The End of the Peace Process Read online

  All that is well known, as are the monopolies and scams that still bedevil life under the Authority, its stooges and hangers-on. What is less well-known is that professionals, members of the better-off middle class, and many in positions of leadership have if not prospered then made an accommodation with the status quo. Let me say at the outset that it’s easy to be critical if one doesn’t have to worry about the future of one’s family, job, all-over livelihood. So I can perfectly well understand the need felt by Palestinian doctors, engineers, academics, and economists living through the tribulations, punishments, and anxieties of years and years of occupation and uncertainty and desperation to make the best of a bad situation. And it really is a bad situation, with Israel on one side and the coarse rule of the Authority on the other. Very little reporting has been done on the day-to-day problems of Palestinians, so one has the impression that everyone manages. The question is how, and in what context.

  Without at all wishing to underestimate the difficulties faced, I’d like to suggest that the professional class in particular—the class, that is, which supplies Palestinian life with its officers, teachers, physicians, architects, lawyers, engineers, journalists, and economists—has in effect made its peace with the present situation. The readiness of funders like members of the European Union, the Ford Foundation, and countless others like them have made ample money available to establish a large number of research institutes, study centers, women’s and professional groups, all of which are extremely productive and do important work as (mostly) NGO’s (nongovernmental organizations). The sad fact is that the Palestine Authority and its various spoke-persons have made no secret of their animosity toward these NGOs, which they see correctly as rivals both in patronage and influence; over the past four years various attempts have been made by the Authority to try to close them down, acquire or at least siphon off their budgets, and generally make their life difficult. Still, the NGOs go on so long as the funding and the will and determination of their members do not waver. That is a positive development.

  Yet the question I raise here concerns the long-range strategy of these groups and the kind of thing they do. Put very simply, are they a substitute for a political movement, and can they ever become one? I don’t think so since each operates in a bilateral relationship with the funders, each of whom makes it clear that money for work on democracy, health care, education—all important things—is forthcoming only within the overall framework of the current peace process. At least that is the implicit assumption. And these NGOs, necessary though they are to keep Palestinian life going, themselves become the goal instead of, for instance, liberation, or ending the occupation, or changing Palestinian society. The leadership vacuum, the absence of a political vision of the future, the general quiescence of Palestinian life, with everyone more or less fending for his/herself, have placed such secondary tasks as assuring oneself of funding, keeping the office staff at work, setting up meetings in Europe and elsewhere, ahead of the main task facing us as a people, which can be nothing less than liberating ourselves from our legacy of occupation, dispossession, and undemocratic rule.

  This substitution of a short-range nationalism for a longer-range social movement is one of the intended effects of Oslo, in effect, to depoliticize Palestinian society and set it squarely within the main current of American-style globalization, where the market is king, everything else irrelevant or marginal. Just to have a Palestinian institute of folklore research or a Palestinian university or a Palestinian medical association is therefore not enough, any more than nationalism is enough. Frantz Fanon was right when he said to Algerians in 1960 that just to substitute an Algerian policeman for a French one is not the goal of liberation: a change in consciousness is. And the likelihood of that change is slowly being eroded in the current vogue for seminars, funding missions, and project reports. We need to concentrate our collective efforts on the collective destiny of the Palestinian people, however utopian and irrelevant such efforts may now seem. Unless the group spirit remains fixed on the attainment of real liberation and real self-determination—which themselves need to be clarified—we can quite easily drown in the global market with our flag proudly flying over us.

  The second problem of the present impasse is consequent on the first. Being or remaining Palestinian is scarcely an end in itself. It is perfectly in keeping with the colonial spirit of the peace process that Israel and the United States are at bottom delighted to give us symbols of sovereignty, such as a flag, while witholding real sovereignty, the right of return for all refugees, economic self-sufficiency, and relative independence. I have always felt that the meaning of Palestine is something more substantial than that. The struggle for Palestinian rights is first and above all a modern secular struggle to be a full, participating member in the modern world of nations from which we have long been excluded. It is not about returning to the past, or establishing a parochial little entity whose main purpose is to give the world another airline or bureaucracy or a handsome set of colored postage stamps.

  Because the struggle against the repressive aspects of Jewish nationalism is so complex and difficult, I have also always felt that what we contribute toward Palestine is synonymous with a new sense of modernity, that is, a mission for getting beyond the horrors of the past into a new relationship with the whole world, not just with Israel and the Arabs, but with India, China, Japan, Africa, Latin America, and of course with Europe and North America. For this we require more, not less sophistication and knowledge, and especially an expansive, inquiring attitude toward other peoples and other histories. Only this can enable Palestinians to transcend themselves as a small people and to enter the ranks of the human vanguard along with the modern South Africans, who did so with such effect because they linked their struggle for justice to the entire world. For all sorts of reasons, we have for the time being lost that sense of confidence and worldliness, partly because we have had incapable, small leaders, and partly because we have become content with mere survival and the symbolic achievements I mentioned above. Our only hope is to be found among my children’s generation, young people lucky enough to be crippled neither by the limitations imposed by the nakba nor by the dreadful lack of freedom and enlightenment prevailing in the Arab world today. Otherwise we might as well say that we already have a Palestinian state (declared, one ought to remember, in Algiers, November 1988), and so why bother.

