Whining and dining - By Hani Shukrallah (AL Ahram 2/3/01)
"The time has come to listen to the people," sneered the Arabs' erstwhile great
white hope, Shimon Peres, to Labour Party opponents of a "national unity"
government under Sharon. A rowdy meeting of the Labour Party's Central Committee has
confirmed by a two-thirds majority that it will be joining Sharon's government,
responsible for the key portfolios of foreign affairs, defence and settlements
(euphemistically called "infrastructure") among a total of eight seats in a
28-man cabinet. Peres, who has accepted the post of foreign minister, will be bonding with
bomb-the-High-Dam-and-"transfer"-the-Palestinians psychopaths, Lieberman and
Ze'evi, among 20 other representatives of Israel's extreme right wing, all under the
leadership of Sharon, "the butcher."
And the "people" (at least those who went to the polls) have overwhelmingly
chosen as their leader a war criminal, whose fundamental message is that Israel's survival
is contingent upon the shedding of Palestinian blood.
The matter is settled, then. Everybody seems to recognise that Labour Zionism, whose one
remaining distinction from the right was its allegedly dovish position on Arab-Israeli
peace, is in its death throes. The Palestinians are to be confronted by a politically
monolithic Israel, which has effectively released itself from all obligations established
by eight years of the Oslo peace process and has unilaterally halted negotiations with the
Palestinians; its foremost mandate is to crush the Intifada, whatever it takes.
With the Intifada entering its sixth month and its cost in Palestinian blood and suffering
rising by the minute, such dramatic changes in Israel, one would expect, should have
encouraged some original thinking among the Palestinian leadership -- the sense that the
need for a creative response of some sort was, at the very least, felt. No such luck. The
PA's one response is to hang on to a lie, and our credulity is to be tested to the point
of total idiocy. What was patently impossible to achieve in Camp David in July, in New
York in September, and via Clinton's last-ditch "bridging proposals" in
December/January, was, we are now being told, "almost" achieved in six days of
negotiations in Taba, held on the very eve of Israeli elections. The Intifada was raging.
Israel was busy assassinating the leading cadres of its "peace partners."
Helicopter gunships, artillery, tanks and dumdum bullets continued to sow death and
destruction. The Palestinians' homes were being bulldozed, land they had been cultivating
for centuries was being destroyed and their towns and villages were subject to a deadly
siege. Meanwhile, Barak and Arafat were engaged in a last desperate, and futile, effort to
forestall a Sharon electoral victory. Taba, as almost everyone recognised even then, was
nothing but a bungled PR exercise.
What was achieved in Taba, anyway? The two sides set down, in familiarly vague terms,
their areas of agreements and disagreements. The first amounted to the Palestinians
conceding "a limited state" whose alleged sovereignty is exercised always
"in coordination" with Israel; conceding, in principle, that there will be no
full withdrawal from the West Bank; that there will be some sort of shared control over
Arab East Jerusalem; and that Israel will annex the major settlement blocs in occupied
Palestinian territories, effectively cutting the fledgling Palestinian state into three
Israeli-besieged sections. The second amounted to the Palestinians objecting to the extent
and form of withdrawals, settlement annexation and shared control of Jerusalem. Some sort
of "language" was apparently reached with respect to the right of return, but
nothing about implementation. In short, nothing.
And, as per standard peace process logic, the Palestinian side, clinging to "the
letter and spirit" of the latest almost-agreement, established their concessions as a
new ceiling for any future negotiations.
Now it's Powell's turn to be told that Arafat, if he agrees to the latest set of
concessions demanded of him, risks being assassinated by his own people. This time around,
the argument is being put forward with respect to Sharon's position that a final-status
agreement should be given up in favour of a long-term interim agreement. Indeed, the
Palestinian leader is now saying, it is not a question of if he will be assassinated, but
when. I don't know which of Arafat's bungling advisers fed him that assassination line.
Whoever it is, he should be arrested and investigated, preferably by the notorious Force
17, for an Israeli agent. And even if found innocent, he should still be shot for the
crime of extreme stupidity.
The argument is shameful. It purports to scare the Americans and the Israelis into
contemplating the chaos that would beset Palestinian society upon Arafat's demise. But it
is testimony to an administration that is at once extremely authoritarian and totally
inept, threatened by collapse the moment the leader passes away, whether by an act of God
or man. And it is so easily answerable. Arafat's Israeli and American negotiators could
just as well promise him elite guards -- the best trained CIA and Mossad operatives -- to
protect him day and night. And the EU can always foot the bill. In public, they could
berate him, as Barak used to do, by citing the example of such "true leaders" as
Rabin and Sadat, who paid for peace with their lives. And what sort of a freedom fighter
is so afraid for his life anyway?
It was the Intifada that brought down the Oslo peace process. The Israelis now recognise
that Oslo is over, and so do the Americans. It is about time that the Palestinian
leadership did. And the "symbol of the Palestinian people" should not whine, at
least in public. |
