[ 13/07/2011 - 09:57 PM ]
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has never been a truly honorable and dignified entity where excesses and flaws are the exception rather than the norm.
As a deformed child of the infamous Oslo Accords, the PA continues to encapsulate all the disfigurements and abnormalities inherent in the scandalous agreements.
I know that people shouldn’t beat dead horses, however, in the Palestinian case, the dead or dying horse continues to carry out a harmful role, endangering, even in irreversible manner, the durability and resilience of our people's struggle for justice and freedom from Israel's colonization and Nazi-like occupation.
The PA suffers a fundamental and inherent contradiction. On the one hand, it claims that the liberation of parts of occupied Palestine from monstrous Zionism is its ultimate raison d'tre. On the other hand, however, a fleet glance at the PA reality and the overwhelming restrictions and fetters governing its performance shows that the PA can only survive, let alone grow, depending on the Israeli "good will."
In recent weeks, the PA leadership has displayed a preponderance of dithering, vacillation, reluctance and dawdling pertaining to its purported plans to seek U.N. recognition of a putative Palestinian state.
PA officials, including Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, made a plethora of statements and remarks, suggesting that the PA has yet to get its act together. For example, the PA leadership is still harboring certain hopes that the so-called peace talks with Israel might help the Palestinians recover their inalienable rights from Zionist thieves.
This is no less than scandalous. Nearly 20 years of futile "peace talks" with successive Israeli governments should have convinced any responsible leadership of the utter uselessness of talks with a venomous colonial power that seeks our obliteration and annihilation.
However, the fact that the PA leadership chose to accommodate Zionist whims, by maintaining a willingness to go on and on and on, on an open-ended track that leads to illusion and further illusion suggests there is something fundamentally wrong with the Palestinian strategy.
The PLO ambassador to the U.N. Riyad Mansour has been quoted as saying that Palestinian efforts to obtain international recognition at the UN in September were a last attempt to save the two-state solution from a last irreversible collapse.
Last week, PA prime minister Salam Fayyad was quoted during a visit to the northern West Bank that the Palestinians would demand the right to vote for the Israeli Knesset if the Jewish state kept thwarting efforts to establish a viable Palestinian state.
However, Abbas, who is displaying increasing signs of autocracy and despotism, is keeping his silence, contenting himself with revealing that he soon would make "surprises" and that he would resign if efforts to establish the long-awaited state proved unsuccessful.
Hence, Abbas and the close coterie of aides, advisors and hangers-on, ought to know that the masses are fed up with their disdainful theatrics, useless political gymnastics, and games of make believe.
Supporters and apologists of the " Oslo leadership" have always argued that the PA is an absolute asset for the Palestinian people and their enduring just cause. However, with as many as 200,000 employees and civil servants, the PA regime is facing the dilemma of reconciling the task of securing sufficient financial sources to pay this army of salary-recipients while at the same time tending and remaining faithful to the national cause.
Needless to say, experience has shown that the two tasks are intrinsically irreconcilable, especially when much of the needed financial resources can only be obtained from or through Israel and its supporters and allies, e.g. the United States .
It is therefore imperative that the PA immediately seek to rectify this unacceptable equation whereby overcoming its chronic financial crises can only be achieved at the expense of maintaining Palestinian steadfastness in the face of Zionist recalcitrance and intransigence.
True, this particular task is not going to be easy. However, the semi-autonomous PA hierarchy must understand that saving the Palestinian cause from slow dissolution and obliteration is more important than paying salaries to tens of thousands of security personnel filling redundant jobs that bring no benefit for the Palestinian people.
The PA should therefore seriously think of trimming its bloated payroll and get rid of many or most of the estimated 60,000 security personnel who devour the lion's share of PA financial resources while doing nothing apart from maintaining the symbols of a police state apparatus.
Besides, it is crystal clear that the security establishment, in its current state of affair, is a burden and serious liability, not an asset as some of its members have excelled in persecuting and torturing other Palestinians on suspicion of resisting the Israeli occupiers.
On this occasion, one has to remember that the financial administration of the PA pay-roll system was dictated by political not fiscal considerations. This explains why some security retirees receive extremely hefty retirement salaries that exceed by far anything that even the highest-ranking professor emeritus would receive. And the reason for that is to keep these mostly former Fatah activists silent.
Then there is the reconciliation with Hamas. The PA, which was taken by surprise by Hamas's good-will, seems off-balance and utterly unable to make a departure from its erstwhile subservience to Israel and guardian-ally, the United States .
Again, the PA must be warned against allowing Palestinian national unity to be held hostage to Israeli insolence and the Zionist-inspired American Islamophobia.
Needless to say, the United States , which is languishing in the throes of the Jewish-Zionist stranglehold, can not and will not extricate the Palestinians from the claws of Zionist occupation and criminality. Those who can't help themselves can not help others.
Hence, the PA, if it wants to survive and be respected and accepted by the Palestinian people, must have the courage to say NO to Israel and the United States . It wouldn't have much to lose anyway.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
No comments:
Post a Comment