Part 6 (1/2)

What boggles the mind is that no official-no American, Palestinian, Arab, UN, European, or any other-has challenged Israel on this point, which has been threaded through all of the Oslo doc.u.ments, procedures, agreements. Which is why of course after nearly ten years of ”peace negotiations” Israel still controls the West Bank and Gaza. These lands are more directly controlled (owned?) by more than a thousand Israeli tanks and thousands of soldiers today, but the underlying principle is the same. No Israeli leader (and certainly not Sharon and his Land of Israel supporters, who are the majority in his government) has either officially recognized the Occupied Territories as occupied territories or gone on to recognize that Palestinians could or might theoretically have sovereign rights, that is, without Israeli control over borders, water, air, security on what most of the world considers Palestinian land. So to speak about the ”vision” of a Palestinian state, as has become fas.h.i.+onable, is mere vision, alas, unless the questions of land owners.h.i.+p and sovereignty are openly and officially conceded by the Israeli government. None ever has, and if I am right, none will in the near future. It needs to be remembered that Israel is the only state in the world today that has never had internationally declared borders; the only state that is not the state of its citizens but of the whole Jewish people; the only state where over 90 percent of the land is held in trust for the use only of the Jewish people. That it is also the only state in the world never to have recognized any of the main provisions of international law (as argued recently by Richard Falk) suggests the depth and structural knottiness of the absolute rejectionism that Palestinians have had to face.

This is why I have been skeptical about discussions and meetings about peace, which is a lovely word but in the present context simply means that Palestinians will have to stop resisting Israeli control over their land. It is among the many deficiencies of Arafat's terrible leaders.h.i.+p (to say nothing of the even more lamentable Arab leaders in general) that he neither made the decade-long Oslo negotiations ever focus on land owners.h.i.+p, thus never putting the onus on Israel to declare itself const.i.tutively willing to give up t.i.tle to Palestinian land, nor asked that Israel be required to deal with any of its responsibility for the sufferings of his people. Now I worry that he may simply be trying to save himself again, whereas what we really need are international monitors to protect us as well as new elections to a.s.sure a real political future for the Palestinian people.

The profound question facing Israel and its people is this: is it willing juridically to a.s.sume the rights and obligations of being a country like any other, and forswear the kind of impossible land-owners.h.i.+p a.s.sertions for which Sharon and his parents and his soldiers have been fighting since day one? In 1948 Palestinians lost 78 percent of Palestine. In 1967 they lost the last 22 percent. Both times to Israel. Now the international community must lay upon Israel the obligation to accept the principle of real, as opposed to fictional, part.i.tion, and to accept the principle of limiting Israel's untenable extraterritorial claims, those absurd biblically based pretentions, and laws that have so far allowed it to override another people completely. Why is that kind of fundamentalism tolerated unquestioningly? But so far all we hear is that Palestinians must give up violence and condemn terror. Is nothing substantive ever demanded of Israel, and can it go on doing what it has without a thought for the consequences? That is the real question of its existence: whether it can exist as a state like all others, or must always be above the constraints and duties of all other states in the world today. The record is not rea.s.suring.

Al-Ahram, April 1824, 2002.

Al-Hayat, April 21, 2002.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

Crisis for American Jews.

A few weeks ago a vociferous pro-Israel demonstration was held in Was.h.i.+ngton, at roughly the same moment that the siege of Jenin was taking place. All of the speakers were prominent public figures, including several senators, leaders of major Jewish organizations, and other celebrities, each of whom expressed unfailing solidarity with everything Israel was doing. The administration was represented by Paul Wolfowitz, the number-two man at the Department of Defense, an extreme right-wing hawk who has been speaking about ”ending” countries like Iraq ever since last September. Also known as a rigorous hard-line supporter of Israel, in his speech he did what everyone else did-celebrated Israel and expressed total unconditional support for it-but unexpectedly referred also in pa.s.sing to ”the sufferings of the Palestinians.” Because of that phrase, he was booed so loudly and so long that he was unable to continue his speech, leaving the platform in a kind of disgrace.

