18 - 24 April 2002
Issue No.582
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 18 - 24 April 2002 Issue No.582 |
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Palestine as phoenix
From Abu Jihad to Marwan Barghouthi, from one Intifada to the next, there is no shortage of Palestinians to take up the struggle, writes Lamis Andoni*
It seems more than a historic coincidence. Almost exactly 14 years to the day that Israel assassinated Fateh leader, Khalil Al-Wazir -- otherwise known as Abu Jihad and venerated as the 1987 Intifada's godfather -- Israel captured Marwan Barghouti, the current Intifada's most prominent leader.
The historic parallel is a profound manifestation of the continuity of the Palestinian movement, a movement that has survived successive Israeli invasions, crackdowns and atrocities. A new generation always takes off from those who have fallen -- and Israel is left with the challenge of facing a never-ending Palestinian national liberation movement.
The language here is not of the past but of the present and future. With every Israeli siege, blow and massacre, new symbols of resistance are born. The Jenin refugee camp, and the death and carnage that it has become synonymous with, symbolise the current uprising. Besieged Palestinians in their towns and villages are the face of Palestinian defiance to subjugation. Palestinian President Yasser Arafat stands taller, more dignified and more representative of the Palestinians in his shattered bunker than in all of his prior visits to the White House.
The era of "security arrangements" and piecemeal interim agreements is over. Palestinians will no longer acquiesce to these humiliating terms of subjugation. In case the US and Israel are not reading the signals -- and it seems that they are indeed in denial -- the Palestinians, now fortified with the arrival of new generations, have reverted to the roots of their anti-colonialist struggle.
The protests that have been organised by Palestinians around the world, and the activism that underpins them, are based on a renewed collective awareness of the rights of an indigenous nation -- uprooted, dispossessed, estranged and dehumanised in its own homeland. New generations of Palestinians, some of whom do not even speak Arabic, have joined international movements in demanding their usurped rights -- unimpressed by the US- Israeli framework that accommodates a colonialist, apartheid-like system. But these organisations, which revolve around the right of return for Palestinian refugees -- Al-Awda is the best known organisation in exile -- are an extension of a bigger phenomenon that has sprouted inside Palestine, under the Israeli occupation's very nose.
It is the story of Israel's failure to fragment the Palestinians and dwarf their cause, whether through the Oslo accords or through other subsequent agreements that confine a population and control it within Israel's chosen boundaries. It is the US- backed Israeli policy of trying to force Palestinians into submission -- in a bid to reduce their dreams and humanity -- that ironically expanded the Palestinian consciousness of its identity.
Both Israel and the US saw in the partial agreements a way of reducing the Palestinian identity and transforming it from an uprooted indigenous nation to a series of tiny fragmented communities within the confines of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Such a shortsighted approach was aimed at guaranteeing the end of the Palestinian challenge to the legitimacy of Israel's dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 and 1967.
The joint American-Israeli approach was based on the underlying assumption that, by focusing on arrangements for those Palestinians who live inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian leadership would no longer have to answer to the broader Palestinian constituency.
In that context, Israel and the US ensured that Israeli security remains the driving force for negotiations and even a final settlement. The whole process, as US and Israeli officials have stated again and again, is about solving Israel's "security threats" rather than about recognising an uprooted nation's rights.
It is this mentality, and the policies and actions it entails, that undermine Israeli goals and reignite a collective political consciousness of resistance.
While the Palestinian Left and a number of intellectuals spoke out against the Oslo accords as a preclusion of Palestinian independence, it took longer for grass-roots activism to ensue.
It started in the refugee camps -- where the root of the injustice lies. Starting from 1995, refugees inside and outside Palestine started organising in a mobilisation that was reminiscent of the post-1948 formation of the Palestinian resistance movement. Faced with the threat of being estranged in cantons shaped out of their own lands -- a prospect that was magnified as Israeli settlements mushroomed across the land and rootless Palestinian refugees withered -- Palestinians responded in a slow but steady tenor.
The same process, while initially welcomed by many 1948 Palestinians -- the Israeli Arabs -- gradually threatened to undermine their struggle for equal and national rights. For, without an Israeli aknowledgement of Palestinian national rights, Palestinian citizens of Israel are also reduced to strangers in their own land.
Meanwhile the negotiations continued in a total disconnect to the brewing movement in the refugee camps. In April 2000 Palestinians, and their supporters in America, formed the Al-Awda movement in the aftermath of an international conference that was organised by the Trans-Arab Research Institute (TARI) in Boston. The right of return has been gaining in popularity as a concept and has become the unifying focus for Palestinian activism everywhere.
Thus, when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak tried to force Arafat into relinquishing the Palestinian refugees' right of return in July 2000, he and his American backers were either in denial or contemptuous of the emerging Palestinian reality. At the Camp David summit, Arafat's constituency was not just the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but the broader Palestinian nation as well. The apparently shrinking and fragmented Palestinian constituency of the first Oslo years was been gradually restored as the constant US-Israeli denial of the Palestinians' collective rights breathed new life into the cause. At Camp David, Arafat had to deliver to his Palestinian constituency independence and Palestinian national rights, including the right of return.
Israel offered neither. Its idea of a Palestinian state proved to be a modern paradigm for neo- colonialism -- an entity of four disconnected Bantustans with no control over its air-space, water resources or borders. It was a deal that did not amount to the creation of a sovereign state.
The infamous "generous Israeli offer" of Camp David was the decisive turning point that shattered illusions in the Oslo process and provided the glue that reconnected the Palestinians in a renewed sense collective fate.
Most significantly the US-Israeli position at Camp David has inadvertently fuelled the wrath of resistance in the Fateh movement -- Arafat and "the peace process's" main power bases.
The second Intifada erupted less than two months after Camp David II and Barghouti, by then the most influential and populist Fateh leader after Arafat, dubbed it the "uprising of the peace camp." In effect, Barghouti's announcement was a Fateh declaration of the "Oslo process's" death and the renewing of armed resistance. Barghouti later told me that there was no going back to the Camp David formula.
The weight, history and sheer numbers of Fateh's membership tipped the balance in favour of an already brewing and expanding Palestinian collective culture of resistance. Contrary to Israeli, American or even some Palestinian expectations, Fateh's main organisational structure, in spite of all the bonds attached by the consecutive agreements, remained rooted in the Palestinian people. The reassertion of Fateh as leader of the Intifada lifted alongside it all those PLO groups which had never stopped mobilising and organising throughout the times when Israel attempted to assert its security over the Palestinians' national aspirations and rights.
The Intifada inside the occupied territories immediately found echoes and extensions among the burgeoning movements of the diaspora. The three circles of which the Palestinian constituencies are composed became complete when the Palestinian citizens of Israel, through their protests and political actions, added their voice to the growing clamour, incurring death and punishment in the process.
Ariel Sharon's treacherous campaign to crush the Palestinians into oblivion has further succeeded in bringing together the three circles of the Palestinian people and united them in a reinforced culture of resistance. The assassination of Abu Jihad inspired generations to invoke his memory in the second Intifada. Barghouti, despite his incarceration and the severe blow it deals to the Palestinian movement, provides a courageous model for future Palestinian leaders.
In fact Israel, especially Sharon, is creating new leaders who will not wait for Israeli or American offers but will demand their rights.
* The writer is a Boston-based Palestinian academic.
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