The new Arab order that emerged
after the Gulf War institutionalised the traffic between the US and the
Arabs: the Arabs gave, and the US gave more and more to Israel.
Even by the terribly low standards of his other speeches, George W
Bush's 24 June speech to the world about the Middle East was a
startling example of how an execrable combination of muddled
thought, words with no actual meaning in the real world of living,
breathing human beings, preachy and racist injunctions against the
Palestinians, an incredible blindness, a delusional blindness, to
the realities of an ongoing Israeli invasion and conquest against
all the laws of war and peace, all wrapped in the smug accents of a
moralistic, stiff-necked and ignorant judge who has arrogated to
himself divine privileges, now sits astride US foreign policy. And
this, it is important to remember, from a man who virtually stole an
election he did not win, and whose record as governor of Texas
includes the worst pollution, scandalous corruption, the highest
rates of imprisonment and capital punishment in the world. So this
dubiously endowed man of few gifts except the blind pursuit of money
and power has the capability to condemn Palestinians not just to the
tender mercies of war criminal Sharon but to the dire consequences
of his own empty condemnations. Flanked by three of the most venal
politicians in the world (Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice), he pronounced
his speech with the halting accents of a mediocre elocution student
and thereby allowed Sharon to kill or injure many more Palestinians
in a US endorsed illegal military occupation.
It
wasn't only that Bush's speech lacked any historical awareness of
what he was proposing, but that its capacity for extended harm was
so great. It was as if Sharon had written the speech, amalgamating
the disproportionate American obsession with terrorism to Sharon's
determination to eliminate Palestinian national life under the
rubric of terrorism and Jewish supremacy on "the land of Israel".
For the rest, Bush's perfunctory concessions to a "provisional"
Palestinian state (whatever that may be, perhaps analogous to a
provisional pregnancy?) and his casual remarks about alleviating the
difficulties of Palestinian life brought nothing to this new
pronouncement of his that warranted the widespread -- I would go so
far as to say comically -- positive reaction elicited from the Arab
leadership, Yasser Arafat leading the pack as far as enthusiasm is
concerned.
Over 50 years of Arab and Palestinian dealings with the US have
ended in the rubbish bin, so that Bush and his advisers could
convince themselves and much of the electorate that they had a
god-given mission to exterminate terrorism, which means essentially
all the enemies of Israel. A quick survey of those 50 years shows
dramatically that neither a defiant Arab attitude nor a submissive
one have made any changes in US perceptions of its interest in the
Middle East, which remain the quick and cheap supply of oil and the
protection of Israel as the two main aspects of its regional
dominance.
From Abdel-Nasser to Bashar, Abdullah and Mubarak, Arab policy,
however, has undergone a 180 degree turn, with more or less the same
results. First there was a defiant Arab alignment in the post-
independence years inspired by the anti-imperialist, anti-Cold War
philosophy of Bandung and Nasserism. That ended catastrophically in
1967.
Thereafter, led by Egypt under Sadat, the shift took place that
brought cooperation between the US and the Arabs under the totally
delusional rubric that the US controls 99 per cent of the cards.
What remained of inter-Arab cooperation slowly withered away from
its high point in the 1973 War and the oil embargo, to an Arab cold
war pitting various states against each other. Sometimes, as with
Kuwait and Lebanon, small weak states became the battleground, but
to all intents and purposes the official mind-set of the Arab state
system came to think exclusively in terms of the United States as
the pivotal focus for Arab policy. With the first Gulf War (there is
soon to be a second) and the end of the Cold War, America remained
the only superpower, which instead of prompting a radical
re-appraisal of Arab policy drove the various states into a deeper
individual, or rather bilateral, embrace of the US whose reaction in
effect was to take them for granted. Arab summits became less
occasions for putting forth credible positions than for derisory
contempt. It was soon realised by US policy-makers that Arab leaders
barely represented their own countries, much less the whole Arab
world; and, in addition, one didn't have to be a genius to remark
that various bilateral agreements between Arab leaders and the US
were more important to their regimes' security than to the United
States. This is not even to mention the petty jealousies and
animosities that virtually emasculated the Arab people as a power to
be reckoned with in the modern world. No wonder then that today's
Palestinian suffering the horrors of Israeli occupation is just as
likely to blame "the Arabs" as he is the Israelis.
By
the early 1980s all parts of the Arab world were ready to make peace
with Israel as a way of ensuring US good faith towards them -- take,
for example, the Fez Plan of 1982 which stipulated peace with Israel
in return for withdrawal from all the occupied territory. The March
2002 Arab summit replayed the same scene for the second time, this
time as farce it should be added, and with equally negligible
effect. And it is precisely from that time two decades ago that US
policy on Palestine completely changed its bases, for the worse. As
former CIA senior analyst Kathleen Christison points out in an
excellent study published in the US bi-weekly Counterpunch (May
16-31, 2002), the old land-for peace formula was given up by the
Reagan administration, then more enthusiastically by Clinton's,
ironically just at the time that Arab policy generally and
Palestinian policy in particular had concentrated their energies on
placating the US on as many fronts as possible. By November 1988,
the PLO had officially abandoned "liberation" and at the Algiers
meeting of the PNC (which I attended as a member) voted for
partition and co-existence for two states; in December of that year
Yasser Arafat publicly renounced terrorism and a PLO-US dialogue was
begun in Tunis.
