Part 2 (1/2)

Time to Turn to the Other Front.

Until the intifada is understood in the West as a civilian uprising against colonial oppression, the Palestinians have no chance of obtaining equality and justice.

During the past several weeks, the Israeli government has vigorously pursued policies on two fronts, one on the ground, the other abroad. The first is vintage Sharon or, for that matter, vintage Israeli military. The idea is to hit Palestinians in every way possible, making their lives unbearable and so confined and strangulated as to make them feel that they can no longer endure remaining there. The rationale for this, as the Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha has studied it in three important books, is that Zionism has always wanted more land and fewer Arabs; from Ben-Gurion to Rabin, Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu, Barak, and now Sharon, there is an unbroken ideological continuity in which the Palestinian people is seen as an absence to be desired and fought for.

This is so obvious and, at the same time, so carefully obscured from the international (and even regional) public's view as to require only some additional remarks here. The core idea is that if Jews have all the rights to ”the land of Israel,” then any non-Jewish people there are ent.i.tled to no rights at all. It is as simple as that, and as ideologically unanimous. No Israeli leader or party has ever considered the Palestinian people as a nation or even as a national minority (after the ethnic cleansing of 1948). Culturally, historically, humanly, Zionism considers Palestinians as lesser or inferior. Even s.h.i.+mon Peres, who occasionally seems to speak a humane language, cannot bring himself ever to consider the Palestinians as worthy of equality. Jews must remain a majority, own all the land, define the laws for Jews and non-Jews alike, guarantee immigration and repatriation for Jews alone. And though all sorts of inconsistencies and contradictions exist (e.g., why should there be democracy, as it is called, for one people and not for another in a ”democratic” state?), Israel pursues its policies- ethnocentric, exclusivist, intolerant-regardless. No other state on earth except Israel could have maintained so odiously discriminatory a policy against a native people only on religious and ethnic grounds, a policy that forbids native people to own or keep land or to exist free of military repression, but for its amazing international reputation as a liberal, admirable, and advanced country.

This brings me to the second front of Israeli policy, which must be seen therefore through a double lens. Even as it besieges Palestinian towns using medieval techniques like ditches and total military blockades, it can do so with the aura of a besieged victim of dangerous, exterminationist violence. Israeli soldiers (called a ”defense force”) bomb Palestinian homes with helicopter guns.h.i.+ps, advanced missiles, and tank barrages; Israeli soldiers kill 400 civilians, cause 12,000 casualties, bring economic life down to a 50 percent poverty level and 45 percent unemployment; Israeli bulldozers destroy 44,000 Palestinian trees, demolish houses, create fortifications that make movement impossible; Israeli planners build more settlements and settlement roads-all this while maintaining the image of a poor, defenseless, and terribly threatened people. How? By a concerted international, especially American, public relations campaign, as cynical as it is effective.

Last week (March 2001) alone Sharon, Peres, and Avraham Burg (Knesset speaker) were in the United States to consolidate the Israeli image as righteously fighting off terrorist violence. The three of them circulated through one influential public platform after another, gaining support and sympathy for Israel's policies every minute. In addition, the media announced that the Israeli government had hired two public relations firms to continue promoting its policies through advertis.e.m.e.nts, concerted lobbying efforts, and Was.h.i.+ngton congressional liaisons. News of the Palestinian intifada has gradually disappeared from the media. After all, how long can ”violence,” which seems to be directed neither at long-standing injustice (such as military occupation and collective punishment) nor at a particular policy (such as Israel's adamant refusal to regard Palestinian claims as having any merit whatever), keep hold of reporters whose every deviation from an accepted pro-Israeli editorial policy is punished? It's not only that reporters have no great story to report (such as a ready narrative of Palestinian liberation), it is also that Israel has never been firmly indicted for years and years of ma.s.sive human rights abuses against the entire Palestinian population.