The moral of this incident is that public American Jewish support for Israel today simply does not tolerate any allowance for the existence of an actual Palestinian people, except in the context of terrorism, violence, evil, and fanaticism. Moreover, this refusal to see, much less hear anything about, the existence of ”another side” far exceeds the fanaticism of anti-Arab sentiment among Israelis, who are of course on the front line of the struggle in Palestine. To judge by the recent antiwar demonstration of sixty thousand people in Tel Aviv, the increasing number of military reservists who refuse service in the Occupied Territories, the sustained protest of (admittedly only a few) intellectuals and groups, and some of the polls that show a majority of Israelis willing to withdraw in return for peace with the Palestinians, there is at least a dynamic of political activity among Israeli Jews. But not so in the United States.

Two weeks ago the weekly magazine New York, which has a circulation of about a million, ran a dossier ent.i.tled ”Crisis for American Jews,” whose theme was that ”in New York, as in Israel, [it is] an issue of survival.” I won't try to summarize the main points of this extraordinary claim except to say that it painted such a picture of anguish about ”what is most precious in my life, the state of Israel,” according to one of the prominent New Yorkers quoted in the magazine, that you would think that the existence of this most prosperous and powerful of all minorities in the United States was actually being threatened. One of the other people quoted even went so far as to suggest that American Jews are on the brink of a second holocaust. Certainly, as the author of one of the articles said, most American Jews support what Israel did on the West Bank, enthusiastically; one American Jew said, for instance, that his son is now in the Israeli army and that he is ”armed, dangerous and killing as many Palestinians as possible.”

Guilt at being well-off in America plays a role in this kind of delusional thinking, but mostly it is the result of an extraordinary self-isolation in fantasy and myth that comes from education and unreflective nationalism of a kind unique in the world. Ever since the intifada broke out almost two years ago, the American media and the major Jewish organizations have been running all kinds of attacks on Islamic education in the Arab world, in Pakistan, and even in the United States. These attacks have accused Islamic authorities, as well as Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority, of teaching youngsters hatred of America and Israel, the virtues of suicide bombing, and unlimited praise for jihad. Little has been said, however, of the results of what American Jews have been taught about the conflict in Palestine: that the land was given to Jews by G.o.d, that it was empty, that it was liberated from Britain, that the natives ran away because their leaders told them to, that in effect the Palestinians don't exist except recently as terrorists, that all Arabs are anti-Semitic and want to kill Jews.

Nowhere in all this incitement to hatred does the reality of a Palestinian people exist, and more to the point, there is no connection made between Palestinian animosity and enmity toward Israel and what Israel has been doing to Palestinians since 1948. It's as if an entire history of dispossession, the destruction of a society, the thirty-five-year-old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, to say nothing of ma.s.sacres, bombardments, expulsions, land expropriations, killings, sieges, humiliations, years of collective punishment, and a.s.sa.s.sinations that have gone on for decades were as nothing, since Israel has been victimized by Palestinian rage, hostility, and gratuitous anti-Semitism. It simply does not occur to most American supporters of Israel to see Israel as the actual author of specific actions done in the name of the Jewish people by the Jewish state, and to connect in consequence those actions to Palestinian feelings of anger and revenge.

The problem at bottom is that as human beings the Palestinians do not exist, that is, as human beings with history, traditions, society, sufferings, and ambitions like all other people. Why this should be so for most but by no means all American Jewish supporters of Israel is something worth looking into. It goes back to the knowledge that there was an indigenous people in Palestine-all the Zionist leaders knew it and spoke about it- but the fact, as a fact that might prevent colonization, could never be admitted. Hence the collective Zionist practice of either denying the fact or, more specially in the United States, where the realities are not so available for actual verification, lying about it by producing a counterreality. For decades it has been decreed to schoolchildren that there were no Palestinians when the Zionist pioneers arrived, and so those miscellaneous people who throw stones and fight occupation are simply a collection of terrorists who deserve killing. Palestinians in short do not deserve anything like a narrative or collective actuality, and so they must be trans.m.u.ted and dissolved into essentially negative images. This is entirely the result of a distorted education, doled out to millions of youngsters who grow up without any awareness at all that the Palestinian people have been totally dehumanized to serve a political-ideological end, namely to keep support high for Israel.

What is so astonis.h.i.+ng is that notions of coexistence between peoples play no part in this kind of distortion. Whereas American Jews want to be recognized as Jews and Americans in America, they are unwilling to accord a similar status as Arabs and Palestinians to another people that has been oppressed by Israel since the beginning.

