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Israel's dead end
by Edward
Said
The earth is closing on us,
pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass
through." Thus Mahmoud Darwish, writing in the aftermath of the PLO's
exit from Beirut in September 1982. "Where should we go after the last
frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?"
Nineteen years later, what was
happening then to the Palestinians in Lebanon is happening to them in
Palestine. Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began last September, Palestinians
have been sequestered by the Israeli army in no fewer than 220
discontinuous little ghettos, and subjected to intermittent curfews often
lasting for weeks at a stretch. No one, young or old, sick or well, dying
or pregnant, student or doctor, can move without spending hours at
barricades, manned by rude and deliberately humiliating Israeli soldiers.
As I write, 200 Palestinians are unable to receive kidney dialysis,
because for "security reasons" the Israeli military won't allow them to
travel to medical centres. Have any of the innumerable members of the
foreign media covering the conflict done a story about these brutalised
young Israelis conscripts, trained to punish Palestinian civilians as the
main part of their military duty? I think not.
Yasser Arafat was not allowed
to leave his office in Ramallah to attend the emergency meeting of the
Islamic Conference foreign ministers on 10 December in Qatar; his speech
was read by an aide. The airport 15 miles away in Gaza and Arafat's two
ageing helicopters had been destroyed the previous week by Israeli planes
and bulldozers, with no one and no force to check, much less prevent, the
daily incursions of which this particular feat of military daring was a
part. Gaza Airport was the only direct port of entry into Palestinian
territory, the only civilian airport in the world wantonly destroyed since
World War II. Since last May, Israeli F-16s (generously supplied by the
US) have regularly bombed and strafed Palestinian towns and villages,
Guernica-style, destroying property and killing civilians and security
officials (there is no Palestinian army, navy, or air force to protect the
people); Apache attack helicopters (again supplied by the US) have used
their missiles to murder 77 Palestinian leaders, for alleged terrorist
offences, past or future. A group of unknown Israeli intelligence
operatives have the authority to decide on these assassinations,
presumably with the approval on each occasion of the Israeli Cabinet, and
more generally, that of the US. The helicopters have also done an
efficient job of bombing Palestinian Authority installations, police as
well as civilian. During the night of 5 December, the Israeli army entered
the five-storey offices of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in
Ramallah and carried off the computers, as well as most of the files and
reports, thereby effacing virtually the entire record of collective
Palestinian life. In 1982, the same army under the same commander entered
West Beirut and carted off documents and files from the Palestinian
Research Centre, before flattening its structure. A few days later came
the massacres of Sabra and Shatila.
The suicide bombers of Hamas
and Islamic Jihad have of course been at work, as Sharon knew perfectly
well they would be when, after a 10-day lull in the fighting in late
November, he suddenly ordered the murder of the Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu
Hanoud: an act designed to provoke Hamas into retaliation and thus allow
the Israeli army to resume the slaughter of Palestinians. After eight
years of barren peace discussions, 50 per cent of Palestinians are
unemployed and 70 per cent live in poverty on less than $2 a day. Every
day brings with it unopposable land grabs and house demolitions. The
Israelis even make a point of destroying trees and orchards on Palestinian
land. Although five or six Palestinians have been killed in the last few
months for every one Israeli, the old warmonger has the gall to keep
repeating that Israel has been the victim of the same terrorism as that
meted out by Bin Laden.
The crucial point in all this
is that Israel has been in illegal military occupation since 1967; it is
the longest such occupation in history and the only one anywhere in the
world today. This is the original and continuing violence against which
all the Palestinian acts of violence have been directed. On 10 December,
for instance, two children aged three and 13 were killed by Israeli bombs
in Hebron, yet at the same time an EU delegation was demanding that
Palestinians curtail their violence and acts of terrorism. Five more
Palestinians were killed on 11 December, all of them civilian, victims of
helicopter bombings of Gaza's refugee camps. To make matters worse, as a
result of the 11 September attacks, the word "terrorism" is being used to
blot out legitimate acts of resistance against military occupation, and
any causal or even narrative connection between the dreadful killing of
civilians (which I have always opposed) and the 30-plus years of
collective punishment is proscribed.
Every Western pundit or
official who pontificates about Palestinian terrorism needs to ask how
forgetting the fact of the occupation is supposed to stop terrorism.
Arafat's great mistake, a consequence of frustration and poor advice, was
to try to make a deal with the occupation when he authorised "peace"
discussions between scions of two prominent Palestinian families and
Mossad in 1992 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge.
