11 - 17 April 2002
Issue No.581
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 11 - 17 April 2002 Issue No.581 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Resisting the guns of Sharon
Madafi' Sharon (The Guns of Sharon), Medhat El-Zahed, Cairo: Dar Al-Kalima, January 2002. pp231
On the front cover of this book, there is the image of a blood-stained hand, its fingers made to look like the gun barrels of tanks. On the back cover, another hand, this time set against the background of the Palestinian flag, grips a stone. Thus juxtaposed, these two images encapsulate a contest between two forces, the one that of a brutal occupying power, the other that of the Palestinian people struggling to liberate their land and to reclaim their right to national independence.
photo:AFP
Inside the book, the author sketches the Palestinian Intifada (uprising) against Israeli occupation. In the foreground, the funeral procession of a Palestinian martyr, his coffin wrapped in the Palestinian flag, erupts into a political demonstration, mourning fading to celebration as a blend of anger and resolve lets loose a volley of stones that spells Palestine. In the middle ground, Palestinian children from Arab towns and villages parade a picture of Mohamed Al-Durra, the young Palestinian boy killed last year by Israeli gunfire in his father's arms, setting fire to the Israeli flag as adults donate blood, sacks of rice, tea and sugar, and medicine to a people under armed siege and beleaguered by economic blockade. Further back on the horizon is a landscape of changing borders: the land of Palestine occupied in 1948, the West Bank and Gaza occupied in 1967, the relationship between Palestine and the capitals of the Arab World and between Arab men and women and Arabs of all ages. Today, Palestinian resistance has dissolved many of these borders, as surely as Israeli missiles have destroyed Palestinian homes in Gaza and Ramallah. Meanwhile, Israeli Apache and F-16 fighters roar in the skies, Israeli gunships off the coast of Gaza let fly a torpedo barrage and, on the ground, the guns of Sharon roar.
Yet, despite the appalling character of the Israeli actions that this book describes, the drama that it portrays is both appalling and reassuring. For, in spite of all the horrors and the bloodshed, it restores our confidence in Arab youth, who had not witnessed the 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars, and perhaps could not therefore readily recall the crimes Israel perpetrated against the Palestinians and the Arabs. For these young people, contemporary history has been dominated by the mirage of the "peace process" and by the comings and goings of Likud and Labour governments in Israel and of Democrats and Republicans in the US. While these things were happening, the Arabs felt only an overwhelming sense of futility, as rebuffs greeted their every gesture towards peace.
The author of this book, Midhat El-Zahed, belongs to a generation that saw the Israeli assault of June 1967 and grew up with events such as the war of attrition, the Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal and the 1973 October War, the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982 and the massacres it has perpetrated in the Occupied Territories. El- Zahed joined the student uprising that took place on Egyptian university campuses between 1968 and 1973, uprisings that sought to liberate occupied Palestinian land and to restore to the Palestinians rights usurped by an occupying power. Subsequently, El-Zahed has pursued these concerns through his career as a writer and journalist, and today he is not only a frequent contributor to the Egyptian and Arab press, but also a member of the Arab Affairs Committee of the Egyptian Progressive Unionist Party (Tagammu), a member of the Committee to Support the Palestinian Revolution formed during the Israeli blockade of Beirut and a member of the People's Committee to Support the Intifada created a month after its outbreak.
In Madafi' Sharon, therefore, one senses the work of an active participant in the unfolding narrative. And one senses, too, that El-Zahed has taken sustenance from the formation of a new kind of political consciousness among Arab youth, even though this is different from that which marked the Egyptian student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which he received his political apprenticeship. Successive Israeli governments during the latter half of 1990s, he writes, have rejected fundamental principles and obligations for peace, deliberately portraying the Palestinians and the Arabs as "the eternal enemy." These governments have represented nothing less than a state-of- the-art training academy in the ways of Israeli policy and of the Israeli war machine. Yet, this academy's use of the latest high-tech weaponry against Palestinian civilian targets has served only as a pedagogical device for providing insight to new generations of Arabs into the realities of Israeli brutality.
