http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/1000/sc11.htm
27 May - 2 June 2010
Issue No. 1000
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
The PLO's bargain
Edward Said says that Yasser Arafat has failed to consult sufficiently
widely, and has struck what looks like a poor bargain for the Palestinians
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The "historical breakthrough" announced recently by the PLO and the
Israeli government is basically a joint decision to signal a new phase of
reconciliation between two enemies; but it also leaves Palestinians very much
the subordinates, with Israel still in charge of East Jerusalem settlements,
sovereignty, and the economy. Though I still believe in a two- state solution
peacefully arrived at, the suddenly proposed peace plan raises many questions.
The plan is unclear in its details (no one seems fully to grasp all its
aspects), but plain enough in its broad outlines. Israel and the PLO will
recognize each other. Israel will allow "limited autonomy" and "early
empowerment" for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Jericho, a small West Bank
town 90 kilometers away. Yasser Arafat is reported to be allowed a visit but
not residence; a few hundred members of the Palestine Liberation Army, at
present in Jordan, will be permitted to handle internal security, i.e. police
work. Municipal oversight of health and sanitation, as well as education,
postal services and tourism, will be covered by Palestinians. The Israeli army
will re-position itself away from population centres, but will not withdraw for
a while. Israel will control the land, water, overall security and foreign
affairs in these "autonomous" areas. For the undefined future, Israel will
dominate the West Bank, including the corridor between Gaza and Jericho, the
Allenby bridge to Jordan, and almost all the water and land, a good percentage
of which it has already taken. The question remains, how much land is Israel in
fact going to cede for peace?
There has been much talk of vast sums coming for development. One
prominent Arab daily reported that Arafat was bringing $2.7 billion to the
deal. The West Bank is supposed to get an additional $800 million. The
Scandinavian governments are said to have pledged considerable amounts for West
Bank and Gaza development; Arab governments and the United States are expected
to be asked for money, although given the unfulfilled promises of the past,
Palestinians are justifiably sceptical.
Clearly the PLO has transformed itself from a national liberation
government into a kind of small-town government, with the same handful of
people still in command. PLO offices abroad -- all of them the result of years
of costly struggle whereby the Palestinian people earned the right to represent
themselves --are being closed, sold off, deliberately left to neglect. For the
over 50 per cent of the Palestinian people not resident in the Occupied
Territories -- 350,000 stateless refugees in Lebanon, twice that number in
Syria, many more elsewhere -- the plan may be the final dispossession. Their
national rights as people made refugees in 1948, solemnly confirmed and
re-confirmed for years by the UN, the PLO, the Arab governments, indeed most of
the world, now seem to have been annulled.
All secret deals between a very strong and a very weak partner
necessarily involve concessions hidden in embarrassment by the latter. Yes,
there are still lots of details to be negotiated, as there are many
imponderables to be made clear, and even some hopes either to be fulfilled or
dashed. Still, the deal before us smacks of the PLO leadership's exhaustion and
isolation, and of Israel's shrewdness. Many Palestinians are asking themselves
why, after years of concessions, we should be conceding once again to Israel
and the United States in return for promises and vague improvements in the
occupation that won't all occur until "final status" talks three to five years
hence, and perhaps not even then.
We have not even had an explicit acknowledgment from Israel (which has
yet to admit that it is an occupying power) that it will end the occupation,
with its maze of laws and complicated punitive apparatus. Nothing is said about
the 13,000 political prisoners who remain in Israeli jails. We must put into
whatever is going to be signed (no one is sure by whom) that Palestinians have
a right to freedom and equality and will concede nothing from that right. Can
the Israeli army march in at will? Who decides and when? After all, limited
"self-rule" is not something around which to mobilise or give long-term hope to
people. Above all, Palestinians now must have the widest possible say in their
future as it is largely about to be settled, perhaps irrevocably and unwisely.
It is disturbing that the National Council has not been called into session,
and that the appalling disarray induced by Arafat's recent methods has not been
addressed.
Two weeks ago the only really independent members of the PLO Executive
Committee, Mahmoud Darwish and Shafiq Al-Hout, resigned in protest; a few more
are said to be considering the move. Hout said that Arafat became an autocrat
whose personal handling of Palestinian finances was a disaster and, worse,
accountable to no one. I count no more than a handful of people including
Arafat who, with scant legal background, or experience of ordinary civil life,
holed up in Tunis, have hatched decisions affecting almost 6 million people.
There has been no consultation with Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. In the
territories, the occupation has been getting worse, and this after 10 rounds of
fruitless negotiations. When I was there this summer no one I spoke to failed
to make the connection, blaming Arafat and the delegation members in equal
measure. Then in July three leading negotiators resigned, bewailing Arafat's
undemocratic methods, implying that while they bled themselves dry with the
Israelis, Arafat had opened up a secret channel for his negotiations. They were
subsequently brought back into line, leaving their fellow negotiator, the
respected Gaza leader and delegation head Dr.Haidar Abdel-Shafi, to issue
statements calling for "reform and democracy".
With the PLO in decomposition and conditions in the territories
abysmal, there never was a worse internal crisis for Palestinians than the one
that began this past summer- that is, until Arafat fled into the Israeli plan,
which in one stroke propels him onto centre stage again, and rids the Israelis
of an unwanted insurrectionary problem that Arafat must now work at solving for
them. I admire those few Palestinian officials who bravely aver that this may
be the first step toward ending the occupation, but anyone who knows the
characteristic methods of Yasser Arafat's leadership is better advised to start
working for a radical improvement in present conditions.
No political settlement of a long and bloody conflict can ever fit all
the circumstances, of course. To be recognised at last by Israel and the United
States may mean personal fulfillment for some, but it doesn't necessarily
answer Palestinian needs or solve the leadership crisis. Our struggle is about
freedom and democracy; it is secular and, for a long time- indeed up until the
last couple of years -- it was fairly democratic. Arafat has cancelled the
Intifada unilaterally, with possible results in further dislocations,
disappointments and conflict that bode poorly for both Palestinians and
Israelis. In recent years Arafat's PLO (which is our only national institution)
refused to mobilise its various dispersed constituencies to attract its
people's best talents. Now it plunges into a new phase, having seemed to
mortgage its future without serious debate, without adequate preparation,
without telling its people the full and bitter truth. Can it succeed, and still
represent the Palestinian nation?
Issue 133 - 9 September 1993
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