Only if one were to live in the United States for years would one be aware of the depth of the problem, which far transcends ordinary politics. The intellectual suppression of the Palestinians that has occurred because of Zionist education has produced an unreflecting, dangerously skewed sense of reality in which whatever Israel does, it does as a victim: according to the various articles I have quoted above, American Jews in crisis by extension therefore feel the same thing as the most right-wing of Israeli Jews, that they are at risk and their survival is at stake. This has nothing to do with reality, obviously enough, but rather with a kind of hallucinatory state that overrides history and facts with a supremely unthinking narcissism. A recent defense of what Wolfowitz said in his speech didn't even refer to the Palestinians he mentioned but defended President Bush's Middle East policy.

This is dehumanization on a vast scale, and it is made even worse, one has to say, by the suicide bombings that have so disfigured and debased the Palestinian struggle. All liberation movements in history have affirmed that their struggle is about life, not about death. Why should ours be an exception? The sooner we educate our Zionist enemies and show that our resistance offers coexistence and peace, the less able will they be to kill us at will and never refer to us except as terrorists. I am not saying that Sharon and Netanyahu can be changed. I am saying that there is a Palestinian-yes, a Palestinian-const.i.tuency, as well as an Israeli and American one, that needs to be reminded by strategy and tactics that force of arms and tanks and human bombs and bulldozers are not a solution but only create more delusion and distortion, on both sides.

Al-Ahram, May 1622, 2002.

Al-Hayat, May 19, 2002.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

Palestinian Elections Now.

Six distinct calls for Palestinian reform and elections are being uttered now: five of them are, for Palestinian purposes, both useless and irrelevant. Sharon wants reform as a way of further disabling Palestinian national life, that is, as an extension of his failed policy of constant intervention and destruction. He wants to be rid of Yasir Arafat, cut up the West Bank into fenced-in cantons, reinstall an occupation authority- preferably with some Palestinians helping out-carry on with settlement activity, and maintain Israeli security the way he's been doing it. He is too blinded by his own ideological hallucinations and obsessions to see that this will bring neither peace nor security and will certainly not bring the ”quiet” he keeps prattling on about. Palestinian elections in the Sharonian scheme are quite unimportant.

Second, the United States wants reform princ.i.p.ally as a way of combating ”terrorism,” a catchall of a word that takes no account of history, context, society, or anything else. George W. Bush has a visceral dislike for Arafat and no understanding at all of the Palestinian situation. To say that he and his disheveled administration ”want” anything is to dignify a series of spurts, fits, starts, retractions, denunciations, totally contradictory statements, sterile missions by various officials of his administration, and about-faces with the status of an overall desire, which of course doesn't exist. Incoherent, except when it comes to the pressures and agendas of the Israeli lobby and the Christian right whose spiritual head he now is, Bush's policy consists in reality of calls for Arafat to end terrorism, and (when he wants to placate the Arabs) for someone, somewhere, somehow to produce a Palestinian state and a big conference, and finally for Israel to go on getting full and unconditional U.S. support, including most probably ending Arafat's career. Beyond that, U.S. policy waits to be formulated, by someone, somewhere, somehow. One should always keep in mind, though, that the Middle East is a domestic, not a foreign, policy issue in America and subject to dynamics within the society that are difficult to predict.

All this perfectly suits the Israeli demand, which wants nothing more than to make Palestinian life collectively more miserable and more unlivable, whether by military incursions or by impossible political conditions that suit Sharon's frenzied obsession with stamping out Palestinians forever. Of course, there are other Israelis who want coexistence with a Palestinian state, as there are American Jews who want similar things: but neither group has any determining power now at all. Sharon and the Bush administration run the show.

Third is the Arab leaders' demand, which as far as I can tell is a combination of several different elements, none of them directly helpful to the Palestinians themselves. First is fear of their own populations, who have been witnessing Israel's ma.s.s and essentially unopposed destruction of the Palestinian territories without any serious Arab interference or attempt at deterrence. The Beirut summit peace plan offers Israel precisely what Sharon has refused, which is land for peace, and it is a proposal without any teeth, much less one with a timetable in it. While it may be a good thing to have it on record as a counterweight to Israel's naked belligerence, we should have no illusions about its real intention, which, like the calls for Palestinian reform, are really tokens offered to seething Arab populations who are quite thoroughly sick with the mediocre inaction of their rulers.

