MCC Palestine Update #51

MCC Palestine Update #51

This past week has been yet another of sadness, insecurity, and loss in Israel/Palestine. Two suicide bombings in Jerusalem have caused death, pain, anger, and grief. Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip feel increasingly insecure, with the closure continuing to tighten and with many cities now reoccupied once more and under curfew.

How can Christians act and respond amidst such violence and despair? Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian Christian and former MCC volunteer, spoke this week to a visiting delegation of Quakers on this topic. Kuttab pointedly noted that the peace and justice community (he included himself in this group) had failed during the Oslo process, failed by not insisting that final settlements be grounded in international law and be non-discriminatory, by making Palestinian statehood an end in itself rather than a means to landed security for all, and by not observing that direct negotiations in a situation of dramatic power imbalance would inevitably favor the stronger party. Whatever Christians should do now, Kuttab suggested, they should not retreat from vigorous critiques of any "peace" moves (say, the recent talk of a "provisional" Palestinian state) which are once more ripped out of the context of international law and resolutions; rather than worrying about being "effective" (since, as he noted, peace and justice groups have been notably ineffective at securing a just peace in Palestine/Israel), Christians should be willing to be marginalized if that is the price for speaking the truth.

Part of truth-telling, Kuttab noted, involves critiquing the mismanagement and corruption of the Palestinian Authority. There has been much in the press about US and Israeli calls for the "reform" of the Authority. Palestinians, too, are calling for reform, although for different reasons than the US and Israel; the reform envisioned is also quite different. Below are three pieces on the topic of reform. The first, by Edward Said, outlines a call for new elections. The second presents a new Palestinian movement for reform in the occupied territories. The third and final piece calls for a reform of the Palestinian struggle, as Palestinian intellectuals issue a call for an immediate end to the immoral and counterproductive use of suicide bombings.


1. Palestinian Elections Now
Edward Said

Six distinct calls for Palestinian reform and elections are being uttered now: five of them are, for Palestinian purposes, both useless and irrelevant. Sharon wants reform as a way of further disabling Palestinian national life, that is, as an extension of his failed policy of constant intervention and destruction. He wants to be rid of Yasser Arafat, cut up the West Bank into fenced-in cantons, re-install an occupation authority preferably with some Palestinians helping out -- carry on with settlement activity, and maintain Israeli security the way he's been doing it. He is too blinded by his own ideological hallucinations and obsessions to see that this will neither bring peace nor security, and will certainly not bring the "quiet" he keeps prattling on about. Palestinian elections in the Sharonian scheme are quite unimportant.

Second, the United States wants reform principally as a way of combating "terrorism," a panacea of a word that takes no account of history, context, society or anything else. George Bush has a visceral dislike for Arafat, and no understanding at all of the Palestinian situation. To say that he and his disheveled administration "want" anything is to dignify a series of spurts, fits, starts, retractions, denunciations, totally contradictory statements, sterile missions by various officials of his administration, and about-faces, with the status of an over-all desire, which of course doesn't exist. Incoherent, except when it comes to the pressures and agendas of the Israeli lobby and the Christian Right whose spiritual head he now is, Bush's policy consists in reality of calls for Arafat to end terrorism, and (when he wants to placate the Arabs) for someone somewhere somehow to produce a Palestinian state and a big conference, and finally, for Israel to go on getting full and unconditional US support including most probably ending Arafat's career. Beyond that, US policy waits to be formulated, by someone, somewhere, somehow. One should always keep in mind though that the Middle East is a domestic, not a foreign, policy issue in America and subject to dynamics within the society that are difficult to predict.

All this perfectly suits the Israeli demand, which wants nothing more than to make Palestinian life collectively more miserable and more unlivable, whether by military incursions or by impossible political conditions that suit Sharon's frenzied obsession with stamping out Palestinians forever. Of course there are other Israelis who want co- existence with a Palestinian state, as there are American Jews who want similar things, but neither group has any determining power now. Sharon and the Bush administration run the show.