Senator George Mitch.e.l.l's commission of inquiry as well as Mary Robinson's similar set of human rights experts, comprising a distinguished group that includes Richard Falk of Princeton, will doubtless come to similar conclusions. I have read the Robinson report, and it is unequivocally d.a.m.ning of Israel's cruelty and disproportionate military response to what is in effect an anticolonial civilian uprising. But one can be certain that few people will see or be affected by these excellent reports. Israel's public relations machine, in the United States especially, will make certain of that.

Such propaganda campaigns in the United States are far more effective there than they are in the United Kingdom, for instance. Robert Fisk, the excellent Middle East reporter for the Independent, has complained of attacks on him and his paper by the British Israeli lobby, but he continues to write fearlessly. And when the Canadian media tyc.o.o.n Conrad Black tried to stop or censor criticism of Israel in the Daily Telegraph or the Spectator, both of which he owns, a chorus of his own writers and others, like Ian Gilmour, were able to respond to him in his own papers.

This could not happen in the United States, where leading newspapers and journalists for the most part simply do not permit pro-Palestinian editorial comment at all. The New York Times has had only two or three columns like that, as against dozens of ”neutral” or pro-Israel commentaries. A similar pattern obtains in every major U.S. newspaper. Thus the average reader is inundated with dozens upon dozens of articles about ”violence,” as if that violence were somehow equal to, or worse than, Israel's attacks with helicopters, tanks, and missiles. If it is sadly true that one Israeli death appears to be worth many Palestinian deaths on the ground, then it is also true that for all their actual suffering and daily humiliation, Palestinians in the media seem scarcely more human than the c.o.c.kroaches and terrorists to which they have been compared.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Palestinian intifada is unprotected and ineffective so long as it does not appear to be a struggle for liberation in the West. The United States is Israel's strongest supporter at $5 billion a year, and the one thing that Israelis have long understood is the direct value of their propaganda, which in no uncertain terms allows them to do anything at all and still retain an image of serene justice and confident right. As a people, we Palestinians have to do what the South African antiapartheid movement did, that is, gain legitimacy in Europe and especially in the United States, and consequently delegitimize the apartheid regime. The whole principle of Israeli colonialism must be similarly discredited in order for any progress in Palestinian self-determination to be made.

This task can no longer be postponed. During the 1982 siege of Beirut by Sharon's armies, a substantial group of Palestinian businessmen and intellectuals met in London. The idea was to help alleviate Palestinian suffering and also to set up an information campaign in the United States: Palestinian resistance on the ground and the Palestinian image were seen as two equal fronts. But over time the second effort was totally abandoned, for reasons I still cannot completely understand. You don't have to be Aristotle to connect the propaganda framework turning Palestinians into ugly, fanatical terrorists with the ease with which Israel, performing horrendous crimes of war on a daily basis, manages to maintain itself as a plucky little state fighting off extermination, and maintaining unconditional U.S. support paid in full by an uncomprehending American taxpayer.

This is an intolerable situation, and until the Palestinian struggle resolutely focuses on the battle to represent itself as a narrative surviving valiantly against Israeli colonialism, we have no chance at all of gaining our rights as a people. Every stone cast symbolically in support of equality and justice must therefore be interpreted as such and not misrepresented as either violence or a blind rejection of peace. Palestinian information must change the framework, must take responsibility for it, and must do so immediately. There has to be a unified collective goal.

In a globalized world, in which politics and information are virtually equivalent, Palestinians can no longer afford to s.h.i.+rk a task that, alas, the leaders.h.i.+p is simply incapable of comprehending. It must be done if the loss of life and property is to be stopped, and if liberation, not unending servitude to Israel, is the real goal. The irony is that truth and justice are on the Palestinian side, but until Palestinians themselves make that readily apparent-to the world in general, to themselves, to Israelis and Americans in particular-neither truth nor justice can prevail. For a people that has already endured a century's injustice, surely a proper politics of information is quite possible. What is needed is a redirected and refocused will to victory over military occupation and ethnically and religiously based dispossession.

Al-Ahram, March 29April 4, 2001.

Al-Hayat, April 4, 2001.

CHAPTER NINE.

These Are the Realities.

