A protest too long delayed
By Edward Said (Al-Ahram Weekly, 9-15 December 1999)
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.
