27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001
Issue No.553
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001 Issue No.553 |
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Changes within
Since the first day of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, commentators predicted that it would be a long struggle. As summer 2000 began, Israel had completed its left-wing cycle, a period during which the left virtually monopolised Israeli life. Especially after the October 1973 War, before President Sadat's visit to Jerusalem and during the first Camp David negotiations, the left-wing orientation began to disintegrate. The right continued to triumph, the left to regress; left-wing parties, even while not in power, adopted right- wing Zionist policies like the occupation of new Palestinian lands.
Early in 2000, the military and political Israeli establishments had concluded that the experiment of importing non-Jewish people was a success. In other words, Israeli leaders had turned "Israeli" into an identity in itself, capable of standing side by side with Zionism and Judaism. "Israelism" is different from both, however: it stipulates no ideology- or creed-related values, and therefore cannot be weakened by international condemnation of Israel's violence against an unarmed people. These leaders, therefore, have come to believe that new immigrants who adopt this identity are those who will realise the project of an expanded Israeli state, ideally conceived within the borders at which they choose to stop.
By 2000, other developments had emerged on the Palestinian side. It had been almost a decade since Madrid, six years since Oslo. In other words, it was time for leaders returning from abroad to show and tell, since they had directed the negotiators in Madrid and participated in Oslo. In the period during which the two conferences took place, Palestinians within and outside Palestine watched Israeli forces gnaw deeper into Palestinian land, and observed the PA's failure to establish a state or improve their material life. Without loyalty to the Palestinian president, or to the revolution, the Palestinian leadership would not have survived these failures for long.
In early 2000, all hopes pinned on the positive role the US might play, according to the confident reiterations of Arab regimes and the PA, were already shattered. When it became clear that this role would not be in the Palestinians' interest (and would in fact empower the Israeli occupation) the Palestinians and the Arabs generally fell prey to the greatest disillusionment. All external forces seemed united against the Palestinians to a previously unsuspected degree.
Israeli society is now pouring all its energy and will into the new secular right. The vast majority of new immigrants support this orientation. There is also an inclination toward traditional, religious right-wing politics, more extreme, more powerful and bolder than ever.
On the other hand, the Intifada has transformed the composition and internal dynamics of Palestinian society. True, Palestinians in the diaspora have been marginalised and disenfranchised by the PA. The Palestinian leadership at home has almost completely abandoned them; yet these forces are interacting with their young counterparts in Palestinian lands and perhaps also with Palestine's Druze communities; they are communicating with new coalitions of activists, who cross the frontiers of the various factions. All these forces are acting to create a new Palestinian social reality.
The Intifada, moreover, has been the cause of direct confrontations between ordinary Arabs and the US, the first of their kind in the history of the region. And these confrontations, I strongly believe, will have grave consequences for all parties concerned.
* The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
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