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A
Roadmap to Where?
by
Edward Said
June
16, 2003
Early
in May, while Colin Powell was on his visit to Israel and the Occupied
Territories, he met with Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Prime Minister, and
separately with a small group of civil society activists, including Hanan
Ashrawi and Mostapha Barghuti. According to Barghuti, Powell expressed surprise
and mild consternation at the computerized maps of the settlements, the
eight-meter-high fence, and the dozens of Israeli Army checkpoints that have
made life so difficult and the future so bleak for Palestinians. Powell's view
of Palestinian reality is, to say the least, defective, despite his august
position, but he did ask for materials to take away with him and, more
important, he reassured the Palestinians that the same effort put in by Bush on
Iraq was now going into implementing the road map. Much the same point was made
in the last days of May by Bush himself in the course of interviews he gave to
the Arab media, although as usual, he stressed generalities rather than
anything specific. He met with the Palestinian and Israeli leaders in Jordan
and, earlier, with the major Arab rulers, excluding Syria's Bashir al-Asaad, of
course. All this is part of what now looks like a major American push forward.
That Ariel Sharon has accepted the road map (with enough reservations to
undercut his acceptance) seems to augur well for a viable Palestinian state.
Bush's
vision (the word strikes a weird dreamy note in what is meant to be a
hard-headed, definitive and three-phased peace plan) is supposed to be achieved
by a restructured Authority, the elimination of all violence and incitement
against Israelis, and the installation of a government that meets the requirements
of Israel and the so-called Quartet (the US, UN, EU and Russia) that authored
the plan. Israel for its part undertakes to improve the humanitarian situation,
easing restrictions and lifting curfews, though where and when are not
specified. By June 2003, Phase One is also supposed to see the dismantling of
the last 60 hilltop settlements (so called "illegal outpost settlements
established since March 2001) though nothing is said about removing the others,
which account for the 200,000 settlers on the West Bank and Gaza, to say
nothing of the 200,000 more in annexed East Jerusalem. Phase Two, described as
a transition to run from June to December 2003, is to be focused, rather oddly,
on the "option of creating an independent Palestinian state with provisional
borders and attributes of sovereignty" -- none are specified--culminating
in an international conference to approve and then "create" a
Palestinian state, once again with "provisional borders." Phase Three
is to end the conflict completely, also by way of an international conference
whose job it will be to settle the thorniest issues of all: refugees,
settlements, Jerusalem, borders. Israel's role in all this is to cooperate; the
real onus is placed on the Palestinians, who must keep coming up with the goods
in rapid succession, while the military occupation remains more or less in
place, though eased in the main areas invaded during the spring of 2002. No
monitoring element is envisioned, and the misleading symmetry of the plan's
structure leaves Israel very much in charge of what--if anything--will happen
next. As for Palestinian human rights, at present not so much ignored as
suppressed, no specific rectification is written into the plan: apparently it
is up to Israel whether to continue as before or not.
For
once, say all the usual commentators, Bush is offering real hope for a Middle
East settlement. Calculated leaks from the White House have suggested a list of
possible sanctions against Israel if Sharon gets too intransigent, but this was
quickly denied and then disappeared. An emerging media consensus presents the
document's contents--many of them from earlier peace plans--as the result of
Bush's new-found confidence after his triumph in Iraq. As with most discussions
of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, manipulated clichés and far-fetched
suppositions, rather than the realities of power and lived history, shape the
flow of discourse. Skeptics and critics are brushed aside as anti-American,
while a sizeable portion of the organized Jewish leadership has denounced the
road map as requiring far too many Israeli concessions. But, the establishment
press keeps reminding us that Sharon has spoken of an "occupation,"
which he never conceded until now, and has actually announced his intention to end
Israeli rule over 3.5 million Palestinians. But is he even aware of what he
proposes to end? The Ha'aretz commentator Gideon Levy wrote on June 1 that,
like most Israelis, Sharon knows nothing "about life under curfew in
communities that have been under siege for years. What does he know about the
humiliation of checkpoints, or about people being forced to travel on gravel
and mud roads, at risk to their lives, in order to get a woman in labor to a
hospital? About life on the brink of starvation? About a demolished home? About
children who see their parents beaten and humiliated in the middle of the
night?"
Another
chilling omission from the road map is the gigantic "separation wall"
now being built in the West Bank by Israel: 347 kilometers of concrete running
north to south, of which 120 have already been erected. It is twenty-five feet
high and ten feet thick; its cost is put at 1.6 million dollars per kilometer.
