The Question of Palestine Read online

  U.S.–Palestinian Relations

  Because Israel’s main patron and strategic ally is the United States, and because the United States, unlike Europe, is the only outside force willing to play a direct role in the Middle East, we should look at its status with regard to Palestine today. U.S.-Palestinian relations have been exceptionally complicated and exceptionally unsatisfactory, which is largely the somewhat lackluster endproduct of U.S. domestic politics. In 1975, Henry Kissinger accomplished the feat of precluding American dealings with the PLO, just at the moment, of course, when the PLO had begun to modulate its international position by placing important emphasis on the UN (Arafat’s only visit here—he was prevented from returning in 1988 by Secretary of State Shultz under pressure from American Jewish organizations and in violation of the UN’s agreement with its host government). That prohibition, based variously on the PLO’s refusal to accept Resolution 242, its alleged repeated participation in terrorism, and various other moral preconditions of the sort never extended to Israel, also made it impossible for PLO members to enter the country; in 1988, the Grassley Amendment sought by Congressional fiat to forbid the PLO from any dealings in the United States, and required the closing of the Palestine Information Office in Washington as well as the PLO’s observer mission at the UN (this latter attempt was defeated in U.S. District Court, and the UN office remains open). In the summer of 1979, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Andrew Young was forced to resign because he had what was in effect a brief social meeting with Zuhdi Terzi, the PLO delegate at the UN.

  Until late 1988, this crippling inhibition of any contact at all between representatives of the U.S. and of the Palestinian people remained in force, largely at the behest of the Zionist lobby, in concert with right-wing Israeli governments. One should not mistake the true character of this inhibition, which in fact was an extension of Israel’s longstanding, increasingly violent official policy of total hostility toward the Palestinian people, as a people, and its representatives. (On the West Bank and Gaza, for example, it was forbidden to mention the word “Palestine,” to display the Palestinian flag, or even to use the colors of the flag, which some U.S. commentators crudely labelled the “PLO flag” despite the fact that both the flag and its colors antedate the existence of the PLO.)

  Nonetheless—and here we leave the realm of intention and enter once again that of fact—there were U.S.-Palestinian contacts, most of them of some immediate benefit, ironically enough, to the U.S. Thus, during the early to mid-seventies, the PLO protected the American Embassy in Beirut, and when large numbers of American dependents were evacuated from Beirut by sea in 1976 the operation was carried out under the care of Palestinian guards. In 1979, thirteen American hostages were released from the American Embassy in Tehran, entirely due to Yasir Arafat’s intercession. Numerous contacts between the PLO and the U.S. took place, all of them through third parties, most of them secret.

  Rarely were such contacts to Palestinian advantage, however. For at least twenty years one sensed an almost plotted dys-synchrony between the U.S. and the Palestinians—two worlds moving in parallel, yet according to different agendas, with different rhythms, answering to different pressures. In the U.S., the Palestine question was always secondary to the massive American interests in the Arab states and, of course, to Israel; indeed, one could go as far as to say that Palestine was a domestic American issue, dominated since 1948, almost without demurral anywhere in society, by the Israeli lobby. It is true, as already noted, that with the emergence of the Palestine national movement, Palestinians began to insinuate themselves into the American consciousness, albeit to a considerably lesser degree than in the Third World or Eastern and Western Europe. The frustrating irony is that very little net effort was expended by the PLO upon improving its position in the U.S. Rather, Palestine became an independent issue there thanks, first, to local Palestinian and Arab-American efforts. Second, one would have to mention the work of independent and liberal (or left) opinion, organizations, and individuals, which constitute the anti-war, anti-imperial opposition in the U.S. Third, one should note the influence of some American and European Jews, a small number of American and European Jewish organizations, like the short-lived Breira, or the various groups in support of Peace Now, and anti-war resisters and the like in Israel. In other words, the battle in America was almost exclusively an American one, with which, alas, the PLO—unlike its altogether better performance in Western Europe—seemed insufficiently concerned, either through lack of attention, or, later, when indifference could no longer be argued, lack of knowledge; neither is excusable.

