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Zaqout stresses here that the syndrome of misery and hope is the Palestinian story, and I believe that it is time to highlight the beautiful face of Gaza. Gaza is not Hamas, and it is not this or that faction. Gaza, like Jerusalem and all the cities of Palestine, is the symbol of the unified identity, and will not be its graveyard no matter what. It cost sacrifices.
The Institute for Palestine Studies (Beirut/Ramallah) recently issued the memoirs of the struggling writer and political activist Jamal Zaqout, titled “Ghazzawi: A Narrative of Misery and Hope,” which were three hundred and seventy-nine medium-sized pages, and contained an introduction and five chapters, A photo appendix includes sixteen photos that depict some stages of their owner’s life.
Zaqout's memoirs according to the publisher; It is a review of the long journey of the life of a refugee and a fighter from the Nakba generation in the Gaza camps and the diaspora, in which it combines intimate personal experience and the public scene, shedding light on the transformations of Gaza society in critical stages, the most notable of which are: daily life in Beach Camp in the 1950s after the displacement; Egyptian military rule in Gaza during the Nasser era; The beginning of the Israeli occupation and the diaries of the resistance, some of whose details are revealed for the first time. It traces the rise of the national movement within the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, after the resistance left Beirut in 1982, recounting chapters from a new phase of the national struggle within Palestinian cities, camps, towns and villages with the outbreak of the first Palestinian Intifada in late 1987.
Restoring Palestine's position in human civilization
These memoirs shed light on the author's dramatic life in the camp, and during his studies and struggle in Cairo and Bulgaria, leading up to his return to Palestine and his role in the phase of establishing the Palestinian Authority. Going through providing historical testimony related to the role of the faction to which the “Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine” belonged at the national level at that stage, reviewing the organizational challenges it faced, which ultimately led to its division against itself at the beginning of the nineties of the last century.
In the “Rumman Cultural” interview with the author of the memoirs, Jamal Zaqout, we first asked him about his biography and career as a writer and political activist?
He answered us by saying: Like all the people of my generation who were born between the Nakba and the defeat of 1967, whether that was in the camps of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, or in the diaspora camps, this generation lived through years of poverty, misery and deprivation, and they lived on the one hand, and perhaps they had not yet learned about Their childhood, attempts to erase and dissipate national identity and eliminate Palestine from public awareness, whether in Palestine itself, or at the regional and international levels. In this context, they were also part of the first building blocks of the rise to confront one of the greatest crimes of the modern era.
Our guest continued his conversation with us, saying: These were the first building blocks that always pushed me to take the initiative, no matter how simple they were. In light of the comprehensive vacuum that was imposed on the Palestinian issue, they were certainly like a stone thrown into waters that were intended to be stagnant and incapable of creating hope and life. This lesson has remained with me in my experience since the mid-seventies within the framework of the National and Democratic Action factions, in siding with the poor and marginalized in order to restore justice, and the absolute conviction at the same time that responding to attempts to tear apart the Palestinian identity and entity always and in all circumstances calls for the restoration of unity within the framework of inclusive nationalism. And its institutions and comprehensive expressions, whether within the framework of the Liberation Organization or the experiences of struggle within the occupied country, the most prominent of which was the establishment of the “Unified National Command for the First Intifada” in 1987.
Zaqout adds: It always caught my attention that most of the founding leaders, including the founding leader Abu Ammar, took the initiative while they were young. This is what prompted us, who were still in our thirties, to take the initiative with awareness of unity and the nature of the moment, in which polarization with the racism of the occupiers was at its peak, to establish “ “Unified Leadership,” and this is a message, and at a time when national frameworks are suffering from erosion due to failure, division, and tyranny, to youth leaders inside and outside the national movement in order to regain the initiative, in the spirit of unity, the summary of experience and the size of the sacrifices made by the people of Palestine, and to begin taking concrete steps to rebuild the national movement. Including all Palestinian communities, the project of tearing apart national identity is still present, and it can only be confronted by a national, liberal, democratic, and progressive project from all Palestinians in all their locations.
Here, it is necessary to record the central role played by national figures within the framework of the national movement inside the occupied territories, and their role in establishing the “National Front” and the “National Guidance Committees”, including the participation of leaders in the municipal elections, and I am reminded here of the historical role played by the late leader Dr. Haider Abdel Shafi in consolidating the unified national leadership and his tireless attempt to resolve the discrepancies between its political and organizational components, and his constant keenness to overcome the factional calculations that some of these components showed from time to time. And also how Dr.
