It was last Thursday afternoon, soon after the stunning news of the landslide victory Hamas scored in the national elections was flashed on the screen, when I found myself walking out of the National Press Club building with a former fellow Palestinian activist, now a professor and pundit, heading to the Metro Center subway stop in downtown Washington. We were reminiscing, as former activists are now reduced by cynicism and the onslaught of age to doing, about the old days, evoking a time — and it seemed like yesterday — when Fatah ruled supreme, its power unchecked, its leadership answerable to no one, its excesses brazen, and its off-the-cuff strategy for liberation leading the Palestinians nowhere but down the garden path. Over a period of a quarter century, this group, embodied for the most part in the persona of one man, had managed to lead the people of Palestine from one military defeat to another, one act of social grief to another and one diplomatic disaster to another.
Back then, my friend reminisced, we were so eager not to appear critical in public of our national movement that we kept our reservations to ourselves. After all, we worked for the cause, and the cause alone. We even turned a blind eye not only to how Fatah leaders ad-libbed their way to Oslo in 1993 to sign an agreement without the presence of a single expert in international law accompanying their delegation, to advise them on the intricacies of what deep waters they were getting themselves into, but signed that agreement behind their people’s back, without consulting anyone — not the Palestine National Council, not the other factions in the movement, no one. Effectively, the fate of a whole nation was left to a handful of men to determine.
My friend and I elbowed our way through the rush hour throngs and decided, instead of hopping on our trains, his to the burbs, mine to Cleveland Park, to grab a table at Starbucks in order to rap some more, to hark back to the old days and harp on what the old guard had wrought on our society.
“And who would have printed our stuff anyhow, had we wanted to be openly critical of what was going on?” I blurted. Fatah — the then all-powerful Fatah, that pulled all the financial strings and controlled virtually all Palestinian institutions — bucked no criticism of its actions, even where those actions clearly represented glaring failures. Those few lost souls who dared be an adversarial current in society soon had their heads hit when they were lifted and their voices silenced when they were raised.
I recalled for my friend the day I submitted a long New Journalism style piece to the Journal of Palestine Studies back in 1980 about the formation of a Palestinian-American outfit in Washington called the Palestine Congress of North America which, at its opening, was addressed by a visiting PLO yahoo dignitary from Beirut. I wrote, not implausibly, that the man, with his bulging gut, ill-fitting Armani suit — or whatever the devil-designer suit he wore — “did not fit the image of a revolutionary.” The editor promptly called me up at home to tell me that, regretfully, my piece was being turned down because it was “too mocking of the leadership.” To embrace nostalgia, of the reflective kind my friend and I indulged that afternoon, triggered by the improbable news that heralded the demise of Fatah and the advent of a new kid on the block called Hamas, is to embrace its bitter contradictions — high-minded activists coexisting with corrupt officials given to a raving hunger for living high on the hog and skimming off the top of whatever funds they could lay their hands on.
Here’s another example. The same year that article was turned down by the Journal of Palestine Studies because it seemingly was “mocking of the leadership,” I had occasion to be invited to Tunis to negotiate with Anis Sayegh, director of publications at the Arab League (whose headquarters remained in the Tunisian capital at the time) over the possibility of my editing their English language journal, Arab Affairs. There I came across Mahmoud Darweesh, a friend of many years.
“And what on earth are you doing here?” I asked in puzzlement, knowing that the Palestinian poet laureate was based in Beirut, where he edited “Shuoon Falastiniya” (Palestine Perspectives), a literary journal funded by the Palestinian movement. This was two years before the PLO was made to lift anchor, sail out of Lebanon and relocate in Tunis.
And here’s cutting a long story short. Darweesh had made the mistake of printing an article by a prominent Palestinian commentator who was “mildly critical” of the excesses of PLO officials, cronies and hangers-on in the Lebanese capital. The next day the poet arrived in his building to find his offices padlocked and guarded by elements of Squad 16, or whatever the name given then to those thuggish MPs appointed by the Palestinian leader as a kind of presidential guard.
“When I confronted Arafat,” Darweesh told me over dinner in his little villa overlooking the Mediterranean,” I discovered that the order came directly from him.”
So, predictably, Darweesh up and left Beirut in disgust, and found himself gainful employment with the Arab League. People were growing tired even then, and Darweesh’s tale — a wisp of a tale among many, many others like it — lends piquancy to the fact that the surest way to alienate your people is to ride roughshod over them, denying them access to voices that seek an articulation of the fragile plurality of human nature and conduct in society, and quashing creative men and women into scrappy team players that obediently toady the line. But stifling the voice of a poet! You stifle that voice and you forget, in the words of George Steiner in his commentary on the Iliad and the Odyssey, that “men’s lives go to forgotten dust unless they are given immortality by the song of a poet.”
My friend and I sipped our coffee and giggled bitterly — something unseemly for two older men to be doing, to be sure, but giggle we did. Giggling bitterly, over a grave issue like that, is the histrionic tactic — the defense mechanism, if you wish — of the democrat who had been betrayed by the cause that he had invested virtually a lifetime promoting, of the patriot who is proven wrong to have felt that national struggle is a scenario of gradual humanization of a human community, an unfolding intimacy of a people with firm political beliefs and moral values — political values and moral beliefs being the subtlest and most direct languages of social experience.
It’s all over. The wheel has come to a full turn. Like it or not, Hamasism is the new trend in Palestine today. Get used to it, dude. The people have spoken. And it is not difficult to discern the material and psychological reasons for their reversal of judgment on who should lead them to the clearing.
The US, along with the Israeli entity and the European Union, is not, to put it mildly, happy with the people’s democratic choice. But Americans should wake up and smell the coffee, for they too, in a way, cast their ballot in favor of Hamas last Thursday. Washington, for example, was forever responsive to the ebb and flow of Israeli politics, but tone-deaf to the seething discontent in occupied Palestine. It was so enchanted by and focused on the withdrawal from Gaza that it didn’t meanwhile demand that Israel halt its settlement expansion, that it release prisoners from its jails (an issue of impassioned concern to Palestinians) and that it stop the daily indignities that ordinary Palestinians are subjected to at checkpoints.
Washington also, in recent months and years, became notorious for issuing high-sounding rhetoric about peace, and President Bush repeated promises about a Palestinian state by such and such a date, without any sustained or credible involvement on the ground. Not to mention that the Palestinian Authority was rendered pathetically helpless in the eyes of its people when President Bush approved the retention by Israel of virtually all its settlements in the West Bank, and the canning of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return (a right sacrosanct in Palestinian political iconography) as a quid pro quo for its withdrawal from Gaza. Something had to give. And something did — at the polls last Thursday.
My friend and I sip on our last drop of coffee and stand up to leave. “If I had been in Palestine earlier today and was registered to vote, I would have cast my ballot for Hamas too,” he said, again affecting a cynical giggle. “I would have done that not because of my love for Hamas but because of my revulsion for Fatah.” And my friend is a Palestinian Christian, for crying out loud.
