9 - 15 May 2002
Issue No.585
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 May 2002 Issue No.585 |
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Making a choice
Sharon's trip to Washington was bound to fail as long as the Israeli premier and the Bush administration refuse to confront some home truths, Heidi Shoup*, in Washington, writes
Washington awaited with bated breath the outcome of last week's meeting between US President George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who arrived in Washington with his own version of a peace plan. Washington Policy Institute insiders assert that, at best, Sharon's plan will grant the Palestinians less than what they were offered at the Taba negotiations in 2000 while those on the political Right, including high-ranking members of Congress, have openly stated that, as far as they are concerned, Israel can keep all of "Judea and Samaria." The crucial item on the agenda, they repeat, is putting a stop to (Palestinian) terrorism, and guaranteeing Israel's peace and security.
Should Bush decide to direct his administration towards effective engagement in the region aiming at ending the Israel- Palestinian conflict -- as opposed to executing media spins and carefully-crafted speeches that play equally well in Jacksonville as in Jeddah -- then such involvement must be premised on certain preconditions. Of these, the crucial are a return to the application of international law, the principle of land for peace and the recognition that the continued oppression of the Palestinian people will necessarily cripple Bush's war on terrorism.
If there is a lesson to be learned from the 19-month long second Intifada it is that Israeli security and Palestinian freedom are inseparably entwined. Israel will not achieve security until Palestinians achieve the freedom for which they struggled for much of the last century.
Israelis are obsessed by security issues. This is perhaps in no small part due to their awareness that, as Moshe Dayan once stated, "Before (the Palestinians') very eyes we are inhabiting the land and the villages where they and their ancestors lived. We are the generation of colonisers and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree or build a house." This reality was incorporated into the Oslo "peace process." In the words of Shlomo Ben-Ami, "the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever."
While many Americans know that Israel is the United States' largest recipient of economic and military aid, approaching $7 billion annually, there are many important facts that they remain ignorant of. Most US tax-payers are unaware of the fact that Israel is by many assessments the fourth most powerful military power in the world or that, during the seven years of the Oslo peace process, it confiscated 50 per cent of the area of the West Bank and Gaza and doubled the settler population within it. In the same period, Palestinians experienced a steady economic decline leading to 70 per cent of the population now getting by on less than $2 per day and unemployment hovering at the 60-70 per cent mark.
In 1988 the Palestinians forsook their claim to 78 per cent of their patrimony and reconciled themselves to building their state on 22 per cent of historic Palestine. This decision was enshrined in 1993 in the Oslo peace accord. Now, however, Palestinians are being pressed to make additional territorial concessions. A good example is Barak's so-called generous offer at Camp David which would in fact have reduced Palestine to an unviable series of Bantustans, lacking in sovereignty and without control over natural resources.
Few Americans can know that the vast majority of the international community views Israel's policies as the primary obstacle to peace and considers the United States -- Israel's military supplier and chief financial backer -- as complicit in that obstruction.
In the coming weeks, Bush's response to Sharon's plans will show us whether the United states will continue to facilitate oppression while acceding to Israel's military actions and political demands or if Bush is willing to take the risk of redirecting America's will and ending Israel's ongoing occupation.
Following an Israeli withdrawal to the June 1967 borders and given certain agreed-upon modifications the United States can guarantee Israeli security in cooperation with European and Arab allies. The United States will never be able to guarantee Israel's security as long as checkpoints remain in the West Bank and Gaza, land confiscation continues apace and settlements persist. Frighteningly, the US is appearing to silently acquiesce to a proposed Israeli "transfer" of Palestinians to Jordan or beyond -- a policy option that is increasingly popular in Israel. International humanitarian organisations, America's European allies, the Arab and Muslim worlds, the Palestinians and many within Israel are calling for international intervention and the implementation of international law.
US inaction vis-à-vis the United Nations fact-finding commission into the events in Jenin does not offer a hopeful indication as to where US policy will head next. While the UN adopted the proposed US format, the US remained publicly silent as Israel raised one objection after another and finally rejected the commission outright.
Meanwhile the US media focuses on what the precise definition of a massacre is, the precise body count at Jenin and disputed accounts of the atrocities that occured there. What is indisputable is that in the words of Amnesty International's preliminary findings "the evidence compiled indicates that serious breaches of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed, including war crimes."
What is similarly undeniable is that for weeks Israel prevented medical assistance, food, and water from reaching hundreds of thousands of Palestinians caught up in the Israeli military onslaught.
It is equally clear that most Palestinians are still struggling under curfew and each day a few more -- mostly civilians -- are killed by the Israeli military. The widely reported withdrawal from Palestinian cities and villages is, in the words of Dr Mustafa Barghouti, "a big lie, because the tanks are still present and can invade, and have reinvaded whenever they want."
In virtually all of the Arab world and much of the rest of the world, the US is seen as complicit in the ongoing Israeli violence against Palestinians. This complicity is worsened as it becomes increasingly clear the real aim of "Operation Defensive Shield" was, rather than aiming at destroying the infrastructure of terrorism, in the words of Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, to "break the backbone of the Palestinian people, crush their governmental institutions, turn the people into human wreckage that can be dealt with as (Sharon) wishes."
The mild US response to these facts appears unfathomable to the international audience and is compounded when the US calls for a corruption-free Palestinian leadership. It is seen as being the height of hypocrisy to speak of Palestinian Authority corruption in an implication that somehow it is corruption that has kept Palestinians from tasting freedom. At the same time, the Bush administration welcomes in Washington without criticism the Israeli Prime Minister, an acknowledged war criminal who has actively worked against the realisation of every peace effort to date and whose vision of a Palestinian state is one of a dependent and subjugated Bantustan.
In fact, the PA has, for the most part, done Israel and America's bidding in the past eight years, through policing its own people and maintaining calm. The Israelis have, on the other hand, systematically created a matrix of control over the Palestinian territories they occupy, meant to guarantee Israel's domination of the area's resources forever.
After his delayed entrance into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and following a wealth of mixed, often contradictory, signals, we shall soon see if the US president was being frank when he said that he would do anything it takes to resolve the Middle East conflict. This pledge will require even-handed application of the principles Americans believe our country still stands for; freedom, justice, and the rule of law. It will require abandoning the current conflict-management course that the US has followed since Madrid and embracing a true conflict-resolution strategy.
Bush will find enthusiastic support from European and Arab allies, churches and human rights organisations, both in the US and abroad. It will be a major step in ensuring victory in our war on terror through removing a major source of anti-American hatred.
* The writer is executive director of the Centre for Policy Analysis on Palestine, Washington, DC.
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