  Thus the next phase, with Ehud Barak and the others negotiating away busily, will go forward as planned. There’s no point in being too enthusiastic about its narrow results, which are already clearly mapped out and are certain to be celebrated by the media and the White House. Beyond that, the process is considerably slower and longer-range. As I have tried to characterize it, it is where emphasis needs to be placed as much in terms of awareness as in terms of concrete steps. What needs more reflecting on is the relationship between this process in its Palestinian form and similar democratic and secular currents in other parts of the world, where once again the longer-term view is far more important and hopeful than anything the next political phase might succeed in fulfilling.

  Chapter One

  The First Step

  A SHORT WHILE AGO I was invited to present my views on the current “peace process” to an invited group of guests at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Aside from a small number of individuals from the university itself, and one Arab UN ambassador, the audience of about fifty people comprised reporters, news directors, and columnists from television, newspapers and radio. What I had to say was described by the title of my remarks—“Misleading Images and Brutal Realities”—which argued that the picture given in the U.S. media as well as by the U.S. government of a wonderful progress toward peace in the Middle East is belied and contradicted by the worsening situation in the area, especially so far as Palestinians are concerned. I gave a documented and discouraging picture of how the Oslo agreement and its aftermath have increased Palestinian poverty and unemployment; how
the worst aspects of the Israeli occupation—now the longest military occupation of the twentieth century—have continued; how land expropriation and the expansion of settlements have gone on; and finally, how for Palestinians living under the “limited autonomy” supposedly controlled by the Palestine Authority life has gotten worse, freedom less, and prospects diminished. I laid the blame for this on the United States, which sponsors the injustices and inequities of the process; on Israel, which exploits Palestinian weakness to prolong its military occupation and settlement practices by other means; and on the Palestinian Authority, which has legalized the illegal, not to say preposterous, aspects of the “peace process” and presses on with it weakly and incompetently, in spite of incontrovertible evidence that Israel and the United States remain unchanged in their hostility to Palestinian aspirations.

  A period of discussion and questions followed, most of it dominated by two or three supporters of Israel, one of them an Israeli employee of Reuters. The irony here was that all of them attacked me personally, speaking about my lack of integrity, anti-Semitism, and so on, without ever saying a single thing that contradicted the picture I had just presented. Both the organizer of the seminar and myself tried to push past the storm of insults and slurs, asking that people dispute with me on the basis of contested facts or figures. None was forthcoming. My crime seemed to be that I opposed the peace process, even though it was also the case that what I said about it in fact was true. My opponents were in every case people who described themselves as supporters of Peace Now (i.e., liberal Jews) and hence of peace with Palestinians. I kept raising the question of military occupation, settlement policy, the annexation of Jerusalem, but I received no response—only more accusations that I had missed certain nuances and important distinctions.

  I concluded from this that in some very profound way I had violated the accepted norms for Palestinian behavior after Oslo. For one, I persisted in bringing up embarrassing questions and troubling issues. We are now supposed to feel that peace is moving forward and to question anything about the “peace process” is tantamount to being an ungrateful, treasonous wretch. For another, I spoke in terms of facts and figures, and I was unsparing in my criticism of all the parties to the peace process. But I found that I was expected to express gratitude and a general attitude of cheerfulness, which I had violated by complaining about concrete abuses. Lastly, I had had the nerve to speak about the situation neither as a supplicant nor as a subservient “native.” This was particularly annoying to one of the individuals, who who had become accustomed to Palestinians regarding her as a superior “expert” and foreign adviser. In other words Palestinians are obligated to see such people as somehow entitled to tell us what is good for us, for our own good. The precedent seems to derive from the PLO chairman, who has surrounded himself with foreign advisers and financial experts, all of whom aid him in his private investments and commercial undertakings.

