The End of the Peace Process Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  Chapter One - The First Step

  Chapter Two - How Much and For How Long?

  Chapter Three - Where Negotiations Have Led

  Chapter Four - Where Do We Go from Here?

  Chapter Five - Reflections on the Role of the Private Sector

  Chapter Six - Elections, Institutions, Democracy

  Chapter Seven - Post-Election Realities

  Chapter Eight - The Campaign Against “Islamic Terror”

  Chapter Nine - Modernity, Information, and Governance

  Chapter Ten - Total Rejection and Total Acceptance Are Equivalent

  Chapter Eleven - Mandela, Netanyahu, and Arafat

  Chapter Twelve - The Theory and Practice of Banning Books and Ideas

  Chapter Thirteen - On Visiting Wadie

  Chapter Fourteen - Uprising Against Oslo

  Chapter Fifteen - Responsibility and Accountability

  Chapter Sixteen - Intellectuals and the Crisis

  Chapter Seventeen - Whom to Talk to

  Chapter Eighteen - The Real Meaning of the Hebron Agreement

  Chapter Nineteen - The Uses of Culture

  Chapter Twenty - Loss of Precision

  Chapter Twenty-one - The Context of Arafat’s American Visit

  Chapter Twenty-two - Deir Yassin Recalled

  Chapter Twenty-three - Thirty Years After

  Chapter Twenty-four - The Debate Continues

  Chapter Twenty-five - The Next Generation?

  Chapter Twenty-six - Are There No Limits to Corruption?

  Chapter Twenty-seven - Reparations: Power and Conscience?

  Chapter Twenty-eight - Bombs and Bulldozers

  Chapter Twenty-nine - Strategies of Hope

  Chapter Thirty - Israel at a Loss

  Chapter Thirty-one - Bases for Coexistence

  Chapter Thirty-two - Iraq and the Middle East Crisis

  Chapter Thirty-three - Isaiah Berlin: An Afterthought

  Chapter Thirty-four - Palestine and Israel: A Fifty-Year Perspective

  Chapter Thirty-five - The Challenge of Israel: Fifty Years On

  Chapter Thirty-six - The Problem is Inhumanity

  Chapter Thirty-seven - Gulliver in the Middle East

  Chapter Thirty-eight - Making History: Constructing Reality

  Chapter Thirty-nine - Scenes from Palestine

  Chapter Forty - End of the Peace Process, or Beginning Something Else

  Chapter Forty-one - Art, Culture, and Nationalism

  Chapter Forty-two - Fifty Years of Dispossession

  Chapter Forty-three - New History, Old Ideas

  Chapter Forty-four - The Other Wilaya

  Chapter Forty-five - Breaking the Deadlock: A Third Way

  Chapter Forty-six - The Final Stage

  Chapter Forty-seven - The End of the Interim Arrangements

  Chapter Forty-eight - Incitement

  Chapter Forty-nine - West Bank Diary

  Chapter Fifty - Truth and Reconciliation

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  ALSO BY EDWARD W. SAID

  Copyright Page

  To Deirdre and Allen Bergson

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I AM SPECIALLY grateful to Deirdre Bergson for going over these essays with a critical eye, and for helping me enormously in getting them into shape. Patrick Deer also took time to look them over and make editorial suggestions: he has my warm thanks. With two exceptions all these essays originated in the pages of the Cairo Ahram Weekly and, in Arabic, in the London-based daily, al-Hayat. Mona Anis was my extremely helpful editor and friend at the former, Jihad al-Khazen and Dania Shamy at the latter. I owe them a great deal for their support and interest. Shelley Wanger in New York once again bore with me patiently as we prepared the text for publication. She is a dear friend and superb editor, whom I cannot thank enough. As ever, my assistant Zaineb Istrabadi prepared, collated, numbered, dated and put all of these pieces in order. I could not have done any of the work in this book without her, and I am profoundly grateful to her. “On Visiting Wadie” was published in the London Review of Books by its gifted and ever-accommodating editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, whom I am happy to thank warmly. Harvey Shapiro of the New York Times Magazine proposed that I write the last piece in this book, and Kyle Crichton skillfully saw it through the editing process. I am indebted to them both for giving me the opportunity to write what I did.

