-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1999/459/op2.htm
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A protest too long delayed
By Edward Said
Two warring camps: one championing globalisation (which 1�Snderstands to
varying degrees), the other attacking globalisation (sometimes with a grasp of
the issues, often with a refusal to comprehend). Both have their fanatics.
Twenty Palestinian citizens of the West Bank and Gaza, nearly all of them
extremely popular and prominent, issued a bitingly pointed denunciation of
Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, accusing it of massive "corruption,
humiliation and abuse", selling out the Palestinian people in the "peace
process" as it is still quaintly known, and generally allowing the Palestinian
common weal to deteriorate on every level. Oslo is blamed for much of this, but
the statement specifically (and justifiably) named Arafat himself as the most
responsible party for the whole sorry mess; he is cited as having himself
opened the doors to financial corruption, misled the people as to Oslo's
achievements, and promised them a Singapore instead of the stagnant morass in
which almost three million people, with the exception of two or three hundred
around him who have officially designated VIP status and are doing brilliantly,
thank you very much, have sunk. With characteristic subtlety, the Authority
responded by arresting nine of the 20, and placing two more under house arrest;
several others have been called in for interrogation, all under the orders of
Ghazi Jabali, head of Arafat's main police force, who came to Palestine with
his chief in 1994, having sat out the Intifada in comparative luxury in Tunis.
The New York Times and a few other mainstream papers picked up the story on 29
November, but none of them put it in its real context, or interpreted it for
what it is, a tip-of-the-iceberg sign of how totally unpopular Arafat, his
partners the US and Israel, and their peace have now become, not just among the
"Islamic enemies of peace" that Bill Clinton sees around every corner, nor
among the "Syrian agents" that Arab clients of the US love to blame for
discordant noises about Oslo, nor "isolated" people like myself, but among
nearly all ordinary Palestinians and their Arab counterparts. It isn't at all
what Thomas Friedman recently suggests is the problem, that the Arab
governments that have signed on to the peace process haven't sufficiently
educated their populations into "the culture of peace," a fatuous phrase if
there ever was one, but that "peace" is being made by undemocratic, profoundly
unpopular and isolated governments who have charged ahead with it because of US
support for their precarious regimes, and because Israel's blatantly explicit
unwillingness to abide by the two UN resolutions that stipulate land for peace
has made it clear that the settlements will continue and grow larger, Jerusalem
will remain under exclusive Israeli sovereignty, borders and security as well
as water will be under Israeli control, and whatever meaningless Palestinian
"state" will emerge is as contemptibly unviable, as it was always planned to
be. Add to that the horrible deterioration of Palestinian quality of life, plus
Israel's utter refusal to accept any significant return or compensation of the
refugees that it created in 1948, and one has something of an idea of how
desperate and disgusted all Palestinians feel now that the "final status
negotiations" approach their culmination, with the Western media already
celebrating the millennial peace and the World Bank forking over more and more
money directly into Arafat's greedy little hands.
The misrepresentations of "peace" extend still further, as a closer look at the
signatories will reveal. Bassam Al-Shakaa is not simply the former mayor of
Nablus, but a genuinely admired hero who lost both of his legs when an Israeli-
set booby trap exploded in his car in 1980. Known as a fearless champion of
Palestinian independence, he refused to allow Arafat to visit him in his home
in 1994, and when I spoke to him last week he told me that despite his house
arrest he routinely leaves his house in his wheel-chair to buy bread and defy
Jabali to arrest him. Rawya Al-Shawa is a strikingly brilliant and articulate
member of the Legislative Council who comes from Gaza's leading family; her
husband is Gaza's mayor but she has made no secret of her opposition to
Arafat's dreadful regime. Tactfully, the bully Jabali didn't even try to arrest
her, obviously preferring not to take on someone so formidable but settling
instead for easier targets. Ahmad Kattamesh, who was arrested, has only just
been released by the Israelis after being the longest held prisoner in
administrative detention, i.e. without trial. Abdel-Jawad Saleh is a former PLO
minister, Fatah member (like several of the other signatories), and Council
member. Adil Samara and Abdel-Sattar Qasem are respected, independent
academics; Adnan Odeh is head of the Parliamentary Research Unit, Abdel-Rahman
Kitani is a well-known physician, as is Yasser Abu Saffiyeh, who is also a
board member of the Union of Health Work Committees. Arafat also tried to strip
the nine legislators of their parliamentary immunity, raiding homes and offices
with stunning brutality.
Even as I write these lines, hundreds, and even thousands more Palestinians are
speaking out, signing petitions, openly calling for new elections and Arafat's
ouster. The scandal is that the Chairman is being kept around simply to sign
this convenient peace, in the meantime employing no less than about 125,000
people as part of his security and bureaucratic apparatus (almost 70 per cent
of the budget) while spending only two per cent on the infrastructure.
Especially hated lieutenants of his -- celebrated in Israel and Washington as
brave advocates of peace -- have built ostentatious multi-million dollar villas
on the Gaza beachfront (in full view of Jabalya, a 90,000-person refugee camp
criss-crossed with open sewers), their wives go to Paris on shopping sprees,
and their children and relatives manage monopolies of nearly everything, with
Israeli bank accounts to squirrel away their money in. Unemployment fluctuates
between 20 and 40 per cent, the house demolitions and land expropriations
continue unimpeded, while Ehud Barak, that famous champion of peace, continues
to increase military and settlement spending beyond even Netanyahu's.
Even the combined talents of Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh couldn't have
invented anything more stupid and doomed to failure than the current peace
juggernaut. It will certainly hurtle forward but just as certainly bring more
instability and bloodshed for Palestinians and Israelis alike. But neither the
enlightened Israeli nor the Western liberal Left seems to want to step forward
and state the obvious, as if the word "peace" has become a mantra that has
hypnotised them all into stupefaction. What policy makers should at very least
sense, however, is that Palestinians and Israelis are too politicised and savvy
a pair of peoples to be fooled for long by their cowardly leaders, or to accept
schemes for separation that are little more than apartheid given a new name.
The scandal of this recent protest should awaken people to what has been
happening all along in this most grotesquely misnamed of all "peace" processes.
But, alas, it won't, so stay tuned for more of the same until some eyes are
opened, and Arafat is finally removed, which he most certainly will be once he
has fulfilled his purpose. Then the upheaval may be too great to stop, and Oslo
will be exposed forever as the lamentable mockery it has been for so long.
For the present, an international conference of politically active and
independent Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, Israel and all the
refugee populations is being planned. Its platform will include an alternative
peace process, democratic elections, and representative institutions. One hopes
that such an initiative will at last succeed in allowing Palestinians to
represent themselves.
But matters on the ground have considerably worsened, with several of the
jailed protesters now being denied the right to see lawyers and family members,
street demonstrations increasing and, not least, Palestinian negotiators at
long last facing an inevitable reality: that Israeli final-status negotiations
do not include any plans for either dismantling or curtailing the expansion of
most of the settlements. So much, then, for the "advantages" of peace.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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