What is needed today is the mountain of experience of the loyal people who still cling to the vision and vision of Haider Abdel Shafi, Ibrahim Al-Daqqaq, Karim Khalaf, Fahd Al-Qawasmi and Bassam Al-Shakaa, along with the spirit of young leaders who will not allow the banner to be torn down in the corridors of division and factional division that are complicit with the plans of the occupation. This integration between the experience and willpower of young leaders and movements in all their manifestations will sooner or later mature a radical national movement of a new style. The imminent danger today, in light of the divisional conflict at the expense of the conflict with the occupier, who, by the way, does not distinguish between one Palestinian and another, is the decline and disintegration of the national movement, and the rise of regionalism and tribalism, which facilitates its fall into the trap of the regional canton project at the expense of the national project and entity.
We ask our interlocutor what main ideas and theses are contained in his first book, “Ghazawi: A Narrative of Misery and Hope?” He answered us:
Zaqout added: In light of the failure of the settlement path, the deepening state of division, and the blockage that the national movement is experiencing, I believe that the most dangerous thing facing us is that the long years of struggle are making attempts to erode its achievements, along with the noble values and the spirit of sacrifice and collective solidarity generated by the years of suffering and revolution alike. Explaining that the most important meaning that I found in this book and that I wanted to convey is that the Palestinian experience does not know and must not submit to the impossible, and the Palestinian has no choice but to create means of steadfastness and revolution against the injustice that he has experienced and is still targeting.
The struggling writer and political activist Jamal Zaqout confirms, in our interview with him, that asylum and rebellion against the Nakba, the struggle for knowledge, and the spirit of solidarity that distinguished the Palestinian in the course of his struggle, which culminated in the uprising of an entire people, are what I wanted to describe through a narrative in which I recorded my testimony, and no I absolutely claim that it includes the comprehensive narrative of the militant alienation of our Palestinian people, whose miracle continues to this day. Whoever will read this narrative will excuse me because it may not cover what this reader knows or has experienced, and it is not recorded in the book “Ghazawi: The Narrative of Misery and Hope.” I always say, especially when describing the Great Intifada, in which millions of Palestinians participated, that each one of them has the right to see his role as a leader in its activities, and this is not limited to the Palestinians of the occupied territories but also to the countries of the diaspora, as they are the source of the revolution and the Intifada was its climax. The coalescence of people in Every place during the uprising, which I witnessed after my deportation, pointed to that fact, as the massive national advancement that the uprising achieved strengthened and consolidated its democratic content, and the expansion of popular participation in its activities and its financial, media and political support. What is also more important is to raise the importance of unity, unifying identity, and hope for victory, and this is what we suffer from losing today, and this is our responsibility to restore it as an indispensable condition in the path of our struggle, the chapters of which are not yet complete.
We must not accept division
What are the most important messages that our speaker wanted to convey to the readers in this book? Who are they hoping to reach? He answers us: This is the essence of my message. We must not accept the division that breaks the back of the entire national struggle, and threatens the great achievements that our people have accumulated since the Nakba until today.
I believe that the signs that are accumulating in social, political, and struggle movements of various forms are the fermentation stage of a new birth for the national movement. This birth, which seems intractable and is experiencing painful throes due to the illusion of the Zionist project, whose proponents see the historical moment as appropriate to address Zionism’s historical impasse once again by completing the Nakba, but This is an illusion and it will fail. It is true that the bureaucracy of the National Movement and its division in the struggle for power, and perhaps within this exclusionary struggle, is trying to prevent the crystallization of any serious initiatives, and is even working to avert them.
Zaqout believes that the monopoly of power, especially in light of the failure of its project, turns the Palestinian political system into an obscurantist state on the one hand, and an oppressive state on the other hand, and this contradicts the content of the conflict with the Zionist project, which targets everyone, including those who dominate the divisive scene. The historical role of the intellectual, especially the organic intellectual, is to always take the initiative and constantly open windows of hope for change and the mobilization of the subjective factor, because the objective factors of the conflict leave people no choice but resistance, unity, and the preservation of political and intellectual pluralism. He adds definitely, this requires a broad coalition in which popular initiatives meet with the political experience of personalities whose experience has not made them unable to give, but in the end, handing over the national banner to the younger generations while they hold their inspirations high, and not handing them banners torn by division or the wreckage of experience...
