 |
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 21 - 27 September 2000 Issue No. 500 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 21 - 27 September 2000 Issue No. 500
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
Egypt Elections Development Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Special Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Religious pathos and pathetic politics
By Hani Shukrallah
I am not about to make light of the various religious "sensitivities" towards Jerusalem, even while recognising that, though the sacred is held to be everlasting, religious sensitivities of all sorts invariably reveal a decidedly conjunctural nature. The fact that Jews, Christians and Muslims (by virtue of their common religious descent) hold Jerusalem holy and certain sites and shrines within it sacred, nonetheless gives none of them a claim on the city beyond that of enjoying fairly free access to these sites, and the freedom to perform whatever religious rituals their respective religions enjoin them to. And, one might add, access is never "unfettered," but is everywhere regulated and ultimately controlled by sovereign (political) states -- even in the Vatican itself. Need we remind anyone of the kind of "access" Palestinian, not to speak of other Arabs, Muslims and Christians alike, have been enjoying to this most holy of cities during the past 33 years?
The patently obvious fact about Jerusalem that has been drowned out by the raucous peace process rhetoric is that it is a Palestinian Arab city. Until 52 years ago, all of Jerusalem was a Palestinian Arab city (the prospective site of the American embassy was the home of a Palestinian family). Until today, East Jerusalem remains a Palestinian Arab city. It is a miracle that it does -- despite 33 years of economic and physical strangulation, and the gradual but unwavering policy of ethnic cleansing pursued by an occupying power that boasts one the most effective war machines in the world.
It is testimony to the indomitable ordinary heroism of the Palestinian people that they have not been "cleansed" from Jerusalem; that they have been able to withstand the invasive spread of Jewish settlements into the very heart of their city in what Netanyahu used to call "organic growth," but what any student of elementary biology would recognise immediately as cancer. For despite the unbearable oppression, the arm-breaking, the arrests and detentions without charge or trial, the legal and extra-legal torture, the house demolitions and the countless daily humiliations by a virulently racist settler population and its military guardians, East Jerusalem has remained a Palestinian Arab city. Pakistani Muslims, American Jews and European Christians may be as "religiously sensitive" as they wish about Jerusalem. The Palestinians' right to their city is derived simply from the fact that it is theirs -- an immutable spiritual and physical bond between a people and their land.
It is typical of the distortive effect that lies at the very heart of the "peace process" that this most fundamental right of a people to their own land has been transformed into a question of reconciling the religious sensitivities of the world's three great monotheistic religions, including such disparate communities as Pakistani Muslims, American Jews and European Christians.
The obfuscation has been so thorough in the case of Jerusalem as to open a Pandora's Box of sheer rubbish, what with Barak offering us such profound arguments in support of Israel's claims to Arab East Jerusalem as there having been no mosques around when Jesus walked the streets of the city 2,000 years ago, and the Americans proposing "divine sovereignty" over the Dome of the Rock. Not to be bested in the religious sensitivity free-for-all, Arafat reportedly suggested to Clinton (during their latest meeting on the sidelines of the Millennium Summit in New York) that sovereignty over the site be given to the Jerusalem Committee of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.
Distorting and concealing the fundamental facts of usurpation, dispossession and oppression have made up the cardinal logic of the peace process. The Palestinian leadership's complicity in this distortion in the case of Jerusalem is not merely a function of its irrevocable entanglement in that process, however. There is an additional "perk", which for some mysterious reason Palestinian negotiators seem to believe is their strongest bargaining chip. The question of religious sensitivity conjures up the spectre of militant Islamism. In trying to outbid the Israelis in underlining the intensity of Muslim, as opposed to Jewish, religious zeal towards Jerusalem, the Palestinian negotiators hope to paint a sufficiently horrifying picture of fanatical hordes unleashed in a rampage of terror and destruction.
It is not a threat that is even dignified by the implication that those who are making it intend to put into effect, failing a just peaceful settlement of their cause. Rather, they openly state that they will be its first victims. Barak recently derided Arafat for allegedly whining to world leaders that he would be killed by his people if he accepted what the Americans and Israelis are putting before him. Reminding Arafat that both Sadat and Rabin had been killed "for the sake of peace," Barak quipped that "we know of no attempt on Arafat's life."
In an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat, Salim Al-Zaanoun, the head of the Palestine National Council, revealed that a thoroughly dispirited Arafat had, in the course of Camp David II, told Clinton: "Don't forget to walk in my funeral, Mr President." The statement was intended to be dramatic. Strange, then, that it sounded pathetic instead.
