A Satirical Guidebook to Independence

Dear Kosovo, Uyghur, Catalunya, Tibet, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Chechnya, the Basques Country, Quebec, Bavaria, Corsica, Kurdistan, Puerto Rico, and Scotland, if you wish to gain your independence or greater autonomy, here are the steps you ought to follow:

First, make sure you get some really rich leaders like Yasser Arafat, who was an Egyptian multi-billionaire who adopted an Iraqi keffiyeh as a symbol of a new national identity whose name is rooted in a colonial Roman term (Palestine). Or you can bring in more billionaires like Ismael Haniyeh or any other one of the Hamas leaders who stay in luxury hotels in Doha. And although they have billions in their pockets, you shall follow their “successful” footsteps and starve your population while you store weapons in kitchens and kindergartens and with the aid money that you could invest in the public sector, you shall dig a massive underground tunnel network that’s bigger than the London Underground. Build your main military headquarters under the biggest hospital you have. Teach your kids the Jihadi ideology from a very young age and store Kalashnikovs in their classrooms. Smuggle artillery from the Russian, North Korean, and Iranian friends you acquired over the years, and with those missiles aim to kill as many civilians and cause as much damage as possible in your neighboring state. But do yourself a favor and take inspiration from Hamas, who were just rewarded with a state, and launch them from schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. This way, when your enemy fires back at your rocket launchers (who lack the basic soldier’s discipline, nor the dignity of wearing a uniform), you can use the retaliation as leverage and blame your enemy for targeting civilian infrastructure despite the fact that they used humanitarian precautions like dropping leaflets with the exact time and date of the attack, making personal phone calls, and sending text messages to warn civilians to evacuate combat zones.

If you want to be really efficient, never compromise on the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to help your population, like other underdeveloped regions or states in the world. Rather, form a separate UN agency that is created especially for you (like UNRWA) and make sure that your refugee status is so unique and distinct that you’re the only ethnic group or ideology in the world that, even when seventy percent of your population is born in your self-governing land, they will still be recognized as refugees.

Once you gain sufficient influence, impact, and support on the used-to-be impartial global international organization, such as the United Nations – you have two options. Either you sit back, observe, and watch the rising wave of  delegitimization, or you can sail along, side by side, on the same anti-Israeli boat that unites nations against the one and only island of inclusiveness, free speech, and democracy in an ocean of theocratic dictatorships and monarchies like those of the Middle East.

When you reach that point of influence, where you can basically do whatever the hell you want – you can start capitalizing on international fundraisers and humanitarian aid and steal goods for your own good, while you leave your people behind. Moreover, you also possess the complete freedom to employ workers from that same broken and corrupted organization and include them in terrorist attacks, just like the 19 UNRWA workers who killed and kidnapped Israelis on October 7th and, of course, got away with it. As the international wave against your enemy intensifies and the universal moral values upon which the organization was built after the Holocaust remain buried deep at the bottom of the ocean, you can get away with just about anything.

Furthermore, never, ever accept a peace agreement deal that does not include wiping out your neighboring state. And while you share borders with other countries, like Gaza shares with Israel and Egypt, choose for yourself one enemy as your scapegoat.

Ultimately, despite your population booming and growing by 200% over the past two decades, do not hesitate to accuse your neighbors of committing a genocide in your territory and apartheid in theirs, even though people of the same religion and culture as yours represent your neighbor’s national parliament.

Here’s a rhetorical question: are there any other nations that are being accused of committing an ethnic cleansing while, at the same time, members of the allegedly persecuted ethnic group hold seats in the accused national government?

Last but not least, to finish the job: plan a barbaric massacre where you invade your enemy’s territory and burn them alive, butcher body parts, invade a music festival and throw grenades at homes and shelters, commit war crimes and break international laws that were set by the very same organization that helped you break them in the first place. Pick up every body you can find, whether it’s dead or alive, including babies or grandparents or women or men that were raped by your barbaric friends, and put them all in the back of your trunk, like Faisal Ali Musalam Naami, an UNRWA social worker who picked up the body of the 21-year-old Israeli Yonatan Samerano and put him on a truck and drove him back to Gaza. Take all of them back to your well-developed underground tunnels we discussed earlier, the tunnels that you operate with electricity and gas that you get from none other than the UN and that you steal from your citizens. And don’t forget to document it all too. Don’t forget to put Go-Pro cameras on and post everything on Facebook Live so you could make your parents proud, exactly like what Hamas did on October 7th – where they filmed themselves massacring and/or kidnapping innocent civilians in their pajamas.

If you finish doing those exact steps and you fear that the state you attacked would retaliate and bomb the hell out of you, you can be safe in your tunnels with the hostages and the dead bodies you took earlier.

As a bonus, negotiate the release of those hostages via a ceasefire deal that includes the return of your imprisoned friends who serve multiple life sentences and have blood on their hands. As your enemy shockingly refuses to release 2,000 bloody terrorists for one innocent child, your foreign policy and your public relations will still be on the winning side though, because the international community will heavily criticize your enemy for rejecting a ceasefire deal.

Only then, above the surface (literally) and amid a war that you initiated, you shall choose to sacrifice the large majority of your population and put them on the frontline. After that, call up some journalists from a corrupted news agency like Al-Jazeera from some corrupt dictatorship like Qatar and ask them to take pictures of their injured bodies so they can go viral. The larger the number of casualties that your terrorist regime (that you label a “Health Ministry”) provides to the international community, the better it fits into your victimization narrative.

To conclude, rather than separating radical Islamist principles from your national law and especially from your foreign policy, or forming a legitimate government that upholds the core values of democracy, which would both ensure the well-being of your population and create a possibility of a co-existing future with your neighbors – when you follow the steps above-mentioned, not only will you get the independence you were hoping for, but you will also gain international support and sympathy!