Third, is the Arab leaders' demand which as far as I can tell is a combination of several different elements, none of them directly helpful to the Palestinians themselves. First is fear of their own populations who have been witnessing Israel's mass and essentially unopposed destruction of the Palestinian territories without any serious Arab interference or attempt at deterrence. The Beirut summit peace plan offers Israel precisely what Sharon has refused, which is land for peace, and it is a proposal without any teeth, much less one with a timetable. While it may be a good thing to have it on record as a counter-weight to Israel's naked belligerence, we should have no illusions about its real intention which, like the calls for Palestinian reform, are really tokens offered to seething Arab populations who are thoroughly sick with the mediocre inaction of their rulers. Second, of course, is the sheer exasperation of most of the Arab regimes with the whole Palestinian problem. They seem to have no ideological problem with Israel as a Jewish state without any declared boundaries, which has been in illegal military occupation of Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank for 35 years, or with Israel's dispossession of the Palestinian people. They are prepared to accommodate nicely those terrible injustices if only Arafat and his people would simply either behave or quietly go away. Third, of course, is the long-standing desire of Arab leaders to ingratiate themselves with the US and, among themselves, to vie for the title of most important US ally. Perhaps they are simply unaware of how contemptuous most Americans are of them, and how little understood or regarded is their cultural and political status in the US.

Fourth, in the chorus of reform are the Europeans. But they only scurry around sending emissaries to see Sharon and Arafat, they make ringing declarations in Brussels, they fund a few projects and more or less leave it at that, so great is the shadow of the US over them.

Fifth, is Yasser Arafat and his circle of associates who have suddenly discovered the virtues (theoretically at least) of democracy and reform. I know that I speak at a great distance from the field of struggle, and I also know all the arguments about the besieged Arafat as a potent symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israeli aggression, but I have come to a point where I think none of that has any meaning anymore. Arafat is simply interested in saving himself. He has had almost ten years of freedom to run a petty kingdom and has succeeded essentially in bringing opprobrium and scorn on himself and most of his team; the Authority became a byword for brutality, autocracy and unimaginable corruption. Why anyone for a moment believes that at this stage he is capable of anything different, or that his new streamlined cabinet (dominated by the same old faces of defeat and incompetence) is going to produce actual reform, defies past year he has exposed to unacceptable pain and hardship, all of it based on a combination of his absence of a strategic plan and his unforgivable reliance on the tender mercies of Israel and the US via Oslo. Leaders of independence and liberation movements have no business exposing their unarmed people to the savagery of war criminals like Sharon, against whom there was no real defence or advance preparation. Why then provoke a war whose victims would be mostly innocent people when you have neither the military capacity to fight one nor the diplomatic leverage to end it? Having done this now three times (Jordan, Lebanon, West Bank) Arafat should not be given a chance to bring on a fourth disaster.

He has announced that elections will take place in early 2003, but his real concentration is to reorganise the security services. I have long pointed out in these columns that Arafat's security apparatus was always designed principally to serve him and Israel, since the Oslo accords were based on his having made a deal with Israel's military occupation. Israel cared only about its security, for which it held Arafat responsible (a position, by the way, he willingly accepted as early as 1992). In the meantime Arafat used the 15 or 19 or whatever the right number of groups was to play each off against the other, a tactic he perfected in Fakahani, and which is patently stupid so far as the general good is concerned. He never really reined in Hamas and Islamic Jihad which suited Israel perfectly: it would have a ready- made excuse to use the so-called martyr's (mindless) suicide bombings to further diminish and punish the whole people. If there is one thing along with Arafat's ruinous regime that has done us more harm as a cause it is this calamitous policy of killing Israeli civilians, which further proves to the world that we are indeed terrorists and an immoral movement. For what gain no one has been able to say.

Having therefore made a deal with the occupation through Oslo, Arafat was never really in a position to lead a movement to end it. And ironically, he is trying to make another deal now, both to save himself and prove to the US, Israel and the other Arabs that he deserves another chance. I myself don't care a whit for what Bush, or the Arab leaders, or Sharon says: I am interested in what we as a people think of our leader, and there I believe we must be
elections, reorganising the government and security services. His record of failure is too dismal and his capacities as a leader too enfeebled and incompetent for him to try yet again to save himself for another try.

