The Palestinian leadership…to where?

You are under fire from your own constituents for failing to rebuild Gaza nearly two years since the last war with Israel in July 2014; schools and courts are often closed, medical facilities are shuttered, sewage runs through the streets, piles of garbage are everywhere, government employees are staying home, and political disagreements often lead to murder.

The recent civil servant strike was not against Israel, and no Israeli flag was set on fire. 50,000 workers in Gaza went on strike because they cannot make ends meet due to your failure to pay them their hard-earned salaries since 2014, but you blame Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to cover your squandering of funds.

In times of relative quiet, you indoctrinate, train, and prepare the young to fight another senseless war against Israel, and in times of war you use women and children as human shields, boasting about your heroism while you live in hiding to protect your skin.

You seem to relish ruling over dispirited and dispossessed people. They will recover once you have gone, leaving behind a legacy of delusional leaders who betrayed their people and vanished in disgrace.

Internal political discord

You are duplicitous politicians, like the blind leading the blind; both of you have your own personal schemes, surrounding yourselves with morally tainted 'Yes men' who are vested in your warped ideology that has for decades been misleading every Palestinian.

You suffer from mutually maligning political discord between you and within your armed wings, and you refuse to reconcile with the PA, whose President (Abbas) remains the legitimate head of the Palestinian national movement and the de facto head of state.

With chaos among the leadership, you move from one crisis to another, leading by your whims while trying to outwit each other.

Abbas recognizes the urgent need to make peace with Israel to give the people a new horizon and the prospect of better days, but you steer against the public's powerful desire for peace in order to serve your bankrupt political agenda, sabotaging peace further and further each passing day.

By now, you should recognize that time is not on your side; you must reconcile with the reality of Israel and accept the centrality of peace with Israel based on a two-state solution.

Like your counterpart the PA, you must embrace the Arab Peace Initiative (API), which provides you with the political cover to negotiate peace without losing face. The API calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders (with some land swaps), which you, Mr. Meshal, have endorsed on a number of occasions.

Based on prior negotiations, there are several critical common denominators in the API that a majority of Palestinians and Israelis share, including a realistic solution to the refugee problem and the future status of Jerusalem, which the entire Arab and Muslim world supports.