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The price of Camp David
by Edward
Said
One year ago, Bill Clinton
convened a meeting of the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships at the
presidential retreat in Camp David to finalise a peace agreement that he
thought they were ready for. I emphasise Clinton's role in all this
because it was characteristic of the man that Palestinians had placed
their hopes in, had greeted in Ramallah and Gaza like a hero, had deferred
to on every occasion, that he rushed together the two opponents, locked
together for decades in a convoluted struggle, to be able to say for his
own selfish purposes that he had engineered an historic achievement.
Yasser Arafat didn't want to
go. Ehud Barak was there mainly to extract a promise from the Palestinians
that would end the conflict and, more important, would end all Palestinian
claims against Israel (including the right of return for refugees) once
the Oslo process had been concluded. Clinton had always been an
opportunist first and last, a Zionist second, and a clumsy politician
third. The Palestinians were the weakest party; they were badly led and
poorly prepared. Clinton surmised that because his (and Barak's) terms in
office were ending, he could produce a peace ceremony based on Palestinian
capitulation, a ceremony that would forever enshrine his presidency by
erasing the memory of Monica Lewinsky and the developing scandal of Marc
Rich's pardon.
This great plan, of
course, failed completely. Even American sources recently made
public supported the Palestinian argument that Barak's "generous
offer" was neither an offer nor generous. Robert Malley, a member of
Clinton's White House-based National Security Council, has published
a report on what took place and, although it is critical of
Palestinian tactics during the Camp David summit, it shows clearly
that Israel wasn't even close to offering what the Palestinians'
legitimate national aspirations required. But Malley spoke out in
July 2001, a full year after the Camp David summit ended and well
after Israel's well-oiled propaganda machine launched the by now
standard chorus that Arafat had mischievously rejected the best
imaginable Israeli offer. This chorus was abetted by Clinton's
repeated claim that, whereas Barak was courageous, Arafat was only
disappointing. And so the thesis has lodged in public discourse ever
since, to Palestine's immense detriment. Unnoticed was the
observation made by an Israeli information flunky that after Camp
David and Taba, no Palestinians played a consistent role
disseminating a Palestinian version of the debacle. Thus, Israel has
had the field to itself, with results in exploitation and backlash
that have been virtually incalculable.
I was well aware of the
damage being done to the Intifada as a result of Israel's
self-portrayal as a rejected peace-lover last autumn and winter. I
made phone calls to members of Arafat's entourage urging them to
convince their leader of how Israel was making use of Palestinian
silence, which it quickly established was the verbal equivalent of
Palestinian violence. Word reached me that Arafat was adamant, that
he refused to address his people, the Israelis, or the world, no
doubt hoping that fate or his own miraculous powers of
non-communication would affect the Israeli disinformation campaign.
In any event, my urging did absolutely no good. Arafat and his
numerous lackeys remained ineffective, uncomprehending, and of
course largely silent.
We must blame ourselves
first of all. Neither our leadership nor our intellectuals seem to
have grasped that even a brave anti-colonial uprising cannot on its
own explain itself, and that what we (and the other Arabs) regard as
our right of resistance can be made to seem by Israel like the most
unprincipled terrorism or violence. In the meantime, Israel has
persuaded the world to forget its own violent occupation and its
terrorist collective punishment -- to say nothing of its unstoppable
ethnic cleansing -- against the Palestinian people.
Indeed, we have made
matters worse for ourselves by allowing the inadequate Arafat to
come and go as he pleases on the question of violence. Every human
rights document ever formulated entitles a people to resist military
occupation, the destruction of homes and property, and the
expropriation of land for the purpose of settlements. Arafat and his
advisers seem not to have understood that when they blindly entered
Israel's unilateral dialectic of violence and terror -- verbally
speaking -- they had in essence given up their right of resistance.
Instead of making clear that any relinquishing of resistance had to
be accompanied by Israel's withdrawal and/or equal relinquishing of
its occupation, the Palestinian people were made vulnerable by their
leadership to charges of terror and violence. Everything Israel did
became retaliation. Everything Palestinians did was either violence
or terror or (usually) both. The resulting spectacle of a war
criminal like Sharon denouncing Palestinian "violence" has been
little short of disgusting.
Another consequence of
Palestinian ineptitude was that it let the so-called Israeli peace
activists off the hook, turning that sad collection of camp-
followers into silent allies of Israel's lamentable Sharon-led
government. A few brave and principled Israelis like some of the New
Historians -- Jeff Halper, Michel Warschavsky, and their groups --
are an exception. How many times have we heard the official
"peaceniks" rant on about their "disappointment" at Palestinian
"ingratitude" and violence? How often does anyone tell them that
their role is to pressure their governments to end the occupation
and not (as they always have) to lecture a people under occupation
about their magnanimity and disappointed hopes? Would any but the
most reactionary French person in 1944 be tolerant of German pleas
to be "reasonable" about Germany's occupation of France? No, of
course not. But we tolerate the hectoring Israeli "peace" proponents
to go on and on about how "generous" Barak has been, without
reminding them that every one of their leaders has made his name as
a killer or oppressor of Arabs, from 1948 to the present. Ben-Gurion
presided over the Nakba; Eshkol over the conquests of 1967; Begin
over Deir Yassin and Lebanon; Rabin over the bone-breaking of the
first Intifada and, before that, over the evacuation of 60,000
unarmed Palestinian civilians from Ramleh and Lydda in 1948; Peres
over the destruction of Qana; Barak personally took part in the
assassination of Palestinian leaders; Sharon led the massacre of
Qibya and was responsible for Sabra and Shatila. The real role of
the Israeli peace camp is to do what it has never seriously done,
which is to acknowledge all of that and to prevent further outrage
by the Israeli army and air force against a dispossessed and
stateless people, not to be free and easy with advice to
Palestinians or to express hopes and disappointment to the people
whom Israel has oppressed for over half a century.
But once the Palestinian
leadership had forsaken its principles and pretended that it was a
great power capable of playing the game of nations, it brought on
itself the fate of a weak nation, with neither the sovereignty nor
the power to reinforce its gestures or its tactics. So hypnotised is
Mr Arafat with his supposed standing as a president, jumping from
Paris to London to Beijing to Cairo on one pointless state visit
after another, that he has forgotten that the weapons the weak and
the stateless cannot ever give up are its principles and its people.
To occupy and unendingly defend the high moral ground; to keep
telling the truth and reminding the world of the full historical
picture; to hold on to the lawful right of resistance and
restitution; to mobilise people everywhere rather than to appear
with the likes of Chirac and Blair; to depend neither on the media
nor the Israelis but on oneself to tell the truth. These are what
Palestinian leaders forgot first at Oslo and then again at Camp
David. When will we as a people assume responsibility for what after
all is ours and stop relying on leaders who no longer have any idea
what they are doing?
Source:
by the same author:
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