www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, December 2004Lead articleAfter the death of ArafatIs there a way forward for Palestine and Israel?by Kevin A. Barry After Yasir Arafat died on Nov. 11 in Paris, there were three memorial ceremonies, not one. In the first, an honor guard of French soldiers escorted his flag-draped coffin to the plane, as President Jacques Chirac stood by. Next came a full-dress funeral in Egypt, attended by heads of state from the Arab world, other major countries such as South Africa and Indonesia, and the foreign ministers of most European countries. As a sign of its hostility, the Bush administration sent only a low-ranking diplomat. MASS OUTPOURING IN RAMALLAH Then came the mass outpouring in Ramallah, where mourners briefly seized the coffin from Palestinian officials. The scene was described by Uri Avnery who was there as part of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom. While he referred to Israeli misperceptions about Arafat, Avnery’s remarks could also be applied to the U.S. media and political elites: "The demonization of the Palestinian national leader, which has been the centerpiece of Israeli propaganda for decades, continues even after his death. It seems that 37 years as occupiers have bestialized our society and left it bereft even of common decency. Ministers and fishmongers, TV icons and university professors, ‘leftists’ and outright fascists tried to outdo each other in utter vulgarity. "Never was the huge gap in the perceptions of the two peoples more striking than on the day of Arafat’s funeral. While Israeli commentators and ‘experts on Arab affairs’...described the late leader as a veritable monster, the epitome of cruelty, viciousness and corruption—a hundred thousand grief-stricken mourners in Ramallah exploded in a burst of emotions that nearly threw the funeral into pandemonium. If the Israeli army had not surrounded and isolated all Palestinian towns that day, more than a million people would have been there...No Arab leader–and very few world leaders–evoke such profound love and admiration among their people as this man." ARAFAT’S LEGACY On the one hand, Arafat’s life and death embodied the claims of the Palestinian people to nationhood and therefore their own state. On the other hand, he represented the rankest opportunism and the politics of the gun. An exile, then a terrorist, later the head of a quasi-state, Arafat lived out the last three years of his life confined inside his bombed-out headquarters in Ramallah, menaced daily by Israeli tanks and missiles. Only as he was dying did the Israelis allow him to leave for Paris. In this sense, his life paralleled that of his people, themselves penned up under Israeli occupation ever since Israel took control of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem during the 1967 War. George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon kept saying that Arafat had been sidelined since his confinement. Physically this may have been true, and their mistreatment of the frail 75-year-old may indeed have hastened his death. But now they have to contend with something perhaps more challenging, not Arafat the man but Arafat the symbol of an oppressed people, a people whose very existence is an open wound for the whole Middle East and thus for the global political-economic order. Truly Arafat was the founder of a new nation. As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote: "He was not victorious in his military battles, whether in exile or at home. But he was victorious in the fight to defend the existence of the nation." Arafat could be compared to those national revolutionaries who founded or refounded their nations during the anti-imperialist struggles of the 20th century. These would include the likes of Eamon De Valera and Michael Collins of Ireland, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Sun Yat-sen of China, or Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt. As with those leaders, Arafat’s political legacy is a mixed one that includes courage and selflessness, as well as authoritarianism and class compromise. For all its revolutionary rhetoric, even at the height of its guerrilla phase in the 1960s and 1970s, the political program of Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization was essentially conservative. Factories were to remain in the hands of private capitalists, trade unions were to be linked to the state, and women’s rights were hardly a major part of the nationalist agenda. In the Palestinian case, the pressure to avoid class or gender "divisiveness," found even in the more democratic national movements, was intensified by two things: 1) The movement had a militaristic, secretive structure, which included the use of the gun in internal disputes. 2) For decades, the long-exiled leadership of Arafat and company cultivated close relations with some very oppressive Arab rulers. Its rhetoric of Arab unity excluded any serious critique of internal Arab culture or politics, blaming everything negative on Israel. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir could write in the London SUNDAY TIMES, "There is no Palestinian people." Since then, the whole world has been forced to recognize their existence. However, as other long-suffering peoples like the Kurds know well, global recognition is not the same thing as self-rule, let alone being allowed to form one’s own state. THE COLLAPSE OF OSLO The First Intifada, begun in 1987, was a major step in that direction. Spearheaded by a new generation of Palestinians in the occupied territories, this was not an isolated terrorist movement, but a highly organized mass uprising that made the occupied territories ungovernable. The result was the 1993 Oslo accords, the first official recognition by Israel and the U.S. of the need for a Palestinian state. The Palestinian movement under Arafat also recognized Israel’s right to exist as a state. In addition Arafat's recognition meant that the nearly solid wall of Arab rejection of Israel now began to crumble. The road since Oslo has been harsh. Even under the more