http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,380885,00.html
Double standards
The US celebrates Serb freedom, but the
case of the Palestinians is, apparently,
different
Edward Said, Thursday October 12, 2000
Misreported and hopelessly flawed from the start, the Oslo peace
process has entered its terminal phase - of violent confrontation,
disproportionately massive Israeli repression, widespread Palestinian
rebellion and great loss of life, the vast majority of it Palestinian.
Ariel Sharon's visit to Haram al-Sharif on September 28 could not have
occurred without Ehud Barak's concurrence. How else could the paunchy
old war criminal have appeared there with a thousand soldiers guarding
him? Barak's approval rating rose from 20% to 50% after the visit, and
the stage seems set for a national unity government ready to be still
more violent and repressive.
The portents of this disarray, however, were there from the 1993
start. Labour and Likud leaders alike made no secret of the fact that
Oslo was designed to segregate the Palestinians in non-contiguous
enclaves, surrounded by Israeli-controlled borders, with settlements
and settlement roads punctuating and essentially violating the
territories' integrity, expropriations and house demolitions
proceeding inexorably through the Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak
administrations along with the expansion and multiplication of
settlements (200,000 Israeli Jews added to Jerusalem, 200,000 more in
Gaza and the West Bank), military occupation continuing and every tiny
step taken toward Palestinian sovereignty - including agreements to
withdraw in minuscule, agreed-upon phases - stymied, delayed,
cancelled at Israel's will.
This method was politically and strategically absurd, even suicidal.
Occupied East Jerusalem was placed out of bounds by a bellicose
Israeli campaign to decree the intractably divided city off limits to
Palestinians and to claim it as Israel's "eternal, undivided capital".
The 4m Palestinian refugees - now the largest and longest existing
such population anywhere - were told that they could forget about any
idea of return or compensation.
With his own corrupt and stupidly repressive regime supported both by
Israel's Mossad and the CIA, Yasser Arafat continued to rely on US
mediation, even though the US peace team was dominated by former
Israeli lobby officials and a president whose ideas about the Middle
East were those of a Christian fundamentalist Zionist with no exposure
to or understanding of the Arab-Islamic world. Compliant, but
isolated and unpopular Arab chiefs (especially Egypt's President
Mubarak) were compelled humiliatingly to toe the American line,
thereby further diminishing their eroded credibility at home. Israel's
priorities were always put first, as was its bottomless insecurity and
its preposterous demands. No attempt was made to address the
fundamental injustice done when Palestinians as a people were
dispossessed in 1948.
Behind the peace process were two unchanging Israeli/American
presuppositions, both of them derived from a startling incomprehension
of reality. First was that given enough punishment and beating over
the years since 1948, Palestinians would ultimately give up, accept
the compromised compromises Arafat did in fact accept, and call the
whole Palestinian cause off, thereafter excusing Israel for everything
it has done. Thus, for example, the "peace process" gave no considered
attention to immense Palestinian losses of land and goods, none to the
links between past dislocation and present statelessness, while as a
nuclear power with a formidable military, Israel nevertheless
continued to claim the status of victim and demand restitution for
genocidal anti-semitism in Europe. Incongruously, there has still been
no official acknowledgement of Israel's (by now amply documented)
responsibility for the tragedy of 1948, even as the US went to war in
Iraq and Kosovo on behalf of other refugees. But one can't force
people to forget, especially when the daily reality was seen by all
Arabs as endlessly reproducing the original injustice.
Second, after seven years of steadily worsening economic and social
conditions for Palestinians everywhere, Israeli and US policymakers
persisted (stupidly, I think) in trumpeting their successes, excluding
the UN and other interested parties, bending the disgracefully
partisan media to their wills, distorting the actuality into ephemeral
victories for "peace". With the entire Arab world up in arms over
Israeli helicopter gunships and heavy artillery demolishing
Palestinian civilian buildings, with almost 100 fatalities and almost
2,000 wounded (including many children) and with Palestinian Israelis
up in arms against their treatment as third-class, non-Jewish
citizens, the misaligned and skewed status quo is falling apart.
Isolated in the UN and unloved everywhere in the Arab world as
Israel's unconditional champion, the US and its lame duck president
have little to contribute any more.
Neither does the Arab and Israeli leadership, even though they are
likely to cobble together another interim agreement. Most shocking has
been the total silence of the Zionist peace camp in the US, Europe and
Israel. The slaughter of Palestinian youths goes on and this band of
supposed peace-lovers either backs Israeli brutality or expresses
disappointment at Palestinian ingratitude. Worst of all is the US
media, completely cowed by the fearsome Israeli lobby, with
commentators and anchors spinning distorted reports about "crossfire"
and "Palestinian violence" that eliminate the fact that Israel is in
military occupation and that Palestinians are fighting it, not "laying
siege to Israel", as the ghastly Mrs Albright put it. While the US
celebrates the Serbian people's victory over Slobodan Milosevic,
Clinton and his minions refuse to see the Palestinian insurgency as
the same kind of struggle against injustice.
My guess is that some of the new Palestinian intifada is directed at
Arafat, who has led his people astray with phony promises, and
maintained a battery of corrupt officials holding down commercial
monopolies even as they negotiate incompetently and weakly on his
behalf. Some 60% of the public budget is disbursed by Arafat to
bureaucracy and security, only 2% to the infrastructure. Three years
ago his own accountants admitted to an annual $400m in disappeared
funds. His international patrons accept this in the name of the "peace
process", certainly the most hated phrase in the Palestinian lexicon
today.
An alternative peace plan and leadership is slowly emerging among
Israeli, West Bank, Gaza and diaspora Palestinians. No return to the
Oslo framework; no compromise on the original UN resolutions (242,
338, and 194) "mandating the Madrid conference in 1991; removal of all
settlements and military roads; evacuation of all the territories
annexed or occupied in 1967; boycott of Israeli goods and services. A
new sense may actually be dawning that only a mass movement against
Israeli apartheid (similar to the South African variety) will work.
Certainly it is sheer idiocy for Barak and Albright to hold Arafat
responsible for what he no longer fully controls. Rather than
dismissing the new framework being proposed, Israel's supporters would
be wise to remember that the question of Palestine concerns an entire
people, not an ageing and discredited leader. Besides, peace in
Palestine/Israel can only be made between equals once the military
occupation has ended. No Palestinian, not even Arafat, can really
accept anything less.
*Edward Said's book, The End of the Peace Process, will be published
by Granta.
