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Al-Ahram Weekly 31 August - 6 September 2000 Issue No. 497 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 31 August - 6 September 2000 Issue No. 497
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters All roads lead to the lawn
By Hani Shukrallah
Bill Clinton, it now seems likely, will have his final signing ceremony after all. The soon-to-be-ex-president's claim to posterity is, alas, to be more than that of a post-modern Casanova. It is even whispered that the party to end all Mid-East parties may come right on the heels of the UN General Assembly's Millennium Summit. Spectacles galore seem to be in the making, and headline writers, columnists and TV anchors would be wise to start scouring their thesauruses for appropriately emotive, hopefully original words to describe the odds-on event. No mean task this, since we're already four or five (I seem to have lost count) tear-jerking historic-hand-shake-great-moment-for-peace-White-House-lawn signing ceremonies into the Middle East peace process, not to mention two sets of split Nobel peace prizes.
Such "optimism" is not derived from any credulous supposition that the Israelis are now any more willing to concede fundamental Palestinian and Arab rights than at any time during the past nine years of tortuous negotiations, including countless agreements to implement agreements, and yet others to implement various implementation agreements. (If you don't mind a bit of brave-and-peace-loving-little-Israel rhetoric, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's web site has an excellent family tree of the peace process -- very useful for whoever, like myself, needs to be constantly reminded of the process's mysterious ways.) Nor, it has become patently obvious, is the optimism a function of the supposed skillfulness or, God forbid, impartiality of the American mediation role.
None of Henry Kissinger's devious brilliance or Jimmy Carter's self-righteous tenacity here. As several commentators have observed on the pages of this newspaper and elsewhere, the crux of the US mediation role as seen by Clinton/Albright and the rest of their team may be summed up in their trying as best they can to: a) discern Israel's latest ideas on the issue(s) at hand, and then present them as American ones; b) publicly blame the Arab side for every hiccup or failure; c) refrain absolutely from any criticism of Israel, even when it violates agreements signed on the basis of Israeli ideas presented as American ones; and finally, d) with a little willingly supplied help from the New York Times and the Washington Post, come down on the Arabs like a ton of bricks.
The optimistic outlook for a final status agreement between the Palestinians and Israel (during September) is rather predicated on the one deadline that all the parties, for different reasons, are desperate to meet: Clinton's exit from the White House. Clinton, for obvious reasons, wants an agreement. For Barak, an agreement with the Palestinians could be his one chance to remain in power, tighten the squeeze on Syria and offset his Lebanese blundering. Above all, however, he would go down in history as the Israeli prime minister who finally got the Palestinians to declare an end to their struggle with Israel, formally forfeiting their historic rights and rendering future struggle illegitimate.
Arafat, on the other hand, is afflicted by a singular lack of options. His strongest negotiating card is his weakness -- the phantom of militant Islamism. But it is a card on which the Americans and their Israeli allies have continually called the Arabs' bluff. Even at its peak, in the late '80s and early '90s, the so-called Islamic threat was, for the Western world, little more than a hobgoblin with which the little ones (i.e. the public) could be kept relatively quiet, both domestically and globally. They never took it very seriously. And where is the "Islamic threat" today?
Moreover, it is a card that no Arab party can play very convincingly. Ultimately, Hamas is much more a threat to Arafat than to Israel, and the same could be said of its equivalents across the Arab world.
And what about the unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood, which Arafat has already threatened twice? In practical terms, the declaration of statehood as such is totally without meaning. Arafat would have no more territory than he already has, and as little real sovereignty over that territory as he already enjoys. The fuss, and the American and European pressure, are really about the implicit meaning of the step, at least as far as the Palestinian people are concerned. It is not formal Palestinian statehood that the Israelis, Americans and Europeans are so much against (they all know how empty it is, and they all concede it, whether explicitly or implicitly), but the fact that Palestinians would see it as a war cry, a declaration that the time for negotiations is over, and the time for struggle has come.
But this is a choice that Arafat has had, and has been loath to make, all along. It would expose him to severe American/Israeli punishment (though, in my view, the Israeli threat of re-occupying the self-rule areas is largely bogus), while putting him and his authority at the mercy of their people; he would become a hero, but an accountable one -- a revolutionary leader, as he used to be so many years ago, and not the Arab president he has become. It is precisely because of the strategic choice implied in the declaration of statehood that Arafat has been careful, firstly, to try and tame it as much as possible (i.e. to diminish its "subtext" to an absolute minimum, which is why European blessing, and terms, were deemed so vital), and, secondly, to use it largely as a pressure card. His bluff has been twice called and, ironically, the threatened declaration is thus transformed into an additional constraint on the Palestinian leader, forcing him to work even more urgently towards some sort of agreement -- against his own deadlines, un-sacred as they have continually proven to be.
Meanwhile, in Agadir, the extent of joint Arab and Islamic support that Palestinian negotiators can count on, even on the "highly sensitive" issue of Jerusalem, has been revealed to all and sundry. And so has the efficacy of American pressure in the age of globalisation. An Arab summit, as usual, proved impossible to convene. An Islamic summit was equally unworkable. All we finally got, several weeks after the failure of the Camp David II talks, was a low-key meeting of the Jerusalem Committee of the OIC, and a statement reiterating the committee's position on Palestinian rights in Jerusalem. All eyes, however, were on Cairo, where Clinton's brief stopover for talks with President Mubarak seemed to confirm the revived sense of optimism.
All roads seem to be leading us once again to the White House lawn. The accent now is on "creative" solutions. And creativity seems to consist of putting essentially the same content into a form so intricate and obscure that it will hopefully help the Palestinian and Arab side in general to swallow the bitter medicine they've been destined to take all along.
Clinton will most likely get his party, then; the pundits, headline writers and TV anchors will get to test the limits of their verbal eloquence, and none of it will be able to hide the fact that nothing really has been settled, that one nation continues to enslave another, and that, ultimately, no declaration or signed document has yet succeeded in making an oppressed people forfeit their right to struggle.
