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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§Resistance is not enough
What has gone wrong? Abdel-Jawad Saleh* tallies the victims
The basic problem facing the Palestinians is how to translate a defenceless people's courageous resistance to a major military power into a viable political stand. For the past 18 months, the Palestinians have withstood Israel's repression by sheer force of will. The occupation forces have committed almost every war crime and crime against humanity defined in the Geneva Conventions.
Supported by a powerful lobby that has wielded accusations of anti-Semitism to paralyse Western governments and prevent them from defending the Palestinians' human and political rights, the Israelis have defined victims as executioners, and claimed that the children whom Israeli soldiers gun down in cold blood are actually sent to slaughter by their own parents. Israel has convinced most of the world that the Palestinians pose a threat to its existence, calls Palestinian freedom fighters terrorists, and blames the resistance for the colonisation of Palestinian land and the theft of Palestinian water.
Whether or not they realised what they were doing, the Americans made a mistake in appointing the Israeli prime minister the arbitrary judge of an impossible cease-fire. The mistake has left hundreds of dead on both sides, and shaken any hope in the possibility of peace and coexistence. It also gave Sharon the opportunity to destroy anything the Oslo accords had achieved.
The Palestinians have spent 35 years in a Pavlovian maze, while the Israeli military establishment experimented with new ways of developing systematic hatred. Although the Israelis tried to create slaves crippled by a thirst for revenge, their Palestinian victims have become martyrs on the same cross as Christ, suffering for the same country and the same people.
Why was Arafat able to maintain peace and impose complete respect for a cease- fire during Rabin's time? Why did he crack down on Hamas in Gaza? Why did he imprison Hamas and Jihad leaders, more successfully than the Israelis in 35 years of occupation? At the time, he claimed to be building a Palestinian "national project." The Palestinian people gave him this opportunity when Peres refused to budge on redeployment from Hebron, after Rabin's assassination.
Netanyahu, in turn, insisted that only Israel could determine the extent and timing of redeployment. The PA claimed that by the end of the transitional stage it would control 90 per cent of the occupied territories. What it got was inhabited areas -- i.e. the towns, villages and camps Israel sought to get rid of after the first Intifada.
Barak was worse yet. He would not move an inch, although the Knesset allowed his government to hand the towns of Abu Dis and Azaria, around Jerusalem, to the PA. He refused even that. His "generous offer" was a hoax. The "90 per cent" of the occupied territories that he purported to be delivering at Camp David excluded those areas of Greater Jerusalem that were annexed to Israel, the Dead Sea area, the banks of the Jordan River, and the area along the 1967 lines. These, he considered part of Israel.
*The writer is a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
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