MERIP Primer on the UPRISING IN PALESTINE

Introduction

Not so long ago, US President Bill Clinton hosted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to discuss final arrangements for peace in Palestine and Israel. In late October 2000, peace seems very far away. Since September 28, over 180 people–all but 12 of them Palestinians–have died, and thousands more Palestinians have been wounded, as a popular uprising rages against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. What is the history of the conflict over Palestine? Why did Ariel Sharon’s visit to a mosque in Jerusalem provoke Palestinian public opinion? Is Israel right to blame Arafat for the numerous Palestinian deaths and injuries? Can US mediation help to stop the violence? Does the US media do a good job educating Americans about what’s happening in Israel and Palestine?

The Conflict over Palestine

At the start of the 20^th century, the Ottoman Empire ruled much of the Arab world, including the lands that now constitute Israel and the Occupied Territories. With the Allied victory in World War I, the area came under the control of the British who made contradictory promises to Arab and Zionist leaders about how–and by whom–the Mandate of Palestine was to be governed. At the time, 90 percent of the population was Arab; the Jewish community included long-time residents and new immigrants fleeing persecution in Russia and, later, other parts of Europe. A three-year uprising in the late 1930s against British rule and increased Jewish immigration resulted in a British proposal to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. UN General Assembly Resolution 181 reaffirmed partition in 1947.

The war that followed led to the establishment of the State of Israel; Israel, Egypt, and Jordan each claimed sovereignty over parts of the territory designated for a Palestinian state, displacing some 750,000 Palestinians. Less than 20 years later, in the June 1967 War, Israel gained control of the rest of the former Mandate of Palestine (the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1980), the Egyptian Sinai (since returned to Egypt), and the Syrian Golan Heights. UN Security Council Resolution 242, never implemented, affirmed "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and called upon Israel to withdraw "from territories occupied in the recent conflict." The 1970s and 1980s saw Arab-Israeli wars in 1973 and 1982, the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada in December 1987, and Yasser Arafat’s condemnation of terrorism and recognition of the state of Israel in December 1988.

The Madrid peace conference followed the Gulf war in October 1991. A year later, secret Israeli-Palestinian talks began in Oslo, Norway, culminating in the September 1993 Declaration of Principles (DoP) on interim Palestinian self-government, signed by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The DoP set out a process for transforming the nature of the Israeli occupation but left numerous issues unresolved, including the status of Jerusalem, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the disposition of Israeli settlements (whose expansion continues until today) and final borders between Israel and a Palestinian state.

Under the DoP, Israel relinquished day-to-day authority over parts of the Gaza Strip and West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, headed by Arafat who returned to Gaza in 1994. However, ultimate power remained with Israel, which exercised its control by frequently sealing off the Palestinian-governed areas from the rest of the Occupied Territories and from Israel. Subsequent agreements in 1995, 1998 and 1999 failed to resolve these issues. With Palestinian-Israeli negotiations stalled, US President Bill Clinton called a summit at Camp David in July 2000. After two weeks of intensive negotiation, the talks ended without a deal.

Who Is Ariel Sharon?

A retired army general, Ariel Sharon, 72, has been a major figure in Israeli politics for decades. In 1971, he led a systematic campaign to quell opposition in Gaza through massive repression, expulsions, and arrests. He was first elected to the Knesset in 1977 and, as defense minister in 1982, he led the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. An Israeli tribunal found Sharon indirectly responsible for the massacre (by Lebanese militias under Israeli control) of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians living in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. In the aftermath, he was removed as defense minister but retained a role in the Cabinet as "minister without portfolio."

In the early 1990s, Sharon served as housing minister and promoted a massive construction drive to increase Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 1998, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu named Sharon foreign minister. As current head of the Likud party, Sharon has vociferously criticized Prime Minister Ehud Barak for negotiating with the Palestinians. He maintains a residence in Jerusalem’s Old City (draped in an Israeli flag) and his provocative visit to al-Haram al-Sharif on Sept. 28, and the harsh Israeli response to the protests that followed, helped ignite the current uprising.

Who Controls the Palestinian Street?

Since 1994, portions of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been administered by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA is not a fully sovereign state like Israel or the United States, but it does provide municipal services and attempts to maintain order in the areas under its control. The PA’s top ranks, including Arafat, mostly belong to Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But Fatah is independent of the PA, and Arafat does not control the entire organization. The current uprising in the Occupied Territories has pushed militant local leaders of Fatah to the forefront, and Fatah units have coordinated much of the street fighting.

