Personal Info
- Country of residence: Portugal
Information
Bassam Shakaa was born in Nablus in 1930 and studied in its schools. In 1948, he joined the Arab Liberation Army and the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, but he officially left the party in 1961 due to his disappointment with the secession that ended the United Arab Republic, which had united Egypt and Syria. He was sentenced in absentia to three years in prison, but he sought refuge in Syria and became a political refugee there from 1959 to 1965. His election, along with the municipal council, in April 1976, and the election of most municipalities in the West Bank, was a pivotal event that led to the decision of the Arab Summit Conference held in Rabat in 1974, which stipulated that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was the sole representative of the Palestinian people everywhere.
The fighter Bassam Shakaa: A man and a cause / By: Ali Aqla Arsan
Abu Nidal is a resistance fighter from the Mountain of Fire. The radiance of his spirit is from the radiance of his land, the determination of his people, and his steadfastness to principle, that renewed, inspiring, and brilliant steadfastness, despite his long and bitter suffering. He draws strength and impetus from the justice of the Palestinian cause to which he dedicated himself, from the option of resistance that he chose, and from the blood of the martyrs who illuminate the paths and renew the covenant to struggle until liberation. He says all of this and belongs to it. As I knew him closely, he is a man of position, principle, vision, and methodology. He was devoted to Palestine and completely dedicated to it, and he saw it only from the perspective of his broader and deeper belonging to his Arab homeland and his ancient Arab nation, with its great goals and legitimate aspirations.
Bassam Shaka’a lived through the details of the Palestinian cause from its beginning, and it took root in his veins until it became the warp and weft of his life. The right of return and the right to self-determination for this patient, persevering, struggling, and steadfast people on their historical land of Palestine became his title, the lifeblood of his life, the focus of his activity, and his highest concerns. He is a man who does not exploit his people's cause for personal gain, nor does he believe that negotiations with the occupying Zionist enemy, based on concessions, can offer no solution. He argues that the Palestinian side is defenseless, lacking the means of resistance to serve as a shield, a fortress, support, and strength. We share his belief that the solution lies in the liberation of all of Palestine, from the river to the sea. The Zionist occupier desires all of Palestine, from the river to the sea, and is working to exterminate its people both physically and morally. The appropriate response to this racist, genocidal Zionist project is not surrender, handing over Palestine as a "Jewish" state, and allowing the occupier to implement its plans with impunity, according to a phased approach imposed by the occupier and its allies on the Palestinians by all means necessary, including their fragmentation and isolation from their Arab homeland. This also applies to a nation that the enemy and its Western allies are pushing to view the issue as a Palestinian-Israeli conflict, rather than an Arab-Zionist, and implicitly Jewish, struggle. Israel is doing all this under the guise of... Negotiations and the claim of working for "peace" while all the facts indicate that the racist enemy is settling, Judaizing, and strengthening its presence with comprehensive force, and by possessing all kinds of nuclear, strategic and conventional weapons. This clearly means that it is laying the foundation for aggression and the continuation of the occupation, and that there is no coexistence or peace with a racist occupying entity with these characteristics, goals, methods and means.
This was the main concern of Shaka’a, the essence of his call, and the focus of his attention. He worked to make the Palestinian people aware of these facts and to confront them with a firm, continuous, and growing national and patriotic strategy. This is the concern of the fighter Bassam Shaka’a, the basis of his thinking, the focus of his struggle and planning, and the essence of his principled positions, as I see it. It is the reason for his refusal to cooperate with the occupation and its American allies, and the reason for his disagreements with Palestinian leaders and figures who have different visions from his, and choices that differ from his choices.
Our great fighter’s approach to the solution he sees and accepts for a just cause, whose history his people have written in tears and blood, is resistance until victory, the complete liberation of the land, and the triumphant return of the people to their historical homeland, to exercise with dignity and competence their right to self-determination in complete freedom, on the soil of their liberated homeland. And the tireless work to make the entire Palestinian people stand firmly behind this option, and make it, through sacrifices and perseverance, the option of the entire Arab nation.
