writer Muhammad Jihad Ismael of Gaza
on New Palestinian Elections, Leaders & Allies
(edited in English by Jack Dempsey)
JD: Hello again, Muhammad. Events of early 2021 clearly worsened the lives of 2.5 million Palestinians (half of them children)still caged in 141 square miles of the Gaza Strip for 14 years now. Infrastructure is in ruins, food and water grow harder to find each day: gardens are dying in the heat, fishing is scarcely allowed, healthcare is near collapse, and Israeli barbed wire cuts off workers and industries from the world.
MJI: Yes. Actually, our home is happy this week as we welcome new twin daughters to the family. Yet, the ongoing crises of food, water, electricity and other basic needs continue to worsen. Today I could not find water to wash my face. We are running out of canned milk for our babies, and its price is very high. What will become of my little girls, and my son?
JD: Do you see any hope for changing these conditions?
MJI: First, from Gaza to the West Bank and Jerusalem, we must face the facts of where our so-called leaders have brought us since our last election in 2006, 15 years ago. As we suffer more than ever, neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority can imagine their own reelection—so, they keep finding ways to prevent a new popular vote. They have already done this three times (in 2010, 2014 and 2018). And because I pay close attention to my community and all Arabic media, I know that our people’s demands for new leaders and new policies are growing every day.
JD: How do people define the main obstacles to peace and progress?
MJI: In a word—corruption. No one is acting independently to serve our people’s goals. Listen. We elected Hamas in 2006 because they alone delivered life-saving services. After Israel and the United States rejected our vote with an attempted coup, Hamas became more self-protective. So now, without most people’s support, they take money from Qatar, Turkey, Iran, globalist groups like Muslim Brotherhood. They take more money, from us their people, with monopolies on every necessity for life. Meanwhile, Israeli business deals with Arab nations work against our hope for their support. So, we live like prisoners between Hamas and Fatah’s Palestinian Authority, another force that serves the goals of Zionists. Their results show their true functions over 15 years—to keep Palestinians weak and divided between territorial governments, when what we want is unity.
JD: And do you hear this popular hope across the territories?
MJI: I do not mean Palestinians have no divisions of their own. For example, it comes to us in Gaza that many West Bankers consider us their inferiors. But expressions of this are based mostly in our cultures. Politically—and you saw this in so many demonstrations of our unity this past spring—we understand the roots of our people’s real power.
JD: A younger new Palestinian leadership would start to replace the generation formed, like Israel’s leaders, by war and mistrust and apartheid. Can you characterize what these new voices have to say?
MJI: For one thing, they call for more equality with international funding like the EU support for the P.A. None of it helps Gaza for rebuilding or employment. Hamas may be the reason, but Hamas is not the Palestinian people, so this collective punishment is a grave injustice.
This we can begin to change with a new election—which now depends on outside arbiters such as the US and EU (who have functioned that way before), putting pressure against all the propped-up obstacles, be they Hamas with dollars from Qatar, the PA, or Israel itself. If we could stop the corrupting outside funds even for six months, change would have to come. Then, they say, new leadership can build on what our families have always hoped, to live in peace with our neighbors, as we really did in living memory. They cannot perform miracles—but what I hear is their willingness to try.
JD: And yet, the Israeli mainstream is more right-wing than ever.
MJI: We can only keep trying. Zionists reject one state because of tomorrow’s demographic problem: they reject two states not wanting Palestine to be born. This leaves them to defend a theocratic apartheid regime with no claim as a democracy. Yet, the simple realities of future population will make that impossible to sustain. So comes this time of ours for crucial and necessary new understandings, and change.
The truth is, people here on every side have become very invested in old mistakes and are unable to admit them. We must keep trying to show Israelis that we want only to live as equal neighbors. And perhaps they will realize that the moral wisdom to admit and correct old mistakes would make every honorable Israeli more Jewish, not less.
In 1921 our great-grandparents published “An Appeal to the Civilized World” to support democratic justice. 100 years later, it is more than time for this world to act—to help us to create real peace.
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Muhammad Jihad Ismael writes Palestinian histories and short fiction published in Arabic (muhammad.eagle.85@gmail.com). Jack Dempsey is an historian of early America and Minoan Crete (Ancientlights.org).