Issue No. 605
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26 Sept. - 2 October 2002 Issue No. 605 Special |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Of victory and defeat
It has been a year of Israeli victories and Palestinian defeats. There are few signs it will change. Graham Usher, in Jerusalem, looks at the Intifada two years on
For the third time in six months on 19 September the Israeli army laid siege to Yasser Arafat's presidential headquarters in Ramallah. Bulldozers razed every building save one housing his office. Tanks blasted adjoining bridges and stairwells. Soldiers took Palestinian prisoners. And diggers ploughed trenches rimmed with barbed wire.
This was Ariel Sharon's response to two suicide attacks in Israel that left five Israelis and one foreigner dead in as many days. He says the army will stay until Arafat hands over 50 Palestinian "fugitives" allegedly interned with him. But all are aware the real goal is to snuff out what remains of Arafat's leadership and Authority.
It remains to be seen whether the Palestinian leader still has the "relevance" to shield these candles from extinction. Europe and the Arabs condemned the siege. The US suggested Israel "keep in mind the consequences of its actions on the peace process and on efforts to reform the Palestinian Authority". Less publicly, it advised Arafat to hand over the "wanted" Palestinians.
Two years after Palestinians mounted their second Intifada in less than a decade Arafat's ruinous compound rises like an epitaph on the Palestinian struggle. The thousands who finally took to the streets in Ramallah, Nablus, Tulkarm and Gaza to protest their leader's incarceration is perhaps the only glint on the horizon -- but they are distant stars shrouded in night.
VICTORY: Defeat was always latent in a rebellion that had neither goal, plan or strategy. But it became a tangible destiny in the wake of the seismic events of 11 September 2001. Convinced finally that the world really did change that day, on 16 December Arafat chose the survival of his regime over the fate of the uprising. He called for "a complete cessation of all military activities" and, via his Fatah movement, persuaded the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad to submit to a unilateral cease-fire.
It held, more or less, for three weeks. In reply, Israel mounted 16 invasions into PA areas and killed 21 Palestinians, eleven of them children. Ariel Sharon distracted the world from this assault by focusing attention on Arafat's alleged role in purchasing arms from Iran in a ship bound for Gaza. The world -- including the Arabs -- followed Israel's cue.
Hamas broke ranks first, shooting dead four Israeli soldiers outside Gaza on 9 January in retaliation for the army's killing and mutilation of three Palestinian teenagers. Fatah followed, after Israel's assassination of its military leader in Tulkarm, Raed Karmi, on 14 January. "The hoax of the so-called cease-fire is over," announced Fatah's armed wing, the Al-Aqsa Brigades.
Confrontation took its place, as Sharon's military solutions moved seamlessly from shelling Palestinian areas to reinvading them (including the hitherto sacrosanct refugee camps) and Palestinian resistance went from guerrilla warfare to suicide bombings in Israeli cities, the bombers dispatched now by Al-Aqsa Brigades as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In March alone, 250 Palestinians and 125 Israelis were killed.
For a while the blood seemed to pay dividends. It stirred the Israeli "peace camp" from slumber, with Peace Now demonstrating in Tel Aviv and 250 reserve officers refusing to serve in "a war for the settlements" in the occupied territories.
It also broke the diplomatic quarantine imposed on Arafat after the arms shipment imbroglio, stirred the Arab "street" into ferment and delivered arguably the most significant Arab initiative in 50 years of conflict, one which massively strengthened the Palestinians negotiating clout vis-à-vis Israel.
In an interview with the New York Times, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah said he was "considering" submitting a proposal to the Arab summit in March in which the Arabs would offer "normal relations" with Israel in return for Israel's full withdrawal from the territories it occupied in the 1967 war.
But the Palestinian militias' indiscriminate violence against civilians in Israel enabled Sharon to slip these nooses. On 27 March -- two hours after the Saudi initiative had become Arab policy -- a Hamas suicide bomber detonated in a hotel in Netanya. 28 Israelis were killed celebrating Passover, 21 of them pensioners. Sharon had the cause he required to vanquish Arafat, the PA and all things Oslo.
Between 28 March and 4 April, Israel invaded and reoccupied all West Bank cities save "Palestinian" Hebron and Jericho, in a massive military offensive named "Defensive Shield". In Ramallah, it besieged Arafat's compound, killed 26 Palestinians, crushed the resistance within two days and spent three weeks systematically gutting every Palestinian institution, public and non- governmental, security and civilian.
Arafat remains defiant despite Israel's near total destruction of his headquarters in Ramallah, known as Al-Muqataa. Meanwhile, Israel has escalated its policy of destroying Palestinian homes, allegedly to deter Palestinian attacks. Nevertheless, Palestinian resistance fighters, with their simple and light weapons, have managed to inflict significant casualties on occupation forces (photos: AFP & AP) In Bethlehem, it snared 200 Palestinians in the Church of Nativity to force the surrender of wanted Fatah and Hamas militants among them. In an attrition lasting six weeks it eventually extracted PA and European covenant for the illegal expulsion of 13 of them to Europe. 26 others were dumped in Gaza. None have or, likely, will return to the West Bank.
But the real war was fought in Nablus and Jenin, long the heart of the West Bank Palestinian resistance. For five days soldiers and militiamen fought house-to-house, and sometimes hand-to- hand, before the army conquered the Casbah, leaving mosques blasted, ancient soap houses razed and 74 Palestinians dead, half of them civilians.
In Jenin refugee camp bulldozers tore down shelters (sometimes with residents within them) and helicopters pounded missiles into homes in a ferocious battle that killed 52 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers and left 4,000 refugees homeless.
