Enough ! Enough is enough

Azmi Al-Shuaibi does not need my testimony, nor the testimony of anyone. But for those of the younger generations who do not know Al-Shuaibi, or those who think they can silence and intimidate him, their memory must be polished, as the late leader Abu Ammar used to say. The history of Azmi Al-Shuaibi’s struggle began since the prime of his youth when he was a university student in Alexandria, and throughout his life’s struggle for the sake of Palestine and the cause of our people, he was not one of the “high-ranking elites” despite the partisan, national and official positions he occupied, but rather he was always close to the people, feeling their pain and suffering under the occupation and in Opposites of asylum. Perhaps the dental profession helped him feel pain with his patients, as he was always biased towards the poor and the oppressed. I was a witness to his connection with the people in his clinic in Jabal Al-Hussein in Amman, where years of deportation and work brought us together in the Occupied Territories Committee of the Democratic Front and then the Democratic Union. Azmy had deported him and the activists Marwan Barghouti and Amin Maqbool to Jordan before the outbreak of the major uprising at the end of 1987, where we worked together in the Support Committee for the Intifada from Amman. He had previously represented the Democratic Front in the National Front and the National Steering Committees with the late greats Haider Abdel Shafi, Ibrahim Al Dakkak, Fahd Al Qawasmi, Bassam Al Shakaa, Karim Khalaf, Muhammad Melhem and other national symbols, and he ran in the municipal elections in the city of Al Bireh in 1976, which represented at the time a challenge to the occupation. Raising the voice of the Palestine Liberation Organization, despite the occupation's brutality and bloodshed. Azmy is one of the founders of the volunteer movement in Palestine, in the early and mid-seventies. After he became a member of the Legislative Council, he chose to work to institutionalize parliamentary oversight of the government and the executive authority, as it became clear to many since the establishment of the authority, including those who believed that Oslo might be a step towards ending the occupation, that it had the ability to establish justice, good governance and good performance. To establish a respectable institution free from nepotism and corruption, that respects its people first, and invests its resources to enhance their steadfastness, ability to survive, and popular resistance. The governments of Israel, which began to pay the price of its occupation imposed on it by the Intifada, concluded that without flooding occupied Palestine with the bureaucracy of corruption that began to hold the neck of the exile revolution, it would not escape its predicament or be able to contain the local, regional and international transformations imposed by the Great Intifada, which carried hope. With the possibility of defeating the occupation and moving forward towards freedom, the Intifada, despite the gaps that befell it, was likely to develop into a historical lever to restore stolen national rights, after Israel had been under the illusion that it had succeeded in burying Palestinian patriotism between the Nakba wars of 1948 and Lebanon 1982.

I am not legal to refute the nature of the assault on the law that was included in the attempt to silence Al-Shuaibi and Issam Al-Haj, and even the Aman Coalition, the national member of Transparency International itself, but I realize, according to all polls, that the phenomenon of corruption in all its forms and the phenomenon of nepotism and influence-abuse have crossed all red lines in each of The Gaza Strip, which is under the control of Hamas or within the framework of the national authority, feeding on the absence of parliamentary oversight due to the freezing of the work of the Legislative Council after the division and then its dissolution, and the insistence on evading the entitlement to hold general elections, even if the price for that is the disintegration of the inclusive national legitimacy and the loss of the national cause As a result of the division, which has become the most important tool in the hands of Israel to destroy the national entity and to attack the historical rights of our people in this country.

Attempt to silence Shuaibi

Al-Shuaibi only did what was imposed on him by the rules of good citizenship, and the national responsibility entrusted to all citizens and institutions of the Palestinian people, including the AMAN Coalition, and the goals for which it was established to combat corruption "in the institutions of the de facto authority led by Hamas in Gaza or the government of the National Authority and its affiliated institutions." In this context, AMAN’s 2022 report “The Reality of Integrity and Anti-Corruption in Palestine” was fulfilling the responsibility entrusted to it, although this came some time late, and after the ears of the relevant institutions that were addressed by the AMAN Coalition closed their eyes to those issues it included. The report and some of them touch the nerve of Palestinian patriotism. Instead of these institutions returning to carry out their duties, a complaint was filed and a case was initiated in the courts against those who fight corruption and perform the duty to strip it. What recklessness is this with people's minds? This constitutes a violation of all red lines, as instead of holding the corrupt accountable and holding them accountable, an attempt is being made to silence Al-Shuaibi, Al-Hajj, and Aman and put them on trial!!! However, it seems that this attempt is turning into a public opinion issue and a popular trial for corruption and the corrupt.

The exclusion approach is a shovel for the destruction of the national movement

Yes, enough! Enough is enough. The continued attempts to exclude everyone who has an opinion turns the national movement and the country's institutions into mere emptiness, and constitutes a threat to the national destiny. We have to look at this issue, which has become a public opinion issue with these dimensions, in addition to what is happening affecting the status of the national cause among the natural allies of our people, including Transparency International, which has become a site of global influence. I was a coincidental witness to AMAN's regional and international standing at the Transparency International conference held in Copenhagen in 2019, where it happened to host the film Naila and the Intifada to show the ugliness of the occupation within the framework of the development of the role of Transparency International in addressing and exposing issues of political corruption and government violations, including the Israeli occupation. In the context of this conference, which was attended by more than forty foreign ministers and hundreds of institutions and parliamentary figures from most countries of the world. Palestine and the Aman Coalition were strongly present and had influential relations with this Coalition as one of the levers for the right of the Palestinians to live and to be independent by self-determination and the management of their looted resources from the occupation.

Laws by decree and executive regulations were previously designed in contradiction with the laws in force and the statute, with the aim of restricting non-profit institutions and forcing some of them to close, as happened with the Al-Ghad Foundation, which was founded by former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to support farmers and rural areas threatened with settlement and confiscation, and our people in the Old City of Jerusalem and restoration The ramshackle houses in some of the camps. This is after all attempts to distort the institution that justice has triumphed have failed.

The lesson that must be drawn here is if the silence on what happened with Al-Ghad Foundation is in contradiction with the higher national priority related to strengthening people’s steadfastness in the face of settlement, which requires mobilizing all official, popular and civil resources in the service of this national priority, and not pushing it to close, then we must realize Those who dominate resources and the national destiny are now threatening anyone who disagrees with their opinion and seeking to silence it. If this attack passes without a deterrent popular stance, the social fabric will be subject to targeting and disintegration.

Towards a popular coalition to defend the national destiny

How desperately we are in need for the emergence of a broad popular coalition to defend the supreme national interests and national destiny, adhere to the rules of pluralism in the face of policies of exclusivity, exclusion and divisive domination, and restore consideration to the inclusive national institutions to unify all efforts in order to straighten the compass of the national struggle against the occupation instead of continuing bleeding in the components of the front interior. Progress towards achieving this requires the initiative of national personalities and leaders who are independent in their opinion and orientations outside the axes of divisional polarization and hegemony, to constitute a political lever for social, popular and national movements and for the broad groups affected by division and corruption, and to present a transitional road map that contributes to getting our national cause out of the blockage it is going through, and devotes Its priorities are to strengthen people's steadfastness and restore their constitutional rights by preparing for general elections within a sufficient period to release freedoms that make elections a station for change, overthrowing division, and saving the national cause. This is the duty of all Palestinian patriots wherever they are. Otherwise, history will not have mercy on us, nor will our people, whose banner will not be lowered.