian-donated Russian-made helicopter, declaring one city after the other “liberated, liberated, liberated.” (The two helicopters, dubbed by Israel as the Palestinian air-force were later destroyed by the Israeli air force).
The fact that two or four Israeli warplanes were always escorting Arafat’s two helicopters spoke volumes. However, many people preferred to believe Arafat than their own eyes.
I remember I attended a peace conference in Vienna in 1995, and after I spoke for 20 minutes on the situation in occupied Palestine, I was asked by several delegates from Europe and the US why I was so pessimistic, with one Austrian official saying “why are you so negative? You have been given a state, you have a government, a President, and parliament and armed forces. You have all the trappings of a state, what more do you want? Do you want to destroy Israel”?
I was not surprised by the shocking detachment from reality which the Austrian official’s remarks reflected. He was probably voicing the prevailing perceptions about the Oslo Accords in most of Europe and North America, namely that the Palestinians were finally having a state, or at least as quasi state which soon would evolve into a fully-fledged state.
Faced with the scandalously erroneous and ignorant remarks, I retorted, almost in a defensive-reflexive manner, telling the Austrian official “well, if this is the view of people who are supposed to be well-informed, then what am I supposed to expect from ordinary Europeans and Americans who know next to nothing about the situation IN Palestine?”
Of course, the Europeans, including many of their politicians, couldn’t be completely blamed for their ignorance, even willful ignorance, of the real situation in Palestine, although the issue was never purely a matter of ignorance. After all, they can’t be more Palestinian than the Palestinians themselves.
But the stupid and theatrical behavior of the Palestinian leadership then, as it is now, which devoted disproportionate attention to the empty trappings and symbols of statehood while utterly ignoring or paying scant attention to the hard and harsh realities on the ground, namely the deepening Israeli occupation, gave the world, including many in the Arab and Muslim world, a false impression that the Palestinians were finally achieving liberation and dependence.
It was this atmosphere of false euphoria, fraudulence and deception that enabled professional liars such as Israel’s current President Shimon Peres to claim through every media outlet that the Palestinian problem was virtually over and that Israel had nothing to do with internal problems “because 99% of Palestinians are under Arafat’s authority, not Israel’s.”
Of course, the pathological liar wouldn’t tell his interlocutress and viewers that Arafat himself was 100% under Israeli control and that he and his authority couldn’t even breath without an Israeli permission.
Now, Arafat’s unglamorous successor, Mahmoud Abbas, and the army of sycophants, acolytes, hangers-on and money-grabbing careerists around him are repeating the same scandalous theatrics by giving the impression that the PA, which lives on conditional handouts from the West and its pliant Arab Sheikhdoms and is solely dependent for its very survival on the “goodwill” and “good mood” of the Nazi-like Israeli regime, is a genuine state and that only a few minor problems needed to be fixed before the State of Palestine becomes a reality.
Abbas is actually enforcing these decidedly false impressions even more than Arafat did.
It is now a routine feature watching Abbas, Qurei’, et al, hugging, embracing and kissing with Israeli leaders, the very people who meet with them in the morning and in the afternoon issue orders to seize more Palestinian land, demolish more Palestinian homes, and round up more Palestinians to swell the prisoner population of Israeli detention and concentration camp.
Still more scandalous is this pornographic collaboration between Abbas’s American-trained and American-financed Palestinian “forces” and the Israeli occupation army, which takes the form of the former being fully at the latter’s beck and call.
Indeed, in light of this manifestly promiscuous relationship between the PA and Israel, one would wonder if and how the world could relate to Abbas’s recurrent half-hearted complaints about Israeli crimes and intransigence.
Well, if Israel doesn’t want peace, as Abbas rightly said in his “independence-day speech,” Saturday, 15 November, then let him tell us for God’s sake why he has been holding all these meetings and sessions and cordial encounters with Israeli leaders?
Is he deliberately deceiving the Palestinians? Is he addicted to fruitless and futile negotiations which experience has showed will lead nowhere?
Or is he suggesting that we Palestinians stay put on this track of futility and treachery until Israel devour whatever has remained intact of our country?
As a frustrated Palestinian, I would like to ask Mr. Abbas the following question: how many more meetings, “peace conferences” and “international forums” will it take to discover that Israel is not interested in peace?
Or are we supposed to keep up the “process” going irrespective of what Israel is doing on the ground?
Abbas and his Fatah organization ought to know that the bulk of Palestinians are not willing to let them go on and on and on like this as we watch our motherland being stolen, one hill after the other, on orchard after the other, and one home after the other, while the orphans of Oslo are busy swelling their pockets and fattening their bank accounts, and, above all, persecuting and torturing the honorable men and women of Palestine on Israel’s behalf.
Abbas claims that there won’t be peace and stability in the Middle East until Israel withdraws to the 1967-borders.
Well, if so, why did he and his visibly stupid negotiators agree to allow Israel to retain the so-called “Jewish neighborhood” in East Jerusalem in the context of any prospective final status settlement? Aren’t these illegal colonies built on occupied territory in violation of international law, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled a few years ago?
Moreover, is Abbas willing to trade Jerusalem, the first kiblah of Islam, the home of al Masjidul Aqsa and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, for a few snake-infested sand dunes in the Negev desert?
Besides, does Abbas really think that any Israeli government will be willing to give up all these colonies, especially in East Jerusalem, and go back to the armistice line of 1967?
Why would the Israelis do it under existing circumstances, especially with PA military and political leaders telling Israeli leaders in broad daylight that “we are friends and allies and have one common enemy which is Hamas?
And I don’t think they ever will as long as the current Palestinian leadership continues to behave and act as beggar and collaborator.
Because beggars can’t be choosers and collaborators are no better than dogs.
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