That said, the book is not so much an account of the chronology of a people's struggle against formidable odds -- the events are too breathtakingly fast and numerous to be fixed between the covers of a book in this way. Rather, it is an attempt to pinpoint the dynamics of the transformation of a people's resistance strategy. El- Zahed opens his investigation with a number of questions: why have Sharon's plans, variously code-named "hellfire," "revolving door" and "field of thorns," been unable to quell the resolve of the Palestinian people? What have the results of the Al-Aqsa Intifada been since its beginning in September 2000? Why do these results defy assessment in terms of the numbers of the dead, or in terms of numbers of detainees and stones thrown?
The answer to these questions is, as the author makes clear, that the Intifada was itself the result of deeply felt frustrations on the Palestinian side. Beginning as a result of intense and accumulating pressures generated by the stalled implementation of the agreements signed between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and successive Israeli governments, frustration mounted as it became clear that despite the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993, Israel has no intention of honouring its obligations under the agreements and was doing everything it could to thwart Palestinian hopes for peace and nationhood. Indeed, each new government in Israel, El-Zahed writes, has played its part in freezing, or in slowing down, the redeployment of Israeli forces as stipulated under the Oslo agreements, with the result that the endless procession of talks, from Oslo to Cairo, and to Taba, Sharm El-Sheikh, Hebron, Wye River I and Wye River II, have produced nothing but further Israeli reneging on its obligations. Thus, the five-year interim phase ended with redeployment only halfway completed, and with the so-called "final status issues," namely the status of Jerusalem, the dismantling of Israeli settlements, borders and water rights, and the return of Palestinian refugees, still up in the air. As a result of this prevarication and dishonesty on the part of Israel, it required only Sharon's provocative visit to Al-Haram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem to light the fuse of Palestinian anger.
The brutality of the Israeli response to the uprising touched off another chain reaction, channelling what had begun as a spontaneous outpouring of protest into organised resistance. El- Zahed perceives this development as passing through several distinct phases. Initially, the spontaneous political demonstrations triggered by the death of Palestinian civilians constituted a primary form of grassroots participation in the Intifada. Secondly, the throwing of stones at the occupation soldiers, in a repeat of the famous David-versus-Goliath symbol of the first Intifada in the late 1980s, acquired a new dimension. Whereas in the earlier uprising, Palestinian youths had hurled their ready-to-hand missiles at Israeli soldiers stationed in Palestinian towns and villages, in the Al-Aqsa Intifada, as Palestinian protest was more systematic. Forces were mobilised and deployed to the front lines, in other words to the security checkpoints outside Palestinian cities behind which occupation forces were stationed. In spite of the rudimentary weaponry pitted against Israeli tanks, the confrontation took a major toll on Israeli morale. According to Israeli police statistics cited in El- Zahed's book, in a period of four months from January to April 2001, Israeli settlers in the West Bank were subjected to 2,227 incidents of stone throwing. The message was unequivocal: the Palestinian people wanted the occupiers out.
Israeli Prime Minister Barak's and then Sharon's tactics of blockade and economic strangulation only contributed to militarising the resistance, generating a form of guerrilla warfare in which stones were now combined with bullets. According to the Israeli minister of defence, Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza were the targets of 5,289 shooting incidents in the period between 29 September 2000 and 31 May 2001, and he complained that because of the almost daily engagements it was no longer safe for settlers to use the roads leading to the settlements. Because of the brutality of Israeli repression, Palestinian resistance tactics escalated rapidly, traversing the boundaries of Israeli settlements and spilling into Israel proper. Settlements were subjected to sustained machine-gun and mortar fire, and paramilitary operations were mounted against military targets in the occupied territories and inside Israel, perhaps the most notorious incidents of which were the raid on a military depot in Gaza and the opening of fire on Israeli soldiers in front of the Ministry of Defence building in Tel Aviv. There then ensued the most dramatic and, to the Israelis, most alarming escalation, in the form of the suicide bombings that have taken place at bus stops and in restaurants, cafés and nightclubs inside Israel.
