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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 18 - 24 January 2001 Issue No.517 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 18 - 24 January 2001 Issue No.517 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
And now for victory
By Hani Shukrallah
Since people, and their will to resist oppression, can transform an ostensibly realistic project into a fanciful daydream, why shouldn't they also be able to transform a seemingly utopian vision into a realisable plan? Clinically dead since the outbreak of the Intifada, the Oslo "peace process" has failed to respond to the most desperate attempts at resuscitation. Dogged realists who have long lectured the rest of us in the "art of the possible," however dismal and oppressive, were caught in the act of earnestly seeking the impossible -- and that for the sake of the same miserable outcome we were supposed to accept not because it was good, moral or emancipatory, but simply because it was feasible.
As absurd as it was glaringly banal from the start, the so-called 11th-hour bid to salvage the moribund process had at least the dubious value of revealing to all and sundry that Oslo's demise was not for want of trying to keep it alive, however artificially. There is little comfort in this, perhaps, for the Palestinian and Arab side. Ever eager to prove their "good intentions" to the sponsors in Washington, they walked willingly, yet again, into an ambush from which they could only emerge as losers. Their options were a thoroughly humiliating surrender they could ill afford, or carrying the burden of blame for having failed to go "the last mile" to bring a peaceful ending to the "100-year conflict." They began by eagerly welcoming Clinton's "bridging proposals" and ended up having to admit what they must have known from the start: that Clinton's bridge was a one-way street to the Israeli side.
All they got for their trouble was yet another fatuous letter from Bill Clinton's self-styled alter ego at the New York Times, once again railing against the anachronistic authoritarianism of Arab leaders. Arafat, after all, had failed to see the light of liberal globalisation and cooperate sufficiently with Mossad and the CIA in stomping all over the basic rights of his own people, even as guaranteed by globally recognised human rights conventions. In the globalisation religion, interpreting the scriptures is the sole preserve of the high priests in Washington and their zealot missionaries in the New York Times and elsewhere. Extra-judicial executions, collective punishment, compulsory disappearances, administrative detention of individuals without charge or trial and torture, not to mention war crimes, ethnic cleansing and depleted uranium, are not necessarily antithetical to democracy and human rights. It all depends on who's doing them, and to whom. The Market moves in mysterious ways.
The peace process will not be laid to rest formally, however. The corpse will just lie there, rotting away and smelling to high heaven. There is too much at stake to acknowledge its demise; most notably, the Palestinian and Arab side would be obliged, at the very least, to recognise the need for an alternative strategy and a genuinely critical reassessment of what has posed as a strategy during the past 25 years. The status quo ante was not, after all, a mere error in judgement -- too many powerful interests have been vested in it.
But while the erstwhile realists wait upon Bush Jr's pleasure and grotesquely, if ineffectually, play at improving Barak's meagre electoral fortunes -- even as they fervently wish for a Peres come-back -- the fact remains that at no time during the past quarter century has it been so imperative, and opportune, for the Palestinians and Arabs to work on elaborating a new strategic vision and mapping out a path of struggle towards its realisation.
No longer does the Palestinian and Arab intelligentsia have the luxury of rejecting from the side-lines. Empty rhetoric and slogan-mongering are suicidal, even if many of those who spout them are often quite safe. Shouts of "Intifada until victory" may have had some inspirational value during the first weeks of the uprising, but in fact have little meaning outside the now defunct agenda of Arafat's Palestinian Authority, wherein "victory" merely signifies a somewhat less embarrassing Oslo deal -- a less flagrant Apartheid system, but an Apartheid system nonetheless. And even that bid has patently proved a failure. Rather than giving the Oslo deal a desperately needed face-lift, the Intifada set in motion processes, in both Palestinian and Israeli societies, and indeed throughout the region, which struck at its very foundations.
We need to define what "victory" means as well as the ways by which to achieve it. And we need to do this by rigorously settling accounts with both the peace process discourse and the "rejectionist" discourse that so clearly failed to effectively challenge it.
The Palestinians' is a moral and humanitarian cause that for the past 25 years has been squandered in the pursuit of an ever-elusive "historical compromise" whose fundamental basis was to side-step the very issue that is now staring us in the face: the colonial and racist nature of the Zionist project. A moral and humanitarian solution to the Palestinian-Israeli struggle -- one that embraces the fundamental human and national rights of the two peoples, recognises the enormous suffering to which they have both been exposed, and realises all that is noble and good in their rich heritage -- may well sound like a utopian dream. But if all available options are equally "unrealistic," better a moral dream than a sordid illusion.
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