  Although all the other members of the audience soon tired of my opponents, and expressed agreement with my views, I realized that the nature of the encounter I had just had with proponents of the “peace process” was the main thing that was wrong with that process: its total obliviousness to the interests of the Palestinian people, as well as its enhancement of Israel’s position by propaganda and unstinting political pressure. Oslo gave Israelis and supporters of Israel a sense that the Palestinian problem had been solved, once and for all; it also gave liberals a sense of achievement, particularly as the “peace” came under attack by the Likud and settler movement. And this, in turn, made it unacceptable for Palestinians to express anything except appreciation for what had been done for them by Oslo, Clinton, Rabin, and Peres—even though unemployment in Gaza had risen to 60 percent, and closure of the West Bank and Gaza had demonstrated that Israeli occupation practices remained unchanged. When I was asked for an alternative I said that the alternative had been there from the very beginning: end of occupation, removal of settlements, return of East Jerusalem, real self-determination and equality for Palestinians. I had no problem at all with the prospects of real peace and real coexistence and had been speaking about those for twenty years; what I, and most Palestinians, opposed was a phony peace and our continued inequality in regard to the Israelis, who are allowed sovereignty, territorial integrity, and self-determination, whereas we are not.

  Now that expropriations of Arab land in East Jerusalem are once again taking place—rather brazenly this time—I find myself puzzled as to why both the PLO and the Arab states allowed themselves to get in such an extraordinarily stupid position, that is, to sign peace agreements with Israel before even the most limited versions of Resolutions 242 and 338 had been complied with. After all, Jerusalem was annexed in 1967, shortly after which the expropriations and settlements were begun by successive Labor governments. In her recent book about the peace process (This Side of Peace) Hanan Ashrawi lifts the curtain on the mentality of those Palestinian leaders who were anxious to sign the Oslo accord with Israel before securing a satisfactory Israeli position on the settlements and Jerusalem. One of them told her, “We will sign now, then you [presumably he meant you inhabitants of the occupied territories] can negotiate the details of settlements and Jerusalem with the Israelis later.” In other words, the attitude seems to have been that “we” would sign now, thereby giving up everything; thereafter “we” would hope that “you” would get something back later by being extremely clever.

  Indeed, this quite bizarre notion seems to be at the core of the current flurry of Arab diplomatic activity concerning Jerusalem. Morocco, which heads the Arab League Jerusalem Committee, has made its peace with Israel; so too have the PLO, Jordan, and several other countries (unofficially), who have already welcomed or said they would welcome visits from Israeli leaders. While they have been so cordial with Israel, that country has continued its drive to increase the size of, and add new land to, annexed Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as Gaza settlements; the latter now total about 40 percent of the “autonomous” area, and in the West Bank and Jerusalem, confiscated land amounts to 75 percent of the whole, all of it earmarked for Jewish use exclusively. Ninety-six incidences of such acts have been recorded by Israel between October 1993 and the end of January 1995.

  Why then the sudden call for emergency UN sessions, the complaints, the uproar—most of it verbal, none of it revealing the slightest amount of coordination and strategy? How could the Arab leaders, plus the United States, and Israel have persuaded the Palestinian leadership to sign Oslo and its subsequent phases without a word about guarantees on settlements, Jerusalem, and self-determination, except that these central issues, the very core of the Palestinian claim to self-determination, would be “considered” at the final stage, when there would be nothing left to negotiate? Those are the questions that need to be answered now, as a matter of accountability and clear political and moral responsibility.

  In the meantime, we would have to conclude that the great intellects that capitulated to Israeli pressure and were cajoled into believing that a big favor was being done them by “recognition” are, and will continue to be, incapable of leading the battle to recover Palestinian rights. A child can see that. What puzzles me is how so many Palestinian intellectuals, businessmen, academics, and officials persist in the illusion that the peace process is good for them and their people, and likewise persist in giving loyalty and deference to a Palestine Authority that at best leads its people completely astray and at worst simply enforces the Israeli occupation at the behest of Israeli leaders who have persuaded themselves and their supporters that this is a genuine “peace process.” Corruption? Venality? Incompetence? Or is it moral idiocy, that state of convincing yourself and others that your interests are being advanced, even as you continue to live as a prisoner? No matter what clever strategies are now planned for the Security Council and Arab League, and no matter how high the rhetorical level rises, there is no avoiding the issue of how such a leadership can continue to lead after having aba
ndoned its people and its history to so fraudulent a set of promises.

  The first step in liberating the occupied territories is to determine that they are to be liberated. Just because Israel and the United States have decided that annexation and the peace process are irreversible is no reason to accept injustice. The first step therefore is to admit that such a process is indeed reversible and that in order to achieve it there has to be real mobilization and preparation. As for relying on Rabin and Clinton—“trusting them” in the words of Arafat—would it now not be apparent after the U.S. Security Council veto, that far from being trustworthy, they have nothing but contempt for the Arabs? It is obvious to me, even though I must also say that I am quite certain that every Arab leader will now send the US a private letter of apology, asking to be excused for having had the ill-grace to complain in the first place!

  Al-Ahram Weekly, May 25, 1995

  Chapter Two

  How Much and For How Long?