Sixth, finally, is the Palestinian people who are now justifiably clamouring both for reform and elections. As far as I am concerned, this clamour is the only legitimate one of the six I have outlined here. It's important to point out that Arafat's present administration as well as the Legislative Council have overstayed their original term, which should have ended with a new round of elections in 1999. Moreover, the whole basis of the 1996 elections were the Oslo accords, which in effect simply licensed Arafat and his people to run bits of the West Bank and Gaza for the Israelis, without true sovereignty or security, since Israel retained control of the borders, security, land (on which it doubled and even tripled the settlements), water and air. In other words, the old basis for elections and reform, which had been Oslo, is now null and void. Any attempt to go forward on that kind of platform is simply a wasteful ploy and will produce neither reform nor real elections. Hence the current confusion which causes every Palestinian everywhere to feel chagrin and bitter frustration.

What then is to be done if the old basis of Palestinian legitimacy no longer really exists? Certainly there can be no return to Oslo, anymore than there can be to Jordanian or Israeli law. As a student of periods of important historical change, I should like to point out that when a major rupture with the past occurred (as during the period after the fall of the monarchy because of the French Revolution, or with the demise of apartheid in South Africa before the elections of 1994 took place), a new basis of legitimacy has to be created by the only and ultimate source of authority, namely, the people itself. The major interests in Palestinian society, those that have kept life going, from the trade unions, to health workers, teachers, farmers, lawyers, doctors, in addition to all the many NGOs must now become the basis on which Palestinian reform despite Israel's incursions and the occupation -- is to be constructed. It seems to me useless to wait for Arafat, or Europe, or the US, or the Arabs to do this: it must absolutely be done by Palestinians themselves by way of a Constituent Assembly that contains in it all the major elements of Palestinian society. Only such a group, constructed by the people themselves and not by the remnants of the Oslo dispensation, certainly not by the shabby fragments of Arafat's discredited Authority , can hope to succeed in re-organising society from the ruinous, indeed catastrophically incoherent condition in which it is to be found. The basic job for such an Assembly is to construct an emergency system of order that has two purposes. One, to keep Palestinian life going in an orderly way with full participation for all concerned. Two, to choose an emergency executive committee whose mandate is to end the occupation, not negotiate with it. It is quite obvious that militarily we are no match for Israel. Kalishnikoffs are not effective weapons when the balance of power is so lopsided. What is needed is a creative method of struggle that mobilises all the human resources at our disposal to highlight, isolate and gradually make untenable the main aspects of Israeli occupation e.g., settlements, settlement roads, roadblocks and house demolitions.The present group around Arafat is hopelessly incapable of thinking of, much less implementing, such a strategy: it is too bankrupt, too bound up in corrupt selfish practices, too burdened with the failures of the past.

For such a Palestinian strategy to work there has to be an Israeli component made up of individuals and groups with whom a common basis of struggle against occupation can and indeed must be established. This is the great lesson of the South African struggle: that it proposed the vision of a multi- racial society from which neither individuals nor groups and leaders were ever deflected. The only vision coming out of Israel today is violence, forcible separation and the continued subordination of Palestinians to an idea of Jewish supremacy. Not every Israeli believes in these things of course, but it must be up to us to project the idea of co-existence in two states that have natural relations with each other on the basis of sovereignty and equality. Mainstream Zionism has still not been able to produce such a vision, so it must come from the Palestinian people and their new leaders whose new legitimacy has to be constructed now, at a moment when everything is crashing down and everyone is anxious to re-make Palestine in his own image and according to his own ideas.