These discussions only discussed Israeli security; nothing at all was said
about Palestinian security, nothing at all, and the struggle of his people
to achieve an independent state was left to one side. Indeed, Israeli
security to the exclusion of anything else has become the recognised
international priority, which allows General Zinni and Javier Solana to
preach to the PLO while remaining totally silent on the occupation. Yet
Israel has scarcely gained more from these discussions than the
Palestinians have. The Israeli mistake has been to imagine that by conning
Arafat and his coterie into interminable discussions and tiny concessions,
it would get general Palestinian quiescence. Every official Israeli policy
thus far has made things worse rather than better for Israel. Ask
yourself: is Israel more secure and more accepted now than it was 10 years
ago?
The terrible and, in my
opinion, stupid suicide raids against civilians in Haifa and Jerusalem
over the weekend of 1 December should of course be condemned, but in order
for these condemnations to make any sense, the raids must be considered in
the context of Abu Hanoud's assassination earlier in the week, along with
the killing of five children by an Israeli booby trap in Gaza -- to say
nothing of the houses destroyed, the Palestinians killed throughout Gaza
and the West Bank, the constant tank incursions, the endlessly grinding
away of Palestinian aspirations, minute by minute, for the past 35 years.
In the end, desperation only produces poor results, none worse than the
green light George W and Colin Powell seem to have given Sharon when he
was in Washington on 2 December (all too reminiscent of the green light
Alexander Haig gave Sharon in May 1982). With their support went the usual
ringing declarations turning the people under occupation and their
hapless, inept leader into worldwide aggressors who had to "bring to
justice" their own criminals even as Israeli soldiers were systematically
destroying the entire Palestinian police structure which was supposed to
do the arresting!
Arafat is hemmed in on all
sides, an ironic result of his bottomless wish to be all things
Palestinian to everyone, enemies and friends alike. He is at once a
tragically heroic figure and a bumbling one. No Palestinian today is going
to disavow his leadership, for the simple reason that, despite all his
wafflings and mistakes, he is being punished and humiliated because he is
a Palestinian leader, and in that capacity, his mere existence
offends purists (if that's the right word) like Sharon and his American
backers. Except for the health and education ministries, both of which
have done a decent job, Arafat's Palestinian Authority has not been a
brilliant success. Its corruption and brutality stem from Arafat's
apparently whimsical, but actually very meticulous, way of keeping
everyone dependent on his largesse; he alone controls the budget, and he
alone decides what goes on the front pages of the five daily newspapers.
Above all, he manipulates and sets up against each other the 12 or
14 -- some say 19 or 20 -- independent security services, each of which is
structurally loyal to its own leaders and to Arafat at the same time,
without being able to do much more for its people than arrest them when
enjoined to do so by Arafat, Israel and the US. The 1996 elections were
designed for a term of three years, but Arafat has shilly-shallied with
the idea of calling new ones, which would almost certainly challenge his
authority and popularity in a serious way.
He and Hamas have had a well-publicised
entente of sorts since the latter's June bombings: Hamas wouldn't go after
Israeli civilians if Arafat left the Islamic parties alone. Sharon killed
off the entente with Abu Hanoud's assassination: Hamas retaliated and
there was nothing to stop Sharon squeezing the life out of Arafat, with
American support. Having destroyed Arafat's security network, his jails
and offices, and having physically imprisoned him, Sharon made demands
that he knows can't be met (even though Arafat, with a few cards up his
sleeve, has managed, astonishingly, to half comply). Sharon stupidly
believes that, having dispensed with Arafat, he can make a series of
independent agreements with local warlords, and divide 40 per cent of the
West Bank and most of Gaza into several non-contiguous cantons whose
borders would be controlled by the Israeli army. How this is supposed to
make Israel more secure eludes most people, but not, alas, the ones with
the relevant power.
That still leaves out three
players, or groups of players, two of whom, in his racist way, Sharon
gives no weight to. First, the Palestinians themselves, many of whom are
far too intransigent and politicised to accept anything less than
unconditional Israeli withdrawal. Israel's policies, like all such
aggressions, produce the opposite effect to the one intended: to suppress
is to provoke resistance. Were Arafat to disappear, Palestinian law
provides for 60 days of rule by the speaker of the Assembly (an
unimpressive and unpopular Arafat hanger-on called Abul-'Ala, much admired
by Israelis for his "flexibility"). After that, a succession struggle
would ensue between other Arafat cronies such as Abu Mazen and two or
three of the leading (and capable) security chiefs -- notably, Jibril
Rajoub of the West Bank and Mohamed Dahlan in Gaza. None of these people
has Arafat's stature or anything resembling his (perhaps now lost)
popularity. Temporary chaos is the likely result: we must face it,
Arafat's presence has been an organising focus for Palestinian politics,
in which millions of other Arabs and Muslims have a very large stake.
