>To argue that the Peace Process was nothing but violence for the
>Palestinians is reductionist in the extreme. It did not match all the
>aspirations or just settlement of issues either, but the Oslo process had
>brought not just transfers of control of large swathes of territory to
>democratic control by the Palestinian Authority - frankly setting the stage
>for the power of the present uprising -- but included as well transfer of
>control of economic development and institutions such as electricity and
>phone infrastructure.
Well, maybe it was reductionist, but the extent of the autonomy is largely overstated, and, more to the point, the military repression increased for Palestinians, more than it decreased. Yes, it is true that walking around Ramallah two years ago there was a palpable sense of liberation and pride in the Palestinian police. At Bir Zeit university, though, there was a lot more cynicism.
>
>There is no question that there are strains between the PA leadership -
>partly because of serious corruption issues -- and the population, but the
>present uprising is a rather uneasy mix of Fatah pressure on Israel to
>secure a broader and deeper settlement for the Palestinians while at the
>same time being a chance for Hamas and other forces to derail the
>negotiating process altogether.
The corruption issue is mostly a red herring, got up by NGOs and Israel. The PA is no more nor less corrupt than any state institution. It is a great deal less corrupt than the Israeli system, which as Maxim Ghilan described is basically a negotiation over the split of the aid package from abroad.
Hamas' influence is pretty overstated too. I talked with many Palestinians who supported Hamas when it suited them. Hamas is mostly a flag of convenience for militants with little other outlet for action. In the eighties the Irish National Liberation Army played a similar role for the IRA. Volunteers who were dissatisfied with the amount of action they were getting with the IRA would moonlight in the INLA. Hamas' welfare and education programme gives them some roots, but the ideology is vague and viewed with a degree of scepticism.
Fatah is not provoking the conflicts. On the contrary, Fatah has systematically reduced Palestinian aspirations, as seen in the recent postponement of the declaration of a state. It was Israel that provoked the recent conflicts.
>
>If a two-state solution based on 1967 borders - roughly what was being
>negotiated in the Peace Process - is not the settlement to be negotiated,
>what does Yoshie and Jim see as the proper goal?
I'm bemused really that nobody asks the obvious question, what is the state of Israel for? Maybe in 1948 there was some noble intention, but that has long since evaporated. It is a disgrace to Jews and a penury to Arabs. For fifty years it has acted as a squalid police force for the US in the Middle East, putting Jews in the front line of America's war against Arab nationalism. Now that even Arab nationalism is exhausted, who needs Israel? Certainly not the people of the region, Arab or Jew.
The utopian solution would be a democratic polity without any affiliation to ethnicity or religion, in which everyone had equal rights, whether in the region currently known as Israel, the occupied territories or refugees from Palestine. The nearest anyone ever came to offering such a state were Palestinian nationalists in the 1970s, but that seems no longer to be on offer.
The first positive thing to be done would be to stop the $2 billion per annum aid that Israel receives from the United States. Ultimately only the people of the middle east can come to a solution. But to start out from the premise that there must be two states at the end is simply to eternalise the conflict in a fantastic and unachievable form. -- James Heartfield