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June
14, 2003
The Latest Peace Plan
A
Roadmap to What and Where?
By EDWARD SAID
Early in May, while Colin Powell was on his visit
to Israel and the Occupied Territories, he met with Mahmoud Abbas,
the new Palestinian Prime Minister, and separately with a small
group of civil society activists, including Hanan Ashrawi and
Mostapha Barghuti. According to Barghuti, Powell expressed surprise
and mild consternation at the computerized maps of the settlements,
the eight-meter-high fence, and the dozens of Israeli Army checkpoints
that have made life so difficult and the future so bleak for
Palestinians. Powell's view of Palestinian reality is, to say
the least, defective, despite his august position, but he did
ask for materials to take away with him and, more important,
he reassured the Palestinians that the same effort put in by
Bush on Iraq was now going into implementing the road map. Much
the same point was made in the last days of May by Bush himself
in the course of interviews he gave to the Arab media, although
as usual, he stressed generalities rather than anything specific.
He met with the Palestinian and Israeli leaders in Jordan and,
earlier, with the major Arab rulers, excluding Syria's Bashir
al-Asaad, of course. All this is part of what now looks like
a major American push forward. That Ariel Sharon has accepted
the road map (with enough reservations to undercut his acceptance)
seems to augur well for a viable Palestinian state.
Bush's vision (the word strikes a weird
dreamy note in what is meant to be a hard-headed, definitive
and three-phased peace plan) is supposed to be achieved by a
restructured Authority, the elimination of all violence and incitement
against Israelis, and the installation of a government that meets
the requirements of Israel and the so-called Quartet (the US,
UN, EU and Russia) that authored the plan. Israel for its part
undertakes to improve the humanitarian situation, easing restrictions
and lifting curfews, though where and when are not specified.
By June 2003, Phase One is also supposed to see the dismantling
of the last 60 hilltop settlements (so called "illegal outpost
settlements established since March 2001) though nothing is said
about removing the others, which account for the 200,000 settlers
on the West Bank and Gaza, to say nothing of the 200,000 more
in annexed East Jerusalem. Phase Two, described as a transition
to run from June to December 2003, is to be focused, rather oddly,
on the "option of creating an independent Palestinian state
with provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty"
-- none are specified--culminating in an international conference
to approve and then "create" a Palestinian state, once
again with "provisional borders." Phase Three is to
end the conflict completely, also by way of an international
conference whose job it will be to settle the thorniest issues
of all: refugees,  settlements, Jerusalem, borders.
Israel's role in all this is to cooperate; the real onus is
placed on the Palestinians, who must keep coming up with the
goods in rapid succession, while the military occupation remains
more or less in place, though eased in the main areas invaded
during the spring of 2002. No monitoring element is envisioned,
and the misleading symmetry of the plan's structure leaves Israel
very much in charge of what--if anything--will happen next. As
for Palestinian human rights, at present not so much ignored
as suppressed, no specific rectification is written into the
plan: apparently it is up to Israel whether to continue as before
or not.
For once, say all the usual commentators,
Bush is offering real hope for a Middle East settlement. Calculated
leaks from the White House have suggested a list of possible
sanctions against Israel if Sharon gets too intransigent, but
this was quickly denied and then disappeared. An emerging media
consensus presents the document's contents--many of them from
earlier peace plans--as the result of Bush's new-found confidence
after his triumph in Iraq. As with most discussions of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, manipulated clichés and far-fetched suppositions,
rather than the realities of power and lived history, shape the
flow of discourse. Skeptics and critics are brushed aside as
anti-American, while a sizeable portion of the organized Jewish
leadership has denounced the road map as requiring far too many
Israeli concessions. But, the establishment press keeps reminding
us that Sharon has spoken of an "occupation," which
he never conceded until now, and has actually announced his intention
to end Israeli rule over 3.5 million Palestinians. But is he
even aware of what he proposes to end? The Ha'aretz commentator
Gideon Levy wrote on June 1 that, like most Israelis, Sharon
knows nothing "about life under curfew in communities that
have been under siege for years. What does he know about the
humiliation of checkpoints, or about people being forced to travel
on gravel and mud roads, at risk to their lives, in order to
get a woman in labor to a hospital? About life on the brink of
starvation? About a demolished home? About children who see their
parents beaten and humiliated in the middle of the night?"
