Suppose you're a Palestinian. One-fifth of your countrymen are herded into a concentration camp, subject to rampant de-development, bombed with high-explosive weapons, burned by white phosphorus, teetering on the brink of an epidemic. The keeper of the keys barely lets out cancer patients for treatment, tries to turn them into informants; barely lets in trucks or even money, and when it does so casts it as "humanitarianism." Your economy is collapsing. A belligerent occupier is equivocating between turning you into a bunch of beggars or carrying out a shoah. And some segment of the people who claim to be your "leaders" looks away from a report by a prominent Zionist jurist accusing your torturers of carrying out crimes against humanity. As Saree Makdisi comments,
As this latest episode so amply demonstrates, the PA serves Israel by facilitating the occupation -- which is why Israel invented it in the first place, just as, historically speaking, colonial powers have always attempted to create or coerce local elites into helping them deal with the population at large. This approach is perhaps most gracefully summarized in Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education of 1835: "We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." Why would the PA want to bring to an end an arrangement from which it benefits? As the French scholar Regis Debray points out, the status quo provides the PA elites in Ramallah "with a living, status, dignity and a raison d'etre," and probably (e.g., if the mobile phone contract rumors prove to be true) much more in the way of emoluments besides that.
Makdisi goes on to suggest that the Palestinians abandon their leadership. Omar Barghouti adds that the UN must act on the Goldstone Report and that the PA should be dissolved. He's right. This is the hugest gift possible for the BDS movement. When political leadership empowered through a belligerent nation-state acts like a bunch of kapos, its legitimacy--what was left of its legitimacy--is shot-through. Good-bye! As a Hamas senior official commented,
He is encouraging the Israeli military leaders to attack Gaza, to kill Hamas, and to kill people because they voted for Hamas; to postpone a very important report concerning the Israelis committing crimes against human beings...He should resign and he should seek a fair trial. He is not representing any of the Palestinian people.
So who will? Who would you vote for?
Related posts:
- Combatants vs. Non-Combatants: Some Spurious Shit Well, the recent B’Tselem report on the number of Palestinian...
- Prelude to the Ramallah Tribunal Or would that be the Tel-Aviv Tribunal? More relevantly, what...
- The Goldstone Report: Competing Comments On the one hand, we have the Angry Arab [thanks...
- Hag Sameach Lot to repent this year! But maybe easier to simply...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Or they could go Angry arab’s ideal route and abolish everything altogether.
Thanks, I had missed this.
[…] of English law with his arguments for the supremacy of common law over royal prerogative. …Vote Hamas? | JewbonicsSuppose you’re a Palestinian. One-fifth of your countrymen are herded into a concentration camp, […]