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A month ago, the whole world wanted to believe that an Israeli-Palestinian final status peace agreement was imminent. Day before yesterday, this benevolent dream was smashed under the rockets of the Israeli helicopters on Palestinian cities, and the brutal mutation of the Israeli discourse from the sphere of bad-faith negotiation to that of an all-out war against the Palestinian people and the Palestinian leadership. Hate-talk has taken hold of the Israeli street, media and public debate, while the Israeli Prime minister negotiates with war criminal Ariel Sharon in order to form what he calls an “emergency government”. After seven years of an ambiguous, fragile, unsteady and chronically delayed peace process, paved with crises and massacres, commitments not upheld, obligations not implemented, and signed interim agreements systematically emptied of their content by Israel’s disrespect for its own signature, the Israeli government, faced with mounting international pressure to walk the last extra-mile to a mutually acceptable peace agreement with the Palestinian side, on the basis of international legality, has opted for escalation and war. Ehud Barak, who lost his political coalition several weeks ago, and was faced with the eventuality of anticipated elections, has thus opened the way to the “national unity” government he has called for ever since he emerged as the victor of the 1999 Israeli elections. Thus has Barak saved his political career by aligning himself on the anti-peace program of his supposed adversaries, and by drowning the peace-process in a river of Palestinian blood. Last night, Barak announced, live on Israeli television, that his new “emergency” government would no longer negotiate with the PLO and the PNA unless the latter capitulated to all of Israel’s demands, and would therefore no longer pursue the search for peace, but would now on condition negotiations to a military victory. The heavily and repeatedly hammered phrase “We have no partner” has become the leit-motiv of this new unified discourse, and the codeword for the “military solution”. WHO HAS NO PARTNER ? For Palestinians, who have lived these seven years of unkept promises and unfulfilled obligations, the notion of having no partner seems totally preposterous. There is no alternative to war except peace, and in peace as well as in war, one does not choose his partner. One does not make peace with friends, but with enemies, who then become former enemies. But one cannot force peace upon a people by beating him and massacring his children until they capitulate. Humiliation feeds revenge, and defeat fuels resentment: this is as mechanical as Archimedes’ postulate on gravity. The Palestinian people has chosen peace as a strategic option in spite of major crimes committed against us. The Palestinian people has opted for peace, many years ago, and long before Madrid and Oslo, in full awareness that this meant peace with those who expelled a million Palestinians from their homes in 1948, with those who have imposed their brutal occupation upon the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Arab Jerusalem, who have committed innumerable massacres and war crimes against the sons and daughters of our people, from Deir Yassin to Sabra and Chatila, and from the days of the Intifada to the massacre of Hebron in 1994, to name only the most notorious. It is the Israeli government, blinded by the arrogance of its military might, who thinks peace can only be achieved with disarmed and submitted native notables, once the patriots have been liquidated. THE LANGUAGE OF FORCE
It is the Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Levy, in a courageous article published last week, who reminded his compatriots that while claiming that Palestinians only understand force, it was in fact Israel which never gave any of its conquests or appetites away, except by force: the October 1973 war made them abandon Sinai; the Intifada engendered negotiations and the Israeli recognition of the PLO, and Lebanese resistance made them withdraw from most of Lebanese territory. If, instead of indulging in racist fantasies, the Israelis, at official as well as at popular level, recognized the humanity of Palestinians, they would understand that, as they themselves proudly declare about themselves from the height of their military might, we will never submit to terror and threats, and that our people, just like any other people, will never relinquish its inalienable rights out of fear. The Israeli approach to “the end of the conflict” – we’ll hit you until you surrender – is an absurd, nefarious, criminal and totally self-destructive one, which can only lead to the most tragic of consequences for all. But, for reasons which have to do with Israeli domestic political considerations as much as with the premeditated decision to turn his back away from the path of peace, Ehud Barak has buried the peace process, in conformity with the