24 - 30 January 2002
Issue No.570
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 24 - 30 January 2002 Issue No.570 |
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From within
While the Israeli forces were wiping out the Palestinian media infrastructure, Egyptian television was delighting its audience with a feature on Moshe Katzev, the president of Israel, in which all the lies that Sharon reiterates were repeated and Arafat, with the Palestinian Authority, was blamed for "violence" against the Israelis and the Karine A affair. Very badly timed and in bad taste, the programme claimed that the dozens of homes destroyed by Israeli forces were uninhabited and used as bases for terrorists -- as if the show was an opportunity to justify the occupation's aggressive policies against Palestinians.
There is no reason to expound the Israeli viewpoint to the Egyptian public, for the concrete results of Israel's policies -- the extrajudicial killing of Palestinian leaders and the destruction of the proto-national infrastructure -- speak for themselves every day. Efforts by Egypt and other countries to persuade Israel to alter its policies have failed repeatedly. Pressure on Arafat to arrest those Israel wants arrested and to maintain the cease-fire has boomeranged too, isolating the Palestinian president even further, both internationally and domestically. This pressure, too, has encouraged Sharon and his gang to exploit the cease-fire with still more impunity in their hunt for Palestinian leaders, 82 of whom had been assassinated in the past 15 months.
As a result of the policy of reconciliation with Israel that Arafat has adopted without a clear strategy to back it up, Palestinians in the occupied territories are in the worst conditions imaginable. Israel has reoccupied many towns and divided Gaza and the West Bank into nearly 200 fragments. Israeli tanks stand 50 metres away from the offices of Arafat, who is a prisoner in Ramallah. And unemployment among Palestinians stands at 50 per cent. The EU built or paid for most of the infrastructure Israel has destroyed, yet the European nations have barely emitted a whisper in protest of Israel's policies. Instead, they blame Arafat when a Palestinian -- whose home was destroyed and whose family was killed by Israel -- loses his mind and decides to fire at some settlers in response to routine, daily attacks against him by F-16s and Apaches.
The problem currently occupying Arafat is whether Israel will allow him to attend the Arab summit in Beirut. It seems likely that the Arab countries will be in no position to take a decisive stand, whether in supporting the Palestinian people or at the international level. America's pro-Israeli bias brooks no intervention, and the Arab world has turned in on itself after the attack on Afghanistan, especially since America is now carrying out revenge operations there under the pretext of fighting terrorism. Some analysts think Israel's ultimate aim is to dissolve the Palestinian Authority in the hope of making it easier for itself and the US to tackle the situation. Yet the only result that can be expected is chaos, which will have the opposite effect. And in this light, perhaps all Arafat can do, if he fails to attend the summit and receive the support he requires, is reorganise his base from the inside, striking at corruption, reviving popular support and uniting the ranks of the resistance behind him.
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