We have never faced a worse, or at the same time, a more seminal moment. The Arab order is in total disarray; the US administration is effectively controlled by the Christian Right and the Israeli lobby (within 24 hours, everything that George Bush seems to have agreed with President Mubarak was reversed by Sharon's visit); and our society has been nearly wrecked by poor leadership and the insanity of thinking that suicide bombing will lead directly to an Islamic Palestinian state. There is always hope for the future, but one has to able to look for it and find it in the right place. It is quite clear that in the absence of any serious Palestinian or Arab information policy in the United States (especially in the Congress) we cannot for a moment delude ourselves that Powell and Bush are about to set a real agenda for Palestinian rehabilitation. That's why I keep saying that the effort must come from us, by us, for us. I'm at least trying to suggest a different avenue of approach. Who else but the Palestinian people can construct the legitimacy they need to rule themselves and fight the occupation with weapons that don't kill innocents and lose us more support than ever before? A just cause can easily be subverted by evil or inadequate or corrupt means. The sooner this is realised the better the chance we have to lead ourselves out of the present impasse.


2. The Palestinian National Initiative
June 17, 2002

Today a group of Palestinian leaders announced the launching of the Palestinian National Initiative at a press conference in Ramallah, led by Dr. Haidar Abdul Shafi, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi and Mr. Ibrahim Dakkak. The main objective of the Initiative is the realization of of Palestinian national rights and of a durable, just peace. Both of these objectives can be best achieved at this juncture through the establishment of a national emergency leadership, the immediate implementation of democratic elections at all levels of the political system, and reform of political, administrative, and other institutional structures in order to meet the needs of the Palestinian people.

Summary of the Statement Distributed at the Press Conference

The Palestinian people have sacrificed a great deal in their struggle to achieve freedom, justice and lasting peace. They will not accept that these sacrifices should have been in vain; on the contrary, they assert that these sacrifices need to be translated into concrete achievements and outcomes. It is imperative that the Palestinians’ resilience and their determination to be freed from 35 years of military occupation be activated and channeled to achieve the collective goals of ending the Israeli occupation of the West bank and Gaza and the dismantling of all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. Only then can a just peace be achieved--through the establishment of a sovereign, independent, viable, and democratic Palestinian state on all of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital.

This Initiative calls for the implementation of relevant United Nations resolutions requiring the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the West Bank and Gaza and safeguarding the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. At this most critical time, we call upon all concerned parties to prevent the Israeli government from annexing the Palestinian territories and from consolidating its discriminatory policy of cantonization and the creation of an apartheid system in the West Bank and Gaza.

The absence of true internal reform and of a unified strategy has been a weakness that Israel has tried to exploit. This has been taken advantage of in order to undermine the Palestinian cause and to divide the Palestinians internally. It is necessary to address this situation through genuine reform and through the creation of internal political structures that can best serve the cause of freedom, independence, and socioeconomic development. Basic measures, rather than superficial changes, must be implemented in order to regain the confidence of the Palestinian people here and in the diaspora.

This Initiative is a response to popular demands from men and women calling for increased participation by Palestinian citizens in the process of nation building and for the opportunity to participate in the just struggle for the realization of an independent, viable, democratic and prosperous state which guarantees security, justice, equality before the law, and a dignified existence for its citizens.

The Initiative is based on a belief in the capacities of our people and in the strength of our country’s human resources. Our challenge is to create the appropriate conditions that will allow for the full and constructive utilization of this collective energy and for the participation of the people in the creation of our national structures. We affirm that internal reform and the development of state structures concern the Palestinian people and their institutions and should be carried out with the active participation of the people, and not only as a response to external pressures.

This Initiative is intended to be part of a dynamic process and should not be conceived of as a predetermined recipe for action. It should be viewed as a catalyst for the purpose of mobilizing the intellectual, cultural, social and political energies of our people. We are and will remain open to the enrichment of this Initiative by the people, so that it might become the means for the development of a wide-scale national democratic movement.

