[Reader-list] Emerging Alternatives in Palestine

[Bhrigu]

                            Emerging alternatives in Palestine 
                                         by Edward Said 

Since it began 15 months ago the Palestinian Intifada has had little to show 
for itself politically, despite the remarkable fortitude of a militarily 
occupied, unarmed, poorly led, and still dispossessed people that has defied 
the pitiless ravages of Israel's war machine. In the United States, the 
government and, with a handful of exceptions, the "independent" media have 
echoed each other in harping on Palestinian violence and terror, with no 
attention at all paid to the 35-year Israeli military occupation, the 
longest in modern history: as a result, American official condemnations of 
Yasser Arafat's Authority after 11 September as harbouring and even 
sponsoring terrorism have coldly reinforced the Sharon government's 
preposterous claim that Israel is the victim, the Palestinians the 
aggressors in the four- decade war that the Israeli army has waged against 
civilians, property and institutions without mercy or discrimination. The 
result today is that the Palestinians are locked up in 220 ghettos 
controlled by the army; American-supplied Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, 
and F-16s mow down people, houses, olive groves and fields on a daily basis; 
schools and universities as well as businesses and civil institutions are 
totally disrupted; hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed and tens 
of thousands injured; Israel's assassinations of Palestinian leaders 
continue; unemployment and poverty stand at about 50 per cent -- and all 
this while General Anthony Zinni drones on about Palestinian "violence" to 
the wretched Arafat, who can't even leave his office in Ramallah because he 
is imprisoned there by Israeli tanks, while his several tattered security 
forces scamper about trying to survive the destruction of their offices and 
barracks. 

To make matters worse, the Palestinian Islamists have played into Israel's 
relentless propaganda mills and its ever-ready military by occasional bursts 
of wantonly barbaric suicide bombings that finally forced Arafat in 
mid-December to turn his crippled security forces against Hamas and Islamic 
Jihad, arresting militants, closing offices, occasionally firing at and 
killing demonstrators. Every demand that Sharon makes, Arafat hastens to 
fulfil, even as Sharon makes still another one, provokes an incident, or 
simply says -- with US backing -- that he is unsatisfied, and that Arafat 
remains an "irrelevant" terrorist (whom he sadistically forbade from 
attending Christmas services in Bethlehem) whose main purpose in life is to 
kill Jews. To this logic-defying congeries of brutal assaults on the 
Palestinians, on the man who for better or worse is their leader, and on 
their already humiliated national existence, Arafat's baffling response has 
been to keep asking for a return to negotiations, as if Sharon's transparent 
campaign against even the possibility of negotiations wasn't actually 
happening, and as if the whole idea of the Oslo peace process hadn't already 
evaporated. What surprises me is that, except for a small number of Israelis 
(most recently David Grossman), no one comes out and says openly that 
Palestinians are being persecuted by Israel as its natives. 
A closer look at the Palestinian reality tells a somewhat more encouraging 
story. Recent polls have shown that between them, Arafat and his Islamist 
opponents (who refer to themselves unjustly as "the resistance") get 
somewhere between 40 and 45 per cent popular approval. This means that a 
silent majority of Palestinians is neither for the Authority's misplaced 
trust in Oslo (or for its lawless regime of corruption and repression) nor 
for Hamas's violence. Ever the resourceful tactician, Arafat has countered 
by delegating Dr Sari Nusseibeh, a Jerusalem notable, president of Al-Quds 
University, and Fatah stalwart, to make trial balloon speeches suggesting 
that if Israel were to be just a little nicer, the Palestinians might give 
up their right of return. In addition, a slew of Palestinian personalities 
close to the Authority (or, more accurately, whose activities have never 
been independent of the Authority) have signed statements and gone on tour 
with Israeli peace activists who are either out of power or otherwise seem 
ineffective as well as discredited. These dispiriting exercises are supposed 
to show the world that Palestinians are willing to make peace at any price, 
even to accommodate the military occupation. Arafat is still undefeated so 
far as his relentless eagerness to stay in power is concerned. 

