It Would Violate Our Dignity To Improve Our Economy

By Mahmoud Abbas, President, Palestinian National Authority

Credit: Kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons

Ramallah, June 26 – The Trump administration’s upcoming conference in Bahrain will go nowhere because it denies the Palestinian people the dignity they maintain through living on international handouts, refusing to develop a sustainable economy, avoiding democratic development at all costs, and remaining a byword for the empowerment of extremism and political violence.

Nothing constructive will occur in Bahrain without acknowledging Palestinian demands for the right to kill Jews as a method of political expression, or just because we can. To deny that right denies historical realities that lie behind our national ethos, and thus denies our identity. Moreover, alleviating the economic malaise that plagues our people removes perhaps the most important piece of leverage in the international community that we wield in our struggle to undo the Nakba of 1948. No credible Western donor or group will give us hundreds of millions of dollars every few months if our people display prosperity. Unless we keep the vast majority of our people in dire financial straits, we can harbor no hope that other nations will pressure Israel to adopt one self-destructive step at a time on the road to our ultimate victory. The Bahrain summit seeks to deny us that leverage, and thus betrays its lack of legitimacy.

Protestations that committing to an economic workshop prejudices nothing in any peace negotiations that may follow several months later, but such insistence ignores the raison d’être of Palestinianism: destruction of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant. Palestinian identity grows exclusively from the desire to rid a historically Islamic region of the Jewish thorn in its side and expunge the shame of losing to a bunch of outnumbered, outgunned, out-supplied Holocaust survivors and refugees in 1948. To salvage whatever dignity we might have remaining after that debacle and 1967, we cannot afford to relinquish the dream of finishing what Hitler started – even if it means sacrificing our health, economy, and political stability, such as it is, in the process. We will accept nothing that benefits Israel, even when that rejection hurts us, because our national movement aims not to liberate and empower ourselves, but to destroy Jewish sovereignty on the way to reasserting longtime Islamic dominance of a helpless Jewish minority. Restoring that status quo is the only way to preserve Palestinian dignity.

So Messrs. Trump and Kushner can take their attempts to give us dignity and stick it where the crescent moon does not shine. No dignity is worth the dignity we already have of squalor, political repression, incitement to terrorism, and victim status.

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