http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2000/487/op2.htm
Not much of a choice
By Abdel-Jawad Saleh*, Al-Ahram Weekly, June 22, 2000
The United States and Israel seem to have placed their bets on
corrupt dictators whom they can trust as peace partners. They think
dictatorships make the best neighbours. Their calculations are
based on the racist belief that Israel's neighbours are divided by
tribal, religious and ethnic rivalries. In other words, they are
not worth democracy.
On this basis, too, the Israeli prime minister sees Palestinian
President Arafat as a more reliable partner in negotiating the
final status issues than any potential successor.
The majority of Palestinian entrepreneurs,
who had returned to Palestine to study the possibility of investing there,
have fled because of corruption. The absence of law constitutes a real
threat to investment. A few corruption-mongers have remained, looking
for carrion. They have found that it is easier and quicker to make money
by recruiting the highest-ranking officials as their partners in newly
established companies and monopolies.
Public tenders and contracts were tailored to their interests. The higher
the partner's rank, the more numerous the millions involved.
Some of these companies' partnership agreements are not known to the
public. The Palestinian Legislative Council cannot investigate them. The
privatisation of the communications sector was planned and executed
behind the relevant minister's back. He does not know the contents of
the agreement, though many years have had passed since it was signed.
The company monopolises communications in PA-controlled areas.
One of the heads of the security agencies was asked whether some of
the negotiators had entered commercial ventures with Israelis, as the
rumour had it. He replied in the affirmative. And why not? After all,
ministers and PLC members have entered such joint ventures, he
asserted.
The US, Israel and the donor countries are not particularly enthusiastic
about combating corruption. These countries are sacrificing Palestinian
democracy and transparency to entice Arafat into signing an agreement
based on Israel's vision of a "final solution."
In October 1999 I was invited to attend the International
Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) in Durban, South Africa. The
speaker of the PLC decided not to send an official delegation funded by
the UNDP as a way of preventing me from participating. I attended
anyway, and paid from my own pocket (it cost more than a month's
salary).
During the deliberations, I was abruptly prevented from continuing my
speech about corruption in the PA. I had been given the floor as a full
member by the South African minister of justice, who was chairing the
session. But I was stunned when Kevin Ford, the American chairman of
the IACC Council, rushed to the podium and asked the minister to
prevent me from continuing my speech to the 1,600 delegates
assembled.
The social fabric of Palestinian society -- its entire value system -- are
shuddering under the blows of the PA's policies. Poverty is spreading as
corruption accelerates. Infighting, still on a limited scale, is being fueled
by dangerous slogans: sectarianism, differences among refugees and
locals, between urban and rural dwellers. These prejudices, and the
tension they have engendered, constitute a phenomenon unprecedented
in Palestinian history.
The "Declaration of the Twenty" has expressed objectively the
Palestinians' disappointment with the PA. The signatories' justified anger
with its handling of the negotiations and support for a corrupt system was
the basis for mobilisation toward democratic change.
This climate poses a major challenge to the PA. The ongoing process of
negotiations on the final status issues will determine the nature of the
future map of Palestine.
The Israelis and Americans are telling Arafat that peace requires us to
forget the past. In other words, we must forsake Jerusalem, surrender
the refugees' right of return, disregard the settlements and the geography
of cantons they perpetuate, abandon the 1967 borders...
Strategic questions must be answered. There is unanimity among
Palestinians that any leader who compromises on the right of return, for
example, will be signing his own political death certificate. Neither
Clinton nor his friends in the Israeli government are worried about
Arafat's future -- after he signs, that is. Barak, with his myopic
perspective, is concerned with winning the hearts of the Israeli right.
Peace does not matter to him.
If these men fail to understand that a viable peace and a working
democracy will benefit everyone, they will destroy any vestige of good
intentions. Peace and democracy are inseparable in the achievement of a
sustainable peace. Yet Arafat has abandoned all the "non-negotiable"
demands of the 10-Point Programme adopted by the PNC in 1974. He
has not only relinquished the call for a democratic state in all of mandated
Palestine, but also backed down on the 1947 Partition Plan. He is
negotiating now a replacement solution comprising only 19 per cent of
Mandate Palestine.
As for Israel, it is determined to implement a new partition plan in the
territories it occupied in 1967 -- the 19 per cent left over from Mandate
Palestine minus Jerusalem.
Clinton is eager to induce Arafat to accept the new Israeli partition plan
in the proposed trilateral summit this summer. He is especially anxious to
go down in history as a peacemaker rather than just a womaniser. The
Israelis and the US are sure that Arafat will acquiesce to their demands.
They have learned that President Assad's death could help a
Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement to no end. But I believe that the
shadow of Hizbullah's victory will haunt Arafat. The envisaged "peace
agreement" will be neither just nor sustainable. It will be a trap into
which Arafat will fall headfirst, and a dump where the Palestinians will
be able to bury their hopes and their aspirations.
The PA will become a new South Lebanese Army. Israel will become
the apartheid state of the 21st century. It will use its prowess and its
nuclear threats to bully the whole area into submission. And everyone
will lose, in the absence of a peace that lives by the principles of a new
century: democracy, human rights, good governance, and civil society.
The victims, of course, will be the overwhelming majority of Arabs --
and democracy itself. The Palestinians, however, will lose the most. The
reaction that will rise from the ashes of frustration, apathy and repression
is difficult to predict. The PA's policies -- deinstitutionalisation,
destruction of social values, a legal vacuum, the absence of sovereignty
and the alienation of the people -- will drive the Palestinians inexorably
into the trap of violence. If the emerging independent leadership
succeeds in mobilising a non-violent struggle, then -- and only then --
will the Palestinians be on the right track to achieving their just and
legitimate rights.
* The writer is a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
