Media coverage
Quds Net · 2016-09-27
An opinion piece by Dr Nasser Ismail al-Yafawi, prompted by a speech in which Khaled Meshaal acknowledged his movement's mistakes. The writer recalls the meeting PalThink held on 8 September 2012 at the Roots restaurant hall in Gaza City, moderated by Omar Shaban as head of PalThink and attended by most of Hamas's political bureau: Shaban opened with a call for a national project built on partnership, which Meshaal welcomed, and lawmaker Rawya al-Shawa pressed Meshaal on whether real reconciliation was coming, to which he answered yes. Four years on, the writer notes, she is still waiting for an answer and Shaban is still convening meetings and workshops between the two halves of the homeland.
An opinion piece by Dr Nasser Ismail al-Yafawi, prompted by a speech in which Khaled Meshaal acknowledged his movement's mistakes. The writer recalls the meeting PalThink held on 8 September 2012 at the Roots restaurant hall in Gaza City, moderated by Omar Shaban as head of PalThink and attended by…
After hearing and analyzing Mr. Khaled Meshaal’s latest speech, and his courageous acknowledgment of the bundle of mistakes his movement had fallen into, and his message calling for the necessity of adopting fruitful and beneficial reviews for the Palestinian cause, and Gaza in particular, my memory returned—while we are in the month of September—to that meeting held by PalThink for Strategic Studies on 8 September 2012 in the hall of Roots Restaurant in Gaza City, which was moderated by the expert and strategic thinker Omar Shaban, Chairman of PalThink, and attended by the majority of the members of Hamas’s Political Bureau. At the time, this meeting carried major significance, and Gaza’s elite awaited the outcomes of the visit and the meeting. Likewise, the street lived between hopes and dreams it felt had become close at hand, but it has now stopped dwelling on them because of how often the scenarios have been repeated in the cities and capitals of the Arab world.
The street was afflicted with boredom; indeed, it no longer swallowed the cracked record of reconciliation and the resounding promises mouthed by the parties to the division. Lean years have passed over the Palestinian cause, and we lost what we lost in them, but we still had—and still have—the balancing of the important and the more important: between surrendering to the system of division and its media machine, which excels in insulting our minds and our ability to read things and changes clearly, or believing what the leaders of factions and parties say in a manner close to a sacred national oath and convincing you that what they say equals in truth political, social, and religious chants written like the texts of the pyramids.
At the beginning of the meeting, and after an eminently national introduction by Mr. Omar Shaban, and his emphasis on the necessity of formulating a national project based on the philosophy of partnership, Professor Khaled Meshaal welcomed the idea and commented in a balanced manner on what Mr. Omar had put forward, and what the majority of those intervening had raised. However, Mr. Meshaal’s answers were not sufficient for MP Rawya al-Shawa, who stood before those present with strength and posed to Khaled Meshaal a clear question without introductions or embellishments, saying: “Are we really heading toward comprehensive national reconciliation, or are we before promises and media consumption? I want a clear and frank answer, and I do not want to hear wishes.” In the tone of one who was confident, Meshaal answered: yes, we are heading toward real and imminent reconciliation.
Today, four years have passed since this intellectual exchange and frank discussion. It was followed by crises, war, attrition, dialogues, and a bundle of agreements, promises, meetings, statements, tours, postponed tours, media sparring, statements, and counter-statements. Rawya al-Shawa is still waiting for the answer, and Omar Shaban is still holding meetings and workshops between the two parts of the homeland, in the hope of stirring the stagnant water...
And the outcomes are still the same: dialogues and the signing of an agreement, as if the director is refilming the same scene, only with a different time and place. In all the seminars and workshops held during the post-signing period, the questions were about the seriousness of the parties this time and about the guarantees that could be trusted after the factions of division had lost their credibility with the citizen. The people remain the ones under pressure from the effects of external pressures on the Palestinian scene. So, will an entire generation die while waiting for the right answers to be realized? Or do we need September 2020, perhaps so that a new leader may visit Gaza and affirm what the previous leader affirmed? The people are still waiting!
By Dr. Nasser Ismail al-Yafawi
Text © Quds Net — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source