We have been accustomed in the past to evaluating and categorizing the statements of President Mahmoud Abbas – by which he embarrassed the Palestinian situation more than once – under the category of strategy and tactics, or dismissing them as a slip of the tongue of a worried politician, out of our concern for national unity and the internal Palestinian balance.
The president's recent statements about the three missing settlers in occupied Palestinian lands, and his promise of pursuing and punishing whoever carried out the operation, cross the red line and require the ringing of the national alarm bell, embodied by the Palestinian street and its national forces, and this ringing must not stop until we see His Excellency the President in the appropriate place: in his home among his grandchildren and sons, far from the Palestinian national affair.
The statements of President Mahmoud Abbas are not only irresponsible and harmful to the highest national interest, but also do not befit him as president of a people languishing under occupation, for weighty reasons, the most important being:
His assertion that an abduction took place and that behind this abduction stands a Palestinian party, despite the absence of evidence to weigh these charges up to this moment, indicates that Mahmoud Abbas has become a promoter of Zionist propaganda that holds the Palestinians responsible for every little and big thing that occurs in occupied Palestine, and that he also does not believe in legal justice that guarantees every accused innocence until the charge is proven against them!
Even if we assume that an abduction operation took place and that the executors of the operation are a Palestinian party, we have the right to ask His Excellency the President whether he actually considers the herds of settlers ordinary civilians? These, Your Excellency the President, are part of the occupation system that torments our people day after day, and their terror campaigns against the unarmed among our farmers are part of their colonial program in Palestine, and accordingly fighting this occupation is considered legitimate according to all international norms. And in case any Palestinian party had a hand in the abduction operation: they, Your Excellency the President, did not do this act to extort money or because they are lovers of crime! They did this act to force the occupation to release our prisoners and the sons of our people whom they abducted and with whom you coordinate security.
The tenderness toward the occupation's youth and their fate and the sympathy with their families make me rightly wonder: Do we not have the right to ask the President why he forgot the abducted young sons of our people in the occupation's prisons? And why does he not sympathize with the tens of thousands of our youth and our children who grew up without a father or mother because of prison or killing by his Zionist masters?
The strange thing is that Mahmoud Abbas forgot, in his shameful statement, the hundreds who were abducted in the few past days by the Zionist occupation, among them prisoners who were released months or weeks ago.
Once again Mahmoud Abbas proved to near and far that the satisfaction of his Zionist friends and the satisfaction of the funders of his authority are more important than the fate of his whole people, and the condemnation of his shameful statements by some Palestinian forces was merely a rising from the knees, nothing more, and the defense of His Excellency by Fatah-ist quarters reminds me of the Palestinian peasant proverb “Even if the goat flies!”!!!! To you all, from a shy defender and critic, I say: You must awaken from your deep slumber before the time passes and you become old news!
It is time for the factions of the Liberation Organization to ask themselves how long they must accept humiliation and sit in the gelatinous bodies that Mahmoud Abbas threw years ago on the roadside between Tunis and Gaza, and to which he turned his back, to the PLO and those who participate in it! Before demanding the reform of the institution, they must first remember the German proverb that says “The fish begins to rot in the head,” and a rotten head cannot be reformed!
And in return, Hamas, which accepted the power-sharing with Mahmoud Abbas as an outcome of its complex crisis, must ask itself, after its prominent personality Aziz Duwaik was arrested under the eyes of the Palestinian security apparatuses and with prior knowledge of the forces of the “sacred security coordination,” whether with its silence it truly remains a faithful and honest guardian of what its leaders blurt out on the satellite screens, or whether it too is ready to give up the constants for the sake of preserving its senseless survival?
After the murderer has become the close friend of the president of the Palestinian authority, and after cooperation with the occupation has come to be called sacred security coordination, and after the Palestinian president gave up the right of return for free, and after he proved to everyone that the settler's blood and life are more precious than the Palestinian blood .... After all of this, we must all ask ourselves: until when must we accept this humiliation? The time has come to say to these people: Go and rest, for you are from a time that is not our time, and your agenda is not the agenda of our occupied people.