  E.W.S.

  New York

  September 22, 1999

  INTRODUCTION

  EVER SINCE IT began secretly in Oslo and was signed on the White House lawn in September 1993, the Middle East “peace process” has seemed to me not only inevitable in its course but certain in its conclusion. Despite various apparent setbacks—from the 1994 Hebron massacre, to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995, to the various Palestinian suicide bombings and subsequent closures of territory, to, most recently, the destructive Benjamin Netanyahu period 1996–9— the sheer disparity in power between the United States and Israel, on the one hand, and the Palestinians as well as the Arab states on the other, has dictated that inevitability and its conclusions: the Oslo agreements would end in apparent success. As Avi Shlaim, the Israeli revisionist historian, puts it in a new book The Iron Wall, it “was the assessment of the IDF director of military intelligence that Arafat’s dire situation [in 1992], and possible imminent collapse, [that] made him the most convenient interlocutor for Israel . . .” With Ehud Barak’s assumption of power in May 1999 things have certainly speeded up, so much so that a comprehensive peace between Israel, the Palestinians, Syria, and Lebanon will very likely be signed, if not completely implemented, within a year or so. All the parties seem to want it. The Arab states, Egypt and Jordan chief among them, have declared themselves willing partners, and what Israel wants it most certainly will get, including the additional military aid and support from the United States that Clinton gave Barak in July 1999. Yasir Arafat and his small coterie of supporters can furnish little resistance to the Israeli-American juggernaut, even though of course real Palestinian self-determination, in the sense that the Palestinian people will enjoy genuine freedom, will be postponed yet again. A “permanent interim agreement”—minus any resolution to the problems of refugee, the status of Jerusalem, exact borders, settlements, and water—is the likely result for the year 2000.

  The essays in this book provide a personal attempt to chronicle the final official chapter of the Oslo peace process, to lay bare its assumptions, to detail its accomplishments and, much more, its failures, and above all, to show how despite the tremendous media and governmental attention lavished on it, it can neither lead to a real peace nor likely provide for one in the future. Written mostly for the Arab and European press these essays, I believe, provide a detailed point of view rarely to be found in the U.S. press. My assumption throughout is that as a Palestinian I believe that neither the Arabs nor the Israelis have a real military option, and that the only hope for the future is a decent and fair coexistence between the two peoples based upon equality and self-determination. Already the Middle East accounts for 60 percent of the world’s arms sales. Far too much of Arab as well as Israeli society is militarized even while democratic freedoms are abrogated, education and agriculture have declined, and the situation of the average citizen with regard to citizenship itself is worse than it was in 1948. The era of partitions and separations since 1948, the date of the Palestinian nakba, or disaster, as well as the date of Israel’s establishment, has not produced wonderful results, to say the least, and can indeed be seen
to have failed. The separation of peoples into supposedly homogenous states has imposed burdens on “outsiders” that are intolerable, both in Israel and in countries like Lebanon, whose fifteen year-old civil war was based on sectarian exclusivism, and produced nothing except a more sectarianized country. Israel’s non-Jewish, i.e., Palestinian, citizens constitute 20 percent of the state, so that even the Jewish state is not “just” a Jewish one. The Oslo agreements have built on, rather than modified, these unsound foundations. Insecurity breeds more insecurity so long as a whole nation or people feels deprived and manifestly treated as inferior on the basis of ethnicity or religion defined in advance as “other” or “alien.”