This is essentially the perspective for which the strikes, popular uprisings, sit-ins, revolutions, and Palestinian intifadas have been based since the ominous Balfour Declaration. It is what the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded upon, what the Palestinian National Charter established, and what many Palestinians and Arabs adhere to. Its validity is confirmed day after day, step by step, for anyone who follows the approach of the Palestinian and Arab agreements, negotiations, and initiatives that abandoned resistance, which some of its leaders condemned and described as terrorism at one time, and which some of them even besieged and fought. Long and bitter experience has proven that negotiations with the Zionist entity will not return a homeland to its people, nor a dispersed people to their homeland. They will not provide effective solutions to a just cause as vast, profound, and multifaceted as the Palestinian cause, nor will they achieve lasting and stable peace in the region. Such negotiations are merely a sedative for the people, a waste of time, and a dissipation of the nation's will. For under their shadow and while awaiting them, resolve dies, men are corrupted, the loyalty of Arab states to the core issue falters, settlement expansion and Judaization encroach upon Jerusalem and most of the West Bank, and the Zionist enemy continues to develop its forces, capabilities, and Nazi-like methods, while seizing land, Judaizing Jerusalem, and killing the people. Thus, negotiations only result in further suffering for the Palestinian people, further concessions to the Zionist enemy, and the entrenchment of the settler-colonial project in the region—a project that targets all the pillars of the Arab nation: its identity, its progress, its advancement, and its very existence.
From this perspective, the Palestinian cause was a national cause and a national responsibility, and it must remain so, because the war machine possessed by the occupying enemy, and what it is working to strengthen in terms of military capabilities, nuclear and non-nuclear, is greater than the capabilities of the Palestinian people alone to achieve liberation, defeat the occupation and restore Palestine. It needs the strength of the nation. For this and for other social, historical, cultural and ideological reasons, etc., the Palestinian cause remains a national cause, and the responsibility for its liberation falls on the shoulders of the Arab nation, and at its forefront the Palestinian people. This is how the cause has been since its inception, and this is how it should remain: a central issue in the Arab struggle to confront the colonial-Zionist scheme that established "Israel" as an advanced stronghold of Western colonialism, in its old and new forms. It is the most severe target of the colonial projects aimed at striking at unity, liberation, will and freedom, social progress and the comprehensive Arab civilizational renaissance.
This is how I see and interpret the vision of this Palestinian oak, Bassam Shakaa, regarding the cause of his people and nation. This is how I perceive his steadfastness amidst the upheavals that have afflicted and continue to afflict the Palestinian and Arab situations, since the fate of the Salvation Army, which Abu Nidal joined in 1948, and which he echoed with his pioneering mentor, the poet, Abdul Rahim Mahmoud, with fervor and enthusiasm:
I will carry my soul in my palm and throw it into the abyss of destruction.
Either a life that pleases friends, or a death that enrages enemies.
Thus, from that glorious history of struggle to the ill-fated Oslo Accords, and what preceded them under Sadat, and what followed in Wadi Araba in terms of agreements and treaties, and the resulting collective Arab policies and initiatives, all grant the occupying Zionist enemy collective Arab recognition, normalization, and guaranteed security, while offering the Palestinians nothing but empty promises and further wounds and suffering.
I became acquainted with the great Arab fighter Bassam Shaka’a during our meetings at conferences, seminars, and gatherings that brought us together in Damascus, Tripoli, Beirut, and perhaps other Arab capitals. This was within the framework of our being members of the General Secretariat of the Arab Revolutionary Dialogue Forum, the Arab National Conference, and the Arab Islamic Conference. I also attended the Palestinian National Conference, which was held in Damascus and which he chaired, as well as the Executive Committee that was formed to follow up on the implementation of its resolutions. My knowledge of him and my appreciation for him increased through following some of his writings and his tireless activity despite a situation that would have hindered many men from taking action. This is in addition to following his news and his positions on the day he was sentenced and exiled from Palestine, which remained in his heart and he never left it. He remained in the Levant, of which Palestine is the southwestern part. I was drawn to him since he became mayor of Nablus in the April 1976 elections, and I was affected by his exposure to an attack by the “secret Zionist terrorist organization of racist Zionists” on June 2, 1980. His car was blown up, resulting in the amputation of his legs. The perpetrators of the terrorist attack that led to the amputation of the legs of Bassam Shaka'a and his colleague Karim Khalaf, both mayors in the West Bank, were a group of Jewish terrorists, including Hagai Segal, who, as of 2018, was the director of "Marsad Al-Oula," which he and the newspaper "Israel Hayom" funded with gambling money from billionaire Sheldon Adelson. This was also mentioned by Odeh Bisharat in his article "Sponsored by a One-Night Terrorist," published in Haaretz on March 5, 2018.