Naila’s story, as it appeared in the movie “Naila and the Intifada,” is in fact also the story of thousands of women who were subjected to the persecution and violence of the occupation, and the release of Naila from Israeli detention as a result of this campaign was in fact a challenge and victory over the Israeli intelligence services, because we snatched Naila from among The jailer's fangs. Naila was also arrested a second time after my deportation, as was our son Majd, who spent six months in detention with his mother. Majd named him Joud Bashir after his uncle, the martyr Bashir Zaqout, who was martyred in the battle of the Litani invasion in southern Lebanon in 1978. The book includes an entire chapter about my martyr brother.
By asking him why he chose the title “Ghazawi: A Narrative of Misery and Hope,” specifically? Zaqout says: Frankly, Gaza has been the epitome of misery and injustice experienced by the Palestinian for years, and after it was a lever for the national project and the restoration of identity, it is intended to be the guillotine for this project, but the experience of our people in the Gaza Strip was and will remain difficult to pass such liquidation plans. Our people in the Gaza Strip today suffer from daily Israeli aggression, and not just from aggression launched by Israel from time to time. They also suffer from the Israeli siege, and the injustice of their relatives in the context of the devastating divisive conflict, not to mention the silence of the international community and our Arab brothers. However, to the extent that the sector represented a historical lever for preserving the unifying national identity in the Egyptian era, the launch of the revolution in 1965, and then the outbreak of the first intifada.
Zaqout stresses here that the syndrome of misery and hope is the Palestinian story, and I believe that it is time to highlight the beautiful face of Gaza. Gaza is not Hamas, and it is not this or that faction. Gaza, like Jerusalem and all the cities of Palestine, is the symbol of the unified identity, and will not be its graveyard no matter what. It cost sacrifices.
We ask our guest about the climate and behind-the-scenes of writing. When was this book written, and how long did it take to write it from the first sentence until it went to press? He says: I started writing it immediately after the announcement of the outbreak of the Corona pandemic, and after, as I believe, I was infected with it and recovered from it. It has become clear to me, from the state of media control that governments sought to promote by spreading panic and intimidation, that they have exceeded the duties they were supposed to provide to the people, especially with regard to caring for the poor and destitute who are affected by the cessation of economic and market activity. These regimes presented nothing but panic and selfishness in a struggle for survival that reached the point of using intelligence systems to control the tools of examination or prevention of the elite who dominate people’s lives. This brought me to two facts:
From here I started, where the open space returned to my memory and opened the closed vaults of time under the weight of preoccupation with the daily and political work with all its complexities. I started writing in mid-March 2020 for about a hundred days a day, for six to seven hours, in an improvised manner that combined a variety of stages and a variety of stories. The result was a wealth of raw material that I worked on in an attempt to make it complete. In the beginning, the size of the material was very large, exceeding five hundred pages. It was revised linguistically with the help of some friends, beginning with the late Faisal Hourani, who was struck by illness and was unable to complete the review of the manuscript, so the friend Abu Al-Alaa Najm volunteered to review it linguistically. This all took more than a year. But the problem of the manuscript’s size remained for me until my friend, the novelist Rabi’ al-Madhoun, was ready to help me shorten it until it became what it was when published in a book. The project for issuing it was with publishing houses in Amman and Ramallah, and suddenly the “Institution for Palestine Studies,” which was I had previously reviewed the diaries, to study the possibility of issuing them from the institution. It was presented to the institution's Research and Publishing Committee to examine the feasibility of this and the validity of the manuscript. This took several months until the end of last year. In the meantime, I conducted additional verification with my friend Ihab Bseiso (former Minister of Culture) and Ibn Gaza. The Foundation approved the publication of the book at the beginning of this year, and the final editing was followed up, and some questions were answered for more accurate documentation, to be published at the beginning of last May in Beirut, and then in Ramallah, and the book will be launched in Ramallah and Gaza, and perhaps In other Palestinian cities, especially in Jerusalem, in the coming weeks.
At the end of our interview with him, Zaqout pointed out that he stopped writing at the beginning of the establishment of the authority, adding that: This was on the advice of a number of friends so that the book “Ghazawi: The Narrative of Misery and Hope” would receive its full due, and then I would continue writing the second part of the narrative. This is my next book project, which will serve as a review of a stage that is the most dangerous for the cause of our people and the features of the future, and it will certainly differ because it will go beyond being a testimony from memory, from the beginning of the Oslo stage until today, and an evaluation of the course of the negotiations, the role of the national authority, and the disintegration of the national movement, and this requires a politically appropriate time. And chronologically, as well as accurate scientific documentation. Some of the material is available in memory and documented information, and I will start writing soon.
Source: Maan News Agency