A leading Palestinian commentator has blamed the Palestinian people for Israel’s political move to the right.
Bassem Eid, 64, a Jerusalem-based political analyst and researcher, told the JC on a recent visit to London: “What we [Palestinians] are doing now, is affecting us much more than the new government.”
He spoke emotionally of the recent capture of a young Druze car crash victim, Tiran Fero, from a hospital bed in Jenin, when armed men came in, disconnected him from medical apparatus, and kidnapped him before returning his body to his family.
“I spoke to the doctor [in the Jenin hospital]”, Eid said. “He told me that Tiran was still breathing when he was taken. I think that if the Palestinians will continue with such behaviour, one day the Palestinians will be trashed (erased) from the map. This is something unbelievable. Not one Palestinian voice came out to condemn what happened in the hospital. I can understand the fear of the people, but in the meantime, if they continue living in such fear, I don’t think the Palestinians will be able to approach their independence.”
An often lone human rights voice, since 2016 Bassem Eid has chaired the Centre for Near East Policy Research. In a gloomy assessment of the current situation in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Eid said that the Palestinian leadership was “in chaos. And the current leaders are very interested in keeping us in such chaos. They are the only ones who benefit from such chaos.”
He was at a loss, he said, to understand why the international community continued to support the Palestinians, “politically and financially”, when it received little in return.
Eid complained bitterly of the ongoing financing by Europe of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) education and staff, without receiving the long-promised changes in Palestinian textbooks which continue to glorify terror. “Where is the democracy and pluralism that Europe is trying to achieve for the Palestinians?” he asked. “I think that it’s a fake.”
He's pessimistic, too, about life for the Palestinians after President Mahmoud Abbas, now 87, dies. “I used to say that life with Abbas is a problem, but that life after Abbas will be a tragedy,” he said. “It won’t be quiet after he dies. The problem is not so much the split between Fatah (in the West Bank) and Hamas (in Gaza). The problem is the separate levels and divisions inside Fatah. Every Fatah guy wants to be president. The young generation is going to fight the old generation — and I don’t think anyone on earth knows who is going to be Abbas’s successor.”
He claims that on the whole Palestinians made no distinction “between Yair Lapid and Benjamin Netanyahu, between Benny Gantz and [far-right politician] Itamar Ben-Gvir. If you come to any ordinary Palestinian and ask for his priorities, he will say a job, the securing of the education system, and the improvement of the health system for his children. Nobody is talking politics, about the wall, the settlements — nobody is even talking about the foundation of a Palestinian state.”
Eid suggests that there were only “a couple of tens of terrorists among us — and there are over two million Palestinians in the West Bank. Let’s go back to the kidnapped Druze boy. You know why they gave the body back to his family? Not because of the pressure of Abbas. But because the Israelis closed the borders, and more than 30,000 Palestinian workers were unable to go to their jobs in Israel. We couldn’t sustain a situation like that for more than 24 hours, because people were starving.”
Given that wages in Israel are eight times the amount paid in the Palestinian Authority, the answer, Eid insists, was always an economic response, rather than a political one.
While Hamas continues to keep quiet, Eid said, he believed that the economic status of Palestinians would remain the top priority of Israel — “not peace, not negotiations, only the economy. If Hamas decide to start shooting rockets again, that will affect the possibility of Palestinians working in Israel. I think the new government, Netanyahu especially, knows that the economic situation of the Palestinians is its priority, and attention to it will decrease violence”.
He called for an international conference to look at economic ways of tackling the Israel-Palestinian conflict. And Eid, looking at the current rebelling in Iran against the regime, predicted that a “Gaza Spring” might well follow.
He has no illusions about his personal safety: “Everything I say in English, I have already said in Arabic.” He argues that he is well-known enough, both domestically and internationally, to be secure. He was arrested by Yasser Arafat in 1996, but a short sharp phone call to Arafat from the then US Secretary of State Warren Christopher ensured that Eid spent only 25 hours in custody. Today he is a clearly tolerated thorn in the side of the Palestinian Authority, travelling the world and saying the unsayable.
He had three words of avuncular advice for both Ben-Gvir and his far-right colleague Bezalel Smotrich, whom he knows from years of joint TV appearances. “Take it slowly,” he advised, suggesting that he does not necessarily buy into the “satanic” reputation of the pair presented by the domestic and international press.