progressive Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, let alone the utterly reactionary Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel slowed the formation of a Palestinian state. They refused to divide Jerusalem, and equally seriously, continued to expand the Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories. For its part, the U.S. continued to arm Israel to the teeth, tacitly agreeing to its (undisclosed) aquisition of nuclear weapons. On the Palestinian side, rejectionists from the fundamentalist Hamas and Islamic Jihad immediately rejected Oslo from the start. While the far greater responsibility for the collapse of Oslo certainly lies on the Israeli side, Arafat for his part could never bring himself to state openly that the millions of Palestinian refugees from 1948 would not be able to return to Israel proper, but at most to a new Palestinian state in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza. This ambiguity concerning Israel’s right to exist as an independent Jewish state helped to break apart the July 2000 Camp David negotiations, as much as did Barak’s failure to agree to a division of Jerusalem. Two months later, the Second Intifada was born, sparked by the war criminal Sharon's provocative visit to the area of the Al Aksa mosque, the most important Muslim religious site in Jerusalem. THE ERA OF SHARON Since his election as prime minister in 2001, Sharon, a vehement opponent of the Oslo accords, has dominated Israeli politics. As the Second Intifada became less a mass movement than a series of terrorist attacks, Sharon responded with a type of force previously thought to be unimaginable. There were hundreds of assassinations of Palestinian leaders, including the religious leader of Hamas, the elderly Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Whole cities were attacked with U.S.-supplied planes and missiles. A separation wall was constructed, going way beyond the 1967 line into Palestinian lands. If Sharon was utterly open about his aggressive designs, Arafat played both sides, publicly condemning but sometimes quietly backing armed attacks on Israeli civilians. Since 2000, some 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis have been killed. Sharon’s only concession has been a grudging promise to withdraw from Gaza in 2005, the better to dominate the West Bank. Every week brings new reports of Israeli atrocities. In November, as reported by the mainstream newspaper YEDIOT AHARONOT, Israeli soldiers took "trophy" videos of themselves exulting over the bodies or body parts of dead Palestinians. In October alone, some 165 Palestinians were killed, most in Gaza. It was also revealed that a "Chechen Unit," composed of Russian immigrants, had been encouraged to use "Russian" methods. In another case in October, an Israeli captain wounded and then "finished off" a 13-year-old Palestinian girl after it was discovered that she had been carrying books, not bombs as she approached an Israeli checkpoint. The grand illusion of Bush and Sharon is that with Arafat gone, they can now find "reasonable" Palestinian leaders who will accept a rump state in Gaza, those parts of the West Bank unoccupied by settlers, and this without any of Jerusalem. That is as great a mirage as was Bush’s dream of reconfiguring the Arab world in a pro-U.S. and pro-Israeli direction by invading Iraq in 2003. On the ground, the suffering on both sides has become unbearable. Even on the Israeli side, economic conditions have deteriorated to the point where 22% live below the official poverty rate. Now serving as finance minister, Netanyahu has provoked three general strikes, most recently in September, by what his critics call a policy of "swinish capitalism." On the Palestinian side, economic conditions are catastrophic. Half live below the poverty line, the economy has shrunk by 23% since 1999, and the official unemployment rate in Gaza is 26%. PALESTINIANS AFTER ARAFAT Arafat’s immediate successors, like the colorless 69-year-old bureaucrat Mohammad Abbas, may be more open to compromise than was Arafat at an individual level. But will Abbas, who has almost no mass following, be able to convince the many rejectionist factions to go along, as Arafat might have done? Today the Palestinians seem bent on achieving a type of unity that will give the new leadership credibility as it represents them to the world. This has led even Hamas to scale back its attacks for the time being. The immensely popular 45-year-old Marwan Barghouti is particularly worth watching. A leader of the First Intifada who grew up under the occupation and was thus not part of Arafat’s inner circle, he is also fluent in Hebrew. He accepted the Oslo accords for a time, but during the Second Intifada, he apparently played some role in organizing Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade suicide attacks on Israeli civilians. No fundamentalist, however, Barghouti has never given up on the possibility of a two-state solution. In terms of internal Palestinian politics, one early test will be whether anything can be done about corrupt warlords in the security forces like Yasir Arafat’s cousin Musa Arafat who has carried out assassinations and extortion in Gaza. Anger at such warlordism was behind the conflict in Gaza last summer, when younger activists challenged Yasir Arafat’s leadership. Another test will be how to respond to Hamas’s demands, if Gaza is returned, for control over education, for women to be veiled, and for imams at mosques to be appointed by religious rather than governmental authorities. Should serious negotiations begin, Barghouti is the type of person who might be able to convince Hamas and other militant groups to call a ceasefire, as he did in 2003. In that period, Sharon responded by doing nothing in return, thus scuttling that truce. Sharon and Bush are saying that Abbas needs to take control in January and then curb terrorism before any concessions can be made. Should they maintain such a stance, while the wall, the lockdown, and the assassinations continue, there is no hope for peace. |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