My visions, opinions, and national positions, and those of Al-Shak’a, were identical regarding the Palestinian issue and many other Arab issues. We met even more in agreeing on the “centrality of national action,” and in the fundamental vision of its necessity and strategy, and the importance of organizing and continuing it, and raising it to the highest level, without affecting its human dimensions. Therefore, I agree with him when he says: “All the fundamental and political data that any people on the globe are guided by indicates that their rise is linked to the national direction because it is the national, geographical, and historical framework that brings together and unites the members of the nation.” I would add to that the moderate ideological dimension, in its organic interpenetration that constitutes the identity.
And that is an entry point to awareness, strength, renaissance, and liberation—liberating Arab decision-making and will from forms of external hegemony, especially American, Western, and Zionist, and from all kinds of helplessness, fear, deviation, collusion, conspiracy, and weakness or absence of a future political vision. It is also an entry point to establishing awareness and belonging to diminish destructive sectarianism and the narrow, self-centered, and "inward-looking" national perspective of "me first," which ultimately means "neither me, nor you, nor our nation" at the very end! The emergence of a liberation project in this sense, structure, and comprehensiveness can only be achieved by liberating the Arab individual, shackled by chains and fetters, and by liberating Arab politics from despotism and the centering around the "deified" individual, from corruption, pretense, and subservience, and by moving it from the circle of seeking protection from others to seeking protection from the people, from entering into the mantle of hegemony to relying on justice and the people, and getting rid of opportunism, extremism, and swollen individualism. The condition for this and its main entry point is the economic liberation of the Arab individual, and his liberation from ignorance, and from all forms of enslavement, injustice, oppression, corruption, and depravity, and from everything that paralyzes his creative initiatives, capabilities, and creativity, and everything that makes him incapable of confronting the challenges of the age, science, technology, and development, and everything that binds him to backwardness and narrow, sick, and diseased loyalties, whatever they may be, and whatever their type or color.
Abu Nidal's (Bassam Shaka'a's) stances had a profound impact on segments of his people. He planted blessed seeds in Palestine and in the Palestinian refugee camps, which yielded resistance fighters. He and his dedicated colleagues, the mayors of the West Bank, and the assassination attempts, persecution, and oppression they endured at the hands of the Zionist occupation, influenced the Palestinian popular uprisings and deepened the roots of resistance and its chosen path. Their stances and struggle against the Zionist enemy's plan, then embodied in the self-rule project, were not merely symbolic, nor a rejection of slogans. Rather, they rejected all applications of that approach and its repercussions on the ground and society. It was a stand against attempts at separation and isolation, and a defense of the spirit and awareness of belonging. Their formation of the National Guidance Committee to resist the occupation's projects and to embody the unity of the people's struggle and its leadership on the ground contributed to the establishment of an unprecedented Palestinian popular movement. This movement was the key to the First Intifada, which paved the way for subsequent widespread Palestinian popular mobilization, leading to the formation of Resistance movements and organizations, both peaceful and armed, have affirmed their ability and firm foothold in the Palestinian struggle arena, and in responding to the ongoing aggression of the Zionist entity. Thus, the Palestinian resistance approach, which rejects surrender and is parallel to the approach of negotiation devoid of any effective leverage or pressure, has been re-established in the face of an enemy that understands only the language of force.
Celebrating Abu Nidal, the oak of Nablus, the glow of Mount Gerizim, and the spirit of the proud Palestinian people, Bassam Shakaa, is a celebration of a symbol of the Palestinian struggle, a tribute to a figure, a generation, and a cause, and a reinforcement of the resistance option and its approach, as that option is the path to liberation and return. In this, too, there is a reminder of the national dimension of the Palestinian cause and the national responsibility for it, and an enrichment of the Palestinian memory, which is full of symbols, martyrs, fighters, and resistance members on the ground and in the prisons of the Zionist enemy and its Nazi detention camps. This celebration, before and after all of that, is a declaration with the voice of reason, conscience, and spirit, which is chanted by throats and written in the blood of martyrs and in words of stances, a declaration that says: “Palestine is Arab from the river to the sea, and it belongs to its original and authentic people, no matter how long their exile from it and its estrangement from them may be, and that victory is coming… coming… coming… and resistance is an approach, a choice, a decision, and a title for a people, and a joy in victory.”
May God heal Abu Nidal “Bassam Al-Shak’a” and grant him recovery. Greetings to him, a long-time companion and partner in honorable struggle. Congratulations to him on his people’s celebration of him as a symbol of the year 2013. Glory to the martyrs of Palestine, its people, its resistance fighters, its strugglers, and its symbols, and to the martyrs of the Arab nation on its path. Freedom for the detainees and prisoners.
It is a revolution until victory, with God's help.
Source
Achievements and Awards
- Years in active
: From
To