Now in its seventh month [April 2001], the intifada has reached the most cruel and, for Palestinians, the most suffocating stage. Israel's leaders are clearly determined to do what they have always done, which is to make life impossible for this unjustly suffering people, and Sharon knows no limits to what he is willing to do, all of it in the name of a ”principle” accepted by the United States, which is to refuse to do anything while ”violence” continues. This therefore seems to ent.i.tle Sharon to lay siege to an entire population of 3 million people, even as he and s.h.i.+mon Peres, surely the most dishonest and hypocritical of the lot of them, go around the world complaining of Palestinian terrorism. So let us not waste any time wondering how it is that they get away with such despicable tactics. The fact is that they do and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Having said and admitted that, however, we have no reason to accept the consequences pa.s.sively. Let us therefore look calmly at the situation from a tactical and a strategic point of view. This is what we find: The Palestinian leaders.h.i.+p that signed on to Oslo and the ruinous principle of U.S. tutelage, as well as all sorts of miserable concessions (including an ongoing settlement drive), is simply incapable of doing anything more than it is now doing, which is to attack Israel verbally and signal to it under the table that it is willing to return to the old (and useless) negotiations in more or less exactly the same way. Beyond that, it has little power and less credibility. Arafat's sheer genius at surviving has carried him as far as he can go, and even though the end of the line must be obvious to him, he has no intention of letting go. The illusion that he is Palestine and Palestine him stubbornly persists; so long as he is alive he will go on believing that, no matter what happens. The further difficulty is that all of his theoretical successors are lesser men and are likely to make matters worse.

U.S. policy is unaffected by the Palestinian plight, no matter how bad that is. Bush is as pro-Israeli as Clinton, and the Israeli lobby in the United States and Europe is as merciless in its lies and misinformation as it has always been, despite years of effort on the part of the Arabs to try to get close both to the U.S. administration and (surprisingly enough) to the Israeli lobby. And yet there is a great deal of untapped sympathy for the Palestinian cause in the United States and Europe, but there has never been any Palestinian campaign (among African Americans, Latino Americans, most of the churches that are not part of the fundamentalist churches of the South, the academic community, and even, as proved by a remarkable statement by several hundred rabbis supporting Palestinian rights in a paid advertis.e.m.e.nt in the New York Times, among Jewish Americans, many of whom are as aghast at Sharon and Barak as we are) to gain this const.i.tuency in a systematic way.

The Arab states are much less likely to be of more than marginal tactical help to the Palestinians than before. All of them have direct interests that tie them to U.S. policy; none of them has the capacity to be a strategic ally for the Palestinians, as the recent Amman summit proved conclusively. On the other hand, there is a wide gap separating rulers from ruled in the Arab world, and this is encouragement enough for the Palestinian cause, if it is directed toward emanc.i.p.ation and the end of occupation.

The Israelis will not stop their settlement policy nor their besieging of Palestinian life in general. Despite his bl.u.s.ter, Sharon is not a very intelligent or even competent man. He has relied on force and deception throughout his career, flirting with crime and terror most of the time, using it whenever he thought he could get away with it. We have never addressed the Israeli public-particularly those citizens disturbed by current developments, which in effect condemn Israel to unending strife- nor, unfortunately, do we now have anything to say, for example, to the hundreds of reservists who have refused military service during the intifada. There is a const.i.tuency inside Israel that we must find a way to engage, exactly as the ANC made it a point of policy to engage whites in the struggle against apartheid.

The Palestinian situation itself is remediable, since it is human beings who make history and not the other way around. There are enough young Palestinians all over the world and enough older ones who are thoroughly and totally exasperated, dismayed, and sick to heart at a leaders.h.i.+p that has gone from one disaster to another without ever being accountable, without ever telling the truth, and without ever being clear about its goals and aims (except for its own survival). As the late Eqbal Ahmad once said, the PLO has historically been very flexible strategically and extremely rigid tactically. In effect, this aphorism is exactly reflected in policy and performance since 1993. Arafat began by accepting UN Resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis of negotiations (strategic), then changed flexibly to accepting one strategic modification after another during the ensuing years; settlements were to be stopped, then they increased, and he accepted that, too. The same with Jerusalem, and the return of all territories. But Arafat never wavered in his tactics, which were to stay in the peace process and rely on the Americans no matter what happened. Strategically flexible, tactically rigid.

