Issue No. 611
Opinion
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7 - 13 November 2002 Issue No. 611 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
The perverse logic of slogans
What has become of the Arabs' central cause, asks Abdel-Moneim Said*. And why
Since 11 September a mirror has been placed against the Arab mentality revealing a mindset ever ready to jump to wild conspiracy theories while evading any examination of the roots of that violence -- the relationship between religion and the state conducive to breeding fundamentalist movements, starting with the Muslim Brotherhood and ending with Al-Qa'eda and the Taliban. And this mentality has had serious repercussions on the central cause of the Arabs: within 12 months after 11 September the PA had lost most of its institutions, the land over which it had exercised authority (Zone A) and all authority within Zone B. The Palestinian cause, now, has reverted to a pre-1993 Oslo accord status, all agreements having been successfully bulldozed by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Perhaps the greatest blow to the cause is that it has slipped into obscurity, the world's attention caught up in other issues. Foremost among them is Iraq which even before any US strike has emerged as the leading item on the international agenda. At the same time everyone has been rehashing the events of 11 September, what happened in Afghanistan and each and every facet of the "global effort to combat terrorism". Concern, too, has been focused on an economic recession that has extended its grip, in one way or another, to reach every national economy. International attention, then, has been focussed on everything but the Palestinian cause, the Israeli reoccupation of Palestinian territories and the Palestinian Intifada.
But why, one might ask, should the world care about the Palestinian cause: isn't it, like other national causes, only natural that it should engage the attention of the international community, occupy the focus of the media, with varying degrees of intensity? But that is not what we have become used to with regard to the Palestinian issue. It has always occupied international attention. The Middle East conflict, after all, has been the subject of more UN resolutions than any other global concern. Never in contemporary history has there been such a procession of foreign ministers, above all US secretaries of state, as there has been to the Middle East. And every time a new EU president takes office, which is every six months, his first act is to undertake an inspection tour of the Middle East.
The precise reasons behind the decline in international focus on the Palestinian situation are not the subject of this article: enough to state that the Arabs' foremost cause long garnered an extraordinarily high degree of attention and does no longer. Whether such attention was because of Israel, oil or the region's status as the origin of the world's revealed religions is not important. The outcome is the same: the once central Palestinian issue lost its centrality within 12 months of the events of 11 September, events that exposed the failures of Arab diplomacy and policies in dealing with the Palestinian issue over the previous 10 years, a period in which, for the first time, a real opportunity existed to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Never had a solution been so within reach, never had the Palestinian people been so close to obtaining their legitimate rights, than in the wake of the Gulf War and the Arab-US-global alliance to liberate Kuwait.
From 1948 onwards the Arab-Israeli conflict has been the history of a foreign occupation of Arab territory. Before two decades had lapsed Israel had occupied all of Palestine, the Sinai and the Golan Heights. Just 15 years later, in 1982, Israeli had occupied, for the first time, an Arab capital -- Beirut -- after which it held on to a broad band of southern Lebanon. This expansionist trend, however, began to reverse after President Sadat shifted Egypt's international alliances from the east to the west and established a special bond with the US. At this juncture Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai became possible. With the Arab-Israeli alliance to liberate Kuwait it became possible to realise a second phase of territorial liberation: in subsequent phases, under the Oslo accords, Israel withdrew from 40 per cent of the West Bank and two-thirds of Gaza. Israel's empire had begun to shrink.
The lessons to be drawn from this history are obvious. Hostility towards the West, and the US in particular, means prolonged occupation of Arab territory; rapprochement and alliance with Washington means liberation. Yet for a decade (1991-2001) the Arabs and their governments handled the situation in a manner that would ultimately forfeit the Palestinian cause. No sooner had the Middle East peace conference in Madrid ended than the majority of Arab states recoiled from the peace process, as a healthy man backs away from a leper. When Oslo was signed in 1993, most of them viewed the agreement as a form of surrender and a betrayal of higher Arab interests.
At this point a completely new factor came into operation. Arab satellite stations, spearheaded by Al-Jazeera in Qatar, would become instrumental in hampering the process of obtaining Arab rights. The policy of these networks was to outbid one another in portraying the peace process as a surrender to Israel rather than a process of liberating territory that Israel had occupied and continued to occupy as a result of reckless radical Arab policies in their Islamist or pan-Arab guises. Accompanying this was a massive offensive against the acuity and political efficacy of the PA. As a result, whereas once the PLO had been the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people, now Hamas and the Islamic Jihad became, for all practical purposes, the voice of the Palestinian people. This had serious implications. It swept the carpet of legitimacy, not only from under the feet of the PA but from under the Oslo accords. When these two organisations boycotted the general elections it also undermined the legitimacy of right of the Palestinian people to elect their own representatives and confer upon them a mandate to steer their national struggle. The upshot of this was that Palestine fell under two vying authorities, each directing foreign policy and the process of territorial liberation in divergent ways. While the PA's strategy aimed at liberating Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, Hamas and its cohort set their sights on liberating all of Palestine and eliminating the state of Israel, even if that brought about the reoccupation of Palestinian territories.