Arafat has always tolerated,
indeed supported a plurality of organisations which he manipulates in
various ways, balancing them against each other so that no one
predominates except his Fatah. New groups are emerging, however; secular,
hardworking, committed, dedicated to a democratic polity in an independent
Palestine. Over these groups, the Palestinian Authority has no control at
all. But it should also be said that no one in Palestine is willing to
accede to the Israeli-US demand for an end to "terrorism," although it
will be difficult to draw a line in the public mind between suicidal
adventurism and actual resistance to the occupation, as long as Israel
continues its bombings and oppression of all Palestinians, young and old.
The second group are the
leaders in the rest of the Arab world who have a vested interest in
Arafat, despite their evident exasperation with him. He is cleverer and
more persistent than they are, and he knows the hold he has on the popular
mind in their countries, where he has cultivated two separate Arab
constituencies, the Islamists and the secular nationalists. Both feel
under attack, even though the latter has hardly been noticed by the vast
number of Western experts and Orientalists who take Bin Laden -- rather
than the much larger number of Muslim and non-Muslim secular Arabs who
detest what Bin Laden stands for and what he has done -- to be the
paradigmatic Muslim. In Palestine for example, recent polls have found
that Arafat and Hamas are now about equal in popularity (both hover
between 20 and 25 per cent), with the majority of citizens favouring
neither. (But, even as he has been cornered, Arafat's popularity has shot
up.) The same division, with the same significant plague-on-
both-your-houses majority, exists in the Arab countries, where most people
are put off either by the corruption and brutality of the regimes or by
the reductiveness and extremism of the religious groups -- most of which
are more interested in the regulation of personal behaviour than they are
in matters like globalisation or producing electricity and jobs.
Arabs and Muslims might well
turn against their own rulers were Arafat seen as being choked to death by
Israeli violence and Arab indifference. So he is necessary to the present
landscape. His departure will only seem natural when a new collective
leadership emerges among a younger generation of Palestinians. When and
how that will happen is impossible to tell, but I'm quite certain that it
will happen.
The third group of players
includes the Europeans, the Americans and the rest, and frankly, I don't
think they know what they're doing. Most of them would gladly be rid of
Palestine as a problem and, in the spirit of Bush and Powell, would not be
unhappy if the vision of a Palestinian state were somehow realised, as
long as someone else did it. Besides, they would find functioning in
Middle East difficult if they didn't have Arafat to blame, snub, insult,
prod, pressure, or give money to. The mission of the EU and General Zinni
seems senseless and will have no effect on Sharon and his people. The
Israeli politicians have concluded correctly that the Western governments
are, in general, on their side and they can continue what they do best,
regardless of Arafat and his people's fruitless begging to negotiate.
The slowly emerging group of
Palestinians, both in Palestine and in the Diaspora, is beginning to learn
and use tactics that solidly place a moral onus on the West and Israel to
address the issue of Palestinian rights, not just of the Palestinian
presence. In Israel, for example, an audacious Knesset member, the
Palestinian Azmi Bishara, has been stripped of his parliamentary immunity
and will soon be on trial for incitement to violence. Why? Because he has
long stood for the Palestinian right of resistance to occupation, arguing
that, like every other state in the world, Israel should be the state of
all of its citizens, not just of the Jewish people. For the first time, a
major Palestinian challenge on Palestinian rights is being mounted
inside Israel (not on the West Bank), with all eyes on the
proceedings. At the same time, the Belgian attorney-general's office has
confirmed that a war crimes case against Sharon can go forward in that
country's courts. A painstaking mobilisation of secular Palestinian
opinion is underway and will slowly overtake the Palestinian Authority.
The moral high ground will soon be reclaimed from Israel, as the
occupation becomes the focus of attention and as more and more Israelis
realise that there is no way to continue indefinitely a 35-year
occupation.
Besides, as the US war against
terrorism spreads, more unrest is almost certain; far from closing things
down, US power is likely to stir them up in ways that may not be
containable. It's no mean irony that the renewed attention on Palestine
came about because the US and Europeans need to maintain an anti-Taliban
coalition.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2001 Al-Ahram weekly & Edward Said
by the same author:
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