conditions that all the new allies of his renewed emergency government, in particular Sharon and Sharansky, put to their rallyment. To those who pressed him yesterday to say so clearly, he answered that Israel had no interest to appear as saying “no” to anything, since the main common objective was now to get the whole world to accuse Yasser Arafat of the collapse of the peace process, leaving it to the “irresponsible” journalists to interpret and read his lips. He also explained that his much famed Camp David so-called overtures – which his right wing allies demand that he renege – were only tactical manoeuvers aimed at unmasking the Palestinian side, and get the American administration to blame Arafat for the collapse of the talks. On the ground, in two weeks of Israeli state-terrorism, more than a 100 Palestinians have been killed, more than 5000 wounded. Israeli settler mob-violence has exacted a particular cruel toll, with civilians (and not even protesters) assassinated, tortured and brutalized, property destroyed and terror imposed upon rural areas of the West Bank, outside the control of Palestinian forces – all of this under the protective wing of the occupation forces. In this context, we still want to know how could the settlers torture to death a Palestinian citizen of the West Bank who had earlier been seen in the hands of the Israeli police. Israeli mob-violence against the Arab citizens of Israel, from Nazareth to Jaffa, and in practically all cities and towns inside the “Green Line” has also been set loose by the official incitement. Jewish crowds and gangs have attacked Arab citizens, have assassinated some of them and wounded many others, while engaging in massive attacks against Arab property. Result of the incitement and proclaimed will to treat the Arab citizens of Israel as an enemy community, and of the campaign to deprive them of whatever rights they have achieved, through years of political struggle against the institutional discrimination and dispossession to which they have been subjected ever since the creation of the State of Israel. THE RAMALLAH EVENTS This is the sad context of the latest Ramallah events, where two Israeli prisoners were killed by a mob who invaded the Police station where they were detained. As a matter of principle, lynch is unacceptable. War prisoners, even when there are no negotiations, have basic rights, according to Islamic (or Christian) ethics as much as according to the Hague regulations of 1907 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949. And even war criminals, if they are not killed in combat, must be imprisoned and tried. Not lynched. Hence the Palestinian official inquiry, and the firm Palestinian intention to establish responsibilities. (Note that the Israeli army has officially announced its intention to pursue and assassinate everyone of those “present”, according to its analysis of the TV footage). Were the Israeli “soldiers” captured in Ramallah undercover agents? The first testimonies gathered mention uniforms concealed under civilian clothes and all sorts of weapons, including a silencer, all of which strengthen the popular conviction that they were part of a duvdevan-type killer unit, and that they were on their way to perpetrate some murderous provocation. An inquiry has been opened, and we hope the Palestinian Security agencies will be able to establish beyond doubt, on the basis of undisputable material evidence, the truth of this matter. But we affirm it without any ambiguity: even if the two Israeli agents were what it seems they were, lynch is unacceptable. It makes us litterally go down to the level of the oppressors of our people, and that is a shame. The only known alternative to mob-rule, however, is the State of Law, and there is no state of law without state. Who has not seen at least one of those hundreds of American “Western” movies where the crowd, spontaneously or not, storms the sheriff’s office to lynch his prisoner, whom they believed was guilty, even when he was not? The term lynch itself refers to the American citizen who first openly advocated this barbarian kind of popular justice, and it has no equivalent in Arabic. For decades, and until the late fifties, white racist mobs in the South of the United States have put African-Americans suspected of offending white supremacy to a horrible death of torture and mutilation. During the conquest of the American West, the Army ended putting Indians into reservations to protect them from genocidal settler mob-violence. The events in Ramallah demonstrate the need for a state, and how far we still are from enjoying the means of a state when our limited forces cannot even move on the roads between our cities – because they are not allowed to go through the “B” and “C” areas that separate them. On that fateful day, the whole territory was blocked, sealed and closed. All ways in and out of the Palestinian territory were controlled by occupation forces and nobody could move – which makes the