  These essays have been written as testimony to an alternative view, another way of looking not just at the present and past, but at the future as well. I maintain here that only by seriously trying to take account of one’s own history—whether Israeli or Palestinian—as well as that of the other can one really plan to live with the other. In both instances, however, I find this historical awareness sadly lacking. The current Palestinian leadership has, in a cowardly and slavish way, tried to forget its own people’s tragic history in order to accommodate their American and Israeli mentors. Consider the most recent instance, the cancellation by the PLO of a meeting to be held July 15, 1999, in Geneva by the High Contracting parties to the Geneva Conventions on war, a meeting originally asked for by the PLO and accepted by the United Nations as a way of protecting the Palestinian populations of the West Bank and Gaza from further Israeli violations (torture, land expropriation, house demolition, imprisonment, etc.) of the Conventions. Instead of going through with the meeting on July 15, the PLO summarily cancelled it as a sign of good will toward Ehud Barak after only one hour’s convening of the group. And this before negotiating with a leader whose long history of enmity toward Palestinians is well known, and whose meager announcements have made it clear that he is not prepared to dismantle most of the illegal Israeli settlements established on Palestinian land since 1967. It is worth noting that there are 13,000 settlement units now under construction, and that no less than 42 hilltop settlements have been established in the West Bank since last year (1998–9). Along with the already existing 144 settlements and, including the population of annexed Jerusalem, there are about 350,000 Israeli Jewish settlers on Palestinian land. With leaders who refuse ever to deal with this major problem, it is this sort of tampering with and manipulating the Palestinian tragedy by our own leaders that these essays strenuously oppose, committed as I am in them to the facts of our history and not to fictions created at will by oppressive dictators.

  As for Israeli history, one of the reasons I salute the New or Revisionist Israeli historians is that through their work they have exposed the myths and propaganda narratives that have attempted to deny Israel’s responsibility in 1948 and thereafter for producing, in effect, the Palestinian catastrophe. I contend that unless this historical responsibility is officially borne by Israeli leaders and faced honestly by Israeli society and its supporters in the West, no paper arrangement, such as the one being projected now, can be transformed into peace. There are too many refugees still left homeless (four million at least), too many claims unsettled, too many apartheid policies still in place that discriminate explicitly against Palestinians on ethnic and religious grounds for us to accept such tinkerings as the Oslo peace process. It cannot succeed for long. Particularly after the NATO war on behalf of the Kosovo refugees, it seems ludicrously unjust not to apply the same criteria of right of return to people who were made deliberately homeless by ethnic cleansing over fifty years ago. But once again, I want it clearly understood here that I am totally in favor of peace by coexistence, self-determination, and equality between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples on the land of historical Palestine, and I am therefore exactly the opposite of an opponent of peace. The current Oslo “peace process” is an expedient and, in my opinion, foolish gamble that has already done far more harm than good. The facts must be faced, and in this book I try to face them. Peace requires sterner measures than Arafat, Clinton, and company have, or are ever likely to have, taken. And so some of us must try to make the effort that our leaders will not make.

  Yet what the United States wants, the Arabs are prepared to give. More explicitly, as concerns the Oslo-Wye agreements it is absolutely clear that whether or not these agreements have actually helped or hindered Palestinian self-determination, no leader is prepared in any way to forego, modify, or renege on them. The Oslo agreements signed at the White House were first, two letters of “mutual recognition” exchanged between Israel and the PLO (though Israel only recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people) and second, a Declaration of Principles that laid out the interim arrangements for redeployment rather than withdrawal of the Israeli army from unspecified, areas of the West Bank except for parts of Gaza and Jericho. The agreements postponed the really complicated issues—Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, and sovereignty—to final-status negotiations that were to have commenced in 1996. Subsequent agreements at Cairo and Taba, and later concerning Hebron, were designed to set up the Palestine Authority that was to administer Palestinian life under Arafat but retained security, border control, water, and most of the land for Israel. Settlements were allowed to continue. Far from ending, the Israeli occupation was simply repackaged, and what emerged in the West Bank was about seven discontinuous Palestinian islands amounting to 3 percent of the land surrounded and punctuated by Israeli controlled territory. Even in Gaza, Israeli settlers held 40 percent of the land.