The wall doesn't simply divide Israel from a putative Palestinian state on the
basis of the 1967 lines borders: it actually takes in new tracks of Palestinian
land, sometimes five or six kilometers at a stretch. It is surrounded by
trenches, electric wire, and moats; there are watchtowers at regular intervals.
Almost a decade after the end of South African apartheid, this ghastly racist
wall is going up with scarcely a peep from the majority of Israelis or their
American allies who, whether they like it or not, are going to pay most of its
cost. The 40,000 Palestinian inhabitants of the town of Qalqilya in their homes
are on one side of the wall, the land they farm and actually live off of is on
the other. It is estimated that when the wall is finished -- presumably as the
US, Israel and the Palestinians argue about procedure for months on end --
almost 300,000 Palestinians will be separated from their land. The road map is
silent about all this, as it is about Sharon's recent approval of a wall on the
eastern side of the West Bank, which will, if built, reduce the amount of
Palestinian territory available for Bush's dream state to roughly 40% of the
area. This is what Sharon has had in mind all along.
An
unstated premise underlies Israel's heavily modified acceptance of the plan and
the US's evident commitment to it: the relative success of Palestinian resistance.
This is true whether or not one deplores some of its methods, its exorbitant
cost, and the heavy toll it has taken on yet another generation of Palestinians
who have not wholly given up in the face of the overwhelmingly superiority of
Israeli-US power. All sorts of reasons have been given for the emergence of the
road map: that 56% Israelis back it, that Sharon has finally bowed to
international reality, that Bush needs an Arab-Israeli cover for his military
adventures elsewhere, that the Palestinians have finally come to their senses
and brought forth Abu Mazen (Abbas's much more familiar nom de guerre, as it
were), and so on. Some of this is true, but I still contend that were it not
for the fact of the Palestinian stubborn refusal to accept that they are
"a defeated people," as the Israeli Chief of Staff recently described
them, there would be no peace plan. Yet, anyone who believes that the road map
actually offers anything resembling a settlement or that it tackles the basic
issues is wrong. Like so much of the prevailing peace discourse, it places the
need for restraint and renunciation and sacrifice squarely on Palestinian
shoulders, thus denying the density and sheer gravity of Palestinian history.
To read through the road map is to confront an unsituated document, oblivious
of its time and place.
The
road map, in other words, is not about a plan for peace so much as a plan for
pacification: it is about putting an end to Palestine as a problem. Hence the
repetition of the term "performance" in the document's wooden prose,
- in other words, how the Palestinians are expected to behave, almost in the
social sense of the word. No violence, no protest, more democracy, better
leaders and institutions, all based on the notion that the underlying problem
has been the ferocity of Palestinian resistance, rather than the occupation
that has given rise to it. Nothing comparable is expected of Israel except that
the small settlements I spoke of earlier, known as " illegal
outposts" (an entirely new classification which suggests that some Israeli
implantations on Palestinian land are legal) must be given up and, yes, the
major settlements "frozen" but certainly not removed or dismantled.
Not a word is said about what since 1948, and then again since 1967, Palestinians
have endured at the hands of Israel and the US. Nothing about the
de-development of the Palestinian economy as described by the American
researcher Sara Roy in a forthcoming book . House demolitions, the uprooting of
trees, the 5000 prisoners or more, the policy of targeted assassinations, the
closures since 1993, the wholesale ruin of the infrastructure, the incredible
number of deaths and maimings--all that and more, passes without a word.
The
truculent aggression and stiff-necked unilateralism of the American and Israeli
teams are already well-known. The Palestinian team inspires scarcely any
confidence, made up as it is of recycled and aging Arafat cohorts. Indeed, the
road map seems to have given Yasir Arafat another lease on life, for all the
studied efforts by Powell and his assistants to avoid visiting him. Despite the
stupid Israeli policy of trying to humble him by shutting him up in a badly
bombed compound, he is still in control of things. He remains Palestine's
elected president, he has the Palestinian purse strings in his hands (the purse
is far from bulging), and as for his status, none of the present
"reform" team (who with two or three significant new additions are
re-shuffled members of the old team) can match the old man for charisma and
power.
Take
Abu Mazen for a start. I first met him in March 1977 at my first National
Council meeting in Cairo. He gave by far the longest speech, in the didactic
manner which must have first perfected as a secondary school teacher in Qatar,
and explained to the assembled Palestinian parliamentarians the differences
between Zionism and Zionist dissidence. It was a noteworthy intervention, since
most Palestinians had no real notion in those days that Israel was made up not
only of fundamentalist Zionists who were anathema to every Arab, but of various
kinds of peaceniks and activists as well. In retrospect, Abu Mazen's speech
launched the PLO's campaign of meetings, most of them secret, between
Palestinians and Israelis who had long dialogues in Europe about peace and some
considerable effect in their respective societies on shaping the constituencies
that made Oslo possible.