Another chilling omission from the road
map is the gigantic "separation wall" now being built
in the West Bank by Israel: 347 kilometers of concrete running
north to south, of which 120 have already been erected. It is
twenty-five feet high and ten feet thick; its cost is put at
1.6 million dollars per kilometer. The wall doesn't simply divide
Israel from a putative Palestinian state on the basis of the
1967 lines borders: it actually takes in new tracks of Palestinian
land, sometimes five or six kilometers at a stretch. It is surrounded
by trenches, electric wire, and moats; there are watchtowers
at regular intervals. Almost a decade after the end of South
African apartheid, this ghastly racist wall is going up with
scarcely a peep from the majority of Israelis or their American
allies who, whether they like it or not, are going to pay most
of its cost. The 40,000 Palestinian inhabitants of the town of
Qalqilya in their homes are on one side of the wall, the land
they farm and actually live off of is on the other. It is estimated
that when the wall is finished -- presumably as the US, Israel
and the Palestinians argue about procedure for months on end
-- almost 300,000 Palestinians will be separated from their land.
The road map is silent about all this, as it is about Sharon's
recent approval of a wall on the eastern side of the West Bank,
which will, if built, reduce the amount of Palestinian territory
available for Bush's dream state to roughly 40% of the area.
This is what Sharon has had in mind all along.
An unstated premise underlies Israel's
heavily modified acceptance of the plan and the US's evident
commitment to it: the relative success of Palestinian resistance.
This is true whether or not one deplores some of its methods,
its exorbitant cost, and the heavy toll it has taken on yet another
generation of Palestinians who have not wholly given up in the
face of the overwhelmingly superiority of Israeli-US power.
All sorts of reasons have been given for the emergence of the
road map: that 56% Israelis back it, that Sharon has finally
bowed to international reality, that Bush needs an Arab-Israeli
cover for his military adventures elsewhere, that the Palestinians
have finally come to their senses and brought forth Abu Mazen
(Abbas's much more familiar nom de guerre, as it were), and so
on. Some of this is true, but I still contend that were it not
for the fact of the Palestinian stubborn refusal to accept that
they are "a defeated people," as the Israeli Chief
of Staff recently described them, there would be no peace plan.
Yet, anyone who believes that the road map actually offers anything
resembling a settlement or that it tackles the basic issues is
wrong. Like so much of the prevailing peace discourse, it places
the need for restraint and renunciation and sacrifice squarely
on Palestinian shoulders, thus denying the density and sheer
gravity of Palestinian history. To read through the road map
is to confront an unsituated document, oblivious of its time
and place.
The road map, in other words, is not
about a plan for peace so much as a plan for pacification: it
is about putting an end to Palestine as a problem. Hence the
repetition of the term "performance" in the document's
wooden prose, - in other words, how the Palestinians are expected
to behave, almost in the social sense of the word. No violence,
no protest, more democracy, better leaders and institutions,
all based on the notion that the underlying problem has been
the ferocity of Palestinian resistance, rather than the occupation
that has given rise to it. Nothing comparable is expected of
Israel except that the small settlements I spoke of earlier,
known as " illegal outposts" (an entirely new classification
which suggests that some Israeli implantations on Palestinian
land are legal) must be given up and, yes, the major settlements
"frozen" but certainly not removed or dismantled.
Not a word is said about what since 1948, and then again since
1967, Palestinians have endured at the hands of Israel and the
US. Nothing about the de-development of the Palestinian economy
as described by the American researcher Sara Roy in a forthcoming
book . House demolitions, the uprooting of trees, the
5000 prisoners or more, the policy of targeted assassinations,
the closures since 1993, the wholesale ruin of the infrastructure,
the incredible number of deaths and maimings--all that and more,
passes without a word.
The truculent aggression and stiff-necked
unilateralism of the American and Israeli teams are already well-known.
The Palestinian team inspires scarcely any confidence, made up
as it is of recycled and aging Arafat cohorts. Indeed, the road
map seems to have given Yasir Arafat another lease on life, for
all the studied efforts by Powell and his assistants to avoid
visiting him. Despite the stupid Israeli policy of trying to
humble him by shutting him up in a badly bombed compound, he
is still in control of things. He remains Palestine's elected
president, he has the Palestinian purse strings in his hands
(the purse is far from bulging), and as for his status, none
of the present "reform" team (who with two or three
significant new additions are re-shuffled members of the old
team) can match the old man for charisma and power.
Take Abu Mazen for a start. I first met
him in March 1977 at my first National Council meeting in Cairo.
He gave by far the longest speech, in the didactic manner which
must have first perfected as a secondary school teacher in Qatar,
and explained to the assembled Palestinian parliamentarians the
differences between Zionism and Zionist dissidence. It was a
noteworthy intervention, since most Palestinians had no real
notion in those days that Israel was made up not only of fundamentalist
Zionists who were anathema to every Arab, but of various kinds
of peaceniks and activists as well. In retrospect, Abu Mazen's
speech launched the PLO's campaign of meetings, most of them
secret, between Palestinians and Israelis who had long dialogues
in Europe about peace and some considerable effect in their respective
societies on shaping the constituencies that made Oslo possible.