Second is the sheer exasperation of most of the Arab regimes with the whole Palestinian problem. They seem to have no ideological problem with Israel as a Jewish state without any declared boundaries, which has been in illegal military occupation of Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank for thirty-five years, or with Israel's dispossession of the Palestinian people. They are prepared to accommodate nicely those terrible injustices if only Arafat and his people will simply either behave or quietly go away.

Third, of course, is the long-standing desire of the Arab leaders to ingratiate themselves with the United States and, among themselves, to vie for the t.i.tle of most important U.S. Arab ally. Perhaps they are simply unaware of how contemptuous most Americans are of them, and how little understood or regarded is their cultural and political status in the United States.

Fourth in the chorus of reform are the Europeans. But they only scurry around sending emissaries to see Sharon and Arafat, they make ringing declarations in Brussels, they fund a few projects-and more or less leave it at that, so great is the shadow of the United States over them.

Fifth is Yasir Arafat and his circle of a.s.sociates, who have suddenly discovered the virtues (theoretically at least) of democracy and reform. I know that I speak at a great distance from the field of struggle, and I also know all the arguments about the besieged Arafat as a potent symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israeli aggression, but I have come to a point where I think none of that has any meaning anymore. Arafat is simply interested in saving himself. He has had almost ten years of freedom to run a petty kingdom and has succeeded essentially in bringing opprobrium and scorn on himself and most of his team; the Authority has become a byword for brutality, autocracy, and unimaginable corruption. Why anyone for a moment believes that at this stage he is capable of anything different, or that his new streamlined cabinet (dominated by the same old faces of defeat and incompetence) is going to produce actual reform, simply defies reason. He is the leader of a long-suffering people, whom in the past year he has exposed to unacceptable pain and hards.h.i.+p, all of it based on a combination of his absence of a strategic plan and his unforgivable reliance on the tender mercies of Israel and the United States via Oslo. Leaders of independence and liberation movements have no business exposing their unarmed people to the savagery of war criminals like Sharon, against whom there was no real defense or advance preparation. Why then provoke a war whose victims will be mostly innocent people when you have neither the military capacity to fight it nor the diplomatic leverage to end it? Having done this now three times (Jordan, Lebanon, West Bank), Arafat should not be given a chance to bring on a fourth disaster.

He has announced that elections will take place in early 2003, but his real concentration is to reorganize the security services. I have long pointed out in these columns that Arafat's security apparatus was always designed princ.i.p.ally to serve him and Israel, since the Oslo accords were based on his having made a deal with Israel's military occupation. Israel cared only about its security, for which it held Arafat responsible (a position, by the way, he willingly accepted as early as 1992). In the meantime Arafat played the fifteen or nineteen or whatever the right number of groups was against one another, a tactic he perfected in Fakahani [the Beirut neighborhood where the PLO had its offices in the 1970s] and that is patently stupid so far as the general good is concerned. He never really reined in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which suited Israel perfectly so that it would have a ready-made excuse to use the so-called martyrs' (mindless) suicide bombings to further diminish and punish the whole people. If there is one thing that has done us more harm as a cause than Arafat's ruinous regime, it is this calamitous policy of killing Israeli civilians, which further proves to the world that we are indeed terrorists and an immoral movement. For what gain, no one has been able to say.

Having therefore made a deal with the occupation through Oslo, Arafat was never really in a position to lead a movement to end it. And ironically, he is trying to make another deal now, both to save himself and to prove to the United States, Israel, and the other Arabs that he deserves another chance. I myself don't care a whit for what Bush, or the Arab leaders, or Sharon says: I am interested in what we as a people think of our leader, and there I believe we must be absolutely clear in rejecting his entire program of reform, elections, and reorganizing the government and security services. His record of failure is too dismal and his capacities as a leader too enfeebled and incompetent for him to try yet again to save himself for another try.

Sixth, finally, is the Palestinian people, who are now justifiably clamoring both for reform and for elections. As far as I am concerned, this clamor is the only legitimate one of the six I have outlined here. It's important to point out that Arafat's present administration as well as the Legislative Council have overstayed their original term, which should have ended with a new round of elections in 1999. Moreover, the whole basis of the 1996 elections was the Oslo accords, which in effect simply licensed Arafat and his people to run bits of the West Bank and Gaza for the Israelis, without true sovereignty or security, since Israel retained control of the borders, security, land (on which it doubled and even tripled the settlements), water, and air. In other words, the old basis for elections and reform, which had been Oslo, is now null and void. Any attempt to go forward on that kind of platform is simply a wasteful ploy and will produce neither reform nor any real elections. Hence the current confusion, which causes every Palestinian everywhere to feel chagrin and bitter frustration.