Therefore, we now need something that the situation demands but that all the actors resist: a real statement of goals and objectives. These have to include first and foremost the end of Israeli military occupation and the end of settlements. No other way can lead to peace and justice for Palestinians or for Israelis. There is no such thing as an ”interim” peace (as Oslo had it all along, to the tremendous detriment of the Palestinian people). Nor are there some rights for Palestinians and not others. That is unacceptable nonsense. One set of laws and rights, one set of goals and objectives. On that basis a new Palestinian peace movement can be organized that must include Israeli and non-Israeli Jews, especially heroic individuals and groups like Rabbis for Human Rights and the movement led by Jeff Halper to end house demolitions.

What then are the objectives for that movement? First of all, an organized movement focused on Palestinian liberation and coexistence, in which everyone is part of a whole, instead of an idle spectator waiting for another Saladin or for orders to come down from above. There has to be concentration on the two other societies whose impact on Palestine is central. One is the United States, which provides Israel with the support without which the actual events taking place today in Palestine wouldn't be possible. After all, the U.S. taxpayer supplies Israel directly with $3 billion in aid, plus a constant resupply of weapons (like the helicopters now bombarding defenseless Palestinian towns and villages) that amounts to a total of almost $5 billion. This aid must be stopped or radically modified. And second, Israeli society, which has gone on either pa.s.sively endorsing racist policies against ”inferior” Palestinians or has actively supported it by working in the army, Mossad, and s.h.i.+n Bet to implement this humanly unacceptable and immoral policy. The wonder of it is that we have stood it for so long, as have many Israeli citizens who need to be involved in changing it.

Although every human rights declaration in the world today (including the UN Charter) gives a people the right to resist by any means when it is under military occupation, and the right for refugees to return to their homes, it is also the case that suicide bombings in Tel Aviv serve no purpose, political or ethical. They too are unacceptable. There's a huge difference between organized disobedience, or ma.s.s protest, on the one hand, and simply blowing up yourself and a few innocents, on the other. This difference has to be stated clearly and emphatically and engraved in any serious Palestinian program once and for all.

The other principles are fairly straightforward. Self-determination for both peoples. Equal rights for both. No occupation, no discrimination, no settlements. Everyone is included. Whatever negotiations are entered into must be on that basis, which must clearly be stated at the outset, and not left unsaid or implied as they were in the U.S.-sponsored Oslo process. The UN has to be the framework. In the meantime, it is up to us as Palestinians, Arabs, Jews, Americans, and Europeans to protect the unprotected and to end war crimes like collective punishment, bombing, and persecution, all of which Palestinians suffer from every day.

These are the realities today, at the heart of which is the enormous asymmetry, the tremendous disparity in power between Israel and the Palestinians. So we must capture the high moral ground immediately, by political means still at our disposal-the power to think, plan, write, and organize. This is true for Palestinians in Palestine, in Israel, in exile. No one is exempt from some obligation to our emanc.i.p.ation. It is sad that the present leaders.h.i.+p seems totally incapable of understanding that and therefore must stand aside, which at some point it most certainly will.

Al-Ahram, April 1925, 2001.

Al-Hayat, April 17, 2001.

CHAPTER TEN.

Thinking About Israel.

The word Israel has a quite unusual resonance in English, especially in the United States. To hear politicians repeat the familiar mantra about supporting Israel and keeping it strong is to realize that an actual country or state is not at issue, but rather an idea or talisman of some sort, one that far transcends the status of every other state or country in the world. A few weeks ago Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly declared that she was donating $1,250 to Israeli settlers so that they could buy more gas masks and helmets, all this, she added solemnly, without a trace of irony or of the macabre humor that the situation deserved, as part of her commitment to keeping Israel strong and secure. Naturally enough-at least for those of us who live in the United States-this episode was reported as if it were an unremarkable, as opposed to a bizarre or preposterous, occurrence.