However, this development in the form that Palestinian resistance has taken can only go so far in explaining the changes that have taken place within Palestine itself. For the complex and over-determined nature of the Al-Aqsa Intifada has produced a transformation that is at once intangible yet palpable, a transformation that could only have come about as a result of shattered illusions. For, El-Zahed, maintains, the Al-Aqsa Intifada has put paid to the idea that the liberation of Palestine would have to await the march of victorious Arab armies, and it has therefore served as a form of self-liberation, enabling the Palestinian people to take their cause into their own hands and prove that it is possible to wreak significant damage on Israel and the Zionist military state through sustained battle from within. Thus, the Palestinian cause has now taken up residence in its proper arena of confrontation, succeeding in mobilising the most indispensable force of all -- the Palestinian people themselves. Now that the Palestinian battle of liberation is emanating from roots in its native soil, it will have the power to regenerate itself from one generation to the next, which is an essential prerequisite for success.
The transformation in Palestinian consciousness, of which the Al-Aqsa Intifada is the most obvious result, has also had a powerful impact on the surrounding Arab environment, stirring what El-Zahed describes as a vast democratic grassroots revival that now constitutes the real strength of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Popular Arab solidarity with the Intifada, reminiscent of the climate of Arab solidarity that prevailed during the interwar period between 1956 and 1973, has belied claims that the spirit of pan-Arabism is dead and proved that this spirit is a fixed socio-cultural component of Arab consciousness and a trait that cannot be monopolised by Pan-Arabists, Nasserists, Baathists, or any other political or ideological party.
The Intifada has also forced Zionism into a period of profound introspection with regard to the nature of the Israeli state, its boundaries and its means of assimilating itself into the region. Here, too, the Intifada has shattered illusions over the feasibility of gaining the "promised land" of Greater Israel at Palestinian expense and over the possibility of sustaining a tranquil, prosperous life in Israeli settlements constructed on occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza through the power of military might. The Intifada, in short, has brought Israel up short before the crucial question of whether two people can coexist in peace on a single land. Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion famously said that the problem of Israel will remain unsolved because two peoples were laying claim to a single land. Because this statement touches upon the very core of the Zionist enterprise, most Israelis want to defer the problem, but now they have been forced to confront it.
How long the Israelis will be able to ignore the prerequisites for peaceful coexistence is difficult to say. El-Zahed cites a Jerusalem Post interview with Israeli Chief of General Staff Lt-Gen Shaul Mofaz, who told the Israeli people that the fight against "terrorism" was "not a question of days, months or even a year. It could take much longer time than that because the battle against terrorism cannot be won in a single round or through three or four operations and then it's over." He went on to say that "We have faced many difficult situations before, such as the War of Attrition along the Suez Canal. However that was far away from the nation. Israel also faced similar circumstances in southern Lebanon, but that too was far away from the nation. Today, however, the conflict is taking place in the heart of the nation." Then, referring to the Israeli settlers in the occupied territories, he said, "It was their decision to live there not ours. They are now under fire. It is dangerous for them to use the roads, and children going to school and people going to work are vulnerable. It is impossible to guarantee 100 per cent security in these cases, in spite of all the efforts of the army."
Finally, El-Zahed holds that there is an organic link between the events of 11 September in the United States and the Palestinian Intifada. At the moment when the world was riveted by the suicide hijackings that toppled the World Trade Center in New York and the subsequent state of alert as the fleets and aircraft of several nations took up position to wage war against terrorism, Sharon wasted no time in exploiting this climate. Likening the hijacked aircraft to human bombs and Bin Laden to Arafat, he unleashed a massive assault against several Palestinian cities. Naturally, this offensive did not succeed in ending the Intifada, nor could it, since Sharon had manifestly miscalculated its nature. However, it gave occasion for many, including El-Zahed, to take stock of events, and to attempt to link such rapid and multifarious global events into a readable portrait of the Palestinian Intifada and of the various transformations, in Palestine, Israel, the Arab World and the wider world, that it has brought about.
Reviewed by Misbah Qutb
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page