2 - 8 August 2001
Issue No.545
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 August 2001 Issue No.545 |
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Reflections
Ultimate dilutions
International protection for the Palestinians is already a thing of the past. We are now calling for the monitoring of the cease-fire and the implementation of the Mitchell report. Meanwhile, international monitoring, as called for by the calamitous G-8 summit in Genoa, is being reduced, at US hands, to American observation. These American observers, moreover, are likely to be confined to Tel Aviv, presumably so that they will be able to better observe the occasional suicide-bomber that manages to slip through the Israeli siege and security dragnet.
Yet Israel rejects even this watering down of international monitoring to the point at which it becomes ludicrous. The killing and devastation continues. Everyone waits upon Washington to say something, anything, while the Palestinian Authority insists on "at least one or two other parties on the monitoring team," in the words of Arafat advisor, Bassam Abu Sherif. He suggested Russian and Italian experts. In the ways of the PA, however, senior Palestinian officials are already being quoted as saying that if Israel continues to reject international monitoring, they will settle for American observers "as a compromise."
This peculiar style of negotiating, in which one party expresses its demands and its willingness to concede them all in the same breath, is not unusual for the Palestinian/Arab side of the "peace process." Much more has been conceded than the symbolic presence of a couple of Europeans on the monitoring team, however. In a sleight of hand typical of the Arab-Israeli negotiating process -- for many years code-named the Peace Process -- the very terms of reference of the conflict have been radically altered. They've been mutating for months. We're no longer talking resistance to occupation, but war and cease-fire. Putting an end to the Intifada is no longer contingent on ending the occupation, but on a cease-fire. We're no longer demanding the dismantling of settlements but a halt to the construction of new ones. And most mind- boggling of all, it is not the Palestinians that are suspending the negotiations with war criminal Sharon's government, but Israel that will not negotiate "under fire." Hundreds have been killed; thousands maimed and disabled; a people's economic, social and psychological life has been devastated; homes razed to the ground; olive and citrus groves destroyed; tens of thousands made homeless and denied their source of livelihood; Palestinian childhood has been shattered and yet the very logic of Palestinian/Arab "demands" is to make it all futile.
A reminder: it all began a little over a year ago with final status talks in Camp David. The Palestinians, realising that all that was on offer at the end of the Oslo process was one large prison with three separate wings and a mosque, rose up in the Intifada. The goal: an end to occupation, i.e., independence. Now we are at pains to prove that the Intifada is over; to restore the situation to what it was before it broke out and to "resume negotiations."
With Sharon? What in heaven's name for? With what objective? The long-term interim agreement he was talking about even before his election?
Apparently, there is a hidden agenda. Arafat, according to Israeli commentators, would like to "internationalise" the conflict, which for some reason is supposed to eventually result in bringing down the Sharon government. The Palestinian leader and his aides are, naturally, as silent as ever about their strategy, if one indeed exists. The Israelis, meanwhile, are bent on foiling Arafat's machinations, which -- we are told -- is why they refuse international monitoring. But irrespective of whether we do get monitors at all or not; whether these monitors stay in Tel Aviv or Ramallah; and whether they're all Americans or include a few Europeans, if Israeli assessments of the PA's strategy at the moment are true then the Palestinians need to do some very hard thinking, and fast. Does anyone seriously believe that nudging Europe to "engage more" in the conflict is anything but an exercise in utter futility? And how is that supposed to bring down Sharon, and in its wake lead to an Israeli government that is, presumably, more willing to end the occupation than Barak's?
That there is no Palestinian/Arab strategy worthy of the name, notwithstanding mini- or macro-Arab summits, goes without saying. Israel has at least four alternative strategic plans that we know of, all of which are continually debated, elaborated and argued by Israeli analysts and commentators. First, there is the strategy supposedly favoured by the Israeli military establishment: to reoccupy parts of the Palestinian self-rule territories, destroy the PA and kill Arafat or send him into exile. This "strategy" has the added benefit of being an excellent bargaining card. Merely hinting at it has had the Arab side scurrying for monitors. Second, there is Barak's "unilateral separation plan," which has resurfaced in Israeli debate, and is supposedly being supported by some members of Sharon's government, if not yet by Sharon himself. And there is, of course, the status quo. A war of attrition on current terms can be won only by Israel. Finally, there is Sharon's long-term interim agreement.
For our part, it would be pitiful indeed if the nearly year-long Intifada is cashed in return for the implementation of some of the recommendations of the Mitchell report.
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