'The moral courage to call us equals'
By Mustafa Al-Barghouti *
It is disturbing that Amos Oz, a well-known Israeli intellectual and veteran peace activist, should write that "Israel is offering the Palestinians a peace accord based on 1967 borders, with minor mutual amendments." First, the concerned citizen he has always claimed to be seems unaware of Mr Barak's self-declared red lines, announced at Camp David last July, and reiterated first in response to former US President Bill Clinton's December 2000 peace proposal and again before the recent Taba marathon peace talks. The Israeli premier had repeatedly pledged not to return to the 1967 borders and not to divide Jerusalem, among other things. This constitutes a total negation of the Oslo accords and subsequent agreements on the basis of which Mr Barak had nonetheless been negotiating with Palestinians for the past year and half. The first article of the Oslo accords stipulates that UN Resolutions 242 and 338 (calling on Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders and to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the principle of land for peace) be the basis for the peace process.
Mr Oz should also know that the proposed modifications in the implementation of Resolution 242 are neither minor nor mutual and that we, the Palestinians, wish to see Israel respect international law and UN resolutions, as it did when it withdrew from Lebanon last May and from Egypt in 1981. The Israeli administration under Barak was asking the Palestinian side, yet again, to compromise on its previous compromises. Indeed, by endorsing the Oslo accords and Resolution 242, the Palestinians have accepted to establish their state on only 22 per cent of Mandate Palestine, thus accepting Israel's sovereignty over 78 per cent of the land. Mr Oz knows this perfectly, as he himself refers to UN Resolution 181 of 1947, which "enacted two sovereign states to be established in the contested land, one for the Jewish people [on 55 per cent of the land] and one for the Palestinian people [on 45 per cent of the land]."
One would assume, moreover, that such a politically aware man has seen, as have many of us in Palestine or abroad, the map that was presented by the Israelis to the Palestinian negotiators in response to Clinton's plan. Besides the absorption of 80 per cent of the settlers in large blocs on occupied land neighbouring Jerusalem, Mr Barak's "peace team" was proposing to leave many of the existing isolated West Bank settlements in place, thus tearing the West Bank into a series of small, disconnected Palestinian bantustans and precluding any contiguity for a future Palestinian state. Contrary to what Mr Oz contends, we Palestinians have received no indications that "Israel is considering a plan to remove the Israeli settlements scattered in the depth of the Palestinian territory, to make East Jerusalem the capital of Palestine and to place disputed holy sites under Palestinian custody." As a matter of fact, we have heard and seen exactly the opposite from Mr Barak's office, beginning with the rapid expansion of settlement construction under his administration, at a rate far superior to that witnessed under his hard-line predecessor, Binyamin Netanyahu. As for the right of Palestinians to establish their capital in occupied East Jerusalem, including sovereignty over the Haram Al-Sharif (see UN Resolution 242), it has been denied over and over again by Mr Barak.
In brief, the "minor" changes that the Israeli premier proposes are in violation of international law and would have created a series of Palestinian bantustans in a sea of Israeli settlements, rather than a viable Palestinian state.
As to the "mutual" nature of these modifications, it strikes me that Mr Oz has conveniently failed to notice, in eight years of painful negotiations, that Israel never treated its Palestinian counterparts as partners with whom "mutual" compromises or understanding could be reached. Rather, we have always been instructed, in the most patronising way, to accept a peace deal on Israeli terms. Now, Mr Oz is joining the many who profess to know what is best for us, rather than recognising that it takes two to tango. What gives him the right to treat us like half-witted "natives"? Where has his peace camp been for the past eight years? It was entertaining pleasant illusions of peace while settlements were mushrooming and Palestinians were being stripped of their rights. It has taken him quite a long time to declare that peace activists should no longer argue, "as we have for decades, that the 'sole obstacle to peace is Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories....We should say that even without peace, governing another nation is wrong. Wrong and harmful." He argues that Israel should withdraw from Palestinian-populated regions to enable us to create our independent state. Withdrawing from "Palestinian-populated regions" is not enough, however, since we have been prevented from building or living on large tracts of the land occupied in 1967 to make way for settlers and allow them to enjoy our pleasant countryside, courtesy of the Israeli government which subsidises lodging in settlements heavily and allows its inhabitants to consume 16 times more (Palestinian!) water per head than the Palestinians.
