Politics is a Playground for Interests, Not an Arena for Emotions!

Politics is a field of interests, not emotions!

A reading of the Palestinian situation a few days after the breakthrough.

This equation, politics is a field of interests, not an arena for emotions, despite its lack of humanity, it is at the core of daily political reality and the essence of political engagement wherever it exists and in all its fields.

The question that remains in this context is: Are interests alone without emotions sufficient to make politics successful? And can emotions and sentiment alone draw the broad outlines of a fruitful realistic policy?

The clear and frank answer to both questions is no.

First, interests in the political field are not isolated nor spontaneous... In the world of politics, interests take their role not individually but as an interconnected and intertwined bundle, and they do not come spontaneously from nowhere but have a historical context and inevitability of existence... This dynamic between realism and inevitability increases and strengthens day by day and cannot be overlooked or neglected... It is part of politics itself.

Interests are of various types: personal, party, and national interests... Among this trio; national, party, personal, there are multiple and complex interests related to certain groups close to the politician or party who care about their existence and need for them, as well as diverse economic interests... In our region, there are family and tribal interests, etc. Defining and scrutinizing the network of interests in reading a certain political step makes it easier for the observer to judge whether the political step is successful or not and what the goal is in the first place of such a step, statement, or political program.

Secondly, the emotions of the masses are a compass and seismograph... The astute politician must read them carefully and judge them so that their steps are not distant from the masses and balanced with their feelings, and so the politician does not become populist and dances on the emotions of the masses far from credibility.

Let us return from political philosophy to political reality;

The day after the Palestinian Prime Minister's visit to the Gaza Strip, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made some statements that provoked some and made them start doubting the president's and his party's intention and seriousness in reconciliation. The rapid reactions from one side to the other flooding social media clearly show that the complexities and intricacies of the project to end the division and achieve full national reconciliation have not been fully understood, not only by the masses but also by some leaders.

In a previous article, I wrote that ending the division is not a single isolated step but a project of steps that could be very long, and ultimately we might reach full national reconciliation in Palestine, but this is not inevitable.

In any project, there are stages that call for some patience or even sometimes stopping to correct the course... And in every project, especially in political work, there is a winning side and a losing side. The losing side will try hard to sabotage the project, and this dialectic must be understood by anyone who sincerely wants to succeed in the project.

In the project to end the division, there are many parties considered losers if reconciliation is achieved, and these are not weak or insignificant, but on the contrary, all have major interests in the Palestinian cause... Complex and intertwined interests, and naturally, we expect that they will not easily give up their interests to satisfy the feelings and desires of the vast majority of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian president is aware of this and is now caught between the hammer and the anvil: between the game of internal and external interests and the arena of emotions, sincere and legitimate desires of his people after this blessed step... He is like a ship captain in a sea full of rocky islands... Any wrong move or direction he or those around him make could disable the ship and cause it to sink...

The concerns of the masses in every society are a fundamental component of the national interest, if not the most important... Not taking these concerns seriously and making them the main focus of the politician or overlooking them, even for a moment, is a neglect of the national interest.

Anyone familiar with the Palestinian cause and its complexities must understand these matters:

First, the return of the late symbol President Yasser Arafat and other leaders to the homeland and the building of the Palestinian Authority was not a Palestinian political project but a necessary result of the convergence of international, regional, and specific Palestinian interests at a certain historical stage and political context. This new reality was imposed on the Palestinian people by persuasion and intimidation and became part of the cause... Interests, American and Western, Arab and Palestinian, international, regional, and Israeli did not leave the Palestinian internal affairs but continued to use their influence to impose their interests on the Palestinian reality and control its future and complexities.

Second, from the first moment of consolidating the Oslo results on the ground, money was pumped into the Palestinian Authority to consolidate the interests of funders from Arabs and foreigners. From that moment, political money became the morphine of the Palestinian people... After a quarter of a century, the people became addicted to this poison! Initially, funders gave morphine to the Palestinian leadership, which distributed it to local leaders in the form of positions and privileges, and the local and middle leadership used this poison as jobs and privileges for their masses and tribes, and thus wide sectors of the people became addicted to political money, and the rest aspire and do everything possible to get a small piece of this happiness!

Hamas, after its coup in Gaza, did not learn from Fatah's mistakes and used the same poison in the same way and method as Fatah did... The only difference was the provider of the poison!

Third, armed struggle has long transformed from a means of resistance against occupation to liberate the homeland into an end in itself. Not only that, it has become part of the factional identity of some movements, and Hamas is not the only one carrying this identity.

All Palestinian leaders from the far right to the far left have failed to learn and deduce the main lesson from the first year of the first Intifada, which is that struggle has stages and cycles and that the means and methods of struggle change with the stages... Nothing is sacred except the supreme goal... In the Palestinian case, the sacred is the right to self-determination and the return of refugees, and everything else is subject to modification, discussion, change, and deletion!