7 - 13 February 2002
Issue No.572
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 February 2002 Issue No.572 |
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Reflections
Exercises in mortification
It was a scene worthy of a bas-relief in an ancient temple: the captive king abasing himself before his vanquisher. In the ultramodern temple that is the New York Times, though, the groveling captive does not get the symbolic foot on the head; he gets a kick in the face. Commenting on Yasser Arafat's unprecedented 2 February article in that illustrious publication, the current "King of the Jews," Ariel Sharon, contemptuously dismissed the Palestinian leader as still "irrelevant." The article, he told Israeli TV, "did not persuade me, and I propose no one else be persuaded."
And where it counts for both Sharon and Arafat (i.e. in Washington), no one was. National Security Adviser (and High Priestess?), Condoleezza Rice was equally unimpressed by the Palestinian leader's bylined vow to "put an end to [terrorist groups'] activities." She reiterated: "We are asking nothing more of Chairman Arafat than we have asked of every other leader in the world. If he's going to be the leader of the Palestinian people it begins with dealing with the terrorists in his [sic] midst." The captive leader, confined to his Ramallah headquarters, staring down the gun barrels of Israeli tanks, not 50m away, living on Sharon's sufferance (and, what with all the havoc going on in "his midst," obviously also suffering from a serious case of upset stomach) has not, according to Ms Rice, been making a "100 per cent effort ... he has not done enough." And only when he does will Washington "get back to pursuing a peace arrangement here."
But this "peace arrangement," as we never cease hearing, is made up of the endlessly- trumpeted Mitchell Report and Tenet Plan, both of which have been described as being essentially "cease-fire" arrangements, involving the return to the situation that existed before the Intifada -- i.e., to the very conditions that triggered the Intifada in the first place. And, for the usual face-saving sugarcoating, a promise to resume the final status talks.
But what cease-fire? Palestinian "fire" is "violence" and Palestinian violence is "terrorism," all of which Arafat himself must clamp down upon with "100 per cent effort" so he can be deemed an appropriate party to negotiating a cease-fire.
The fact that this is nothing short of gangsterism of the most flagrant ("your money or your life") kind should be obvious. It is also beside the point, here. The Palestinian leader's "pitch for American minds" (as the Guardian titled its reaction story on Arafat's New York Times debut) was -- to my mind -- the true nadir of his career. The media have rightly underlined two extremely significant features of the Times act of penance. The first was Arafat's use of the term "terrorist groups" in repeating his condemnation of attacks against Israeli civilians. And he does this in the same breath as he declares his readiness "to sit down now with any Israeli leader, regardless of his history" -- an obvious reference to war criminal Sharon. In pitching for American minds, Arafat borrowed one -- directly from the US State Department -- and, scandalously, went on to describe the major political forces of Palestinian society under occupation, including his own Fatah organisation, as "terrorist groups."
Were any of the Palestinian leader's advisers/ ghost writers aware of the significance of such an acknowledgment at this time of America's "war against terror"? Were they aware that in Washingtonian "minds," "terrorist groups," and not just their activities, should be "ended"? Welcome to the new and improved Camp X-Ray. Location: the West Bank and Gaza.
The Palestinian leader, knowingly or unwittingly, was in fact turning state evidence -- for Mr Ashcroft -- against his own people. Sharon, able executioner that he is, obliged a few days later by assassinating four leading members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Attacks against Israeli civilians, as it happens, are wrong, morally, tactically and strategically. But after months of winking and nodding every which way, it would have been much more appropriate for the Palestinian leader's literary efforts to be directed, in Arabic, toward his own people, explaining in great detail why such attacks were damaging to the aims of Palestinian liberation and (at long last) outlining his proposals for the strategy and tactics of the liberation struggle. For it also so happens that Palestinian civilians are the ones under constant, sustained and brutal attack by a massively superior military force; it so happens that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed (many of them children), and more than 10,000 injured (many of them permanently disabled); it so happens that a thousand Palestinian homes have been destroyed, leaving an estimated 5,000 people homeless -- figures that Arafat's New York Times article did not bother to mention.
The fundamental problem with Palestinian armed attacks against Israeli civilians is that they are the most obvious, knee-jerk response to the enormous violence against them; violence that is systematically unleashed by one of the most advanced military machines in the world against an essentially civilian population; violence, moreover, that transcends the murderous tanks, F-16s and helicopter gunships to permeate every aspect of Palestinian daily life. Mr Arafat would have done well to contemplate, and inform "American minds," of the story of Wafaa Idris, who belonged to no "terrorist group," and who, as a volunteer ambulance worker, witnessed such horrors and suffered such humiliation over the past 16 months that she was literally driven to kill herself and take an 81-year-old Israeli man with her.
The problem with armed attacks against Israeli civilians lies precisely in their desperate nature, their very emphasis on hitting back rather than on winning. The problem, in other words, is a function of two things: the absence of strategy or tactics for winning (for which Arafat, as a "leader," should hold himself, at the very least, highly responsible); and the extreme weakening of the vital political and civic space in Palestinian society, a space which had been hard won during the first Intifada and which the post-Oslo PA did its best to crush.
The second significant feature of Arafat's New York Times article has been his public negotiating and relinquishment of the Palestinian right of return. Arafat has yet to tell us what really happened in Camp David in the summer of 1990; instead, he not only implicitly accepted Clinton and Barak's claims that he ruined the final status talks by insisting on the right of return, he also effectively abandoned that very right ("We understand Israel's demographic concerns and understand that the right of return of Palestinian refugees ... must be implemented in a way that takes into account such concerns").
But the cat was already out of the bag in the first paragraph of the article: "The cycle [of violence] has led many to conclude that peace is impossible, a myth borne out of ignorance of the Palestinian position," reads the second sentence. Israel, the continuing occupation, the settlements and the devastation of Palestinian land and lives, even Sharon, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila: none of these are an obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace -- producing "the myth" of its impossibility. From the very first breath, the PA leader and his ghost writers had already conceded Sharon's claim that it was the Palestinians who were an obstacle to peace, and, whiningly, set about explaining that it's all a misunderstanding.
Sharon declared himself unconvinced; continued to dismiss his captive president as "irrelevant," and carried on with the slaughter.
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