Our Situation Is So Desperate, We Refuse To Sacrifice Anything To Save Ourselves

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

Credit: Kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons

Ramallah, October 27 – The Palestinian national movement has seldom seen darker days. Arab nation after Arab nation has announced normalization with the Zionist entity, even as our cause languishes and we remain powerless as ever to stem the ugly tide of peace. Circumstances have deteriorated to the point that the very survival of the movement hangs in the balance. In such a dire situation, under my leadership the movement has decided to take the drastic step of refusing to budge from our position that we must liberate every last inch of Palestine from the filthy clutches of the Jewish usurpers, no matter how disastrous our situation has become precisely as a result of maintaining that view for the last century.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain – those traitorous snakes represent just the tip of the normalization iceberg; we must face facts. In my eighty-four years I have never seen our cause this close to defeat. The severity, the precariousness, of our condition must prompt introspection, sober reexamination of what elements of our vision must we retain in order to preserve the essence and the survival of the cause, lest further attempts to hold on to extraneous  ambitions compromise the entire endeavor. In my assessment we reached that stage when Donald Trump was elected, though the repercussions of that event took some time to emerge. Now we must make the difficult choices of what to jettison to keep our ship afloat. The answer: nothing.

Contrast this responsible attitude with the capricious behavior of the Jewish leadership in 1947 Palestine. The United Nations voted in favor of a plan to partition the land into a Jewish state and an Arab one. The Jews sought all of the land west of the Jordan for a state, in keeping with post-WWI British guarantees; the partition plan “deprived” the Jews of more than half that territory, but the Jewish leadership in Palestine, knowing the political limitations they faced, fecklessly accepted the plan. Look where it has led them! Now all they control is all the land to the west of the Jordan except for our divided rump state, plus an economy and military that far outstrip any of the countries around them.

We, on the other hand, boast an endless array of refugee camps, Bantustans, incapacitating clan divisions, and hopes for full independence that fade with each passing day of our continued intransigence. The choice we face is stark. But choose we will: oblivion!

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