Yet at some distance from all this, a new secular nationalist current is 
slowly emerging. It's too soon to call this a party or a bloc, but it is now 
a visible group with true independence and popular status. It counts Dr 
Haidar Abdel-Shafi and Dr Mustafa Barghouthi (not to be confused with his 
distant relative, Tanzim activist Marwan Barghouthi) among its ranks, along 
with Ibrahim Dakkak, Ziad Abu Amr, Ahmad Harb, Ali Jarbawi, Fouad Moghrabi, 
Legislative Council members Rawiya Al-Shawa and Kamal Shirafi, writers 
Hassan Khadr and Mahmoud Darwish, Raja Shehadeh, Rima Tarazi, Ghassan 
Al-Khatib, Nassir Aruri, Eliya Zureik and myself. In mid-December, a 
collective statement was issued that was well-covered in the Arab and 
European media (it went unmentioned in the US) calling for Palestinian unity 
and resistance and the unconditional end of Israeli military occupation, 
while keeping deliberately silent about returning to Oslo. We believe that 
negotiating an improvement in the occupation is tantamount to prolonging it. 
Peace can only come after the occupation ends. The declaration's boldest 
sections focus on the need to improve the internal Palestinian situation, 
above all to strengthen democracy; "rectify" the decision-making process 
(which is totally controlled by Arafat and his men); assert the need to 
restore the law's sovereignty and an independent judiciary; prevent the 
further misuse of public funds; and consolidate the functions of public 
institutions so as to give every citizen confidence in those that are 
expressly designed for public service. The final and most decisive demand 
calls for new parliamentary elections. 

However else this declaration may have been read, the fact that so many 
prominent independents with, for the most part, functioning health, 
educational, professional and labour organisations as their base have said 
these things was lost neither on other Palestinians (who saw it as the most 
trenchant critique yet of the Arafat regime) nor on the Israeli military. In 
addition, just as the Authority jumped to obey Sharon and Bush by rounding 
up the usual Islamist suspects, a non- violent International Solidarity 
Movement was launched by Dr Barghouthi that comprised about 550 European 
observers (several of them European parliament members) who flew in at their 
own expense. With them was a well-disciplined band of young Palestinians 
who, while disrupting Israeli troop and settler movement along with the 
Europeans, prevented rock-throwing or firing from the Palestinian side. This 
effectively froze out the Authority and the Islamists, and set the agenda 
for making Israel's occupation itself the focus of attention. All this 
occurred while the US was vetoing a Security Council resolution mandating an 
international group of unarmed observers to interpose themselves between the 
Israeli army and defenceless Palestinian civilians. 
The first result of this was that on 3 January, after Barghouthi held a 
press conference with about 20 Europeans in East Jerusalem, the Israelis 
arrested, detained and interrogated him twice, breaking his knee with rifle 
butts and injuring his head, on the pretext that he was disturbing the peace 
and had illegally entered Jerusalem (even though he was born in it and has a 
medical permit to enter it). None of this of course has deterred him or his 
supporters from continuing the non-violent struggle, which, I think, is 
certain to take control of the already too militarised Intifada, centre it 
nationally on ending occupation and settlements, and steer Palestinians 
toward statehood and peace. Israel has more to fear from someone like 
Barghouthi, who is a self-possessed, rational and respected Palestinian, 
than from the bearded Islamic radicals that Sharon loves to misrepresent as 
Israel's quintessential terrorist threat. All they do is to arrest him, 
which is typical of Sharon's bankrupt policy. 

So where is the Israeli and American left that is quick to condemn 
"violence" while saying not a word about the disgraceful and criminal 
occupation itself? I would seriously suggest that they should join brave 
activists like Jeff Halper and Louisa Morgantini at the barricades (literal 
and figurative), stand side by side with this major new secular Palestinian 
initiative, and start protesting the Israeli military methods that are 
directly subsidised by tax-payers and their dearly bought silence. Having 
for a year wrung their collective hands and complained about the absence of 
a Palestinian peace movement (since when does a militarily occupied people 
have responsibility for a peace movement?), the alleged peaceniks who can 
actually influence Israel's military have a clear political duty to organise 
against the occupation right now, unconditionally and without unseemly 
demands on the already laden Palestinians. 

Some of them have. Several hundred Israeli reservists have refused military 
duty in the occupied territories, and a whole spectrum of journalists, 
activists, academics and writers (including Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, David 
Grossman, Ilan Pappe, Dani Rabinowitz, and Uri Avnery) have kept up a steady 
attack on the criminal futility of Sharon's campaign against the Palestinian 
people. Ideally, there should be a similar chorus in the United States 
where, except for a tiny number of Jewish voices making public their outrage 
at Israel's military occupation, there is far too much complicity and 
drum-beating. The Israeli lobby has been temporarily successful in 
identifying the war against Bin Laden with Sharon's single-minded, 
collective assault on Arafat and his people. Unfortunately, the Arab 
American community is both too small and beleaguered as it tries to fend off 
the ever-expanding Ashcroft dragnet, racial profiling and curtailment of 
civil liberties here. 
Most urgently needed, therefore, is coordination between the various secular 
groups who support Palestinians, a people against whose mere presence, 
geographical dispersion (even more than Israeli depredations) is the major 
obstacle. To end the occupation and all that has gone with it is a clear 
enough imperative. Now let us do it. And Arab intellectuals needn't feel shy 
about actually joining in.