Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 23 - 29 November 2000 Issue No.509
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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The logic of peace

By Hani Shukrallah

Declarations of repentance by members of the all but defunct Israeli peace movement have proved quite revealing. They've been quoted everywhere as expressing their bitter disappointment with the Palestinians: "They don't love us," the peaceniks have been intoning in hurt tones since the first weeks of the Intifada. And it seems that Hell hath no fury like a liberal Zionist scorned. Bewailing the discovery of their unrequited love, the members of the so-called Israeli peace camp (whom some have been ardently wooing for years) penitentially declare their blanket support for Barak's mass murder of the ungrateful Palestinians.

This is not, however, a case of fatal attraction, amorous assignations in Copenhagen, Oslo and other European retreats notwithstanding. There is a logic, of sorts, behind the apparent insanity, and it is the logic of the peace process. The Palestinians, it is perfectly true, have reneged on their side of the bargain. The Euro-funded love-ins have been a sham; Abu Mazen and dozens of other Palestinian, Egyptian and Jordanian realists had horribly misled their Israeli, American and European peace partners as to the reality of the situation. Oslo's obliging house niggers -- to borrow a sixties African American metaphor -- it was suddenly revealed, have been obdurate ranch slaves all along.

At the heart of the disappointment is the essentially racist construction of Israeli/Jewish security upon which the whole peace process has been based. In the Palestinians we have a people dispossessed of their homeland, ruptured as a nation and even as families, transformed into disparate subject populations and stateless refugees, subjected to an on-going process of dispossession and plunder (land confiscation, house demolitions, administrative and economic strangulation, which they suffered both as citizens of the "Jewish state" and as subjects in its conquered territories) and exposed to heinous oppression, including economic enslavement, wide-scale administrative detentions, legalised torture, racist harassment and periodic massacres. Their peace and security have been shattered, and continue to be shattered, for over 50 years, yet it is Israeli, or to put it in more emotive terms, Jewish peace and security, that are supposed to be at stake, under threat and in need of endless guarantees, in return for which the Palestinians may be given back some of their land.

Wherein lies the threat? A cursory glance at the fundamental logic of the peace process would immediately reveal that the Palestinians' mere existence is in and of itself deemed a threat to the "Jewish State." The liberal Zionists' dilemma is that they want the Palestinians to concede not only that they are lesser beings, but relish their third class status. They should concede that their state-to-be should be demilitarised, while the Jewish state maintains 50 nuclear warheads and one of the most advanced military machines in the world; they must concede that Israeli Jewish security requires enough water for lawn sprinklers and swimming pools, while they and their land thirst for it; they must concede that the lightly armed Palestinian police should use their miserable Klashnikovs to protect Jewish security against Palestinian dissidents (through administrative detention and torture), but should never be used to protect Palestinian civilians as they are butchered by missiles, tank-fire, murderous settlers or army sharpshooters thirsty for the blood of their children. They are supposed to concede too that Israeli/Jewish security implies cutting their homeland into isolated cantons, crisscrossed by security installations, settlements and countless by-pass roads over which they have no control, and which can be used, whenever the occasion warrants it, to destroy their homes, shatter their lives and reoccupy the little of their land they have any kind of control over. They are to concede that their economy should remain hostage to the Israeli economy and subject to a political decision to starve them; and to concede as well that a Jewish American from Hollywood could decide tomorrow to "return" to the land of his biblical ancestors and find full citizenship rights, a home and a sprinkler-sodden front yard, while Diaspora Palestinians who have been driven out by massacres, brute force and administrative and economic strangulation can only return in trickles, subject always to Israeli approval. They are to concede that they should be beaten to the ground, shackled, manacled and cuffed hand and foot. They are to concede all this, and like it too, for they are Palestinians and the Israelis are Jews; and as Palestinians, as a colonised non-white, non-Western population, their mere existence is a threat to Jewish security.

It is one of the great ironies of modern history that the "Jewish state," whose founding rationale was the impossibility of Jewish integration into Western Christian civilisation, came to epitomise that civilisation -- a Western outpost amidst a sea of barbarism.

The Palestinians didn't like it.

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