What appears between quotation marks in this article is attributed to the late poet Mourid Barghouti; anything else is an analysis of his views published in newspapers, in books or on social media platforms.
Like a white sparrow so worn down by the wounds of war and exile that he looked like an old, withered palm stalk, the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti sat alone on the banks of the Karama crossing that links the Kingdom of Jordan and the West Bank, chewing over his tragedy and the causes of his usurped homeland. No sooner had he leaned on his thigh and stared at the horizon than the white of his eyes gave away 30 years of diaspora, exile, expulsion, displacement and banishment from the homeland.
“Here you are, returning to your land and your homeland, Mourid, obeying the orders of an authority you refuse to recognise, just as it refuses to recognise you. You return carrying in your hands an Israeli entry permit. Is this how things end, then?” Perhaps that is what he told himself before he woke from his reverie to the voice of an Israeli officer asking him to step forward towards a narrow room with short windows, surrounded on every side by Israeli flags.
Before the forebodings could follow one another in his mind, he tore at his shirt with another question that seemed more logical than the ones before it: why is the room surrounded by Israeli flags even though it lies, in theory, inside Arab land belonging to the Palestinian National Authority? Well, these confused visions stirred in him a different kind of longing, one that required going back thirty years in order to be able to answer.
“Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”
Herbert Spencer
(1)
“I am Mourid Barghouti, four years older than the State of Israel.” While the entire Arab world was being shaped to the measure of Gamal Abdel Nasser, I later found myself following him on a winter night in 1963, when I hurriedly gathered my bags for fear of missing the car heading for Egypt on a study trip that I thought would be short, but which stretched between places of exile until this day. “In Ramallah we used to listen secretly to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s speeches on Sawt al-Arab, because listening exposed a person to suspicion and perhaps to questioning. In Ramallah we danced for the union between Syria and Egypt and the declaration of the United Arab Republic, there we wept on the day the secession was announced, and there we heard for the first time of the ‘socialist’ decrees issued from Egypt, and we, the young schoolchildren, began to wonder what that term could mean.”
That is why I was truly eager to meet his Egypt, I who witnessed his era, its joys and its sorrows, and I still yearn, despite the defeat, the loss and the long years, for his cry before the cameras: no negotiation with Israel, no reconciliation with Israel and no recognition of Israel. Words he was unable to put into practice? You are entirely right; indeed, I will add to that: he did not seek to put them into practice in the first place. Whoever wants unity among the stricken Arab countries must establish a solid democratic system that respects the human being, and whoever wants a great country must voluntarily give up power to allow it to rotate among the general public within a clear constitutional framework.
“Dictatorship is the mother of political cardinal sins,” and consequently it was Abdel Nasser’s cardinal sin, the one that finished him before he could reach his goal. Despite that, he remained more upright in word and deed than the rest. He is the one with whom we began our armed struggle to recover the land, after he tasked Palestine’s representative at the Arab League, Ahmad Shukeiri, at the Arab summit in Alexandria in 1964, with pursuing his contacts with Palestinians wherever they were in order to organise the ranks of the resistance. That was the first step towards founding the Palestine Liberation Organization and its military wing, the “Palestine Liberation Army”, which took armed struggle as the only path to liberate all the occupied land from the water to the water. Here an important question may arise: if the organisation was revolutionary in nature, why did it accept the status quo after Abdel Nasser?
In truth, there are many reasons, which can be summed up in the fact that it was a sound Nasserist idea that carried within it, at the same time, the germ of its own downfall. Why? Because Abdel Nasser ran it in his own way. As was his habit, he did not build an institutional organisation to carry it after him, and he did not rely on competent people to manage its affairs, but on loyalists, so it collapsed at the hands of those he trusted and felt safe with, and quickly turned into its opposite, like every Nasserist experiment that was killed in its cradle or after his death. The fall of his socialist system immediately after his departure is a lesson for those who would learn.
And there is another piece of evidence: that picture hanging in front of me in this narrow border room. Yasser Arafat, Abdel Nasser’s favourite man in Fatah, who rose on his shoulders to the presidency of the Liberation Organization, shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin, the godfather of the Six-Day War. Is this not the main reason for the calamity that befell us and your leader after the Naksa? Since when did this man become a close friend, Abu Ammar?
Gamal Abdel Nasser kept himself away from committing such an act or such a handshake, but he did not raise his men on this, and he did not set out a clear vision for the cause that would take him, as a person, out of the equation. In running affairs, he relied on a pattern of one-man rule that I never supported. Despite that, I still feel nostalgia for his great dream, because at least it held within it a place for everyone, just as it held a special place for me personally. And I say for me personally because the bitterness of loss afterwards would come disguised in the garb of normalised relations between Mohamed Anwar Sadat and the Zionist leadership. No sooner had I decided to take refuge in Nasserist Cairo from the claws of injustice and dispersion after the Naksa than I found myself “deported by force from the safe country for fear that I would object to the peace treaty planned between Egypt and Israel; and this time I did not lose only the homeland, but lost with it the bonds of my relationship with my beloved wife Radwa Ashour and my five-month-old son Tamim”.
That is why I kept carrying in my heart a special bitterness towards Anwar Sadat, one that erased the bitterness that came before it: “The noble remains noble even if wounded by defeat, and the abject remains abject even if he claims victory.”
