From: FOR PALESTINIAN INDEPENDENCE , By: Said, Edward W., Nation, 00278378, 2/14/94, Vol. 258, Issue 6
And the Palestinian response? Yasir Arafat cries betrayal, though he effectively acquiesced to the leverage Israel now exerts when he signed the Oslo declaration without establishing any plan for proceeding and without getting much in return but a grudging recognition of the P.L.O. as the representative of the Palestinian people. In Gaza and elsewhere, local leaders resign from the P.L.O., and its cadres grow more disaffected. No one has anything but complaints about Arafat's leadership; numerous petitions, missions (such as the one led by Haidar Abdel-Shafi to Tunis) and articles in the press have kept up a fairly constant pressure on Arafat to reform, change his autocratic ways, open up the decision-making process to talent and proven ability.
None of these petitions, these appeals for reform, have had the slightest effect. Nor will they ever. You cannot change an elephant into a lion by sending it a letter. Yet what we have is an intolerable mess; it cannot be allowed to continue. At this point Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and in diaspora, must face up to two central challenges--that of leadership and of serious planning through collective action-or else be resigned to a life of permanent oppression, without land, without a voice in shaping the future, without hope, even without pride, as the leadership stumbles from incoherence to incompetence and worse.
It could not be clearer that the P.L.O. hierarchy, including Fatah and its associated parties, as well as its creatures in the occupied territories and elsewhere, should step aside. The leadership has so misunderstood its own people that there is now a simmering--and frequently open--revolt more or less everywhere that Palestinians gather and live. No leadership can expect forever to be in sole control of money and political authority, and to dole these out according to its whims. Some 500 schools and eight universities, as well as 11,000 education workers in the occupied territories languish without a budget and no guidance at all (to say nothing of hospitals without medicine). More than most people, Palestinians have been the victims of abuses by every government--Arab and non-Arab--in whose jurisdiction they have lived. Why should they stand for similar practices from leaders who have neither been freely elected nor shown a spirit of self-sacrificing austerity? Why should hard-pressed Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon and Gaza accept corruption, Parisian shopping sprees and continued bumbling among a handful of officials directed from Tunis? How long can Arafat simply assert his prerogative to be in exclusive control of building contracts, foreign aid, lucrative appointments? Are quick profit and a history of servile loyalty the only criteria for service?
From :PALESTINE, THEN AND NOW , By: Said, Edward W., Harper's Magazine, 0017789X, Dec92, Vol. 285, Issue 1711
[ a juicy little tidbit, quite ironic in comparison to the previous excerpts I've quoted ]
"Just a minute, please," said the young immigration officer, taking my American passport with her to a nearby office, leaving the three others on her desk. Would they send us back? Would they grill us-me especially-and go through our bags? Or-this was my private nightmare-would they march me off to prison? Between 1977 and 1991 I had been a member of the Palestine National Council, the parliament-in of the Palestinians, proscribed as an enemy organization by Israel. I knew Yasir Arafat, was (crudely) referred to as "his man," and at times had even been described, by the scurrilous propagandists of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, as an accomplice of terrorists. |
