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March 23, 2002
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
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Anthrax
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March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
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CounterPunch
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Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
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Robert
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Arabs
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Alexander
Cockburn
When
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March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
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John Patrick
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The
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Wole Akande
US
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11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
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Bush's
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Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
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10
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March 24 / March
30, 2002
Talking to Tanks
By Azmi Bishara
al-Ahram
The Israeli army continues to pursue the objectives
delineated by the Israeli prime minister and his chief-of- staff.
These include not only the restoration of Sharon's damaged prestige
but also breaking the back of the nationalist movement embodied
in the youths of the camps and the armed bodies from all Palestinian
organisations that have resisted the occupation, without taking
into consideration the differences between the PA and the opposition.
These are the organisations of the Oslo generation, their members
men and women who grew up and came to awareness under the interim
accords, under the persistent expansion of Israeli settlements,
under the Israeli army barricades that have governed every detail
of their lives and their prospects for the future since the establishment
of the PA.
This is the generation that has been
deprived of that most fundamental of freedoms, the freedom of
movement. There are members of this generation who have been
unable to leave their camps or cities for a decade; others who
have never left Gaza in their lives. These are the people targeted
by the soldiers of the Israeli army, soldiers who, after their
compulsory military service are then destined for a full year's
rest and recuperation in the forests of far-off Latin America,
India and East Asia before returning to Israel to take up study
in university.
The wholesale detention of the adults
and youths who generated the resistance movement is not, then,
just an attempt to save face but aims at stifling the development
of that movement -- after which the Israeli army will withdraw,
leaving in its wake yet more degradation, rancour, hatred.
In the midst of this offensive Sharon
has declared he is open to negotiations. As long as his great
retaliatory campaign is pursued at full force, with tanks rumbling
from one camp to another and from one town to another, he is
"ready to talk with the Palestinians." On closer inspection,
though, we find that his idea of talks is confined to "negotiations
for a ceasefire while a ceasefire is in progress," a remarkable
example of verbal acrobatics. Ceasefire negotiations take place
when hostilities are still in progress. Sharon's "seven
days of calm," we should remember, were never a precondition
for ceasefire talks but for entering into political negotiations.
Yet Sharon took evident pride in the fact that Peres's talks
with Palestinian leaders focused solely on a ceasefire.
So, what is new? It is difficult to say.
Is Sharon manoeuvering to gain time for his brutal campaign of
repression? Or has he changed his attitude towards negotiations?
Perhaps the safest assumption is that Sharon intends to shift
his position on negotiating with the PA gradually, all the time
continuing his attempts to sap the strength of the national Palestinian
movement. In other words, he will sustain his assault against
Palestinian society and its political forces while reassuring
the world that he will get to the negotiating table in the end.
Sharon clearly does not favour a return
to the negotiating table. But if he has to negotiate, what are
his conditions and what does he want to negotiate over? These,
he hopes, are things his recent military offences will determine.
But they are also what Palestinian steadfastness and resistance
will also determine.
Under present circumstances, which underline
the necessity of sustaining the resistance, it is reasonable
not to respond to Sharon's tactic of encouraging meetings between
the PA and Peres for such meetings will lead to neither negotiations
nor a ceasefire. Their intent is to gain time. It is not, after
all, just a few misunderstandings at stake that can be cleared
up in a meeting with Peres, not one of those hurdles that can
be passed via one of Peres's formulas for circumvention. Such
formulaic circumventions have, in any case, become unpalatable.
The current conflict in Palestine is
not a matter of a misunderstandings or a lack of mutual comprehension.
It is not the result of some inexplicable slide of two sides
into a spiral of tit-for-tat violence -- such verbal constructs
are contrived solely to convey the impression of impartiality
on the part of the observer. The conflict exists because of occupation,
an occupation that has entered one of its virulent phases.
The end of the night is the blackest
part, as Farid Ghanem wrote. Yet even at this bleak hour there
is no sign of any Israeli resolve to dismantle the occupation
so that it can begin to negotiate over the conditions and time
frame for ending it. Israel cannot even take the recent Saudi
Arabian peace initiative seriously. Meanwhile, the world watches
as Israel moves the lines of confrontation into every Palestinian
home the Israeli army storms. And the Palestinians' goal, finally,
is not to negotiate for the sake of negotiations but to end the
occupation. They have no objection to negotiations if negotiations
lead to that end. But they have every objection if negotiations
are turned into yet another Israeli manoeuvre to prolong the
occupation.