If Mr Oz was indeed convinced that Mr Barak was ready to dismantle isolated settlements in the West Bank, then he should have told the then prime minister that we need a contiguous, sovereign state and access to our natural resources, not the Apartheid-like entity that has been taking shape under our and his eyes over the past 33 years. Let him tell his leaders that the creation of an independent state requires more than simply redeployment of the Israeli army from occupied land; it requires the possibility of attaining economic prosperity, which means for example access to borders for exports, the creation of a Palestinian currency with our own monetary policy and abandoning the very unfavourable Paris Economic Protocol. To date, Palestinians are still using the Israeli currency and pricing system. Palestinian per capita DP is over ten times inferior to that of Israel; our purchasing power, once income-adjusted, places the occupied territories among the poorest countries in the Middle East and North Africa, just after Yemen and Morocco, according to a recent World Bank study.
The concessions being demanded of Mr Arafat were not minor. The worst, however, is the stipulation that he deny his people the right of return. This is the same right that any Jew in the world can rely on unconditionally to settle in Israel -- or, as the sentence erroneously goes, to "return" to Israel, even if he or she had never set foot there previously. It is also the same right that many Russians who migrated to Israel in the past ten years have abused, since 40 per cent of them are not Jewish. By comparison, the hundred of thousands of Palestinians who were expelled from Mandate Palestine by the Israeli army in 1948, and whose number now reaches close to four million, had actually been living in Palestine for hundreds of years. Perhaps Mr Oz should like to ponder that. Or perhaps he would prefer it if the Palestinians could simply forget about their homes, their land and what was once their country, because their memories and their collective past threaten the existence of the state and the people that robbed them of their property and identity. Mr Oz chose to dismiss that question, since he cannot answer it, and instead resorted to an unrelated argument, that of the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries.
Contrary to his allegation, I do not believe that Palestinian leaders "cynically ignore the fate of hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews who fled and were driven out of their homes in Arab countries during the same [1948] war." Palestinian leaders are merely concerned with the fate of their own people and cannot be held accountable for what other Arab countries may have done. Here, Mr Oz indulges in the facile, and unfortunately typically Israeli, trick of using "Palestinians" and "Arabs" interchangeably -- implicitly (albeit maybe unconsciously) depriving us of a distinct national identity and aspirations. At any rate, Jews, like Palestinians, should be given the same right to return to their homeland if they choose to do so, or to be compensated if they choose to stay where they are. Still, it must be said that every Jew already has at least one country under the protection and in the comfort of which he or she may ponder this choice. In sharp contrast, most Palestinian refugees have been landless and homeless for the past 52 years.
With the election of Mr Sharon, it has become clear that peace is no longer an option for most Israelis, at least in the short or medium term. This pause in the process of reconciliation, which the Labour Party failed to initiate properly, its arrogance having rendered it incapable of recognising the Palestinians' narrative and legitimate rights, may be a unique opportunity to seize. It may represent an opportunity for Israel to reflect on what has been wrong with the past 52 years, not simply in the years of a flawed peace process. Israeli politicians, intellectuals and ordinary citizens alike could at last engage in introspection about their own history and deeds. By admitting its original sin against the Palestinians, Israel could heal its own wound. It must accept us as a full-fledged people with rights and aspirations, as equals with whom peace can eventually be achieved. We are ready to compromise and live on 22 per cent of what once was our land. Let me ask you, Mr Oz, will your leaders and intellectuals eventually have the moral courage to see us as dignified human beings?
* Mustafa Barghouti (MD, MBA) is a physician and Palestinian civil society leader, president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees as well as director of the Health, Development, Information and Policy Institute (HDIP) in Ramallah, Palestine. HDIP is housing the Palestine Monitor, an information clearinghouse on behalf of the Palestinian NGO Network, a cluster of over 80 Palestinian NGOs. The Palestine Monitor was recently launched in order to convey unified responses from Palestinian civil society about local developments and to provide objective and accurate information to the press and international community.