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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000 Issue No. 505 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000 Issue No. 505
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Disneyland, with guns
By Hani Shukrallah
It took over 25 years to build, and a mere two weeks to crumble to dust. The "peace process" launched by Henry Kissinger in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 October War is over and done with. It fell apart at the very moment of its presumed fulfilment. Despite the amazing odds, the Palestinians, it transpired, had not, after all, been ready to submit. Barak, with a little help from Sharon, thought to teach them one final lesson in "realism." It didn't take. The protests became an Intifada, the Intifada a war of independence, and the Palestinian war of independence an Arab popular reaction so powerful and so unprecedented that it will most likely oblige bookshops to relocate Shimon Peres's The New Middle East to the fiction sections of their establishments -- logged under Romance.
Barak's "time-out" on the peace process is patently absurd; it rather reminded me of a friend who once told me in no uncertain terms that he refused to go to a common friend's dinner party; "anyway, I wasn't invited," he added as an afterthought.
And the end of the peace process has hurled us straight back to where it all began -- the 1948 usurpation of Palestine and dispossession of its people. The Labour Zionist Barak has, in three weeks, killed and injured more Palestinians than Likud's Shamir managed to do in the first four months of the first Intifada in 1988. Israeli snipers, according to eyewitnesses, attach silencers to their guns as they fire into demonstrating Palestinian crowds -- the idea being to avoid dispersing the crowd, with a view to inflicting "maximum damage"; tanks, helicopter gunships and missiles are equally part of Israel's "constrained response" to the Palestinians uprising for independence. And the settlers are on a rampage of terror and murder.
"We cannot live in the same country as the Arabs. I don't hate them, I don't love them. But we cannot share the same land," the Independent's Phil Reeves quoted Yaacov Hayman as saying on 20 October. As it happens, Mr Hayman, described by Reeves as big, bearded and with a pistol on his hip, is a resident of the West Bank; more precisely, of Itamar, a Jewish hill-top settlement south of Nablus. A Jewish American from Hollywood, California, Mr Hayman came to settle in "Israel" a mere 13 years ago. Now he is toting a gun and, with dispassionate ease, talking of dispossessing the "Arabs" of the remaining 22 per cent of their historic land, the land they have lived in and tilled for centuries.
It's not all talk, however. Hayman's gun is not just for show. On 17 October, two of his neighbours, Yaron Degani and Gad Tena (both residents of Itamar), shot dead 28-year-old Farid Nassarah as he picked olives in his orchard in the nearby village of Beit Fureik. California-born and -bred, Yaacov Hayman is probably very health-conscious; I have no doubt he could tell us much about the benefits of olive oil, very likely with considerably greater animation than he, Yaron or Gad would display while taking pot shots at young Palestinian farmers working their olive groves below the hill-top colony of Itamar.
He "doesn't hate them;" but they do tend to cling rather tenaciously to "the land" Yaacov and his friends don't like to share. The fact that the land happens also to be their land does not bother Hayman. And why should it? After all, he's got the gun.
For anyone who is not as severely delusional as Mrs Albright -- whose recent statement on Israel being "besieged" by the Palestinians should put the whole psychiatric profession in the US to shame -- the Serbian aspect of this whole scene is inescapable. But then Israel, as The Independent's commentator Alexei Sayle so succinctly put it, "is merely Serbia with yarmulkes and felafel." And while the Serbs, at least, have been around for a long time, Mr Hayman just dropped in from Disneyland.
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