At the beginning of the Arab movement in Tunisia and later in Egypt, the Palestinians had high hopes from the signals the observer was following and the slogans raised by the movement of the revolting youth in both the Tunisian and the Egyptian street. Solidarity with the Palestinian people, condemnation of the occupation, as well as condemnation of the Arab collaborators from reactionary forces and opportunist compradors were the characteristic image of the movements in their first months.
The chest of the Palestinian people swelled with these images and this moral support. This special solidarity drove many analysts to begin – they were, in my view at the time, hasty and optimistic without reason – to sketch a new scenario of Arab solidarity and support for the Palestinian people, and what all this movement would lead to as a new basis for future peace talks with Israel. All this optimism, unfortunately, dissipated like fog, and it proved to be a mirage that left only hopes hanging in the hearts of the Palestinians. And frustration flooded the Palestinian street after the picture cleared and the full truth emerged. After a little more than two years of the movement, it became clear that the Palestinian question had become a secondary matter, hardly worth mentioning, not only in official forums but also in the heart of the Arab movement. The question of Palestine now occupies a marginal position in world as well as regional politics, nothing more. The Arab masses are preoccupied with their daily worries and their internal struggles.
Most of the traditionally Palestine-supporting Arab states are now drowning in internal upheavals and civil wars whose end will be devastating for the local national economy and the structure of civil society in the Middle East.
Added to this, the old-new alignments between the governments of the Arab Gulf led by the Saudi Wahhabis and the Muslim Brothers in the region ignited the fuse of religious enmity and sectarian war in the East. And the matter becomes more tragic with the bitter truth that the fatal weakness of the progressive, democratic and liberal forces in the Arab world and the decline of their influence in the face of a politics of mere condemnation and their inability to confront the new requirements further aggravate the reality and bode no good for the coming period. This complex situation in the Arab world has without doubt weakened the street movement and split the solidarity forces with Palestine.
The alignment of some Palestinian forces – for ideological pipe dreams and a wrong reading of the Arab reality – alongside conflict parties in some Arab countries against another party drew the Palestinian people and its cause into a labyrinth with no easy way out. And this intervention, which did not remain at the level of political statements, has without doubt contributed to the worsening of the Palestinian situation and entrenched the division in occupied Palestine.
These factors combined drove the influential leadership of the Palestinian people – which had been waiting for just such a “golden opportunity” in the first place – into the gamble of starting futile negotiations with the Zionist occupation and returning to marketing the old opportunist idea: “A little is better than nothing!”
The United States and Israel, and also some countries of the European Union that participated in the pressure on the Ramallah leadership and lured it into starting negotiations with the occupation, knew and still know the extent of the weakness that the Palestinian leadership lives under the conditions in the region, and that the possibilities of convincing this Palestinian leadership of solutions cut to the Zionist measure did not exist in the past years. The leadership of the Fatah state in Ramallah exploited – with an opportunism that reeks to the soul – the critical economic situation and the frustrated psychological condition of the sons of the Palestinian people in occupied Palestine to market the policy of futile negotiations.
The recent events in Palestine, especially in occupied Jerusalem, and the absence of an official and popular Arab response to the desecration of holy sites and the killings and arrests, and before that the announcement of the Zionist plans to expel the Palestinian Bedouin of the Negev from their lands, is the conclusive proof that the greatest loser in this phase is the question of Palestine and its entire people.
And in the end we point out once more that without a Palestinian popular movement to correct the Palestinian course and end the division, Palestine will face a gloomy future in the coming months that will draw the Palestinian situation for long years.
