...Bush's vision (the word strikes a weird dreamy note in what is meant to be a hard-headed, definitive peace plan) is supposed to be realised by the restructuring of the Palestinian Authority, the elimination of all violence and incitement against Israelis, and the installation of a government that meets the requirements of Israel and the so-called Quartet (the US, UN, EU and Russia) responsible for the plan. Israel for its part undertakes to improve the humanitarian situation, by easing restrictions and lifting curfews, though where and when are not specified. Phase One is also supposed to see the dismantling of 60 hilltop settlements (the so-called 'illegal outpost settlements' established since Sharon came to power in March 2001), though nothing is said about removing the others, which account for about 200,000 settlers on the West Bank and Gaza, to say nothing of the 200,000 more in annexed East Jerusalem. Phase Two, described as a transition, is focused rather oddly on the 'option of creating an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty' - none is specified - and is to culminate in an international conference to approve and then 'create' a Palestinian state, once again with 'provisional borders'. Phase Three is to end the conflict completely, also by way of an international conference whose job will be to settle the thorniest issues of all: refugees, settlements, Jerusalem, borders. Israel's role in all this is to co-operate: the real onus is placed on the Palestinians, who must keep coming up with the goods while the military occupation remains more or less in place, though eased in the main areas invaded during the spring of 2002. No monitoring element is envisioned, and the misleading symmetry of the plan's structure leaves Israel very much in charge of what - if anything - will happen next. As for Palestinian human rights, at present not so much ignored as suppressed, no specific rectification is written into the plan: apparently it is up to Israel whether to continue as before or not.
For once, all the usual commentators say, Bush is offering real hope for a Middle East settlement. Calculated leaks from the White House suggested a list of possible sanctions against Israel if Sharon is too intransigent, but this was quickly denied and soon stopped being mentioned. An emerging media consensus presents the document's contents - many of them familiar from earlier peace plans - as the result of Bush's new-found confidence after his triumph in Iraq. As with most discussions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, manipulated clichés and far-fetched suppositions, rather than the realities of power and lived history, shape the flow of discourse. Sceptics and critics are brushed aside as anti-American, while a sizeable portion of the organised Jewish leadership has denounced the road map as requiring far too many Israeli concessions. But the establishment press keeps reminding us that Sharon has spoken of an 'occupation', which he has never conceded until now, and has actually announced his intention to end Israeli rule over 3.5 million Palestinians. But is he even aware of what he proposes to end? The Haaretz commentator Gideon Levy wrote on 1 June that, in common with most Israelis, Sharon knows nothing
about life under curfew in communities that have been under siege for years. What does he know about the humiliation of checkpoints, or about people being forced to travel on gravel and mud roads, at risk to their lives, in order to get a woman in labour to a hospital? About life on the brink of starvation? About a demolished home? About children who see their parents beaten and humiliated in the middle of the night?
Another chilling omission from the road map is the gigantic 'separation wall' now being built in the West Bank by Israel: 347 kilometres of concrete running north to south, of which 120 have already been erected. It is eight metres high and two metres thick; its cost is put at $1.6 million per kilometre. The wall does not simply divide Israel from a putative Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders: it actually takes in new tracts of Palestinian land, sometimes five or six kilometres at a stretch. It is surrounded by trenches, electric wire and moats; there are watchtowers at regular intervals. Almost a decade after the end of South African apartheid, this ghastly racist wall is going up with scarcely a peep from the majority of Israelis, or from their American allies who, whether they like it or not, are going to pay for most of it. The 40,000 Palestinian inhabitants of the town of Qalqilya live on one side of the wall, the land they farm and actually live off is on the other. It is estimated that when the wall is finished - presumably as the US, Israel and the Palestinians argue about procedure for months on end - almost 300,000 Palestinians will be separated from their land. The road map is silent about this, as it is about Sharon's recent approval of a wall on the eastern side of the West Bank, which will, if built, reduce the amount of Palestinian territory available for Bush's dream state to roughly 40 per cent of the area. That's what Sharon has had in mind all along.
An unstated premise underlies Israel's heavily modified acceptance of the plan and the US's evident commitment to it: the relative success of Palestinian resistance. This is true whether or not one deplores some of its methods, its exorbitant cost, and the heavy toll it has taken on yet another generation of Palestinians who refused to give up in the face of the overwhelming superiority of Israeli-US power. All sorts of reasons have been given for the appearance of the road map: that 56 per cent of Israelis back it, that Sharon has finally bowed to international reality, that Bush needs Arab-Israeli cover for his military adventures elsewhere, that the Palestinians have finally come to their senses and brought forth Abu Mazen (Abbas's much more familiar nom de guerre, as it were), and so on. Some of this is true, but I still contend that were it not for the Palestinians' stubborn refusal to accept that they are 'a defeated people', as the Israeli Chief of Staff recently described them, there would be no peace plan. Yet anyone who believes that the road map offers anything resembling a settlement, or that it tackles the basic issues, is wrong. Like so much of the prevailing peace discourse, it places the need for restraint and renunciation and sacrifice squarely on Palestinian shoulders, thus denying the density and sheer gravity of Palestinian history. To read the road map is to confront an unsituated document, oblivious of its time and place.
The road map, in fact, is not a plan for peace so much as a plan for pacification: it is about putting an end to Palestine as a problem. Hence the repetition of the term 'performance' in the document's wooden prose - in other words, the way Palestinians are expected to behave. No violence, no protest, more democracy, better leaders and institutions - all this based on the notion that the underlying problem has been the ferocity of Palestinian resistance, rather than the occupation that has given rise to it. Nothing comparable is expected of Israel except that the small settlements I spoke of earlier, known as 'illegal outposts' (an entirely new classification which suggests that some Israeli implantations on Palestinian land are legal), must be given up and, yes, the major settlements 'frozen', but certainly not removed or dismantled. Not a word is said about what, since 1948, and then again since 1967, Palestinians have endured at the hands of Israel and the US. Nothing about the de-development of the Palestinian economy. The house demolitions, the uprooting of trees, the prisoners (at least 5000 of them), the policy of targeted assassinations, the closures since 1993, the wholesale ruin of the infrastructure, the incredible number of deaths and maimings - all that and more passes without a word....
3 June
Edward Said's most recent books include Out of Place, a memoir, Reflections on Exile, Freud and the Non-European and, with Daniel Barenboim, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society.
[The full text of the article is available at <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n12/said01_.html>.] ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>