18 - 24 April 2002
Issue No.582
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 18 - 24 April 2002 Issue No.582 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Politics before security
The time has come for a state-to-state relationship to replace the state-to-organisation relationship that now exists between Israelis and Palestinians, writes Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Statehood, a luxury enjoyed by the Israelis for over half a century, is still denied to the Palestinians. True, it is only a matter of time before the Palestinian state comes into being, but as matters now stand the lack of symmetry between the protagonists is a major obstacle in the way of ending the current cycle of violence. Both Palestinians and Israelis resort to violence but, while Israeli violence is regarded as legitimate self- defence conducted within the scope of international law, Palestinian violence is seen as lying outside international law and condemned as terrorism. There is a distortion here that needs to be cleared up before we can hope to move beyond the present deadlock.
Whether we like it or not, the state is an instrument of coercion. It is probably the only instrument of coercion that is legal. All states have police forces to preserve the peace, courts to sentence people who break the law and prisons in which to incarcerate them. But Israel is a state of a special nature. It is a state without established borders, a state that has annexed territory that does not belong to it. In other words, part of the territory lying under its sovereign jurisdiction is universally recognised as occupied territory. Indeed, Security Council Resolution 242, the first comprehensive blueprint for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the frame of reference for all subsequent peace initiatives, emphasises the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and calls for the exchange of land for peace; that is, it makes a resolution of the conflict contingent on Israel's readiness to relinquish a part (how much is still to be agreed upon) of the occupied territory presently subject to its authority. Thus the coercion Israel exercises against the Palestinians is illegal coercion designed to perpetuate its illegal occupation of territories seized by force of arms. This has nothing to do with the legal coercion required for the maintenance of security and order.
In all cases, coercion carries an element of violence within it, even when it is used in defence of legitimate rights. When it comes to illegal coercion, as that used to perpetuate military occupation by foreign forces, its illegal character does not lapse under a statute of limitations, however long the occupation might last. Israel's occupation of Arab land has been in place since 1967, that is, for a third of a century. But time has not tempered its character as an act of violence. And yet Israel refuses to admit any share of responsibility for the violence now spiralling out of control in the Holy Land, laying the full blame on the Palestinians. The Israelis conveniently ignore the fact that occupation is violence, while being only too ready to consider the counter-violence perpetrated in reaction to the violence of occupation as illegitimate violence, indeed as out-and-out terrorism. Thus the Palestinians are required to relinquish their violence, while Israeli violence is repeatedly justified as "legitimate self-defence," not only by Sharon but by the Bush administration as well.
However, this skewed perception of reality is rapidly losing credibility. Israel may choose to project the atrocities committed in Jenin, where hundreds of Palestinians were killed, and the systematic destruction of many West Bank towns and villages by the Israeli occupation forces, as acts of legitimate self-defence, but this view is not shared by the European Parliament, which is suspending the EU partnership agreement with Israel, or by two Belgian provinces, which are pressing Brussels to sever its diplomatic relations with Israel. And, according to an opinion poll conducted in the US on 11 April, 60 per cent of Americans were in favour of cancelling or reducing US assistance to Israel if Sharon refuses to comply with Bush's request for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the towns they recently reoccupied, while 75 per cent believed that Colin Powell should meet Arafat during his tour of the Middle East. Judging by these figures, Sharon is as untrustworthy as Arafat in the eyes of the Americans.
That is not to say that terrorism can be justified under any circumstances. The killing of unarmed civilians, whether in Netanya or Jenin, is unacceptable in all cases. But however sad the death of innocent civilians, what is even sadder is that some people can sink to such a level of despair that they see only one way out of their predicament: killing themselves and taking as many as they can with them, even innocent bystanders. Terrorism feeds on despair, frustration and a nihilistic disregard for life; it is a game in which death is used as a negotiating chip to assert the right to live.
There have been attempts to explain the phenomenon of suicide bombings as acts committed by young people brainwashed into believing that the salvation of their souls lies in martyrdom: impressionable victims of a campaign of indoctrination that drives them to sacrifice their lives in acts which, in the final analysis, are criminal. But the question is whether an event as awesome as the Intifada can be reduced to a tactical manouevre dreamt up by a bunch of terrorists. Surely the fact that hundreds of young men and women, with their whole lives ahead of them, are willing to become human bombs is indicative of something far more significant. No one can deny that the first Intifada finally produced the Oslo accords. Is the second Intifada on the way to producing something that can go beyond Oslo, taking Palestinian national liberation to a more advanced stage?
Among the international protests, condemnations and demonstrations triggered by Israel's military campaign against towns and refugee camps in the West Bank, the criticism directed by Nelson Mandela's successor, South African President Thabo Mbeiki, to Sharon a few days ago stand out: "By trying to crush the Palestinian popular Intifada, Israel is repeating the mistakes perpetrated by apartheid in South Africa. Sharon is wrong to demand an end to Palestinian violence as a precondition for the resumption of talks...When we ask that the right to live be respected, we need to strongly emphasise that we are talking about the right of both the Israelis and the Palestinians. But we have to proceed from reality as it is, which says that the Israelis have their state and that the Palestinians do not." South Africa's experience in overcoming apartheid can offer many lessons to the Palestinians as they struggle to end their oppression at the hands of an ethnic group that regards them as its racial inferiors.
Actually, asymmetry in the relative positions of the two parties is a defect that goes back to the Oslo accords. The accords were concluded between two unequal parties: a state (Israel) and an organisation (the PLO). The Oslo accords were not about mutual recognition between similar bodies, but between a state with sovereign prerogatives, the power to deter, and the right to use force in given circumstances without violating international legitimacy, and an organisation that is not vested with sovereign prerogatives under international law and whose struggle for national liberation is clouded in ambiguity as it treads a fine line between legitimate struggle against occupation and illegal practices attributed to terrorism. How can such an asymmetry bring about a situation conducive to the progress of a peace process?
When the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, it was said that the PLO had transformed itself from an organisation which, according to Israel, practiced terrorism, into an organisation qualified to engage in a negotiation process. Its ability to take the peace process forward and build mutual confidence was tested through a series of partial agreements aimed at resolving the easier problems along the lines of a step-by-step approach. The more difficult problems would be left for the more advanced stages of the negotiations at a time there would be greater confidence between the parties.
But this approach did not produce the desired results. The Camp David negotiations between Barak and Arafat under Clinton's sponsorship proved that deferring the more intractable problems to the final stages of the negotiations did not make them any less intractable. Thus lack of balance and inability to move forward remained a feature of the negotiations. Meanwhile, Arafat was subjected to an impossible duality. On the one hand, he was required to respond to Sharon's request to liquidate Palestinian factions of the Intifada on the grounds that they constituted terrorist networks; on the other, to maintain his credibility as representative of the Palestinian movement in its entirety.
As long as the vicious circle of violence continues to be approached exclusively from the security perspective, there is no breakthrough in sight. A political perspective must be brought into play. Overcoming the present impasse cannot be made dependent on random terrorist attacks. The security aspects must be transcended and the political aspects given full priority. The Oslo mistakes have to be corrected and the step-by-step approach abandoned for an overall package deal, basing the solution of the Palestinian problem on two states, one Arab and the other Jewish. This first step should be proclaimed during Powell's current visit to the region. The decisions of the Arab summit in Beirut could serve as road map for further progress towards an overall settlement.
© 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