15 - 21 March 2001
Issue No.525
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 15 - 21 March 2001 Issue No.525 |
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Reflections:
The price of cleverness
The Zionist colonial state is an anomaly. It is impossible. And it knows it, however distorted the forms that kind of self-knowledge takes -- mediated and made malleable by intense anti-Arab racism and by memories of the holocaust. One merely has to stand a little outside the topsy-turvy looking-glass world of the peace process to be struck by just how impossible Israel is, half a century after decolonisation. Note just one fundamental aspect of Israel's existence: over four million people rule, by force of arms, over an almost equal number of people. The fact that the latter do not want this rule is beyond dispute. The fact that they are totally disenfranchised, enjoying not even the most basic and formal of citizenship rights (in Israel or anywhere else) is also beyond dispute. The fact that this situation has gone on for 34 years, with no end in sight, is equally undeniable.
This is not the 19th century. It is only through an assumption of absolute exceptionalism that a state and society can justify, at the beginning of the 21st century, the holding of millions of people captive for even a single day, let alone decades. And it is just such an assumption that makes it possible for an Israeli court to hand down a verdict of six months community service for the proven murderer of a Palestinian child; for a people who have suffered for centuries from pogroms to commit them against others, on a daily basis; for a state to stand accused of every war crime in the Geneva conventions and to be headed by an acknowledged war criminal. Under what kind of law or morality can a community claim for itself virtually unlimited rights to another community's land, water, homes? How else but by an assumption of absolute exceptionalism could you justify such a travesty of logic and humanity as the denial of a Palestinian's right of return while according that right to any Jew anywhere in the world -- not to mention Russian Orthodox Christians whose ancestors virtually invented the word pogrom?
But to say that something is absolutely exceptional is the same as saying that it is impossible. Short of the apocalyptic ravings of a Lieberman (i.e., short of genocide), a Zionist Israel cannot survive, which is all the more reason why mere "cleverness" on the part of the Palestinian leadership is so hopelessly inadequate, so costly and wasteful -- the waste reckoned in terms of Palestinian blood and suffering.
And it's been tested. In Lebanon, the PLO leadership received top marks for cleverness. Anything at all that could be "played," it played: Syria against Egypt and Egypt against Syria; the Saudis and the Iraqis against both and against each other; Sunnis versus Shi'a and Shi'a versus Sunnis; Amal against the communists; Hizbullah against Amal; Jumblatt against the Syrians and the Syrians against Jumblatt. Each and every nook and cranny of the Lebanese configuration was milked for playing cards. The PLO leadership, out of sheer cleverness, found itself out of Lebanon for good, in Tunis, its armed forces in Yemen and Sudan.
It is just this sort of "cleverness" that could explain why the PA has left it to Sharon/Peres to suspend the peace negotiations pending an end to "Palestinian violence and hostilities." The "clever" idea behind this fantastic role-reversal is presumably to appear "moderate," while making the Israelis appear extreme, even as the PA "plays" the Hamas/Jihad card, showing the Americans and Europeans one side of its face and its own people quite another. This game is redundant, boring and futile. The "leadership's" insistence on it can be explained only by a total lack of imagination -- and base self-interest, of course, which makes for a decided lack of other, less ignoble options. The Israelis and the Americans can understand Arabic, and even the most naïve knows a wink when he sees one. All the leadership gets for its mental pains is to let Israel, yet again, set the terms of the debate.
During the past five months, the Israelis have killed some 380 Palestinians in the occupied territories plus 13 within the Green Line. Compared to 65 Israelis killed by Palestinians, we are faced with a ratio of less than two Israelis to every 10 Palestinians killed -- just a little less than the 1:10 ratio the Nazi occupation forces insisted upon as punishment against resistance operations. And this is not counting some 5,000 wounded, a great many of them with permanent disabilities, nor the massive destruction to the homes and livelihood of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. And it is Israel, not the Palestinians, that is demanding an end to "violence" as a condition for negotiations.
It is doing more. The new government has a plan; it's called "Bronze" and it redefines collective punishment in ways hitherto unimagined by the most pessimistic of human rights workers. The West Bank and Gaza are to be divided into 64 separate areas, each of which can be totally cut off from the rest of the territories, and the world, in case of "a specific alert." And, as in Ramallah this week, the alert need not be an act of "violence." It could simply be Israeli intelligence information that such an act is being contemplated by individuals in a particular locality. Tanks, trenches and bulldozers are used to impose the siege.
For good behaviour, the Palestinians get "a phased process" leading to "separation." Akiva Eldar, writing in Haaretz, describes this phased process as "a series of 'understandings' that will be achieved through 'discussions,' not negotiations," through which Israel would -- depending on Palestinian good behaviour -- implement, in "phases," the second and third redeployments agreed upon in Oslo. "Finally," writes Eldar, "after the territories are quiet for 400 days, maybe more, it will be possible, God willing, to renew the negotiations on the final settlement."
And the Palestinian leadership continues to demand a "resumption" of the peace process, from where it left off in Taba. How utterly clever.
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