Nevertheless,
no one doubted that Arafat had authorized Abu Mazen's speech and the subsequent
campaign, which cost brave men like Issam Sartawi and Said Hammami their lives.
And while the Palestinian participants emerged from the center of Palestinian
politics (i.e. Fateh), the Israelis were a small marginalized group of reviled
peace supporters whose courage was commendable for that very reason. During the
PLO's Beirut years between 1971 and 1982, Abu Mazen was stationed in Damascus,
but joined the exiled Arafat and his staff in Tunis for the next decade or so.
I saw him there several times and was struck by his well-organized office, his
quiet bureaucratic manner, and his evident interest in Europe and the United
States as arenas where Palestinians could do useful work promoting peace with
Israelis. After the Madrid conference in 1991, he was said to have brought
together PLO employees and independent intellectuals in Europe and turned them
into teams to prepare negotiating files on subjects such as water, refugees,
demography, and boundaries in advance of what were to become the secret Oslo
meetings of 1992 and 1993, although to the best of my knowledge, none of the
files was used, none of the Palestinian experts was directly involved in the
talks, and none of the results of this research influenced the final documents
that emerged.
In
Oslo, the Israelis fielded an array of experts supported by maps, documents,
statistics and at least 17 prior drafts of what the Palestinians would end up
signing, while the Palestinians unfortunately restricted their negotiators to
three completely different PLO men, not one of whom knew English or had a
background in international (or any other kind of) negotiation. Arafat's idea
seems to have been that he was fielding a team mainly to keep himself in the
process, especially after his exit from Beirut and his disastrous decision to
side with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. If he had other objectives in mind,
then he didn't prepare for them effectively, as has always been his style. In
Abu Mazen's memoir and in other anecdotal accounts of the Oslo discussions,
Arafat's subordinate is credited as the "architect" of the accords,
though he never left Tunis; Abu Mazen goes so far as to say that it took him a
year after the Washington ceremonies (where he appeared alongside Arafat,
Rabin, Peres, and Clinton) to convince Arafat that he hadn't gotten a state
from Oslo! Yet, most accounts of the peace talks stress the fact that Arafat
was pulling all the strings just the same. No wonder then that the Oslo
negotiations made the over-all situation of the Palestinians a good deal worse.
The American team led by Dennis Ross, a former Israeli-lobby employee--a job to
which he has now returned--routinely supported the Israeli position which, after
a full decade of negotiation, consisted in handing back 18% of the Occupied
Territories to the Palestinians on highly unfavorable terms, with the IDF left
in charge of security, borders, and water. Naturally enough, the number of
settlements more than doubled.
Since
the PLO's return to the Occupied Territories in 1994, Abu Mazen has remained a
second-rank figure, known universally for his "flexibility" with
Israel, his subservience to Arafat, and his total lack of any organized
political base, although he is one of Fateh's original founders and a
long-standing member and secretary general of its Central Committee. So far as
I know, he has never been elected to anything, and certainly not to the
Palestinian Legislative Council. The PLO and the Palestine Authority under
Arafat are anything but transparent. Little is known about the way decisions
have been made, or how money gets spent, where it is, and who besides Arafat
has any say in the matter. Everyone agrees, however, that Arafat, a fiendish
micro-manager and control freak, remains the central figure in every
significant way. That is why Abu Mazen's elevation to the status of reforming
Prime Minister, which so pleases the Americans and Israelis, is thought of by
most Palestinians as, well, a kind of joke, the old man's way of holding on to
power by inventing a new gimmick so to speak. Abu Mazen is thought of generally
as colorless, moderately corrupt, and without any clear ideas of his own,
except that he wants to please the white man.
Like
Arafat, Abu Mazen has never lived anywhere except the Gulf, Syria and Lebanon,
Tunisia, and now occupied Palestine; he knows no languages other than Arabic,
and isn't much of an orator or public presence. By contrast, Mohammed Dahlan,
the new security chief from Gaza--the other much-heralded figure in whom the
Israelis and Americans place great hope--is younger, cleverer, and quite
ruthless. During the 8 years that he ran one of Arafat's 14 or 15 security
organizations, Gaza was known as Dahlanistan. He resigned last year, only to be
re-recruited for the job of "unified security chief" by the
Europeans, the Americans and the Israelis, even though of course he too has
always been one of Arafat's men. Now he is expected to crack down on Hamas and
Islamic Jihad; one of the reiterated Israeli demands behind which lies the hope
that there will be something resembling a Palestinian civil war, a gleam in the
eyes of the Israeli military.