Nevertheless, no one doubted that Arafat
had authorized Abu Mazen's speech and the subsequent campaign,
which cost brave men like Issam Sartawi and Said Hammami their
lives. And while the Palestinian participants emerged from the
center of Palestinian politics (i.e. Fateh), the Israelis were
a small marginalized group of reviled peace supporters whose
courage was commendable for that very reason. During the PLO's
Beirut years between 1971 and 1982, Abu Mazen was stationed in
Damascus, but joined the exiled Arafat and his staff in Tunis
for the next decade or so. I saw him there several times and
was struck by his well-organized office, his quiet bureaucratic
manner, and his evident interest in Europe and the United States
as arenas where Palestinians could do useful work promoting peace
with Israelis. After the Madrid conference in 1991, he was said
to have brought together PLO employees and independent intellectuals
in Europe and turned them into teams to prepare negotiating files
on subjects such as water, refugees, demography, and boundaries
in advance of what were to become the secret Oslo meetings of
1992 and 1993, although to the best of my knowledge, none of
the files was used, none of the Palestinian experts was directly
involved in the talks, and none of the results of this research
influenced the final documents that emerged.
In Oslo, the Israelis fielded an array
of experts supported by maps, documents, statistics and at least
17 prior drafts of what the Palestinians would end up signing,
while the Palestinians unfortunately restricted their negotiators
to three completely different PLO men, not one of whom knew English
or had a background in international (or any other kind of) negotiation.
Arafat's idea seems to have been that he was fielding a team
mainly to keep himself in the process, especially after his exit
from Beirut and his disastrous decision to side with Iraq during
the 1991 Gulf War. If he had other objectives in mind, then
he didn't prepare for them effectively, as has always been his
style. In Abu Mazen's memoir and in other anecdotal accounts
of the Oslo discussions, Arafat's subordinate is credited as
the "architect" of the accords, though he never left
Tunis; Abu Mazen goes so far as to say that it took him a year
after the Washington ceremonies (where he appeared alongside
Arafat, Rabin, Peres, and Clinton) to convince Arafat that he
hadn't gotten a state from Oslo! Yet, most accounts of the peace
talks stress the fact that Arafat was pulling all the strings
just the same. No wonder then that the Oslo negotiations made
the over-all situation of the Palestinians a good deal worse.
The American team led by Dennis Ross, a former Israeli-lobby
employee--a job to which he has now returned--routinely supported
the Israeli position which, after a full decade of negotiation,
consisted in handing back 18% of the Occupied Territories to
the Palestinians on highly unfavorable terms, with the IDF left
in charge of security, borders, and water. Naturally enough,
the number of settlements more than doubled.
Since the PLO's return to the Occupied
Territories in 1994, Abu Mazen has remained a second-rank figure,
known universally for his "flexibility" with Israel,
his subservience to Arafat, and his total lack of any organized
political base, although he is one of Fateh's original founders
and a long-standing member and secretary general of its Central
Committee. So far as I know, he has never been elected to anything,
and certainly not to the Palestinian Legislative Council. The
PLO and the Palestine Authority under Arafat are anything but
transparent. Little is known about the way decisions have been
made, or how money gets spent, where it is, and who besides Arafat
has any say in the matter. Everyone agrees, however, that Arafat,
a fiendish micro-manager and control freak, remains the central
figure in every significant way. That is why Abu Mazen's elevation
to the status of reforming Prime Minister, which so pleases the
Americans and Israelis, is thought of by most Palestinians as,
well, a kind of joke, the old man's way of holding on to power
by inventing a new gimmick so to speak. Abu Mazen is thought
of generally as colorless, moderately corrupt, and without any
clear ideas of his own, except that he wants to please the white
man.
Like Arafat, Abu Mazen has never lived
anywhere except the Gulf, Syria and Lebanon, Tunisia, and now
occupied Palestine; he knows no languages other than Arabic,
and isn't much of an orator or public presence. By contrast,
Mohammed Dahlan, the new security chief from Gaza--the other
much-heralded figure in whom the Israelis and Americans place
great hope--is younger, cleverer, and quite ruthless. During
the 8 years that he ran one of Arafat's 14 or 15 security organizations,
Gaza was known as Dahlanistan. He resigned last year, only to
be re-recruited for the job of "unified security chief"
by the Europeans, the Americans and the Israelis, even though
of course he too has always been one of Arafat's men. Now he
is expected to crack down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad; one of
the reiterated Israeli demands behind which lies the hope that
there will be something resembling a Palestinian civil war, a
gleam in the eyes of the Israeli military.
