11 - 17 April 2002
Issue No.581
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 11 - 17 April 2002 Issue No.581 |
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There is a way out
Sam Bahour and Michael Dahan search for the exit
Every foreign military invasion has a pre-defined end called withdrawal. The hideous Israeli incursion into territories internationally recognised as Palestinian is no exception. Every military operation has a defined political goal; yet Sharon, if he has one, seems to be keeping this a secret from his cabinet, the Israeli people -- indeed, the world. Tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, Israel will need to determine to which border it will withdraw its troops. Israel can choose to move back to one of the hundreds of its self-defined "security" borders; or it can, once and for all, choose to end the never-ending spiral of violence by finally implementing UN resolutions and withdrawing back to the 4 June 1967 borders, thus closing one chapter of a senseless military occupation.
The infamous Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, knows this very well. He also knows that his time is limited, and that the assault on Palestinian cities, institutions and lives must end. US-armed Israel can occupy, and re-occupy, Palestinian lands over and over, under any media slogan that fits the times, but will never rid itself of legitimate Palestinian resistance to the illegal occupation that has haunted it, and the world, for 37 years now. The Palestinians went to Madrid, Oslo, Camp David and Taba. They extended the greatest concession ever voluntarily made by an indigenous people: to relinquish 78 per cent of their ancestral homeland so Jews around the world could fulfil their own dream of a homeland. In return, the world community expected the Israeli occupiers to dismantle their illegal occupation of the 22 per cent of Palestinian land that remained: the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. What Palestinians received instead was a package of unprecedented Israeli aggression.
Israeli policymakers are so blinded by the suicide bombings, they cannot comprehend that their military occupation of Palestinian land is generating not only more suicide bombers, but a community increasingly convinced that any future coexistence may be impossible given the deafening silence of Israeli public opinion toward the continuing occupation. Suicide bombings are totally immoral and serve no strategic goal, but have been successful in feeding into the political plans of maniacal military professionals like Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres.
Well-oiled public relations campaigns designed in Washington and Tel Aviv portray Palestinian victims as the rapists and Israeli rapists as poor souls who desperately need security. Yet Palestinians are going out of their way to facilitate Israel's entry into the Middle East as an equal, legitimate entity and a partner for the future. Now, with the Arab League offer for normalisation with Israel if UN resolutions are implemented, the Arab world too, as a whole, is giving Israel a respectable way out as well. Unfortunately, Sharon and Peres are missing this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and would rather turn every single Palestinian citizen's life upside down in the hope of mass submission, which will never come.
History will judge the Palestinian leadership on the basis of its political wisdom, but Israel cannot wait for history. It must choose today -- between peace on internationally recognised terms with the dispossessed indigenous people of its state, and another half-century of isolation against the backdrop of a rapidly encroaching demographic dilemma. As two citizens of this troubled region, we offer President Bush and his administration a history book of Palestine and the Palestinians. For the Palestinian and Israeli leaderships, their part starts with an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and a Palestinian pledge to remain committed -- as Mr Arafat, amazingly, still is, even under gunfire -- to resolving the remaining issues of refugees, settlements, and security in a new and improved peace process.
Today, we write not as colleagues, but as a Palestinian living under Israeli attack, a few hundred metres from Arafat's compound, and an Israeli, living a few hundred metres from one of the latest suicide bombings. There is a way out.
Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American living in the besieged Palestinian city of Al-Bireh in the West Bank and co-author of Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994). Michael Dahan is an Israeli-American political scientist living in Jerusalem.
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