Israel Matzav

'Palestinians' opposed to 'Palestinian state'?

I am not alone. There are a host of other Palestinians today who are not altogether enthused about the emergence of a Palestinian state any time in the near future.

This notion, that engaged Palestinians are alienated from the heroic narrative in their modern history, is difficult to explain, for it will give rise to misunderstanding, however cautiously it is put. But here's the painful truth: an independent Palestine, as envisioned by the current leadership — a handful of men with a powerful security force whose intrusion into citizens' daily lives and violent repression of these citizens' right to free speech is well-documented — will more than likely pan out as a police state.

We are all familiar by now with the Palestinian National Authority's encroachment on independent opinion in the media and heretical thought in academia, as we are equally familiar with its relentless pursuit of individuals espousing adversarial voices, its hysterical fear of the free flow of ideas — which are central to the health of the body politic — and the rest of it.

Now, consider this latest outrage: the PNA's Minister of Religious Affairs, Mahmoud Habbash, has in recent months been sending e-mail missives to the 1,800 mosques across the West Bank dictating, word for word, the Friday sermon that every imam should deliver to his congregation.

The policy is enforced in a grotesquely authoritarian manner — recalcitrant imams are either incarcerated or terminated. Shaikh Hamid Bitawi, a noted Islamic scholar who had delivered sermons in the Nablus area for well over four decades, was unceremoniously fired recently.

Reportedly, dozens of other, though lesser known preachers have met a similar fate, prevented from ever again mounting the pulpits of their mosques to address their congregations.

...

In the West Bank, our political destiny has been left to semi-literate government officials who couldn't run a lunch counter, haven't read half a dozen decent books in their lives, and do not know of those charities of the imagination that are essential to literate minds.

And in Gaza, a pauperised strip of land reduced to becoming a kind of placeless place, left adrift by an equally clueless leadership, life is defined by the hazy utopianism of political Islam, a political Islam mockingly remote from citizens' immediate needs.

It is all sad, but it is all true.

Labels: censorship, Fatah, Hamas, Palestinian state RIGHT NOW syndrome

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:48 PM