Virtually every Arab government remained silent, with some regarding any attempts on the part of the US to get the Arabs and Israelis to exchange land for peace as a mechanism to achieve Israeli domination over the region. Not that they asked why the US, charged with entertaining dreams of domination over the Middle East, would hand the reigns of control to Israel. No concept has been so derided by Arab political and intellectual elites as the "Middle Eastern order", save, perhaps, for globalisation. Both concepts, in one way or another, are associated with the US, which had shortly before participated in the liberation of Kuwait and of other Arab and Islamic territories. Not long afterwards the word precipitate came to be applied to any official or non- official move to promote peace, handing the future of the Palestinian cause over to Israel's hawks and extremists, thirsting as voraciously as ever over the whole of Palestine in order to recreate the "historic" state of Israel. Israeli fanatics, in turn, were aided by their Islamic counterparts, whose eyes remained fixed on liberating all of historic Palestine, towards which end they must dismantle Israel and its nuclear arsenal.
The peace process crumbled. The Israeli right undermined it through continued settlement construction and repression of the Palestinians. The Palestinian right hacked away at it through suicide operations whenever there appeared hope for progress in liberating Palestinian territory. Then, the Arabs began to abandon the peace process. First they let multilateral negotiations die out. Next they slowly asphyxiated the Middle East economic conference because it was a manifestation of "normalisation". They even allowed the Mediterranean partnership to grow so frail that it could no longer impact on a peace process that, to all intents and purposes, no longer existed.
In short, each and every opportunity to liberate Arab land was forfeited. It was obvious that liberation could not take place unless there was a significantly forceful body of opinion inside Israel pushing for withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territory. Nevertheless, Arab governments, together with Palestinian and Arab rejectionists, were bent on strengthening the hand of the Israeli right and sweeping the rug from under forces for peace in Israel. Indeed, when some grass-roots Arab forces attempted to traverse the barriers of war by forming the Arab-Israeli coalition for peace, they quickly came under attack by an Arab elite whose countermove was to initiate boycott drives, not only against Israel, but also against the US, sponsor of the peace process.
The Arab world continued to flounder. With every passing day they lost a bit more of the thread that would lead to the liberation of Palestine. Then came Camp David II and the subsequent Clinton proposals. As Arab governments and political elites scrambled around wondering how to handle them, Hamas escalated its suicide operations, succeeding in expelling the Labour government from power, bringing in Sharon and silencing the Israeli peace camp. For the next eight months, following Sharon's election, the Arabs were unable to formulate an approach capable of handling the new situation, at which point 11 September erupted to expose the extent to which we had let opportunity slip out of our hands.
Recently, Sharon announced that Israel was no longer committed to Oslo or subsequent agreements concluded in Cairo, Hebron, Wye River and Sharm El-Sheikh. His announcement was greeted with jubilation by Israel's ultra-right, which regarded the agreements as a nightmarish threat to the security of Israel, the beginning of the end of the state. It also answered the prayers of the Islamists, Nasserists, pan-Arabists and all other radical Arabs, who regarded the agreements as a nightmare for the Palestinian cause and an unacceptable compromise on Palestinian territory occupied in 1948.
The sole Arab attempt to salvage the situation was the Arab peace initiative, launched by Saudi Arabia and ratified by the Arab summit in Beirut in March. However, and in the face of cautions issued by the PA that another "martyr" operation would lead to Israeli incursions into liberated Palestinian territories and the destruction of all Palestinian institutions, Hamas quickly aborted the initiative by means of the Natanya suicide bombing. Although Hamas had brought about the worst Palestinian "catastrophe" since 1967, it never came under criticism on moral or strategic grounds. On the contrary, the spirit of revenge, rather than liberation, became more entrenched than ever in Arab and Palestinian political thinking. According to recent opinion polls in Palestine 52 per cent of those polled support suicide operations against Israeli civilians, 50 per cent oppose a cease-fire with Israel and 53 per cent oppose PA efforts to halt suicide operations. Finally, 70 per cent believe that suicide operations had helped realise Palestinian national rights, although it is difficult to perceive exactly how those rights have been realised in the shadow of Israel's reoccupation of Palestinian territories. This latter point, however, will carry no weight with the extremists: they are subject to their own logic, within which reoccupation is a historic victory over the "accursed" Oslo accords.
This is the current condition of the Palestinians, and of the Arabs. They vacillate between initiatives that come too late and the passion to rush down blind alleys that lose them land and honour. Evidently, the more and the louder the slogans Arabs hear, the easier they sleep.
* The writer is director of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
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