official Israeli version of the two “innocent” reservists who just found themselves in Ramallah “by accident” even more incredible. There was no way to reinforce the guard around the Police station where the two prisoners were detained. It should be remembered that 15 Palestinian security personnel were injured in the course of their attempts to protect the building and the prisoners. In this sense, these events are also the result of the systematic undermining of the PNA’s authority by Israeli occupation, colonisation and bad faith negotiation. We should add that the assassination of the prisoners has also deprived us of the considerable assets that their testimonies and the proper investigation that should have been conducted would undoubtedly have constituted in the effort to throw light on the methods of the Israeli undercover units and other anti-Palestinian death squads, and to begin with on the objective of their own operation. This without mentioning the fact that, in theory at least, prisoners can be exchanged, as the current Lebanese example shows, and as earlier Israeli-Palestinian prisoners exchanges have shown in the past. LIGHTING A RELIGIOUS WAR In these circumstances, we hold the Israeli government directly and wholly responsible for the dangerous trend which tends to transform the conflict – the essence of which is Land and Rights – into a religious war. Israeli-mob violence has already taken mosques and churches as targets of destruction and desecration, from Tiberias to Jaffa and many more localities throughout Palestine, in a systematic onslaught on Palestinian religious symbols, provoking an inevitably religious counter-reaction. Thus Palestinian rioters have caused considerable damage to Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, after the occupation army evacuated the site. This outburst of popular anger, indeed, was aimed at what had become an aggressive military stronghold, and a focus of settler terrorism. It is nonetheless totally unjustified, and alien to our tradition of religious tolerance. Especially as Joseph’s Tomb, ( the degree of sanctity of which is a subject of historical and theological controversy) just as the Boraq (“The Wailing Wall”), Rachel’s Tomb or the Haram El Ibrahimi in Hebron, is Islamic waqf property. The PNA has condemned the damage done to the site, and has ordered its immediate restoration. In this context, the burning of the Jericho synagogue, where Jewish worship had gone on since 1994 under the protection of the Palestinian Security forces, is another negative sign of a grave degradation of the situation, and the direct result of the deepening of the religious dimension of the conflict – a direct consequence of Barak’s provocative claim for sovereignty over the Haram El Sharif, and of Sharon’s physical provocation there on September 28th. Indeed, the synagogue will be restored, but the negative signal has been sent. At a time when popular anger at Israeli crimes throughout the Arab world and the Islamic Umma, from West Africa to Indonesia, is growing and becoming a factor in the global Middle-Eastern equation, we urge our brothers and friends, including those who support us in Europe and elsewhere, not to fall in the Israeli trap, and to abstain from providing our enemies with arguments to try and convince the world that their war of aggression against our people is nothing but self-defence.
AND NOW WHAT ? Now, and because we do not intend to capitulate, we have to be ready for the next stage, the next strikes, the next vain Israeli attempt to break the will of the people by force. Already Barak’s new allies demand massive military action against our people, dismissing the crimes committed so far as falling short of any significant action. The systematic de-humanization of Palestinians and Palestinian leaders in the Israeli public discourse constitutes an anticipated legitimation of genocide. We know the Israeli war machine is powerful, and we remember the siege of Beirut, the 60.000 killed, the hundreds of thousands wounded, the havoc and destruction, the cluster bombs and the blockade. And yet, with all the cruelty and slaughter of innocent civilians it perpetrated in Lebanon, Israel failed there. We are ready, and we are confident that this present aggression will also fail, as have all earlier attempts at “crushing” Palestinian will. But the world in general, and the European Union in particular, should not only monitor this oncoming massacre: they should take things in hand, and prevent the fire from spreading to the whole region. Israel must renounce war and violence, and must stop using war as an instrument of domestic political struggle. In the meantime, our people needs international protection and support in order to force Israel to stop the state-massacre, and implement international resolutions.
The gloomy alternative is the regionalization of war. Will the world let it happen?
14 October 2000
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The Editor |