In any event, it seems clear to me that,
no matter how assiduously and flexibly Abu Mazen "performs,"
he is going to be limited by three factors. One of course is
Arafat himself, who still controls Fateh, which, in theory, is
also Abu Mazen's power base. Another is Sharon (who will presumably
have the US behind him all the way). In a list of 14 "remarks"
about the road map published in Ha'aretz on May 27, Sharon
signaled the very narrow limits on anything that might be construed
as flexibility on Israel's part. The third is Bush and his entourage;
to judge by their handling of postwar Afghanistan and Iraq, they
have neither the stomach nor the competence for the nation-building
that surely will be required. Already Bush's right-wing Christian
base in the South has remonstrated noisily against putting pressure
on Israel, and already the high-powered American pro-Israel lobby,
with its docile adjunct, the Israeli-occupied US Congress, have
swung into action against any hint of coercion against Israel,
even though it will be crucial now that a final phase has begun.
It may seem quixotic for me to say, even
if the immediate prospects are grim from a Palestinian perspective,
they are not all dark. I return to the stubbornness I mentioned
above, and the fact that Palestinian society -- devastated, nearly
ruined, desolate in so many ways--is, like Hardy's thrush in
its blast-beruffled plume, still capable of flinging its soul
upon the growing gloom. No other Arab society is as rambunctious
and healthily unruly, and none is fuller of civic and social
initiatives and functioning institutions (including a miraculously
vital musical conservatory). Even though they are mostly unorganized
and in some cases lead miserable lives of exile and statelessness,
diaspora Palestinians are still energetically engaged by the
problems of their collective destiny, and everyone that I know
is always trying somehow to advance the cause. Only a miniscule
fraction of this energy has ever found its way into the Palestinian
Authority, which except for the highly ambivalent figure of Arafat
has remained strangely marginal to the common fate. According
to recent polls, Fateh and Hamas between them have the support
of roughly 45% of the Palestinian electorate, with the remaining
55% evolving quite different, much more hopeful-looking political
formations.
One in particular has struck me as significant
(and I have attached myself to it) inasmuch as it now provides
the only genuine grassroots formation that steers clear both
of the religious parties and their fundamentally sectarian politics,
and of the traditional nationalism offered up by Arafat's old
(rather than young) Fateh activists. It's been called the National
Political Initiative (NPI) and its main figure is Mostapha Barghuti,
a Moscow-trained physician, whose main work has been as director
of the impressive Village Medical Relief Committee, which has
brought health care to more than 100,000 rural Palestinians.
A former Communist Party stalwart, Barghuti is a quiet-spoken
organizer and leader who has overcome the hundreds of physical
obstacles impeding Palestinian movement or travel abroad to rally
nearly every independent individual and organization of note
behind a political program that promises social reform as well
as liberation across doctrinal lines. Singularly free of conventional
rhetoric, Barghuti has worked with Israelis, Europeans, Americans,
Africans, Asians, Arabs to build an enviably well-run solidarity
movement that practices the pluralism and co-existence it preaches.
NPI does not throw up its hands at the directionless militarization
of the intifada. It offers training programs for the unemployed
and social services for the destitute on the grounds that this
answers to present circumstances and Israeli pressure. Above
all, NPI which is about to become a recognized political party,
seeks to mobilize Palestinian society at home and in exile for
free elections--authentic elections which will represent Palestinian,
rather than Israeli or US, interests. This sense of authenticity
is what seems so lacking in the path cut out for Abu Mazen.
The vision here isn't a manufactured
provisional state on 40% of the land, with the refugees abandoned
and Jerusalem kept by Israel, but a sovereign territory liberated
from military occupation by mass action involving Arabs and Jews
wherever possible. Because NPI is an authentic Palestinian movement,
reform and democracy have become part of its everyday practice.
Many hundreds of Palestine's most notable activists and independents
have already signed up, and organizational meetings have already
been held, with many more planned abroad and in Palestine, despite
the terrible difficulties of getting around Israel's restrictions
on freedom of movement. It is some solace to think that, while
formal negotiations and discussions go on, a host of informal,
un-coopted alternatives exist, of which NPI and a growing international
solidarity campaign are now the main components.
Today's Features
David
Vest
Bush
Roadmap to What?
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?
John
Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There
Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence
Michael
Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America
Saul
Landau
Shiite Happens
Hammond
Guthrie
Then and Now
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/13
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