Newspapers like the New York Times and Was.h.i.+ngton Post are filled with columnists such as William Safire and Charles Krauthammer who in any other context would seem completely crazy. Both have taken to crowing over Sharon's tenure as head of Israel's government, not because he has shown a propensity to brute force and, on the whole, stupidly destructive actions, but because they argue with a completely straight face that he is the only figure capable of showing Palestinians the kind of disciplinary reasoning that will set them straight. He proposed magnanimously to give them 42 percent of the West Bank, or maybe a bit more, plus keeping all the settlements for Israel and ringing the Palestinian territories with permanent Israeli fences: this is reasonable and good as a way of solving the intifada. He said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post that after all, ”we” have 1 million Arabs in Israel; why can't ”they” (the Palestinians) tolerate a few hundred thousand Israeli settlers? And one more thing about Sharon's American defenders. What is fascinating is how they arrogate to themselves as Americans the right to tell Israel what it should be doing and thinking for its own good.

Israel has therefore been internalized as the private personal fantasy of every American supporter, or so the appearances seem to suggest. Yet American Jews have a special relations.h.i.+p that ent.i.tles them to perhaps a greater degree of involvement in telling Israel what it should be, in particular-and this is the most amazing feature of what I am discussing-on matters of security. No one bothers to note that Israeli citizens are the ones doing the fighting and planning, not long-distance diaspora Jews. It's all part of the domestication of Israel that keeps it away from history and the consequences of its actions. When you venture that Israel is laying up hatred and vindictiveness for itself in every Arab breast by virtue of its bombing and collective punishment, you are told in response that you are being anti-Semitic. Justice and wisdom don't enter into it, only what purports to be (in the case of Israel's Arab critics) an insensate, deeply ingrained hatred of Jews.

It is therefore little short of miraculous that despite its years of military occupation, Israel is never identified with colonialism or colonial practices. That seems to me the greatest failing of all, both of Palestinian information and discourse and even of Israeli dissent, when they undertake to be critical of Israeli government policy. There is an excellent a.n.a.lysis of ”How Far Will Sharon Go?” in the current New York Review of Books (dated May 17, 2001) by Avishai Margalit, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University, which is totally unlike American a.n.a.lyses of the situation in that (a) it minces no words about Israeli collective punishment against Palestinians; and (b) it doesn't attempt to dress up the situation with any fancy language about Israeli security, an appalling habit of intellectuals who feel the need to talk as if they are generals in order to take themselves seriously. My only criticism of Margalit is that he doesn't come straight out and call for the end of military occupation and for an Israeli acknowledgment of injustices done against the Palestinian people. That's what intellectuals are supposed to do, rather than go on about politics from the point of view of politicians. Be that as it may, what is very important about Margalit's writing here is that it demystifies Israel's aura, which has been slowly built up and carefully structured over the years so as to eliminate Palestinians from the picture altogether.

I think therefore that what any Palestinian peace effort must accomplish is first of all to connect Israel with its deeds, and to focus on ending those practices, rather than trying to make a deal with them or to have one brokered. One of the gravest flaws in Oslo was for the PLO leaders.h.i.+p (i.e., Yasir Arafat) to have ignored what Israel had done as an occupying force, and even to have ignored the fact of occupation itself; one can't make a deal with occupation, which is like cancer in that it continues to expand, unless it is identified, surrounded, and then attacked. Israel's history proves it. For those who say that Israel must be accepted, the only sane response is to ask which Israel, since the country has never had internationally declared borders but continues to tinker endlessly with its own size. No other country since World War II has been in such a position, and there is no reason to let that go on indefinitely. Peace can only be made on the basis of full withdrawal and the end of occupation. These are concrete rather than general matters, which often divert us from our goal as a people seeking self-determination.