“What was taken by force is not recovered by begging and pleading.”
Mourid Barghouti
(2)
“I am Mourid Barghouti, four years older than the State of Israel,” and I want to ask a question: why does my friend Mahmoud Darwish heap words of praise on Yasser Arafat, when he knows every detail of my journey from the beginning? Why does he write about “the Old Man”, when I am the Palestinian, the high shadow and the only one in quantity and quality? That is why I truly know that the disputes within the organisational structure of the Liberation Organization intensified after the leadership decided to lay down arms and follow the path of Camp David, to the point that the days before the death of Arafat, besieged in his headquarters since 2002, became a focus for many hidden battles between him and his expected successor Mahmoud Abbas over power, rather than for battles on the ground against the occupation forces or to break the siege on the head of state.
Arafat, who had monopolised power for a long time, suddenly began to feel threatened after Abbas rose to the post of prime minister, especially after he appointed America’s number one man in the organisation, Mohammed Dahlan, as minister of state for security affairs. Arafat’s only response was to undermine the authority of Abbas’s government by appointing Hani al-Hassan as “Fatah’s general commissioner in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip”. Many conflicts over nothing, and this is precisely what Israel had been aiming for since Camp David, through Wadi Araba and the preludes of Bachir Gemayel, up to Oslo: “After the June setback failed to achieve its aims, and Israel found us united economically and politically against its war and its ‘attrition’, it had to change its strategy towards opening fronts of internal conflict in which we devour one another.”
The Zionist mechanisms also tried to persuade the leaders who came after Abdel Nasser to turn on his fighting model and incline towards peace, and this is exactly what they reaped after Camp David, which Sadat concluded without popular backing, causing Egypt to lose its actual control over Sinai, including the border crossing that falls, in theory, under its sovereignty and that of the Palestinian Authority; and likewise after Oslo, which Arafat concluded with the support of the armed factions and some Arab rulers, when the Liberation Organization turned from a national liberation movement into something resembling a small municipal government without real powers, with the same handful of people remaining in the leadership. It was nothing but a paper in which Israel recognised the Palestinians’ right to establish self-rule on the territories from which it would withdraw in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and this self-rule does not necessarily mean recognising the existence of an independent state with full sovereignty.
“It also became the real deal of the century, if you look closely at the disasters it led us to: the collapse of meaning, the erosion of the land, the monstrous growth of the settlements, open and hidden cooperation with the occupation, the division of ranks, the death of our narrative about our right, the rise of the enemy’s narrative and the corruption of the elites.”
“The dinosaurs became extinct because, millions of years ago, they agreed to the Oslo Accords.”
Mourid Barghouti
(3)
“I am Mourid Barghouti, four years older than the State of Israel,” and because of my long life and experience I know full well that power in our Arab world is the only synonym for domination. I once heard from my friend Naji al-Ali that Handala was, and still is, standing with his hands tied behind his back because he rejects normalisation, and that he will remain bound like this until Arab dignity is restored. Is it because of this opinion that the press and political experts linked you to Naji’s assassination, Abu Ammar?
And even if you were not responsible for that killing, this does not mean you are entirely innocent of it, because linking you to the crime in the first place has different connotations, and has precedents about which we can ask Mahmoud Darwish himself, so that he can tell us the reason for the dispute between you and him after you raided the Research Centre to arrest his friend Elias Khoury over an article in which he criticised the organisation’s practices, whereupon Darwish resigned from the presidency of the centre in protest at what you did.
That incident took place before the signing of any agreement, whether in “Gaza-Jericho” or in Oslo, and this is evidence of an inclination towards violence and domination before there were seats, even nominal ones, to fight over. So what is the state of the leadership now, after we lost the only legitimate resistance in exchange for a quasi-state? What is the state of Handala after we handed our enemy the last bullet for the sake of fighting over crumbs and leftovers?
Is this really important at this stage? We do not know, but what we know for certain, and what experience proves, is that Israel never wanted peace for its own sake, and that the calls for peace thrown at us are only valid if everyone believes in them. Likewise, appeasing the enemy and seeking its sympathy without it fearing you or being afraid of you is nothing but an invitation to collective suicide, and the high ideals of living in peace and love cannot be acted upon if one of the parties is not convinced. Therefore there is no place for such agreements on the table, because concluding any real peace would stop Israel from expanding, which of course it does not accept; instead, it strives to conclude partial agreements that guarantee the undermining of the Arabs under the pretext of peace, on condition that it can turn against them whenever it sees fit.
“We will not allow the mistake of Oslo to be repeated.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, 65 days after the launch of Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood”.
In his book “Arab Attitudes to Israel”, Yehoshafat Harkabi, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, argues that the Arab remains a bold knight in battle but is restless by nature, so it is better to drag him into a battle of negotiations in which he is easy to defeat, rather than lure him into bloody battles that will never be easy to win. It is therefore no wonder that the negotiations, agreements and normalisation processes the Zionist entity seeks were already born dead in the eyes of the Arab peoples and the real resistance, and in the eyes of a coming generation whose faces are masked by the Palestinian keffiyeh, through which it came to understand the nature of things and, accordingly, worked to take hold of the reins of resistance once again.
Opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of Zawia3.