  Despite limited changes in American attitudes towards the Palestine question, it would be wrong to see the short-lived PLO–U.S. ambassadorial dialogue in Tunis that began in December 1988 and ended in mid-1990 as anything more (again, ironically) than a sliver chipped away from the large wall of American rejectionism and cosmetically presented as an ongoing commitment to “the peace process.” Whatever achievement was there to be enjoyed by Palestinians when the U.S. granted the dialogue was dissipated when even the most optimistic took considered note of the humiliating ritual they had to go through before the dialogue was signalled by the obdurate and incredibly indulgent (to Israel) George Shultz. (One shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to say that, when he took up his post from the unregretted Alexander Haig in July 1982, Shultz was considered to be vaguely pro-Arab; his years of business dealings through Bechtel and friendly contacts with many Arab, even Palestinian, business associates had predisposed people to think of him as somehow sympathetic to Arab concerns. Yet, in time, he became perhaps the most pro-Israeli of all secretaries of state, a puzzling, not to say infuriating, disappointment to his former friends.) Shultz required that Arafat repeat a series of statements written by the State Department renouncing terrorism, accepting Israel, and embracing UN Resolution 242—all of which were already Palestinian policy—as if only a public show of Palestinian penance and a formal undertaking of good behavior (normally unthinkable in the world of politics and diplomacy) would suffice. Never in the ensuing dialogue did the U.S. accept the notions of Palestinian self-determination, the right to statehood, or redress for Palestinian claims against Israel. When the dialogue was “suspended” by Secretary of State James Baker, the pretext given was the foolish and quite pointless Abul Abbas raid against Tel Aviv beaches (in which there were only Palestinian casualties). A more realistic reason for the suspension was the pressure of the Israeli lobby and the by now routine lack of official American generosity toward the most sorely tried and abused people in the Middle East.

  Even so, fairness requires that the Palestinian side of this sorry tale also be subjected to rigorous analysis. Here, an attitude of almost incredible insouciance, mistiming, and miscalculation, as well as a stark refusal to concentrate diplomatic and political efforts in the U.S., appears to have characterized the PLO’s way of dealing with what in effect is its major non-Middle Eastern field. In the aftermath of Camp David, a number of private initiatives kept a confidential dialogue going between the Carter administration and the PLO in Beirut. In 1979, for example, it would have been possible, and even certain, for a PLO–U.S. dialogue to have been swiftly and advantageously established were the organization to have accepted Resolution 242, along with a lengthy “reservation,” that is, a clause entering the Palestinian objection that the resolution did not in its original 1967 form say anything about Palestinian rights. This initiative was mystifyingly turned down, although Jimmy Carter himself had been the first president to pronounce the words “a Palestinian homeland,” early in 1977. If I may draw from personal experience, I can also attest to numerous attempts by Palestinian and other friends resident in the U.S. to engage the Palestinian leadership’s commitment to the idea that a full-scale, detailed, and sophisticated sensitivity to what was happening in the U.S. be maintained, nurtured, and developed; this hardly came about, although in countries like Britain, France, Sweden, and Italy, as indeed in the EEC as a whole, Palestinian political and informational efforts have been effective. Official Palestinian representation in the U.S. remained skeletal; the complicated currents that run through American society, its institutions, and its history have never really informed, changed, or inflected (except in an extremely approximate manner) PLO attitudes toward, or dealings with, the U.S.

