Pity the people of Palestine who continue to live lives of despair under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, for the kind of despair they feel is not your garden variety sense of depression and hopelessness, anxiety and emptiness, but a feeling of social immobilization, a dreaded feeling that history may have left them by the wayside.
A reminder that Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories, an occupation that was to end five years after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, is still around was brought home recently when media reported the murder of a 53-year-old Palestinian man, killed by three bullets fired at his chest at close range, during an arrest raid carried out by Israeli troops in the village of Beit Omar. His son was shot in the legs and a cousin injured in the face.
For Israeli troops, that’s par for the course. They’ve been doing it year in, year out, for almost five decades. In a way — a crazy, pathological way — you don’t blame them, for you don’t blame the beast of prey for being a beast of prey. That is the nature of the beast. Not to mention the fact that Israeli occupiers have shown themselves to be the most brutal in human history. And as if to attest to that, a much awaited report by Amnesty International, released last Wednesday, stated that during their invasion of Gaza in the summer of 20014, Israeli troops carried out bombings that constituted “war crimes ad crimes against humanity,” and called on the International Criminal Court to investigate.
So Palestinians, helpless, are left to lament their broken democracy, their pauperized society, their disunited polity. Above all, left to lament their sense of shame at being unable, perhaps even prevented, from confronting their Zionist enemy by mounting an uprising against him.
And President Mahmoud Abbas, now 80 years old, and serving the 10th year of a 4-year term in office, has found his popularity progressively decline.
What is even more distressing for Palestinians is that the Palestinian Authority (PA), with its hands tied, has been unable all these years to achieve anything substantial as far as ending the occupation and establishing an independent state for the people it rules over, a people who by now truly deserve to be the only determining force in their political destiny, in their own homeland, on their own ancestral land.
What we see instead is not only a retrenchment on that goal, but a PA hamstrung by political dictates imposed upon it by the military occupation and held back by its financial dependence on taxes collected for it, or withheld from it, on whim, by the Israeli government. That in itself weakens the link between its leaders and the people it leads.
As any undergraduate student majoring in political science will tell you, there is a correlation between a disenchanted populace and an unresponsive ruling elite. Without a strong, representative government, society devolves into despair, followed by chaos, effectively into a failed state unable to meet the political and economic needs of its people, or a collapsed state where the social contract between ruler and ruled breaks down. That undergrad will explain, additionally, that a polity’s success or failure is always assessed by looking at how effectively that polity’s leaders deliver what political scientists call “crucial political goods,” claims made on a state by its citizens, such as security, rule of law, free and full participation in the political process, health care, education, public services and the like.
Unfortunately, given the facts on the ground, the PA today finds itself so weak or ineffective that it has little practical control over much of its territory. Consider the case of Susiya, a village in the West Bank that the occupation authorities plan to erase to the ground in early August. Susiya, more of a hamlet than a village, had found its tiny population of 350 souls pushed out of their homes in 1986, then uprooted again in 1990 and then yet again in 2001 as a collective punishment tied to the shooting death of an Israeli who lived in a nearby colony.
Now the occupiers’ bulldozers are back, one more time. But the offensive to stop them is not mounted by the PA but by international solidarity groups. And these groups are leaving their mark by turning Susiya into a symbol of all the suffering and all the injustices heaped on the Palestinians by their occupiers all these years. “The Israelis used to destroy our village and we slept in the wild, in the rain, and nobody knew anything about us,” a villager told a New York Times reporter last Friday.
Yet, despite the despair, Palestinians sense after travail comes relief — if on a teleological level, as they read in the Q’uran. Or on a more secular level, as Mahatma Gandhi put it: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it, always.”