Hopes that this carnage would expedite international intervention were swiftly dashed. Sharon simply ignored George Bush's 4 April call that his army leave the reoccupied Palestinian cities and "do so now". Instead US Secretary of State Colin Powell spent eight days slouching toward Jerusalem, stopping off for "consultations" in Rabat, Riyad, Cairo, Amman and Madrid.
When he did arrive, he brokered neither a cease-fire nor a withdrawal but only a nebulous Israeli "timeline" that the army would be out of some of the West Bank cities by 21 April. His sole bow to Arab sensibilities was to meet with Arafat in his besieged compound. He told him to declare a cease-fire and act against the militias and suicide bombers. Arafat did the first. It was beyond him to do anything about the second.
For Palestinians the meeting meant the US had yet to draw the curtain on Arafat's leadership or, more precisely, had yet to find a suitable replacement for him. In exchange for a UN whitewash on Israel's actions in Jenin -- and detention of six Palestinians (including the Popular Front leader Ahmad Saadat) in Jericho under British and American "supervision" -- Sharon reluctantly agreed to free Arafat from captivity on 2 May. Right-wing cabinet ministers all but accused their prime minister of treason.
But Sharon knew it was a small (and temporary) price to pay. He was rewarded on 24 June, when Bush finally gave flesh to his "vision" of a Palestine living "side-by-side in peace and security with Israel".
Henceforth, said Bush, all political progress would be predicated on Palestinians electing a "new and different leadership," ending "terrorism" and reforming their institutions, security, political and economic. Once these had been accomplished to Israel and US's satisfaction, a "provisional" Palestinian state could be declared. This in place a final status agreement "could be reached within three years". The Arab initiative was not mentioned.
In absolute impotence the PA called the speech "a serious contribution to the Middle East peace process". Other Arab leaderships called it "balanced". Sharon said nothing. He didn't need to. Following two suicide bombings in Jerusalem that killed 31 Israelis on 18 and 19 June, his army reinvaded Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm and Qalqiliyya, a "Determined Path" that consolidates what "Defensive Shield" had prepared.
Save for Bethlehem, the army remains in these cities today, buttressed by a new military regime of checkpoints, by-pass roads, passes, fences and expanding settlements whose effect -- in the words of Palestinian analyst Rema Hammami -- has been to reverse reality that "Palestinian communities have become settlements in an Israeli West Bank."
The siege on Arafat is the last brick in these bantustans, cemented again by a Hamas suicide bomber. Sharon's belief now is like an old fruit denied sustenance Arafat will wither and to ensure, unlike before, no net will catch him when he falls.
DEFEAT: It did not take Palestinians long to register the defeat. No sooner had Arafat emerged from the rubble of his compound than he was assailed by cries for change, as Palestinians forgot the courage he showed under siege and remembered the lack of leadership that brought them to this pass and the absence of any PA strategy or defence when, finally, it came.
The clearest call came from Fatah's young political leadership in the West Bank. It is easy to see why. More than any other faction Fatah lost most in this latest clash of Jewish and Palestinian nationalisms, as Sharon went root-and- branch after their political and military cadre, including their main tribune and West Bank general secretary, Marwan Barghouti: one of 8,000 Palestinians Israel interned during Defensive Shield.
Slowly the realisation dawned that Fatah's post-cease-fire turn to an "armed Intifada" had proved disastrous to the Palestinian cause. The demand now was for internal reform combined with more political and "disciplined" forms of resistance. Championed by Fatah's West Bank Higher Council, the strategy had three planks.
One was for a National Unity government to oversee and check those mandated with negotiating the Palestinians' fate. The second was for a newly elected, streamlined and professional PA cabinet to weaken Arafat's autocratic and patrimonial methods of rule. The third was to gain cross-factional agreement on the "means and arena" of the Palestinian resistance. The reformers can claim victories in some areas: not in others.
On 11 September Fatah deputies in the PA Parliament led the revolt that forced the collective resignation of Arafat's newly appointed cabinet. They are warning they will do so again unless he removes ministers tainted with corruption and agrees to the appointment of a prime minister. Arafat, so far, has refused both.
In Nablus and now other West Bank cities younger Fatah cadre are also behind attempts to steer the uprising away from the dead-end of armed resistance and toward mass, civilian protests aimed at defying Israel's policies of curfew and institutional destruction.
But they have been less successful in agreeing on a united national policy for the Intifada, defied by a resurgent Hamas and dissidents within the Al-Aqsa Brigades, whose combined standing in Palestinian opinion now exceeds theirs.
Despite months of talks -- and two years of combat -- the Palestinian factions have yet to agree on what they are fighting for.
In line with the Arab initiative, Fatah's goals are for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the entirety of the occupied territories and for a political and armed struggle confined to these areas. Hamas' promise is the liberation of all "Palestinian lands" and the use of all means to recover them, armed and suicidal, inside Israel and without. The Al-Aqsa Brigades agrees with Fatah on the end: with Hamas on the means.
Of the two visions Sharon prefers that of the Islamists. It has not only allowed him the international license to reconquer the West Bank on his terms and in line with his maps. It also squares with an ideological offensive that tries to paint the Israel-Palestinian conflict as another front in the "war against terrorism" rather than that of people striving to rid itself of colonial rule.
There are some in Hamas who accept this vision but reverses its terms. For them too Palestine is not just a struggle for territory, national self-determination and decolonisation. It is also a conflict that is "cultural, religious and civilisational", in the words of one spokesman, whose resolution cannot come as long as Israel exists.
It is a conceptualisation that can only fail the Palestinians, and not only because it denies them solidarity from those international, Israeli and Palestinian constituencies whose support must be won if they are ever to achieve independence.
More immediately it will fail them for the same reason that Oslo failed them. Two years of the Intifada has again demonstrated what history has taught and Arafat's compound now symbolises: that a nation whose leadership is divided on ideology and conflicted on goals will never be free.
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