  Much of the problem comes from the stark reality that Palestinian politics are essentially Arab politics, whereas the U.S. and Western Europe inhabit a totally different world, in which, for example, the media, the academy, and the research institutes, churches, professional associations, and labor unions of civil society play almost as important a role as the central government in political society. Rarely is the contrast between the two worlds so apparent as when Chairman Yasir Arafat has appeared on television. His difficulties, not only with the language, but with the whole presentation of self and image, have regularly been used to his disadvantage; this has been only slightly less true when any of his adjutants have appeared. The net result, therefore, has been a general underrepresentation of Palestine, something a good deal less effective than the results achieved in the heightening of Western consciousness due to the intifada. But this difference is even more maddening when we recall that over the past decades Western, and particularly American, public opinion has risen steadily in favor of a Palestinian state and the end of Israeli occupation.

  By Way of Assessment

  And yet fairness once again enjoins us to recognize that retrospective analysis always favors the analyst, doing little more for the participants than painting them, on the whole, ungenerously. Recent Palestinian history is full of bad turns and even catastrophes to which, at the time, plausible alternatives were only theoretically possible and in fact unrealizable. Who knows w
hether, in 1970, a confrontation with the Jordanian army could have been avoided? or whether the PLO’s trajectory while resident in Lebanon could have remained disentangled from that country’s spiralling rush to civil war? or whether the ravages of the Israeli invasion of 1982 could have been bypassed? or whether the costly price of alienating Syria, with the attendant insurrection of dissident PLO factions in the Syrian sphere in 1983, the war of the refugee camps in the mid- to late-eighties, and the continuing contest with Syria’s president need have been paid? or whether, finally, the disastrous results of the PLO’s tilt toward Iraq, which began at least two years before the invasion of Kuwait, might have been concluded differently, without the horrendous Palestinian losses on nearly every front? It would seem to me that the full irony of regional political dynamics always became crushingly apparent when the Palestinian drive towards self-determination and statehood took concrete form, that is, when the Palestinian component came up inevitably against one or another sovereignty, attracted its attention, brought it to bristling confrontation, and then found it too late to stop. The irony is that, as an expression of national self-determination, Palestinian activity was largely extra-territorial (without territorial sovereignty), and therefore always lived a sort of substitute life somewhere other than in Palestine. This made it vulnerable, not to say completely exposed, to sometimes furious hostility.

  Exile is thus the fundamental condition of Palestinian life, the source of what is both over- and underdeveloped about it, the energy for what is best, say, in the components of its remarkable literature (Emile Habibi’s Pessoptimist, the novels of Ghassan Kanafani and Jabra, the poetry of Rashid Hussein, Fadwa Tuqan, Samih al-Qassem, and Mahmoud Darwish, and the work of numerous essayists, historians, theoreticians, and memoirists) and in its extraordinary network of communications, associations, and extended families. And along with all that has gone Palestine’s intractability. Partly because of its cultural, religious, and historical depth, partly because it abuts on so many interests, both local and international, the cause of Palestine has remained for two decades the one uncooptable, undomesticated, and fierce national and anti-colonial cause still alive—to its adherents a source of unrealized hope and somewhat tarnished idealism, to its enemies a goad and a perdurable political alter ego that will neither go away nor settle into amiable nonentity.

  Yet no one—no Palestinian, no Arab or Israeli—would have suspected, I think, that the twenty years that began with the horrors of Black September could have gone on to produce both so dazzling a set of accomplishments and so terrible a series of disasters—the two extremes united by the fact that Palestinians were at the center of both—without an inch of Palestinian land actually liberated. One hardly knows what name to give this peculiar form of historical experience, but its main features should be rehearsed briefly. After 1948, the Palestinians were dispersed, and what few of them remained in their historic patrie were submerged in a new state decidedly not theirs. Three decades later, the PLO had spearheaded a massive effort at national self-reconstitution. An impressive array of institutions that answered to Palestinian needs in the fields of health, education, industry, research, military power, and law had transformed the lives of all Palestinians, no matter where they resided. At the center of this stood political institutions like the PLO’s Executive Committee, the Palestine Central and National councils, and a decent, though unevenly competent, apparatus of political representation. The leadership has been remarkably enduring, albeit horribly scarred by various assassinations of prominent and sometimes brilliant leaders whose loss significantly diminished Palestinian capacities: Ghassan Kanafani, Gamal Nasser, Kamal Adwan, Yousef Najjar, Abul Walid, Abu Jihad, Abu Iyad, Abul Hol. The mournful role call must also include the numbers killed in Europe, fine men like Naim Khidr, Ezzedine Qallaq, Said Hammami, Issam Sartawi, and Majid Abu Sharrar, whose political sanity was as much the target of terror as their formidable personal talents.