In
any event, it seems clear to me that, no matter how assiduously and flexibly
Abu Mazen "performs," he is going to be limited by three factors. One
of course is Arafat himself, who still controls Fateh, which, in theory, is
also Abu Mazen's power base. Another is Sharon (who will presumably have the US
behind him all the way). In a list of 14 "remarks" about the road map
published in Ha'aretz on May 27, Sharon signaled the very narrow limits on
anything that might be construed as flexibility on Israel's part. The third is
Bush and his entourage; to judge by their handling of postwar Afghanistan and
Iraq, they have neither the stomach nor the competence for the nation-building
that surely will be required. Already Bush's right-wing Christian base in the
South has remonstrated noisily against putting pressure on Israel, and already
the high-powered American pro-Israel lobby, with its docile adjunct, the
Israeli-occupied US Congress, have swung into action against any hint of
coercion against Israel, even though it will be crucial now that a final phase
has begun.
It
may seem quixotic for me to say, even if the immediate prospects are grim from
a Palestinian perspective, they are not all dark. I return to the stubbornness
I mentioned above, and the fact that Palestinian society -- devastated, nearly
ruined, desolate in so many ways--is, like Hardy's thrush in its
blast-beruffled plume, still capable of flinging its soul upon the growing
gloom. No other Arab society is as rambunctious and healthily unruly, and none
is fuller of civic and social initiatives and functioning institutions
(including a miraculously vital musical conservatory). Even though they are
mostly unorganized and in some cases lead miserable lives of exile and
statelessness, diaspora Palestinians are still energetically engaged by the
problems of their collective destiny, and everyone that I know is always trying
somehow to advance the cause. Only a miniscule fraction of this energy has ever
found its way into the Palestinian Authority, which except for the highly
ambivalent figure of Arafat has remained strangely marginal to the common fate.
According to recent polls, Fateh and Hamas between them have the support of
roughly 45% of the Palestinian electorate, with the remaining 55% evolving
quite different, much more hopeful-looking political formations.
One
in particular has struck me as significant (and I have attached myself to it)
inasmuch as it now provides the only genuine grassroots formation that steers
clear both of the religious parties and their fundamentally sectarian politics,
and of the traditional nationalism offered up by Arafat's old (rather than
young) Fateh activists. It's been called the National Political Initiative
(NPI) and its main figure is Mostapha Barghuti, a Moscow-trained physician,
whose main work has been as director of the impressive Village Medical Relief
Committee, which has brought health care to more than 100,000 rural
Palestinians. A former Communist Party stalwart, Barghuti is a quiet-spoken
organizer and leader who has overcome the hundreds of physical obstacles
impeding Palestinian movement or travel abroad to rally nearly every
independent individual and organization of note behind a political program that
promises social reform as well as liberation across doctrinal lines. Singularly
free of conventional rhetoric, Barghuti has worked with Israelis, Europeans,
Americans, Africans, Asians, Arabs to build an enviably well-run solidarity
movement that practices the pluralism and co-existence it preaches. NPI does
not throw up its hands at the directionless militarization of the intifada. It
offers training programs for the unemployed and social services for the
destitute on the grounds that this answers to present circumstances and Israeli
pressure. Above all, NPI which is about to become a recognized political party,
seeks to mobilize Palestinian society at home and in exile for free
elections--authentic elections which will represent Palestinian, rather than
Israeli or US, interests. This sense of authenticity is what seems so lacking
in the path cut out for Abu Mazen.
The
vision here isn't a manufactured provisional state on 40% of the land, with the
refugees abandoned and Jerusalem kept by Israel, but a sovereign territory
liberated from military occupation by mass action involving Arabs and Jews
wherever possible. Because NPI is an authentic Palestinian movement, reform and
democracy have become part of its everyday practice. Many hundreds of
Palestine's most notable activists and independents have already signed up, and
organizational meetings have already been held, with many more planned abroad
and in Palestine, despite the terrible difficulties of getting around Israel's
restrictions on freedom of movement. It is some solace to think that, while
formal negotiations and discussions go on, a host of informal, un-coopted
alternatives exist, of which NPI and a growing international solidarity campaign
are now the main components.
Edward Said
is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University, and is a leading Palestinian intellectual and activist. Among his
books are The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (Pantheon, 2000),
Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace
Process (Vintage, 1996), and Out of Place: A Memoir (Knopf, 1999).