{"id":17907,"date":"2023-12-27T17:28:04","date_gmt":"2023-12-27T15:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=17907"},"modified":"2026-10-24T20:45:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T18:45:10","slug":"mourid-barghouti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/mourid-barghouti\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Palestinian Authority and the Value of Resistance: A Journey into the Mind of Mourid Barghouti"},"content":{"rendered":"

What appears between quotation marks in this article is attributed to the late poet Mourid Barghouti, while everything else is an analysis of his views published in newspapers, in books or on social media platforms. <\/strong><\/p>\n


\n<\/span>Like a white sparrow so badly wounded by war and diaspora that it came to look like the old withered date stalk, the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti sat on the banks of the Karama Crossing, which links the Kingdom of Jordan and the West Bank, alone, chewing over his tragedy and the causes of his plundered homeland, and 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. <\/span><\/p>\n

“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 his inner self said this to him 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 by Israeli flags on every side. <\/span><\/p>\n

And before the premonitions could follow one another in his mind, he tore his shirt with another question that seemed more logical than the ones before it: why is it surrounded by Israeli flags even though it lies, theoretically, inside Arab land belonging to the Palestinian National Authority? Well, these confused dreams stirred in him a nostalgia of a different kind, which required going back thirty years before that in order to be able to answer.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

“Before the great man reshapes his society, his society shapes him first”<\/p>\n

Herbert Spencer<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(1)<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“I am Mourid Barghouti, four years older than the State of Israel.” And while the entire Arab world was being shaped to the measure of Gamal Abdel Nasser, I found myself joining him on a winter night in 1963, when I hurriedly gathered up my bags for fear of missing the car heading towards Egypt on a study trip that I thought would be short, but which turned out to stretch across places of exile to this day. “In Ramallah we used to listen in secret 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, and there we wept on the day the secession was announced, and there we heard for the first time of the “socialist” decisions issued from Egypt, and we, the young schoolchildren, began to wonder what that term could mean.” <\/span><\/p>\n

That is why I was truly eager to meet his Egypt, I, the witness to his era, its joys and its sorrows, and I still long, despite the defeat, the loss and the long years, for his cry before the cameras that there would be no negotiation with Israel, no reconciliation with Israel and no recognition of Israel. Words he was unable to actually implement? You are entirely right; indeed, I will add a few more verses to the poem: he did not seek to implement them in the first place, <\/span>for whoever wants unity between the afflicted Arab countries must establish a solid democratic system that respects human beings, and whoever wants a great country must give up power voluntarily to allow its rotation among the general public within a clear constitutional framework.<\/b> <\/span><\/p>\n

“Dictatorship is the mother of political cardinal sins”, and consequently it was Abdel Nasser’s cardinal sin, which finished him off before he reached his goal; yet 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 al-Shukeiri, at the Arab summit in Alexandria in 1964, with pursuing his contacts with Palestinians wherever they were found in order to organise the ranks of the resistance. That was the first step towards the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and its military wing, the “Palestine Liberation Army”, which took armed struggle as the only path to liberating all of the occupied lands, from the water to the water; and here an important question may arise: if the organisation was revolutionary in character, why did it accept the fait accompli after Abdel Nasser? <\/span><\/p>\n

In truth, there are many reasons, which can be summed up in the fact that it was a sound Nasserist idea that at the same time carried within it the germ of its own downfall. Why? Because Abdel Nasser ran it in his own way: he did not, as was his habit, mobilise for it an institutional organisation that would carry it after him, and he did not rely on people of competence to settle its affairs, but on people of trust, so it collapsed at the hands of those he trusted and felt safe with, and it quickly turned into its opposite, like any Nasserist experiment that was killed in its cradle or after his death; and in the fall of his socialist system immediately after his departure there is a lesson for whoever would learn. <\/span><\/p>\n

And there is another proof: that picture hanging in front of me in this narrow border room: Yasser Arafat, Abdel Nasser’s favoured man in Fatah, who climbed on his shoulders to the presidency of the Liberation Organisation, 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? <\/span><\/p>\n

Gamal Abdel Nasser kept himself away from committing such an act or such a handshake, but he did not raise his men on this, nor did he set out a clear vision for the cause that would take him, as a person, out of the equation, and in running affairs he relied on a pattern of individualistic rule that I was never a supporter of; but 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 El-Sadat and the Zionist leadership. For no sooner had I decided to take refuge in Nasserist Cairo from the clutches of injustice and dispersion after the Naksa than I found myself “deported by compulsory force from the safe country for fear that I would object to the peace treaty that was to be concluded between Egypt and Israel, except that 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”<\/span>. <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

That is why I have kept carrying in my heart a particular bitterness towards Anwar El-Sadat, which wiped out all the bitterness that came before it: “For the noble remains noble even if he is wounded by defeat, and the abject remains abject even if he claims victory.”<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

“What is taken by force is not recovered by pleading and begging”<\/p>\n

Mourid Barghouti<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(2)<\/span><\/p>\n

“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 twist of my journey from the beginning? Why does he write about the Old Man, when I am the Palestinian and the high shadow, and the only one, in quantity and in quality? That is why I truly know that the disputes within the organisational structure of the Liberation Organisation intensified after the leadership decided to lay down arms and follow the path of Camp David. To the point that the days preceding the death of Arafat, besieged in his seat of government since 2002, became a focal point for many hidden battles between him and his awaited successor Mahmoud Abbas over power, and not for battles on the ground against the occupation forces, or to lift the siege on the head of state. <\/span><\/p>\n

Arafat, who had monopolised power for a long period, suddenly began to feel threatened after Abbas rose to the post of prime minister, especially after Abbas appointed America’s number one man in the organisation, Mohammed Dahlan, to the post of minister of state for security affairs, and Arafat’s only response was to undermine the authority of Abbas’s government by appointing Hani al-Hassan to the post of “general commissioner of Fatah in the West Bank and Gaza Strip”. Many conflicts over nothing, and this is precisely what Israel had been aiming for since Camp David, through Wadi Araba and the early stirrings of Bashir Gemayel, all the way to Oslo, “for after the June Naksa failed to achieve its aims, and Israel found us one hand, 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.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The Zionist machinery also tried to persuade the leaders after Abdel Nasser to pounce on his fighting model and incline towards peace, and this is exactly what it reaped the fruits of after Camp David, which Sadat concluded without popular backing and which caused Egypt to lose its actual control over Sinai, including the border crossing that lies, theoretically, 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, whereby the Liberation Organisation 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, for it was nothing but a paper in which Israel recognises the right of the Palestinians to establish self-rule on the lands from which it will withdraw in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and this self-rule does not necessarily mean recognising the existence of an independent state with full sovereignty. <\/span><\/p>\n

“It has likewise become the real deal of the century, if you look closely at the disasters it has brought us to: the collapse of meaning, the erosion of the land, the savagery of the settlements, the open and covert 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.” <\/span><\/p>\n