We often forget
to listen to the views of those who oppose us and why. We do not
have to agree to be able to listen.
October 12,
2000 DOUBLE STANDARDS
By: Edward
Said Misreported and hopelessly flawed from the start, the Oslo
peace process has entered its terminal phase - of violent confrontation,
disproportionately massive Israeli repression, widespread Palestinian
rebellion and great loss of life, the vast majority of it Palestinian.
Ariel Sharon's visit to Haram al-Sharif on September 28 could
not have occurred without Ehud Barak's concurrence. How else could
the paunchy old war criminal have appeared there with a thousand
soldiers guarding him? Barak's approval rating rose from 20% to
50% after the visit, and the stage seems set for a national unity
government ready to be still more violent and repressive.
The portents
of this disarray, however, were there from the 1993 start. Labour
and Likud leaders alike made no secret of the fact that Oslo was
designed to segregate the Palestinians in non- contiguous enclaves,
surrounded by Israeli-controlled borders, with settlements and
settlement roads punctuating and essentially violating the territories'
integrity, expropriations and house demolitions proceeding inexorably
through the Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak administrations
along with the expansion and multiplication of settlements (200,000
Israeli Jews added to Jerusalem, 200,000 more in Gaza and the
West Bank), military occupation continuing and every tiny step
taken toward Palestinian sovereignty - including agreements to
withdraw in minuscule, agreed-upon phases - stymied, delayed,
cancelled at Israel's will.
This method
was politically and strategically absurd, even suicidal. Occupied
East Jerusalem was placed out of bounds by a bellicose Israeli
campaign to decree the intractably divided city off limits to
Palestinians and to claim it as Israel's 'eternal, undivided capital'.
The 4m Palestinian refugees - now the largest and longest existing
such population anywhere - were told that they could forget about
any idea of return or compensation.
With his
own corrupt and stupidly repressive regime supported both by Israel's
Mossad and the CIA, Yasser Arafat continued to rely on US mediation,
even though the US peace team was dominated by former Israeli
lobby officials and a president whose ideas about the Middle East
were those of a Christian fundamentalist Zionist with no exposure
to or understanding of the Arab-Islamic world. Compliant, but
isolated and unpopular Arab chiefs (especially Egypt's President
Mubarak) were compelled humiliatingly to toe the American line,
thereby further diminishing their eroded credibility at home.
Israel's priorities were always put first, as was its bottomless
insecurity and its preposterous demands. No attempt was made to
address the fundamental injustice done when Palestinians as a
people were dispossessed in 1948.
Behind the
peace process were two unchanging Israeli/American presuppositions,
both of them derived from a startling incomprehension of reality.
First was that given enough punishment and beating over the years
since 1948, Palestinians would ultimately give up, accept the
compromised compromises Arafat did in fact accept, and call the
whole Palestinian cause off, thereafter excusing Israel for everything
it has done. Thus, for example, the 'peace process' gave no considered
attention to immense Palestinian losses of land and goods, none
to the links between past dislocation and present statelessness,
while as a nuclear power with a formidable military, Israel nevertheless
continued to claim the status of victim and demand restitution
for genocidal anti-Semitism in Europe. Incongruously, there has
still been no official acknowledgement of Israel's (by now amply
documented) responsibility for the tragedy of 1948, even as the
US went to war in Iraq and Kosovo on behalf of other refugees.
But one can't force people to forget, especially when the daily
reality was seen by all Arabs as endlessly reproducing the original
injustice.
Second, after
seven years of steadily worsening economic and social conditions
for Palestinians everywhere, Israeli and US policymakers persisted
(stupidly, I think) in trumpeting their successes, excluding the
UN and other interested parties, bending the disgracefully partisan
media to their wills, distorting the actuality into ephemeral
victories for 'peace'. With the entire Arab world up in arms over
Israeli helicopter gunships and heavy artillery demolishing Palestinian
civilian buildings, with almost 100 fatalities and almost 2,000
wounded (including many children) and with Palestinian Israelis
up in arms against their treatment as third-class, non-Jewish
citizens, the misaligned and skewed status quo is falling apart.
Isolated in the UN and unloved everywhere in the Arab world as
Israel's unconditional champion, the US and its lame duck president
have little to contribute any more.
Neither does
the Arab and Israeli leadership, even though they are likely to
cobble together another interim agreement. Most shocking has been
the total silence of the Zionist peace camp in the US, Europe
and Israel. The slaughter of Palestinian youths goes on and this
band of supposed peace-lovers either backs Israeli brutality or
expresses disappointment at Palestinian ingratitude. Worst of
all is the US media, completely cowed by the fearsome Israeli
lobby, with commentators and anchors spinning distorted reports
about 'crossfire' and 'Palestinian violence' that eliminate the
fact that Israel is in military occupation and that Palestinians
are fighting it, not 'laying siege to Israel', as the ghastly
Mrs. Albright put it. While the US celebrates the Serbian people's
victory over Slobodan Milosevic, Clinton and his minions refuse
to see the Palestinian insurgency as the same kind of struggle
against injustice.
My guess
is that some of the new Palestinian Intifada is directed at Arafat,
who has led his people astray with phony promises, and maintained
a battery of corrupt officials holding down commercial monopolies
even as they negotiate incompetently and weakly on his behalf.
Some 60% of the public budget is disbursed by Arafat to bureaucracy
and security, only 2% to the infrastructure. Three years ago his
own accountants admitted to an annual Dollars 400m in disappeared
funds. His international patrons accept this in the name of the
'peace process', certainly the most hated phrase in the Palestinian
lexicon today.
An alternative
peace plan and leadership is slowly emerging among Israeli, West
Bank, Gaza and Diaspora Palestinians. No return to the Oslo framework;
no compromise on the original UN resolutions (242, 338, and 194)
'mandating the Madrid conference in 1991; removal of all settlements
and military roads; evacuation of all the territories annexed
or occupied in 1967; boycott of Israeli goods and services. A
new sense may actually be dawning that only a mass movement against
Israeli apartheid (similar to the South African variety) will
work. Certainly it is sheer idiocy for Barak and Albright to hold
Arafat responsible for what he no longer fully controls. Rather
than dismissing the new framework being proposed, Israel's supporters
would be wise to remember that the question of Palestine concerns
an entire people, not an aging and discredited leader. Besides,
peace in Palestine/Israel can only be made between equals once
the military occupation has ended. No Palestinian, not even Arafat
can really accept anything less.
|