  The Wye River agreement signed in October 1998, which was to give Palestinians about 10 percent more land, was never implemented by Netanyahu; he tried to modify or nullify all these agreements but in May 1999 was voted out of office. Ehud Barak has been greeted as the peace candidate, but given his background and what he has said and done so far I am certain that his ideas are not different enough from Netanyahu’s to warrant great optimism. For Barak, Jerusalem remains basically unnegotiable (except for giving Palestinians authority over a few sacred places in the old city and allowing Abu Dis to become their new Jerusalem); the settlements for the most part will stay, as will the bypass roads that now crisscross the territories; sovereignty, borders, overall security, water and air rights will be Israel’s; millions of refugees will have to look elsewhere for help and remain where they are. Other than that, there can be a small Palestinian state and the Authority can continue its, at best, flawed rule. These things are implied in the agreement concluded in September 1999.

  The real problem is that Barak does not seem inclined to visions of coexistence or of equality between Palestinians and Israeli Jews. He has clearly said that separation is what he wants, not integration. Perhaps he actually is a different sort of leader than Netanyahu and is capable of some tremendous about-face, but very little points that way, except the official optimism and hopefulness of the U.S. administration, its European allies, and liberal Zionists, Israeli and non-Israeli alike. The disproportion in power between Israel and the Arabs is so great that there is no room for optimistic speculation of the kind that will suddenly make everyone happy. Barak is a cautious man who seems actively to be seeking an unambitious Israeli consensus which, almost by definition, has a very low tolerance for real Palestinian independence and real self-determination. What he is being promised for his basically cost-free cooperation in return by the Arabs is full normalization, full peace, full opening of markets. He’d have to be a fool not to accept and go along with Wye and even a defanged little Palestinian statelet. If the last five years have taught Israelis, anything, it is that Arafat can be trusted to do the job of policing and demoralizing his people far better than the Israeli Civil Administration could ever do it, so why stop short of letting him call his skimpy areas, 60 percent of Gaza included, a Palestinian state? If Clinton can force himself to do it, so can Barak and the rest.

  None of this makes for pleasant days ahead. But failing
a credible Palestinian opposition—which may slowly be forming—the main matter before those of us who wish for peace and true reconciliation is what sort of strategy and tactics to follow. In the first place, I see no way of stopping Arafat and his people from continuing pretty much the same way in business dealings, civil rights, and peace negotiations. They have no real choice, either because none is offered them by their weakness vis-à-vis Israel, the other Arabs, and the United States, or because constitutively and structurally they are incapable of anything else. Habits are habits and in addition, they are there doing what they do because it suits their “peace partners” perfectly. Corruption, police brutality, and undemocratic life will therefore remain. Arafat refuses to sign either a constitution or even a basic law of the land. The real question is how much damage this does to the long-term interests of the Palestinian people, insofar as there is still a strong desire for true self-determination. I myself think there is that desire: fifty-one years of oppression and bad, not to say disastrous, leadership haven’t dimmed its flame, even though it seems occasionally abated by the sheer number of enemies, difficult obstacles, and detours. There is of course the strong possibility that Palestinians will be Red Indianized forever, but demography and the sheer counterproductiveness and stupidity of Israel’s official arrogance are likely (though not certain) to prevent that. People tend to resist efforts to marginalize and dehumanize them the more these efforts are made. Palestinians are no different, especially given the fact that by the year 2010 Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews will be equal in number on the land of historical Palestine. Yet caution enjoins us to add that we cannot absolutely guarantee success: history, alas, is a cruel arbiter of the fate of small, disproportionately weak peoples, so the role of will and purpose assume greater significance for us.

  One of the calculations made by proponents of the Oslo peace process is that sheer persistence and the longevity of the process itself will wear down resistance to it. This is true, even though for the most part a majority of Palestinians in the working class and rural sectors have actually seen their conditions worsen (and their dissatisfaction increase) since Oslo. Unemployment since 1993 has risen dramatically; GDP has been almost halved; movement from one part of Palestine to the other is extremely difficult; Jerusalem is completely off limits; as yet there is no passage between the West Bank and Gaza even though the Oslo documents specified that there should be. It is the land of disadvantaged Palestinians that is being taken, their jobs lost, their standard of living reduced dramatically. They are the dissatisfied ones. They are the majority. A small number of businessmen and speculators have prospered, however, are written about in the international press, and are organizers of conferences with the Israelis and the Americans to further business and investment opportunities in the area.