11 - 17 January 2001
Issue No.516
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 11 - 17 January 2001 Issue No.516 |
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Reflections:
Making sense of insanity
It has been instructive to observe the dramatic shifts in official Palestinian and Arab responses to Clinton's alleged 11th-hour effort to salvage the "peace process" and get the Palestinians and Israelis to sign a framework agreement on final status issues during his last few weeks in office. The optimism of the past couple of weeks has given way to gloom, and the betting now is on a "presidential statement," accepted by Israel and the Palestinians, to be issued by the American president before he leaves the White House, presumably showing where the negotiations stood when he left. Even that is unlikely, depending of course on the Palestinian leader's ability to balance the bullying of his "peace partners" against the tangible pressure of his own constituency.
Whether Clinton seriously believed that he could get Arafat to sign what he had rejected at Camp David -- well before the Intifada, the brutality and bloodshed -- is academic. Some commentators think that Clinton's "bridging proposals" are intended as a parting bequest to Israel from what arguably has been America's most Zionist administration to date; to absolve it from past, current and future butchery by laying the blame squarely on Arafat, so that Israeli acting Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami could say (as he did this week): "It is very meaningful that the international community will conclude that Israel made the effort until the last moment and not the other side."
Irrespective of the true intentions of the outgoing American president's last stand, then, the accent now is on Arafat's unwillingness to "go the last mile," which we are to believe Israel was willing to do, by agreeing to Clinton's proposals (which, as usual are in fact Israeli ideas), even merely as "a basis for negotiations." Nothing is allowed to detract from Israel's alleged last sprint -- not the threats of total war against a largely unarmed population, the continued killing and destruction, including extrajudicial assassinations of Palestinian leaders, the starvation siege of the cantonised Palestinian territories, not even the fact that 100,000 Israelis demonstrated this week in Jerusalem to protest the ridiculous, and flagrantly cosmetic, offer regarding Palestinian shared "sovereignty" in parts of Arab East Jerusalem. And this ahead of elections the incumbent Israeli prime minister is almost sure to lose, making a framework agreement of whatever sort with him no more than ink on paper, one which everybody knows will never be implemented.
We have been hurled into a make-believe world in which an unarmed, downtrodden and subjugated people under military occupation lay siege to the occupying power; stone-throwing children threaten the security of one of the most highly armed states in the whole world -- a nuclear state to boot; and shattered mothers are blamed for the willful murder and mutilation of their children by both disciplined soldiers and rampaging settlers. All the gruesome fairy tale needed was a snow queen, and we got her. The Queen of Sweden, previously unknown for any kind of interest in this or any other region, has joined the fray to add her own little bit of racist rubbish. Up there in the Ice Castle, the brutal murders of Mohamed Al-Dorra and tens of other Palestinian children is the fault of their mothers -- freaks of nature, so fanatical they send their little children to certain death, just to give nice, decent Israeli soldier boys a bad name, meanwhile disturbing the clearly fragile sensibilities of northern European royals.
There is, however, one aspect of this sordid topsy-turvy world from which one can derive some amusement, however bitter. This lies in the novel definition of leadership (when it applies to Arabs, naturally). Since Camp David, we have been hearing more and more about the kind of treatment Arafat receives from his American patrons and their Israeli allies behind closed doors. Presumably, Mafia bosses making a small-time street hood "an offer he can't refuse" can be described as negotiations, of sorts. It is, in any case, the sort of negotiating style Arafat seems to have been experiencing repeatedly while Clinton was making his various last bids to secure the Palestinian leader's signature on a final status deal with the Israelis.
A total lack of dignity is merely one of the "leadership qualities" Americans and Israelis expect in their Palestinian "peace partner." Strong and courageous Palestinian leadership in the American peace process lexicon means sitting down amicably, and even chuckling idiotically, with the very men who, even as you sit, are wreaking death, destruction and starvation on your people. It means shedding any semblance of common decency by agreeing to engage in "security coordination" with the self-same thugs who are at that moment ordering the assassination of the leading cadres of your own political organisation. Show implacable disregard for your people's feelings, wishes and aspirations, freely squander their most fundamental rights, now and in the future, betray their struggle and dissipate their enormous sacrifices; do this and you will have earned the dubious privilege of being declared a strong leader by Messrs Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak and Thomas Friedman. Don't, and you'll be "forgotten by history" (read: the American administration and media), "cursed by future generations" (ibid.), and have your security coordination confederates plotting your own assassination.
"The issue," according to the acting Israeli foreign minister, speaking to Israeli television this week, "is whether Arafat is ready to make a leadership decision in the next few days..." It is indeed.
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