Whereas I can understand the Palestinian leaders.h.i.+p's desire to do something now to try to end an obviously draining war of attrition, I also think it is grossly immoral and stupid simply to resume the Oslo negotiations as if nothing has happened. In September 1996 a mini-intifada broke out after Israel had provocatively opened a tunnel under the Al-Haram Al-Sharif, but that ended with many Palestinian deaths and nothing changed either on the ground or in the negotiations. Under Barak, as Margalit correctly notes, settlement-building increased along with every imaginable Palestinian difficulty. What is the point of the PLO continuing the unendurable sufferings of its people just for Mr. Arafat to be invited back to the White House? There is no point at all, but what surprises me is the Palestinian Authority's brazen att.i.tude of simply continuing with its talk of resuming negotiations as if four hundred people had not died and thirteen thousand had never been wounded. Do these leaders have no dignity at all, no sense of propriety or even of their own history?

It would therefore seem that Israel's official callousness to the Palestinians has been internalized, not only by extreme American Zionists, the dreadful Ariel Sharon, and the Israeli political establishment, but also by the Palestinian leaders.h.i.+p. In his April 27, 2001, Jerusalem Post interview, Sharon kept repeating that the intifada consists only of ”terrorism” and therefore reduces all Palestinian action, except ending resistance and rearresting Islamic activists, to that and that only. For Arafat to negotiate peace with Sharon without removing the word ”terrorism” from their vocabulary is tantamount to accepting the equation of the Palestinian struggle against occupation with terrorism, yet so far as I know, no concentrated effort is being made through information and addressing Israelis and Americans to restore reality to discourse. The logical a.s.sumption seems to be that Israel = military occupation = Palestinian resistance. So what must become central to Arab efforts now is to disrupt and even destroy the equation, not simply to put forward abstract arguments about the right of return for the Palestinian refugees.

Sharon's reentry into politics has brought with it a quite conscious effort on his part to s.h.i.+ft the scene back to 1948, to attempt to restage Israel's conflict with the Palestinians as a battle for Israel's very survival. He seems to have had no difficulty in finding support for this atavistic, extremely regressive view among some (but obviously not all) Israelis, who have responded to the unstated idea that Jews can never live free of persecution and hostility. To an outsider, such a notion seems both improbable and untenable. For surely having established in many respects a powerful and successful state, Israeli Jews would seem now in an excellent position to be both confident and magnanimous in their att.i.tude toward the victims they have so wrongfully treated. But now they continue to reenact the original situation in which they first dispossessed Palestinians, thereby reexperiencing the hostility and consternation that they themselves caused in others, feeling, however, that the trauma was theirs, not the Palestinians'. Sharon exploits this terrible syndrome, as dramatic an example of the neurosis Freud called the compulsion to repeat as one can find: one returns again and again to the scene of one's original trauma, allowing oneself to remain in the grip of a powerful neurotic fear without availing oneself of the solace either of reason or of reality.

Israeli policies therefore have to appear as they are, rather than as their propagandists wish them to seem. For this, we need the combined efforts of Israeli dissenters as well as Arab intellectuals and ordinary citizens. For not only have the corruptions of language and unexamined history infected the peace process fatally, but they seem to have entered the very thinking of leaders whose first responsibility is to the people they lead rather than to their enemies or their supposed patrons (in this case, the United States). The right lessons should be drawn from Colin Powell's remarks to Israel about its invasion of Gaza. He was basically condemning Palestinian resistance, then condemning the Israeli response to that as disproportionate; this is very far from the truth, of course, and it prolongs the distortions of perception that have crippled our arguments as an unjustly wronged people. If we are seen only as disrupters of Israel's presence-which, falsely portrayed as a beleaguered and victimized state, continues to be the image by which our resistance is judged-then we can only aspire to a mutilated solution and an even more ridiculously skewed kind of peace process. It would therefore seem to me that the first political task of any negotiations that stem from the intifada is to labor mightily to correct the initial error and restore Israel to its proper place as a mature colonial power collectively abusing an entire people against the laws both of war and of peace. Even the obdurate and hopelessly disorganized Palestinian leaders.h.i.+p must be persuaded of this elementary reality before it goes on to do more damage than it has already.