The Immediate Objectives of the Initiative

Creating a national emergency leadership with a unified strategy based on
the principle of full participation in decision-making
Working for free, democratic elections for all institutions and political
Posts including the Presidency, the Palestinian Legislative Council (Parliament), and local councils with an international presence to ensure free elections.
Restructuring government institutions with clear mandates, bylaws, and responsibilities in order to guarantee transparency, accountability, and lack of corruption
Implementing the Basic Law and all other laws passed by the PLC
Working towards the separation of powers with independent judicial and legislative structures, and reform of the court system
Serving the needs of the poor and underprivileged by developing poverty alleviation programs through employment and social welfare schemes
Enhancing the role of local councils, and allocation of adequate budgets to facilitate the execution of their mandates
Consolidating and enhancing the role of civil society institutions and guaranteeing their independence
Centralizing the national budget, instituting a transparent system of expenditures, and guaranteeing oversight by the legislature
Eliminating factors that can lead to corruption, the misuse of funds, and the abuse of power and authority
Restructuring security forces to eliminate the duplication of structures and to ensure their abstention from interference in economic, administrative and political decisions. The security services will be subject to the rule of law and the decisions of the independent judiciary, and their main task will be the protection of the security of Palestinians
Developing and improving basic services in health, education, and social welfare
Promoting a sustainable and high-quality system of higher education to meet the developmental needs of Palestinian society
Continuing the struggle for the release of all Palestinian prisoners and detainees
Activating and engaging diaspora Palestinians in the nation building effort
Developing and expanding the international solidarity movement with the Palestinian people.


3. Urgent Appeal to Stop Suicide Bombings

We the undersigned feel that it is our national responsibility to issue this appeal in light of the dangerous situation engulfing the Palestinian people. We call upon the parties behind military operations targeting civilians in Israel to reconsider their policies and stop driving our young men to carry out these operations. Suicide bombings deepen the hatred and widen the gap between the Palestinian and Israeli people. Also, they destroy the possibilities of peaceful co-existence between them in two neighboring states.

We see that these bombings do not contribute towards achieving our national project that calls for freedom and independence. On the contrary, they strengthen the enemies of peace on the
Israeli side and give Israel’s aggressive government under Sharon the excuse to continue its harsh war against our people. This war targets our children, elderly, villages, cities, and our national hopes and achievements.

Military action is viewed are not assessed as positive or negative exclusively out of the general context and situation. They assessed based on whether they fulfill political ends. Therefore, there is a need to re-evaluate these acts considering that pushing the area towards an existential war between the two people living on the holy land will lead to destruction for the whole region. We do not find any logical, humane, or political justification for this end result.

Signatories:

Below are some of the Palestinian intellectuals and public figures who have signed the petition:

Dr. Sari Nuseiba, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, Saleh Ra’fat, Salah Zuheika, Mamdouh Nofal, Hanna Sineora, Dr. Mohammad Ishtiya, Ibrahim Kandalaft, Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj, Dr. Moussa El-Budeiri Huda El-Imam, Dr. Marwan Abu El-Zuluf, Saman Khoury, Dr. Said Zidani, Dr. Omayya Khammash, Dr. Jad Is’haq, Dr. Manuel Hassasian, Salah Abdel Shafi, Shaher Sa’ad, Dr. Mohammad Dajani, Imad Awad, Fadel Tahboub, Majed Kaswani, Taysir El-Zibri, Dr. Ahmad Majdalani, Dr. Taleb Awad, Khader Sh’kirat, Zahi Khouri, Majed Abu Qubo’, Ehab Boulous , Dr. Isam Nassar, Dr. Salim Tamari, Dr. Suad El-Ameri, Dr. Adam Abu Sh’rar, Dr. Riema Hamami, Subhi El-Z’beidi, Dr. Munther El-Dajani, Osama Daher, Simone Cupa, Jeana Abu El-Zuluf, Yousef Daher, Jamal Zaqout, Dr. Saleh Abdel Jawwad, Dr. Nathmi El-Ju’ba, Dr. Jamil Hilal, Dr. Arafat El-Hadmi, Dr. Leila Faydi, Dr. Zakaria El-Qaq, Amna Badran, Dr. Ali Q’leibo, Marwan Tarazi, Dr. Raja’I El-Dajani, Issa Q’seisiya, Hani El-Masri, Dr. Jumana Odeh, Lucy Nuseiba, Abdel Qader El-Husseini, Zahra El-Khaldi