By Taghreed Saadeh
Political ignorance is the lack of knowledge or understanding of political issues and current events. As circumstances change and positions evolve, the failure to follow developments seriously and accurately and the reliance instead on rumors and misinformation circulating on social media,has produced a hardened form of awareness that is difficult to penetrate. This accurately describes the Palestinian reality today, a condition evident even among those who claim membership in the educated elite.
Many of these individuals are involved in political parties, academia, or the media, yet their positions have remained unchanged despite profound transformations and new realities imposed by events. It is as if politics has become a fixed posture, detached from reading reality or serving the national interest.
In the Palestinian case, one constant remains that the occupation is the enemy. Yet internally, the Palestinian cause is being affected by dangerous changes that cannot be approached with static thinking or ready-made slogans. The existence of an authority on one side and a “resistance” on the other has created a sharp contradiction that has evolved into an internal conflict, without due consideration of the substance of the issue or the broader legitimacy of the national position.
Hamas, which implemented the division, has produced a deep split within Palestinian society and relied on an immense media apparatus foremost among it Al Jazeera and a wide network of funded platforms with financial and organizational ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. This concentrated media discourse has entrenched a single narrative, Hamas as the “resistance,” and its opposite, the Palestinian Authority, as the “collaborator,” leaving no space for debate, deconstruction, or distinction between legitimate criticism and political manipulation.
This critique is not a defense of the Authority; it is a defense of truth and of the national interest that requires safeguarding the Palestinian national project. This distortion is reinforced by those who did not benefit from the Authority and thus turned against it; by those whose interests within it ended; and by those swept along by a torrent of unexamined rumors, magnifying the Authority’s shortcomings while ignoring context amid a near-total absence of any counter-narrative or rational discourse that places matters in their proper balance.
When Dr. Rashid Khalidi stated on a podcast that the Palestinian Authority “receives money from the occupation” a misleading and dangerous characterization we are no longer dealing with a viewpoint, but with the consolidation of a rumor presented as an indisputable fact. More troubling still, this claim was made in response to a question by the host that already assumed the Authority to be “covertly collaborating with Israel,” thereby constructing the entire discussion on a false premise. This is a clear example of how rumor is transformed into a “political truth” shielded from debate.
What we are witnessing today is a form of political stupidity casting its shadow over the public scene, obscurity, a loss of clarity regarding Palestinian interests, circular reasoning, and the pursuit of the loudest discourse rather than the most truthful even when this comes at the expense of the Palestinian cause itself.
The call to “absorb Hamas as part of the people,” while the head of its political bureau abroad, Khaled Meshaal, openly declares acceptance of ruling Gaza separately from the West Bank, claiming the occupation rejects unity, and presents this acceptance to Israel while asking Americans to listen, is a frank call for separation, exactly as occurred in 2007. Yet the left remains silent, as do Hamas’s supporters, secular and religious alike in a troubling silence.
Today, Hamas offers accepts freezing its weapons and whatever else is required in exchange for ruling Gaza, in a context that has become clear as an early alignment since the end of the war on Gaza. Its conduct ruling with fire and iron from the very first moment, carrying out executions of opponents under accusations of collaboration, signals readiness to govern Gaza at any cost, even at the expense of territorial unity and the national project.
Despite what two decades of division have inflicted on the Palestinian cause, forestalling statehood, some still defend a movement that has monopolized the cause for its own interests rather than those of the people, relying on lavish support and external backing from the Muslim Brotherhood, which has lost ground in Egypt and Jordan yet remains entrenched in the Palestinian arena.
This danger is not discussed as it should be, nor confronted with the seriousness it requires. The reason is political ignorance, nourished by social media and reproduced by intellectuals and academics, even within universities. The issue is no longer a divide between the educated and the illiterate; political illiteracy has become a widespread phenomenon that obstructs any rational dialogue.
We are facing a clear polarization “with or against” shaped by propaganda rather than awareness, and by rumor rather than truth. This is why any internal Palestinian progress today is, regrettably, extremely difficult, if not impossible as I have observed through direct conversations with those we commonly describe as the intellectuals.
34 Total Count
