Painful Deception In Palestine Rami G. Khouri September 18, 2006
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.
Sometimes wishful thinking dominates rational hard work. This is probably what is going on with the expectation that a Palestinian national unity government will be formed any day now, comprising Hamas, Fatah and some technocrats and respected independents. This has already generated speculation about the possibility of breaking the diplomatic stalemate with Israel, and ending the American-European-Israeli boycott and economic sanctions against the present Hamas-led government.
We should be clear about what this process is all about. It is emphatically not a self-generated Palestinian national step forward on the road to a coherent, consensus policy on domestic governance or relations with Israel. That is unfortunate, because the Palestinians need, and are capable of, defining their national priorities, agreeing on policies to achieve their goals and mobilizing public opinion to either negotiate peace with Israel or resist it effectively. This is not what is happening, unfortunately.
Rather, the national unity government being contemplated is a show of Palestinian weakness, vulnerability and irresoluteness. It is largely a desperate response to the Israeli-American-European financial embargo that is slowly starving the Palestinians. To avoid death by strangulation and malnutrition, the Palestinians must practice diplomatic submission and subservience to Israel-American positions. In return for a resumption of financial aid and normal diplomatic contacts, the Palestinians must meet the three conditions that were set after the Hamas election victory in January. The Middle East "Quartet"—the U.S., EU, U.N. and Russia—established those conditions as recognition of Israel's right to exist, renunciation of violence, and recognition of previous peace accords with the Israelis.
These are reasonable and logical demands, but they are made unreasonable and illogical by being unilaterally imposed on the Palestinians in a context of siege and starvation warfare. The Palestinians are responding in a way that will not work. They are trying to meet the three demands indirectly, by implication and insinuation, while not meeting them explicitly. The Palestinian government's agreed national political platform affirms the 2002 Arab Summit peace plan. This plan offers recognition and coexistence to Israel, if it returns all lands occupied in 1967 and resolves the Palestine refugee issue on the basis of U.N. resolutions. Israel and the United States have always ignored and disdained the 2002 Arab offer, yet the Palestinians suddenly expect it to open doors. Starvation-induced desperation is an ugly sight.
This waste of time and massive deception deceives nobody. It neither responds to the Quartet's demands nor offers any hope of a diplomatic breakthrough to a negotiated peace. It is not even sure to resume financial aid to the Palestinians, as the ongoing United States-Israel-Europe debate reveals. As a forced response to inhuman strangulation by the U.S.-Israel, the Palestinian national unity government only perpetuates a low quality American-Israeli-Palestinian tradition of dancing around the tough decisions that need to be made, without grasping them. This always turns into a dance of death on both sides, as we witness today.
The main problem with this process is that it remains a unilateral one—with Israel imposing its position on the Palestinians by force, and the United States and Europe siding with Israel. The three reasonable demands made of the Palestinians are one-way dictates, which become divisive rather than constructive. The Palestinians have a right to know what they get in return for meeting these three demands, such as parallel Israeli compliance with international norms of reasonable conduct. This includes Israel's uprooting rogue colonies and settlements, ending expansion of official colonial-settler communities, stopping land expropriations, releasing jailed officials, and ending assassinations of Palestinian militants and civilians. Now that's a deal worth considering, were it ever to be offered.
Instead, the Palestinians are offered only a possible resumption of some financial aid, and a meeting between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. It's hard to think of a more dysfunctional and unpromising diplomatic process than this. Olmert and Abbas are among the world's least credible political leaders. If there were a Nobel Prize for Missed Historic Political Opportunities, they should share it. They and all that they represent have had countless opportunities in the past decade to make progress, and they have consistently, spectacularly failed to do so.
Adding forced capitulation and new levels of ambiguity to the already limp legacy of Palestinian national leadership behavior will only generate new forms of political frustration and tension; these will ultimately express themselves in unpredictable manifestations of contestation, resistance and perhaps violence. Israeli-American attempts to punish, strangle, starve, boycott, jail, kill, bankrupt and generally humiliate the Palestinians into submission and surrender will fail, as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Bringing the elected Hamas leadership into this cycle of false hopes and slightly delusional expectations will only add Hamas to the list of discredited political amateurs.
The only diplomatic process that will succeed has never been seriously attempted: a defand for equal and simultaneous concessions from Israelis and Palestinians on key issues of statehood, recognition, coexistence, and renunciation of violence. Trying to circumvent this moral, historical and political imperative of addressing Palestinian and Israeli national rights equally, and in parallel, is a colossal waste of time, and painful to watch—yet again.
Copyright (c)2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam