I Could Establish A Palestinian State, But Then What Would I Do? Govern?

By Mahmoud Abbas, President, Palestinian Authority; Chairman, Palestine Liberation Organization

All those well-meaning diplomats and politicians urging Palestinians to make peace with Israel, or at least sit down to negotiations, miss one crucial point: without perpetuation of the conflict, I feel purposeless. Once a Palestinian state is established at peace with Israel, what would I and my supporters do? Govern? You have got to be kidding.

Governing is for the little people. I represent a movement, a glorious phenomenon led by none other than the legendary Raïs Yasser Arafat, whose name and image I invoke all the time in the hopes of some of his legitimacy and gravitas rubbing off on me by association, and I cannot be bothered with such minutiae as administration. Such menial tasks are UNRWA’s job, not the role of a person in the august position of he who embodies Palestinian nationalist aspirations. You can’t have those aspirations if they’re fulfilled already.

As Chavez, Ghaddafi, and Mao showed, it can be messy to govern and maintain a “revolution” at the same time. I’m just not interested in it. What kind of glory is there in signing bills into law? But leading a movement against occupation of our homeland that just happens to match the borders drawn up by Britain and France in 1916 even though we claim Palestine has existed for millennia? Well, look at all the pilgrims who come to pay tribute to Arafat. That’s what I want for myself. Not going to get that by agreeing to a final-status arrangement. It’s a non-starter.

The fact that we stand no chance of destroying Israel makes it all the more reason to continue the fight to do so. If we were to engage in an epic struggle that had some likelihood of success, we might have to consider what would happen when that success arrived. Thankfully, Israel has never been stronger and we Palestinians have never been weaker, so those worries remain irrelevant. I can focus my energies on fighting, slandering, terrorizing, and inciting murder, which is what I’ve always wanted to do anyway.

I do harbor some regrets about my decisions since taking over from our beloved Raïs. I never should have held elections, for one thing. No one would ask about my being in the thirteenth year of my four-year presidential term if I had simply taken over as dictator. The nomenclature and trappings of democratic institutions, as empty and cronyism-ruled as they are, create governance expectations that I would just as soon avoid. There’s no romance, no Arafat-like defiant heroism in them.

So it’s not about what Israel offers or doesn’t offer, or about whether the US is an honest broker. Let’s face it: the Jews succeeded in creating a functioning state in 1948 because they had worked hard for a long time before that to establish and develop institutions of state. If you think we’re going to take our cues from those descendants of apes and pigs, you’re delusional.

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