In spite of the all-encompassing spirit
of Palestinian resistance, which has effaced the barriers between
Palestinian factions, it remains possible to delineate two general
Palestinian-Arab moods. The one that prevails views resistance
as a viable, indeed the necessary, route to ending the occupation.
The second watches the spiral of Israeli violence and Palestinian
counter-violence with despair and can imagine no other way of
breaking this cycle of violence except negotiations. Those who
espouse this second view saw Sharon's recent statement as a radical
turn around and awaited Zinni's visit with impatience.
From the perspective of the first view,
the resistance is no longer merely a reaction to brutality, and
even if a change has occurred in Sharon's position it is only
due to the Palestinians' perseverance in their resistance. Sharon's
recent declarations are not, it would follow, an indication of
any practical change in his position, but rather a signal that
the Israeli army will step up its detaining of Palestinian youths
in the squares of Palestinian camps and cities. This group also
has its eyes on Zinni; but more importantly on Dick Cheney, who
refuses to meet with Arafat and who is testing the Arab pulse
preparatory to an attack on Iraq. This group suspects that Zinni's
visit is little more than window dressing while Cheney pursues
Washington's real agenda.
Sharon's recent move to use EU mediation
to invite PA leaders to meet with Peres and his recent announcement
that he has dropped his condition of seven days of calm are no
more than political ruses, an attempt to obfuscate what Sharon
has set his mind upon. This is to crush the Palestinian resistance
by tormenting the entire Palestinian populace and combing through
an entire generation of Palestinians to root out any who might
harbour the flame of resistance.
This is not a policing plan intended
to detain suspects on the Israeli wanted list, as Sharon claims.
He, and his chief-of-staff, know full well that anyone they might
be looking for has long gone into hiding. And what he has unleashed
is not a flash commando operation, but a full-fledged military
offensive using heavy tanks and artillery. This is an operation
intended to let the Israeli army display its mastery of the streets
by firing missiles at anyone so bold as to look out his window
to see what's going on and by blindfolding, kicking and manhandling
the Palestinian youths it has rounded up.
The Palestinians who met with Peres during
this offensive should not have done so. I also believe that the
Arabs should not receive Zinni, or only do so under certain conditions.
Zinni knows as well as anyone what is really going on. Israel
is "making war on terrorists" with whom there can be
no negotiations; the Arabs want to negotiate as though the Israeli
army has not ransacked Palestinian bedrooms, blown up ambulances
and killed detainees.
Under such circumstances the question
of whether or not Arafat will be "permitted" to take
part in the Arab summit is purely secondary. It is secondary
because it has no bearing on what is happening on the ground
in Palestine, just as the fact that Israel's incursion into Ramallah,
with the exception of the area around Arafat's offices, is secondary
to the fact that the leader of the occupying power has granted
Arafat freedom to move in the territories still under occupation.
So even if Israel were to allow the Palestinian president to
attend the summit it would be a cosmetic move, though one that
would give the "moderate forces" in the Arab summit
a victory that spares them having to seek anything else to boast
of at the forthcoming summit, or to explore ways of supporting
the option of resistance.
Sharon's statements regarding the Palestinian
president's freedom of movement at a time when only the occupation
forces are free to move epitomise Israel's attempt to remove
the Palestinian leadership from any contexts of time and place.
It is Israel's way of clarifying the significance of the PA and
Palestinian leadership under the current circumstances. However,
the Palestinian leadership has the tools at its disposal to convey
the opposite message, which is that it does not need a licence
from a brutal occupying power to move freely on its own land.
When Israel has finished ploughing through
Palestinian territories and forcing the Palestinian resistance
to its knees it will welcome ceasefire negotiations. Then it
will let Arafat travel to the summit, where some Arabs are bound
to praise the move as a "breakthrough." That is how
they will market the results of the Israeli military campaign
-- as though it were a victory.
There is, though, only one answer to
Sharon's desperate bid to break the spirit of resistance and
that is to support the resistance. This is the only means to
defeat Sharon and his chief-of-staff. If the Arabs agree to Sharon's
conditions for returning to the negotiating table in the wake
of this appalling offensive, Europe will cheer and the US will
congratulate Sharon on his success. But if the Arabs rallied
behind the resistance and stood against the onslaught of Israel's
tanks, Europe would have to reaffirm the need to explore a just
political solution and the US would have to blame Israel for
the impasse, counsel it again against recourse to the option
of war and tell it to shorten its occupation of Palestinian cities.
Azmi Bishara
is a Palestinian activist and a member of the Knesset. This column
originally appeared in the Cairo-based weekly, al-Ahram.
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