29 March - 4 April 2001
Issue No.527
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 29 March - 4 April 2001 Issue No.527 |
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Reflections
A day for a daydream
Springtime is conductive to daydreaming. I thought I'd share one of mine:
Yasser Arafat declares that the Palestinians have withdrawn indefinitely from any and all negotiations with Israel. The time for negotiations is over, the Palestinian leader tells the world; now is a time for struggle. Such a step no longer requires a leap of faith of any sort, merely an acknowledgement of facts on the ground.
The Intifada, insofar as it underlined that, at the end of the long and tortuous Oslo process, the Palestinians were still not ready for submission, effectively put paid to that process. All attempts at resuscitation failed; Sharon "the butcher" came to power in Israel, and now, in a total travesty of logic, it is Israel that has suspended negotiations pending "an end to Palestinian violence." Even more mind-boggling is the fact that it was left to Israel to suspend the ignoble "security coordination" with the PA under CIA tutelage.
The Palestinian leader has even been denied the opportunity to revive his revolutionary origins of his own accord; the Israelis are doing it for him. Once a terrorist, always a terrorist, war criminal Sharon and his gang of murderous hoods tell all and sundry, and the American media is lapping it up. Meanwhile, the war criminal has been basking in a Washington love-in; the Bush administration unequivocally supports both his ("end to Palestinian violence") condition for a resumption of negotiations and his insistence that there will be no return to final-status negotiations, but to something called long-term interim agreements, which even a child of five would recognise as an absurd contradiction in terms.
This totally lopsided world, in which everything appears as its exact opposite, is an integral function of the peace process to which Arafat and his PA have long been willing accomplices. In the looking-glass of the peace process, the fundamental fact of a relation of extreme oppression, unequal in its extent and flagrancy anywhere in the world, was totally hidden, distorted and made to reappear as haggling in some Middle Eastern bazaar. Three guesses: who was cast in the role of the shifty-eyed, hook-nosed, lying and cheating native tradesman (yesterday's Jew is today's Palestinian)?
But back to the dream. The Palestinian leadership's declaration of its indefinite withdrawal from the peace process inspires the Palestinian people's struggle as never before. No longer are they battling against enormous odds while fearing that their tremendous sacrifices may at any moment be betrayed by a self-serving leadership, which has over and over again dealt with their heroic struggles as so many bargaining cards to be easily squandered in secret and sordid back-room deals. And, for once, the leadership will be at its people's mercy. The long-lost duty of democratising the Palestinian liberation movement is finally at hand.
The popular character of the Intifada, which has been witnessing a wonderful comeback during the past two weeks, is being developed and elaborated to great new heights. Palestinian society in the self-rule areas, besieged, starved and devastated by Israeli brutality and repression, is nevertheless setting up a true "oasis of democracy" in the Middle East. The popular bodies established to organise the struggle against the Israeli occupation are simultaneously being developed as organs of popular power in the self-rule territories. The Tunis bureaucracy is under siege by its own people, forced to become more and more accountable. Human rights abuses are no longer tolerated.
The popular character of the struggle deepens, participation widens and people feel empowered. They are now struggling to win. They are taking part in determining the path of the struggle, turning their backs on acts of futile desperation and those who advocate them, and looking towards a well-reasoned, purposeful strategy. New and ever more creative forms of struggle are developed. A highly moral cause is fought with strictly moral means, as an end itself and as an indispensable way to crack the monolith of Zionist distortions and lies. Solidarity, they realise, is an essential condition for their emancipation, and they direct their struggle towards winning it.
There can be no just solution for the Palestinian-Israeli struggle without striking at the very heart of the colonial Zionist project. And, ultimately, this can only be done by winning over the hearts and minds of a wide section of Israeli society -- through struggle, not so-called dialogue. In particular, there is a growing realisation that armed struggle, even if legitimate when directed against armed occupation forces, has little efficacy in the context of the Palestinian struggle at this stage of its life. Forms of peaceful resistance, which Edward Said has long advocated and Palestinians in the West Bank have been demonstrating lately, could be developed and made devastating to an enemy whose military superiority is impossible to challenge by military means. The settlements, needless to say, are an obvious and immediate target of struggle.
The Palestinians are one people. No longer is it possible to manipulate and then easily discard this or that segment according to the leadership's whims or considerations of expediency. A conference is held bringing together representatives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the Diaspora and Israel. The conference charges some of the best Palestinian minds, people like Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish (who last week brought honour to all Palestinians and Arabs by issuing a statement denouncing a holocaust denial conference that was to be held in Beirut at the end of this month), Azmi Bishara and others, to draw up a manifesto outlining the ultimate aims of the Palestinians. The basic message: The Jewish and Palestinian nations can exist together in the land of Palestine, as one state, a federated state or even as two states, but together nevertheless, on the basis of full equality, mutual respect and brotherhood, never as oppressor and oppressed.
There is still a long way to liberation, but the road lies straight ahead.
The daydream ends there. I am sitting at a café, reading newspaper accounts of the Arab summit in Amman. My mind strayed for a while.
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