Watching the heart-breaking news of violence in Gaza, showing Palestinians fighting each other and causing the death of so many innocent people, it’s so easy from the comfort of one’s own home to “condemn”, or call Palestinians different kinds of things such as “stupid”, or “uncivilized” or “savages”.
But what did we really do to prevent this from happening? did we at least support Palestinians with regard to the sanctions they’re suffering from? Did we help them convince the world to respect their elections and their choices? Did we ask to give them a chance? no, we only wait and watch and then comes our favorite part: condemning.
Clashes broke out following the Palestinian president’s decision to have early presidential and parliamentary elections.
And now we have Fatah and Hamas fighting… such a big mistake!
This reaction is so wrong, yet as disappointing, as wrong, and as saddening as their reaction is, I can’t but find myself understanding it.
I mean, what do we expect of people suffering under occupation, starving because of stupid sanctions that took place only as collective punishment to teach people a lesson: democracy is just a theoretical term, used only as an excuse to interfere in your own affairs and to fulfill our own interests, but if you apply this term in a way that contradicts our interests then there’s a high price to pay, and then we’ll be ready to watch your society fall apart and starve to death.
Few months ago, when no Palestinian-Palestinian fights took place, and when Palestinians were suffering from sanctions to the extreme, no damn country interfered to support or to help the starving people, no one including the Arab World.
But now, when there’s a chance that the sanctions have proven themselves “useful” and there is finally “hope” that new elections will take place and will be as undemocratic as the –you know who- wish them to be, then the current situation has immediately became of interest to the whole world, including the Arab world, and is now considered “a matter of security”, as they prefer calling it, and so we find everyone interfering to “calm Palestinians down” and to “urge Palestinians to work as one hand” and to “find a solution”,well, at least they’re finally interfering… positively.
Fact 1: Few care whether Palestinians have no work, no food, no water, no electricity, no freedom or no dignity, and those few do nothing but watch or throw speeches, and rarely make a difference.
Fact 2: No democracy allowed to be applied in Palestine (or elsewhere in the Arab world unless it meets the interests of certain democracy-making-countries).
Fact 3: No one cares if Palestinians exterminate themselves as long as they elect the “right” ones, those being the ones who are ready to cooperate with outer interference anyway this interference wishes, even if it contradicts the interests of Palestinians or deny them their most basic rights on any level of life.
Fact 4: Those fights are understood as a reaction, but are not accepted as a solution and are SO WRONG and should stop now. But in order to make them stop, Palestinians should be supported: a) by canceling the unfair sanctions, and b) by letting Palestinians practice democracy the way its occupier and the rest of the “democratic” world practice it.