What then is to be done if the old basis of Palestinian legitimacy no longer really exists? Certainly there can be no return to Oslo, any more than there can be to Jordanian or Israeli law. As a student of periods of important historical change, I should like to point out that when a major rupture with the past occurs (like the fall of the monarchy because of the French Revolution, or the demise of apartheid in South Africa before the elections of 1994 took place), a new basis of legitimacy has to be created by the only and ultimate source of authority, namely, the people itself. The major interests in Palestinian society, those that have kept life going, from the trade unions, to health workers, teachers, farmers, lawyers, and doctors, in addition to all the many NGOs, must now become the basis on which Palestinian reform-despite Israel's incursions and the occupation-is to be constructed. It seems to me useless to wait for Arafat, or Europe, or the United States, or the Arabs to do this: it must absolutely be done by Palestinians themselves by way of a const.i.tuent a.s.sembly that contains in it all the major elements of Palestinian society. Only such a group, constructed by the people themselves and not by the remnants of the Oslo dispensation, certainly not by the shabby fragments of Arafat's discredited Authority, can hope to succeed in reorganizing society from the ruinous, indeed catastrophically incoherent condition in which it is to be found. There is one basic job for such an a.s.sembly, which is to construct an emergency system of order that has two purposes. One, to keep Palestinian life going in an orderly way with full partic.i.p.ation for all concerned. Two, to choose an emergency executive committee whose mandate is to end the occupation, not negotiate with it. It is quite obvious that militarily we are no match for Israel. Kalashnikovs are not effective weapons when the balance of power is so lopsided. What is needed is a creative method of struggle that mobilizes all the human resources at our disposal to highlight, isolate, and gradually make untenable the main aspects of Israeli occupation-that is, settlements, settlement roads, roadblocks, and house demolitions. The present group around Arafat is hopelessly incapable of thinking of, much less actually implementing, such a strategy: it is too bankrupt, too bound up in corrupt, selfish practices, too burdened with the failures of the past.

For such a Palestinian strategy to work, there has to be an Israeli component made up of individuals and groups with whom a common basis of struggle against occupation can and indeed must be established. This is the great lesson of the South African struggle: it proposed the vision of a multiracial society from which neither individuals nor groups and leaders were ever deflected. The only vision coming out of Israel today is violence, forcible separation, and the continued subordination of Palestinians to an idea of Jewish supremacy. Not every Israeli believes in these things, of course, but it must be up to us to project the idea of coexistence in two states that have natural relations with each other on the basis of sovereignty and equality. Mainstream Zionism has still not been able to produce such a vision, so it must come from the Palestinian people and their new leaders, whose new legitimacy has to be constructed now, at a moment when everything is cras.h.i.+ng down and everyone is anxious to remake Palestine in his own image and according to his own ideas.

We have never faced a worse or, at the same time, a more seminal moment. The Arab order is in total disarray; the U.S. administration is effectively controlled by the Christian right and the Israeli lobby (within twenty-four hours, everything that George W. Bush seems to have agreed to with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak was reversed by Sharon's visit); and our society has been nearly wrecked by poor leaders.h.i.+p and the insanity of thinking that suicide bombing will lead directly to an Islamic Palestinian state. There is always hope for the future, but one has to able to look for it and find it in the right place. It is quite clear that in the absence of any serious Palestinian or Arab information policy in the United States (especially in the Congress), we cannot for a moment delude ourselves that Powell and Bush are about to set a real agenda for Palestinian rehabilitation. That's why I keep saying that the effort must come from us, by us, for us. I'm at least trying to suggest a different avenue of approach. Who else but the Palestinian people can construct the legitimacy they need to rule themselves and fight the occupation with weapons that don't kill innocents and lose us more support than ever before? A just cause can easily be subverted by evil or inadequate or corrupt means. The sooner this is put into practice, the better the chance we have to lead ourselves out of the present impa.s.se.

Al-Ahram, June 1319, 2002.

Al-Hayat, June 16, 2002.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE.

One-Way Street.