Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | The will to resist

		4 - 10 July 2002 Issue No. 593 Opinion	Current issue Previous issue Site map
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The will to resist
Bush and Sharon may want to create a 'provisional state', writes Medhat El-Zahed, but all they are doing is fuelling permanent Palestinian resistance

US President George Bush has a new product to sell to the Middle East: a "provisional" state. This product is one of the strangest ever seen in political history. Indeed, the forthcoming entity in Palestine, if it ever gets off the ground, will not be less a state, than a prefabricated microstate, whose policies, sovereignty and (quite possibly) leadership will all be determined in advance.
Packaged within the borders of 28 March 2002 -- the area defined by the Israeli positions prior to the recent incursions under Operation Defensive Shield -- rather than the borders of 4 June 1967 (the West Bank and Gaza), it will grant the Palestinians not the 22 per cent of the land that Oslo had led them to expect, but a mere 42 per cent of that 'original' 22 per cent, or less than 10 per cent of historic Palestine.
This new mini-state will have no weapons, no sovereignty, no autonomous frontiers and no territorial integrity. It will be a patchwork of isolated cantons, their borders entirely defined by Israel and its settlements, wrapped round with an immense cordon of buffer zones, and littered with electrified fences, minefields and surveillance cameras.
The genius of occupied Palestine, from the Israeli point of view, resides in the conglomerations of settlements and connecting ring roads planted in the West Bank during those interim phases of the Oslo period that were intended to build not settlements, but trust. The provisional state, too, will be erected on the infinite deferral of the final status issues (Jerusalem, the settlements, water rights, the final borders and Palestinian refugees). As a result, though no precise map has been drawn, it is most likely to come into being in PA areas A and B. The result of this will be to transform area C, in Israel's eyes, from an occupied territory into a disputed area, and from the Palestinian perspective, into the locus of an ongoing, and increasingly bitter confrontation.
By granting the Palestinians provisional statehood, the US is not offering them hope for progress in their negotiations with Israel. On the contrary, it is pushing negotiations on that track right back to square one, at a time when all efforts should be focused on how to cross the finishing line. The result is a return to the original sin of Oslo: an endless succession of interim "phases", with no real end in sight. As the proverb (cruelly) has it: It's the journey that matters, not the destination.
The Palestinians have good grounds to look askance at such an approach. They had first-hand experience of the five-year interim phase under Oslo, during which the occupying forces were supposed to redeploy in stages. However, the five years passed, and redeployment was still less than half complete. Israel meanwhile had frozen the implementation of all provisions pertaining to crossing points, ports, the airport and the release of political prisoners. Nor had final status negotiations begun. And when those negotiations did begin in July 2000 at Camp David, the settlement on the table was little different from that which is being proposed again today -- a proposal whose hollowness has since been exposed by the revelations of Shlomo Ben Ami, Robert Malley and Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen.
In spite of that dismal failure, Washington appears determined to stick to the prolonged phase-by-phase route, while allowing Israel to maintain its effective control over the Palestinian entity. As a result, the Palestinians would seem to be condemned to the fate of Sisyphus, with the peace project as the stone they must eternally push uphill, only for it to come crashing down again on the other side.
At the heart of the US initiative stands not the Palestinian Authority, but its clone. This "reformed" PA will be allowed to govern the day-to-day lives of its people, but will be denied true sovereignty over the land. Meanwhile, the Palestinian security services must become an extension of Israeli security, dedicated to the pursuit and dismantling of the so-called terrorist infrastructure, while all symbols of the national liberation movement and tradition must be replaced by leaders who know how to bow and scrape in gratitude before whatever gifts the US and Israel are prepared to offer.
Central to this push for a provisional state by the US is their attempt to market the 'success' of Operation Protective Shield as a defeat for the Intifada and the battle for Palestinian independence. However, wars of liberation follow a different logic to that of ordinary wars. In ordinary wars, the enemy can be defeated through a decisive battle that destroys its capacity to continue fighting and forces it to compromise, or abandon, its political goals. This is not the case with wars of liberation. Such wars do not end through some military masterstroke. Rather, they are necessarily protracted wars of attrition, in which the theatre of operations extends to cover the entire land under occupation, and in which the resistance has a limitless capacity to regenerate its forces from within the ranks of the people.
Victory in wars of liberation is not, therefore, determined by qualitative superiority in arms or access to state-of-the-art weaponry. Such wars are won by other factors, foremost of which is the occupied people's will to resist. This will is strengthened by the movement's ability to choose its forms of engagement to suit the different phases of the confrontation, its ability to mobilise broad grass-roots support to wage the struggle on diverse fronts and at diverse levels, and its ability to win over international public opinion and sow dissension within the ranks of their enemy. This implies a different approach to military struggle, in which weapons are only one means among many, and the nature and degree of violence are scrupulously controlled and channeled towards the realisation of the ultimate political objective: independence.
Opinion in Israel is gradually beginning to recognise this reality. There is a growing sense that Israel is losing the battle in the West Bank and Gaza, and that the security Sharon promised is instead being pushed ever further out of reach. As a result, there have been calls for the prime minister's resignation, political parties have left the coalition, and open dissent has begun to surface in the ranks of the Israeli reserves.
Although Israel undoubtedly possessed the military advantage, the costs it sustained from Operation Defensive Shield were enormous. The reason for this is simple: even one of the most powerful armies in the world could not mount a full-scale war in the occupied territories without perpetrating appalling massacres against the population. The horror these atrocities aroused in international public opinion left Israel more isolated than it was even in 1967.
Equally, the losses sustained by the resistance only strengthened their resolve to fight again, thus nullifying any temporary gains the military offensive might have achieved. In this sense, Jenin defeated Israel twice over: once through its heroic resistance, and again when the occupation forces found no alternative but to level the camp and murder its inhabitants en masse, to prevent the siege turning into Israel's Stalingrad.
Not only did Operation Defensive Shield and the on-going reoccupation of Palestinian territories fail to break the Palestinian will to resist, it stirred profound and widespread waves of anger. And no weapon is equal to the power of anger in sustaining the will to fight in a war of liberation.
The writer is a journalist and political analyst with the weekly Al-Ahaly newspaper.

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