“You don’t criticize the family, ever, do you hear!” Michael Corleone chided his brother Fredo in “The Godfather”. The weak Fredo, it would appear, did not heed the warning, and he was whacked, on orders given by his younger sibling, no less.
Those are the ways of Cosa Nostra, whose honor code goes back centuries in Sicilian culture. You criticize your own flesh and blood and you pay with your life: La sangu lava lu sangu, which translates as, blood washes blood.
That’s all well and good for the Cosa Nostra, but in politics it doesn’t work, except in police states. Political leaders do not, and should not under any circumstances have to, enjoy an immunity from criticism or scrutiny by the people they lead. Nor is a social system a mafia; it is rather a human community imbued with a diversity of political currents, ideological sensibilities and class stratifications, blessed with thinkers, commentators, theoreticians, intellectuals and, well, critics, to whom failure to oppose questionable judgments by leaders constitutes not betrayal of their community, but quite the opposite. It amounts to self-betrayal.
Let’s face it, the 18 months of bloody confrontations in the West Bank and Gaza have gotten the Palestinians nothing, and have gotten them nowhere. They are left adrift. Their uprising is on autopilot. And their leadership splutters along, in possession of no discernible strategy that anyone can fathom.
What could Palestinian leaders have been thinking 18 months ago? My guess is, not much. These are leaders who have been leading the Palestinian nation for well over three decades (Fatah, the mainstream faction of the Palestinian movement was established in 1965, and prides itself on mounting its first “operation” on Jan. 1, that year), and yet have managed to do no more than lead this destitute nation (what other word will do here?) from one military defeat to another, one diplomatic disaster to another, and one act of social grief to another.
Leaders are meant to grow with their jobs. Not, alas, ours. They have, instead, become notorious for asking their people to take leaps without necessarily knowing beforehand where they would land. To chalk up the kind of dismal record that Palestinian leaders have chalked up over the years, from Black September in 1970 to Tel Zaatar in 1975, and from the excesses in the early 1980s in Lebanon to the little thought-out armed uprising in Palestine recently that has destroyed the chance of their people ever achieving independence in this generation, is clearly the mark of individuals in leadership positions who are clueless.
Palestinian leaders I’ve been meeting over the last quarter century in Beirut and later in Tunis — the third capital they were exiled or expelled to after Amman — are still there today, ostensibly “leading.” They may have acquired broader waists and balder heads, but they have not, I say, grown with their jobs. They have not learned to regroup themselves in response to shift in political reality. Nor, I would hazard to guess, have they read a dozen decent books between them all that time.
Clearly, my intention here is not to suggest that leaders should bypass the collective sensibility, or ignore the national mood, of their people. If the Palestinians have had it up to here with foreign occupation (“when you, Israeli occupiers, have chosen for us to live like dogs, watching over our every move, in our everyday lives, then we will choose to die like patriots, taking with us as many of you possible”), and they are driven to revolt against their tormentors, so be it. Nor is my intention here to suggest that these leaders’ role should be to act as a “moderating influence.”
I believe Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish nationalist leader who told his fellow-patriots in 1885, as his countrymen were dying of starvation during the potato famine while Britain heartlessly exported Ireland’s grain overseas: “No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country — thus far shalt thou go and no further.”
I am suggesting, however, that the brave, little people of Palestine, whose suffering is now beyond all rational understanding, deserve leaders whose judgments on national issues should have lasting validity, and who devise well-studied strategies anchored in a wide range of knowledge of the world around them, not in impressionistic strategies devised off the cuff. Off the cuff, however, is how these leaders, judging by their track record, have been leading all along. Equally unfortunate is the fact that we do not have a tradition in our part of the world of leaders who voluntarily make a dignified exit when it becomes apparent that they have failed in their mission.
The Palestinian liberation movement failed because it became, starting in the late 1980s and culminating in 1993, the only national liberation movement in modern history to turn tail, half way through the struggle, and collaborate with its sworn enemy — the occupier of the national territory of its people — before any of its rights either had been wrested from him or, through negotiations, handed over by him.
Not quite nine years ago, representatives of this movement went to Oslo and signed an agreement, again off the cuff, without advice from legal experts at their side to advise them on the minutiae in the various clauses in that agreement, and ended up getting themselves ensnared in a deal that turned out to be, predictably, so shot full of ambiguities that the Israelis could interpret it any way they wanted, leaving the Palestinians for years afterward high and dry, running around like a man chasing after his hat in a gale.
Yet the leader of the Palestinian Authority today continues to speak of the “peace of the brave,” much in the manner of a man who jumps off a high-rise building, and as he passes the tenth floor waves at the people inside, shouting exultantly, “See, I’m not hurt.”
What’s more, it is probable that this man, already in his mid-70s, will go to his grave without seeing his people achieve the one goal that they have trusted him to achieve for them after all these years of terrible, terrible sacrifice on their part — meaningful independence in their own genuinely sovereign state.
Not many of us today who berate Palestinian leaders for their pedestrian intellects have asked, or pressed home the question: How were these people, despite their consistent failures over the years, been able to lead the national struggle unchallenged for the last three decades?
That’s a seminal question.
Is the blame to be found in us, in our society’s norms, in its backwardness, its patriarchal fear of standing up to authority, its disdain for modernity?
After all, remember, our Palestinian leaders were chosen by us. They come from the bosom of our political culture. They are not anti-gravitational creatures from outer space foisted on us against our will.
We are all implicated in the breakdown, especially those of us who refuse to speak up, because we are afraid that our heads will be hit when we lift them, and that our voices will be silenced when we raise them.
The Mafia’s code may be that blood washes blood. Our own code, however, does not wash at all. (disinherited @yahoo.com)
