Qurei’s pathetic warnings

By Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank

".....Qurei’ and some other PA leaders have been voicing similar warnings for years. These leaders, however, seem to utterly lack the will and inclination to abandon the defunct Oslo process. The reasons for that apparently have more to do with personal and partisan expediency and less with true Palestinian national considerations.

This is why Qurei’s remarks shouldn’t be taken seriously. After all, the very survival of the PA depends, almost completely, on its subservience to Israel.

In recent months, this ignominious subservience assumed more brazen manifestations, including joint raids of Palestinian homes, businesses, charities and educational institutions. Today, PA security cadets are taught that the enemy is Hamas, not Israel......

So why did PA leaders refuse to open their eyes and deal with reality all these years? Were they drunk? Were they asleep? Were they mesmerized by the false luster of authority, an authority whose borders end with the nearest Israeli tank or armored vehicle which is only a few meters away ? Or perhaps they were busy self-congratulating themselves on having been granted empty but grand-sounding titles such “minister of this or minister of that!!” when in fact the lowest-ranking Israeli soldier would stop and humiliate them at the nearest roadblock in full view of Palestinian travelers?

The truth of the matter is that the PA and its leaders lack the ability to challenge Israel. Israel represents the lifeline of their political and especially financial survival.

Without Israel, and especially without this pathetic peace process which has the smell of conspiracy, PA leaders and officials wouldn’t be riding ostentatiously in brand new limousines and having chummy chats with the likes of Tony Blair who privately tells his European and American interlocutors that all that Palestinians need to shut their mouths up is some brand new cars, grand titles, bloated salaries and invitations to Paris, London and Washington where they can have memorial photo-ops with western leaders for self-gratification, this is while their own people are savaged by Nazi-like Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers all over the West Bank......

But, unfortunately, the PA neither behaves nor thinks in this way. This is simply not its character. It is an entity whose leaders would protest an Israeli decision to build more settlements in on stolen Palestinian land by traveling to West Jerusalem the next morning to exchange ostensibly cordial kisses with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the very person who took that decision to build more settlements......

Are we fools? Are we stupid? Otherwise, why do we continue to hold seemingly endless talks with Israel despite our deep convictions that Israel doesn’t want peace? Why have we failed to demand a total stoppage of Jewish settlement expansion as a precondition for the continuation of the so-called “peace talks”? We do have a huge army of “advisors” and “experts” and “consultants” who receive hefty salaries at the expense of hundreds of thousands of impoverished Palestinians who can hardly make ends meet. Can’t these people offer the PA leadership a decent advice with regard to this game of make believe, otherwise known as “peace talks.”....

So, why is the PA refusing to see reality on the ground as it is? Or are we, Palestinians, supposed to continue to give this discredited leadership the benefit of the doubt until Israel destroys the last vestige of our national immunity in the face of Zionism?"