Saturday, January 5, 2008

When will the Ramallah regime wake up?


By Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem

"The Fatah leadership in Ramallah had thought that the American-Israeli onslaught against Hamas, including the ongoing Nazi-like blockade of the Gaza Strip, would benefit their organization and help consolidate its standing among Palestinians. Proceeding from this inherently faulty thinking, Fatah has been doing all it could do to weaken, even decimate Hamas in the West Bank, all in the hope that this would prompt Israel to treat the Ramallah regime as “equal partner” and accord it a modicum of respect.

To realize this impossible task, Fatah militiamen, in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority (PA) security agencies, and often in collusion with the Israeli army, arrested, humiliated and tortured hundreds, if not thousands, of mostly innocent people suspected of affiliation with Hamas. Other free-minded Palestinians, who reject Palestinian subservience to Israel and the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), were also persecuted.

In fact, a number of Palestinians were brutally killed in order to prove to the Israelis and the Americans that the Abbas-Fayyadh regime was tough and was capable of fighting “terror,” a sin-qua-non for advancing the proverbial peace process, which is actually more a process of lying and deception than a process of peace.

Moreover, the Ramallah-based regime closed off hundreds of Hamas-affiliated institutions, including charities upon which thousands of poor and impoverished families had been dependent for years for their livelihood. Along the same lines, PA security and political officials have committed and continue to commit every conceivable act of treachery and treason against the Palestinian masses and their enduring cause, all in order to appease, please and endear Israel.

These acts of perfidy are too numerous to be listed in one or even two articles. But every Palestinian man and woman is well aware of the occupier-quisling formula that came to identify and characterize the PA-Israel relationship. However, instead of receiving a certificate of good conduct from Israel, like allowing the PA to exercise a modicum of authority in Palestinian population centers, Israel has proved repeatedly that it doesn’t have permanent allies or even permanent quislings, but only permanent interests.

This week, thousands of Israeli troops, backed by armored personnel carriers, invaded the northern West Bank town of Nablus, brutalizing, terrorizing and humiliating the town’s estimated 200.000 inhabitants. Nablus had been repeatedly declared a “liberated city” by a naïve PA that failed rather scandalously to understand that Palestinian national sovereignty and the Israeli occupation couldn’t really coexist under any circumstances.

That was during Yasser Arafat’s era. Now, with the more American-accepted leadership of Mahmoud Abbas in power, which means very little in real terms given overwhelming Israeli army domination, the same obscene blunders are being re-enacted again and again, with the imbeciles of Ramallah and their legions of talkative but stupid spokespersons telling the exhausted Palestinian masses that freedom from the Nazi-like Israeli occupation is around the corner.

The act of rape in Nablus, which is continuing unabated as of this time, is being carried out, despite the presence in the town of thousands of American-armed Palestinian security men who are answerable to the Fayyadh government.

According to local sources, the moment Israel informed PA security officials the Israeli army was about to invade Nablus on 3 January, PA forces were instructed to dwell inside their security buildings and close their doors behind them and never to venture into the streets with their arms or uniforms. Well, no one is asking these pitiable young men to commit suicide by challenging the invading terrorists of the Israeli army.

However, the PA and its leaders in Ramallah should immediately think of dissolving its security apparatuses, whose very existence, let alone the tasks they carry out, has become a huge embarrassment to the Palestinian people and their long struggle for justice and freedom.

Reacting to the invasion in Nablus, the Ramallah government was at loss as to how it should relate to the rampage of murder and terror and vandalism in Nablus. After all, this rampage was ordered by the very men with whom Abbas and Fayyadh were exchanging cordial kisses in West Jerusalem just a few days ago.

One PA official, quoted by the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, accused Israel of seeking to evade the road map, as If Israel had ever wanted to honor that hapless mendacity. Similar frustrated words came from Fayyadh himself, who accused Israel of seeking to ruin an internal Palestinian security plan. “These operations destroy our efforts in the field of security, which started bearing fruits lately in a way that people felt the change.” Well, Sah al Noum, a happy wakeup, Mr. Fayyadh.

Abbas and Fayyadh would be naïve, if not outright stupid, if they thought that a genuine and free Palestinian government could function properly in the shadow of Israeli tanks. They should realize that a government under occupation could only be a quisling government, a sort of a Judenrate-like authority that has no choice but to be at the occupier’s beck and call. It makes no difference if the occupiers are Nazi Germany or Israel.

The Fayyadh government did every thing it was asked to do in order to demonstrate “good will” toward Israel. And now Israel is rewarding it with this rampage in Nablus.

Given the ongoing Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the rampage of murder and terror in Nablus, coupled with the massive settlement expansion drive now underway in the West Bank, it is time the leaders of the PA regime, reconsider and review their ignominious subservience to Israel, a state that very much thinks, behaves and acts like Nazi Germany. It is time they stop deceiving themselves and their people by thinking that the more they submit to Israel and meet its whims and desires, the closer Palestinians will be closer to realizing their freedom from the wicked hands of Zionism. "

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