  Although the Palestinian community was dispersed and relocated in so improbably large a set of locales, there was a requisite constancy at the center, as personified by Yasir Arafat, a tragic figure of quite extraordinary political stripe. Much of the feuding between parties, constituencies, and Arab regimes, much of the redoubtable enmity of Israel and the U.S., much of the incoherence and sometimes anarchic internal convolutions of the movement were reduced and often brought into line through Arafat’s maneuverings. He achieved a sort of dual personality: one, as the undoubted and instantly recognizable symbol of Palestine, and two, as the political leader with the laurels and privileges, as well as the drawbacks, that that sort of personality entails. Among his most valuable contributions is the air of relative democracy that characterizes Palestinian political processes (when contrasted with the Arab environment, Arafat is the one leader who remains popular with his people). His shepherding of the nation-in-exile towards coexistence with Israel is perhaps his most lasting achievement. He has been open to a large number of Jews from Israel and the Diaspora, and has established a mode of interaction between people that, while it always places him at or near the center, makes possible a sort of communication between leadership and ordinary people largely unknown in the Third World. Although he is vilified to an unprecedented degree in the West, the sober truth is that, almost alone among post-colonial liberation movement leaders, Arafat has in fact prevented massive sectarian, or intra-Palestinian, violence; he has endured the carping of Palestinian as well as other critics with astonishing patience, and has never allowed what might be his own sense of political orthodoxy to quash or stifle the presence of a quite lively political heterodoxy within Palestinian life.

  Arafat has also presided over Palestinian losses of major proportions. It would be incorrect here for me to try to assess blame or apportion responsibility for any of these; all I am saying is that during his two decades of leadership the Palestinians have endured not only the continuing loss of territory to Israeli settlers on the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, but also the tragic military and civilian losses of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the terrible fallouts that came as the result of the Camp David Accords, and the Gulf crisis of 1990–91. I must leave to later historians and political scientists the balance sheet of his leadership with regard to Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria—that there were dreadful consequences for Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and others cannot be doubted. The exodus from Beirut which followed so much destruction, so much hate, misunderstanding, and waste, this alone is a major blot on the Palestinian record.

  But, one finds oneself saying, finally, the Palestinian political leadership did in fact draw the correct lessons from the intifada, which began in late 1987 and which continues as I write. Every Palestinian feels pride that, at the end of two decades of difficult and laborious effort, so remarkable a national insurrection against injustice should have arisen in the Occupied Territories. The intifada has provided a blueprint for Palestinian political and social life that is lasting, relatively nonviolent, inventive, brave, and confoundingly intelligent. Based on non-coercive norms of behavior that contrast stunningly with Israeli practices against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the intifada soon became a model for movements of democratic protest, not only in countries like Algeria, Tunisia, and Jordan, but also in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia and Africa. Where Israeli troops shot, beat, and harassed civilians, the Palestinians devised modes for getting around and crossing barriers; where the Israeli civil and military authorities forbade education or agriculture, the Palestinians improvised alternative organizations to do what was necessary; where the injunctions of a still largely patriarchal society held women in thrall, the intifada gave them new voices, authority, and power. From the intifada came the inspiration and the force that transformed Diaspora Palestinian caution and ambiguity into clarity and authentic vision; this, of course, was embodied in the 1988 Algiers PNC declarations.