Above all, the ongoing intifada expresses cumulative popular anger at both the violence of the Israeli occupation and the compromises Arafat seems willing to make on basic Palestinian national rights–such as the establishment of a viable sovereign state, the right of return for Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 and 1967 and Palestinian sovereignty in East Jerusalem. Fatah has, to a limited extent, been able to channel this anger in street protests. When Ariel Sharon visited the Haram al-Sharif on September 28, the ensuing Palestinian protests were spearheaded by Islamists and students–the sectors of the population that are most militant in their criticisms of the Oslo process, and among whom Fatah enjoys little influence. Since the initial protests, Arafat’s moves to contain the violence have been unpopular on the Palestinian street. Huge crowds in the West Bank and Gaza demonstrated against Arafat’s presence at the October 17 Sharm al-Sheikh summit, and the failure of Arab leaders to agree on concrete action against the Israeli occupation at the October 21-22 Cairo summit.

The PA security forces whom Arafat does control directly have only rarely intervened in armed clashes. Arafat does not control the armed Fatah cadres, nor the stone-throwing students and youths who constitute a disproportionate number of the dead and wounded. He could crack down on the uprising, but to do so would strengthen the voices that describe the PA as a proxy police force for the Israeli occupation, and endanger his status as leader of the Palestinian cause.

The "Honest Broker" and the UN

Since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, there has been a nearly unanimous international consensus on how to resolve the crisis: an international conference based on international law and United Nations resolutions. But Israel disagreed, and the US backed Israel’s rejection.

After the Cold War, the US has often relied on the UN to negotiate agreements and provide peacekeepers to end regional wars and crises: in Cambodia, Angola and Guatemala and more recently in East Timor, Sierra Leone and elsewhere.

But the US, while mentioning one or two UN resolutions in passing, kept Israel-Palestine diplomacy under its own control. Washington–Israel’s major financial, diplomatic and military backer–claimed the role of the "honest broker." The actual requirements of international law (like Israel’s obligations as an occupying power to protect civilians and to prohibit settling Israeli citizens in occupied territory) and existing UN resolutions (such as 194, ensuring the right of Palestinian refugees to return and receive compensation) were sidelined in favor of US-brokered talks between Israel, the strongest military power in the Middle East and the 17th wealthiest country in the world, and the stateless Palestinians living under occupation or in exile.

In the 1991 Madrid talks, the US-Israeli Memorandum of Understanding stated explicitly that the UN would have no role. In the 1993 Oslo process, the UN was ignored. In 1999 when over 100 signatories of the Geneva Conventions met to assess Israeli compliance with the Conventions, the meeting lasted only ten minutes in order to "avert friction" with Israel. The failed 2000 Camp David summit ignored the UN altogether.

In October 2000, as Palestinians continued to die, Tel Aviv insisted that any UN fact-finding commission would be nothing but a "kangaroo court," and that it would accept only separate Israeli and Palestinian investigations under overall US authority. When 14 out of 15 members of the UN Security Council voted to condemn Israel’s excessive force against civilians, it was the US alone that abstained. US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke threatened to veto any further resolution, stating that the virtually unanimous current resolution had taken the UN "out of the running" to play a role in negotiations.

The September-October 2000 occupation crisis ushered in an unprecedented, albeit significantly limited, role for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

A special session of the UN’s High Commission for Human Rights passed a strong resolution condemning the "grave and massive violations of the human rights of the Palestinian people by Israel", and establishing a "human rights inquiry commission." An enormous US lobbying campaign resulted in Washington’s Western allies opposing the vote, and many non-aligned countries abstaining. When the General Assembly convened, US diplomats again went into high gear to dampen the language of the resolution. Only six countries–the US, Israel and four Polynesian island states–voted no, though nearly a third of the General Assembly abstained.

On October 25, the US House of Representatives voted 365-30 to call on Arafat to stop the violence. Congressional leaders said the House felt compelled to pass the resolution to counter the UN resolutions that are "biased against Israel." The same day, the House passed a new foreign aid bill. Israel will receive $2.82 billion in the next fiscal year–18.9 percent of the total and the largest aid amount of any country.

After almost a month of clashes, over 130 Palestinians and eight Israelis dead, and a military occupation and siege tighter than ever, the best hope for peace is a return to UN resolutions, international law and direct UN involvement in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. Providing international protection to Palestinians and putting Secretary-General Kofi Annan in charge of negotiations instead of President Bill Clinton would certainly raise at least a glimmer of such hope.

Five Questions the US Media Should Ask About the Violence in the Middle East, But Don’t

1. Why didn’t Ehud Barak prevent Ariel Sharon from visiting the Haram al-Sharif?

2. Why do news accounts refer to Palestinian citizens of Israel as "Israeli Arabs," when they call themselves Palestinians?

3. What were the Israeli soldiers who were "lynched" on October 12 doing in Palestinian-controlled Ramallah?

4. Do peoples under military occupation have a right to resist the occupation?

5. Why should the US have a "special relationship" with Israel?