The new Arab order that emerged after the Gulf War institutionalised
the one-way traffic between the US and the Arabs: the Arabs gave,
and the US gave more and more to Israel. The Madrid Conference of
1991 was based on the premise -- for the Palestinians -- that the US
would recognise them and persuade Israel to do the same. I recall
vividly that during the summer of 1991, along with a group of senior
PLO figures and independents, we were asked by Arafat to formulate a
series of assurances that we required from the US in order to enter
the about-to- be-convened Madrid conference which led (although none
of us knew it) to the Oslo process of 1993. In effect Arafat vetoed
all our suggestions for US guarantees. He only wanted assurances
that he would remain the main negotiator for the Palestinians;
nothing else seemed to matter to him, even though a good West
Bank-Gaza delegation headed by Haidar Abdel-Shafi was proceeding
with its work in Washington facing a tough Israeli team that had
been instructed by Shamir to concede nothing and to extend the talk
for 10 years if necessary. Arafat's idea was to undercut every one
of his own people by offering more concessions, which essentially
meant that he made no prior demands on either Israel or the US, just
so he could remain in power.
That, and the prevailing post-1967 environment, solidified the
Palestinian-US dynamic into the by- now permanent distortions of the
Oslo and post-Oslo period. To the best of my knowledge, the US never
called on the Palestinian Authority (nor any other Arab regime) to
establish democratic procedures. Quite the contrary, Clinton and
Gore both publicly approved the Palestinian State Security courts
while on visits to Gaza and Jericho respectively and little
emphasis, if any, was placed on ending corruption, monopolies and
the like. I myself had been writing about the problems of Arafat's
rule since the middle 90s, with either indifference or open scorn as
reactions to what I had to say (most of which proved to be correct).
I was accused of a utopian lack of pragmatism and realism. It was
clear that for the Israelis and the Americans, as well as the other
Arabs, there was a concert of interests that made the Authority what
it was, and which kept it in place as either an Israeli police force
or, later, the focus of everything that Israelis loved to hate. No
serious resistance to occupation was developed under Arafat, and he
continued to allow bands of militants, other PLO factions, and
security forces to run rampant across the civil landscape. A great
deal of illicit money was made, as the general population lost over
50 per cent of its pre-Oslo livelihood.
The Intifada changed everything, as did Barak's tenure which
prepared the way for Sharon's re-entry on to the scene. And still
Arab policy was to placate the US. A small sign of this is the
change in Arab discourse in the United States. Abdullah of Jordan
stopped criticising Israel completely on American TV, referring
always to the need for "the two sides" to stop "the violence".
Similar language was heard from various other Arab spokesmen from
major countries, indicating that Palestine had become a nuisance to
be contained rather than an injustice to be righted.
The most significant thing of all is that Israeli propaganda,
American contempt for the Arabs, and Arab (as well as Palestinian)
incapacity to formulate and represent the interests of their own
people has led to a vast dehumanisation of the Palestinians, whose
enormous suffering on a daily, indeed hourly and minute by minute
basis has no status at all. It is as if Palestinians have no
existence except when someone performs a terrorist act, and then the
entire world media apparatus leaps up and smothers their actual
existence as breathing and sentient people with a real history and a
real society by holding over them an enormous blanket saying
terrorist. I know of no such systematic dehumanisation in modern
history that even approaches this, despite the occasional dissenting
voice here and there.
What concerns me finally is Arab and Palestinian cooperation
(collaboration is the better word) in the dehumanisation. Our tiny
number of representatives in the media at best speaks competently
and dispassionately about the merits of the Bush speech or the
Mitchell plan but in no way do any of them that I have seen
represent the sufferings of their people, or their history, or
actuality. I have spoken often about the need for a mass campaign
against the occupation in the US, but have finally come to the
conclusion that for Palestinians under this dreadful, Kafkaesque
Israeli occupation, the chances of doing that are small. Where I
think we have a hope is in trying (as I suggested in my last article
on Palestinian elections) to establish a constituent assembly at the
grass roots level. We have so long been in the position of being
passive objects of Israeli and Arab policy that we do not adequately
appreciate how important, and indeed how urgent, it is for
Palestinians now to take an independent foundational step of their
own, to try to establish a new self-making process that creates
legitimacy and the possibility of a better polity for ourselves than
now exists. All the cabinet shuffles and projected elections that
have been announced so far are ridiculous games played with the
fragments and ruins of Oslo. For Arafat and his assembly to start
planning democracy is like trying to put together the pieces of a
shattered glass.
Fortunately, however, the new Palestinian National Initiative
announced two weeks ago by its authors Ibrahim Dakkak, Mustafa
Barghouti, and Haidar Abdel- Shafi answers exactly to this need,
which springs from the failure both of the PLO and groups like Hamas
to provide a way forward that doesn't depend (ludicrously in my
opinion) on American and Israeli goodwill. The Initiative provides
for a vision of peace with justice, co-existence and, extremely
important, secular social democracy for our people that is unique in
Palestinian history. Only a group of independent people well
grounded in civil society, untainted by collaboration or corruption,
can possibly furnish the outlines of the new legitimacy we need. We
need a real constitution, not a basic law toyed with by Arafat; we
need truly representative democracy that only Palestinians can
provide for themselves through a founding assembly. This is the only
positive step that can reverse the process of dehumanisation that
has infected so many sectors of the Arab world. Otherwise we shall
sink in our suffering and continue to endure the awful tribulations
of Israeli collective punishment, which can only be stopped by a
collective political independence of which we are still very
capable. Colin Powell's good will and fabled "moderation" will never
do it for us. Never.
