Last week, the Israeli Peace Now movement underlined both its Jewish supremacist (i.e. racist) limitations and its political bankruptcy by issuing in Cairo, with not one, but apparently three distinct Egyptian groups, a "peace document". While of considerably less authentic pedigree than their Israeli counterparts (after all, Peace Now, self-importantly described in the Cairo document as "the largest peace movement in Israel", can at least lay some claim to one great anti-war demonstration in 1982), the Egyptian groups offer a rather complex arithmetic. The Egyptian signatories of the "Cairo document" are presented somewhat confusingly as: the "Egyptian Peace Movement" -- a previously unknown entity -- and the "International Alliance for Peace -- Cairo Peace Society".
The Cairo Peace Society, self-avowedly the Egyptian chapter of the Copenhagen-born "International Alliance for Middle East Peace", recently won the much-coveted and regularly denied (some two score Egyptian human rights organisations testify to this fact) legal sanction of the Ministry of Social Affairs. The combining of the two names in the document is of highly dubious legality, but seems to underline the "official" self-confidence of the "popular" Egyptian group. Whether all this makes one, two, two and a half or three "actually-existing" groups is anybody's guess, but the arithmetic is simplified perhaps by the fact that all three distinct "entities" are led and directed by the same small group of people.
Now unlike many Egyptian and Arab critics of the 17-month-long Copenhagen saga, I do not believe that there is anything particularly threatening or even politically significant about the various spectacles put on by the alleged "popular alliance" established in the Danish capital with a lot of help from a host of "non-popular" -- i.e. governmental -- European agencies. Whether in Copenhagen, Jerusalem or Cairo, the "peace" divertissements have been invariably forced, their rhetoric contrived, their language insipid; the protagonists all "protest too much", but their "passionate" appeals for peace ring hollow -- tired, trite and, if anything, blatantly lacking in genuine feeling of any sort.
Thus we get strings of words such as: "The embattled people of the Middle East are tired of war... the yearning for peace at the closure (sic) of the Second Millennium [has become] for the great majority of men and women on both sides of the divide, the strongest sentiment and the greatest hope, which is awaiting fulfillment by the political leadership." Parroting countless "peace process" spectacles, in the Knesset, on the White House lawn, in Cairo, Amman, Jerusalem and Washington, the document's rhetoric is novel only in its convoluted syntax. For the rest, it combines the deliberately obscure "diplomatic cleverness" of the Oslo Accords with bland and often clumsy rhetoric -- evoking not so much anger as a great yawn of boredom.
All in all, the document is even more skewed in Israel's favour than its precursor, the so-called Copenhagen Declaration. In this, the Copenhagen "initiative" continues to ape the Oslo process, wherein each subsequent "agreement" is progressively worse than the one before it. Suffice it here to say that it rings very similar to the so-called Abu Mazen-Yossi Beilin final status agreement, the existence of which was denied by the Palestinians. An allegedly popular document, it makes no mention of fundamental Palestinian rights nor of the fact of continuing Palestinian dispossession; meanwhile, it recognises "the facts that have been created on the ground" (read: Jewish settlements, Israeli roads, security installations, etc.) as grounds for "border adjustments", without even venturing to say how much land is involved. This at a time when everybody knows that Palestinian land, water and other natural resources are being eaten up at breathtaking speed; that a Labour government started this process of despoliation; and that the Palestinians' right to "their own state alongside the state of Israel", which the document calls upon the Israeli government to "formally recognise", is to be exercised on no more than Israeli-besieged cantons on a fraction of their land: some 40 per cent of Gaza and 15 per cent of the West Bank.
For all its bombast, the supposedly "popular" document has nothing to say on the specific "facts" of Palestinian dispossession, of the daily and unbearable oppression under which a whole people have been living for 50 years. The "peace" rhetoric is used to hide the fundamental fact of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is precisely that one people has dispossessed and oppressed another, and continues to do so. Once the rhetoric is given a backseat, the "facts" are mentioned with deliberate Oslo-style vagueness." Indeed, even the grammar seems to improve once the document starts to deal with such questions as border adjustments, Jerusalem and refugees. The stipulation on the eternally "unified Jerusalem" is hopelessly contorted, but here the convolutions seem deliberate -- opening the door for the so-called "Abu Dis" option. The shifts in the tone of the document, in fact, tempt one to guess that the Egyptian side was given the job of drawing up the rhetoric, while their Israeli peace allies dealt with the less rambling and more deliberate and carefully-worded "negotiated formulations".
Free concessions by diplomats are bad enough; that "popular" movements should join in to deliver a few of their own is, to put it mildly, an exercise in absurdity. But all this seems to underline what Copenhagen has been from the start: an Oslo sidekick. The document makes no secret of the fact that the purpose of the whole "popular" extravaganza is "to reawaken the peace process". As such, there is nothing especially new or particularly threatening about it.
Last week in Cairo, the official lineages of the "popular" participants were starkly revealed for all to see. The hidden agenda is not very well hidden; the gold cufflinks of the diplomat stick out a mile away from underneath the bush jackets of the "popular" representatives. Ultimately, the whole affair is a somewhat ridiculous attempt to "reawaken" the flagging fortunes of the Israeli Labour Party.
*The writer is the managing editor of Al-Ahram Weekly.
