The End of the Peace Process, page 30
The second overriding impression is that minute by minute, hour by hour, day after day, we are losing more and more Palestinian land to the Israelis. There wasn’t a road, or a bypassing highway, or a small village that we passed in our travel for three weeks that wasn’t witness to the daily tragedy of land expropriated, fields bulldozed, trees, plants, and crops uprooted, houses destroyed, while the Palestinian owners stood by, helpless to do much to stop the onslaught, unassisted by Mr. Arafat’s Authority, uncared for by more fortunate Palestinians. It is important not to underestimate the damage that is being done, the violence to our lives that will ensue, the distortions and misery that result. There is nothing quite like the sorrowful helplessness that one feels listening to a young man who has spent fifteen years working as an illegal day laborer in Israel in order to save up money to build a little house for his family, only to discover one day upon returning from work that the house has been reduced to a pile of rubble, flattened by an Israeli bulldozer with everything still inside the house. When you ask why this was done—the land, after all, was his—you are told that there was no warning, only a paper given to him the next day by an Israeli soldier stating that he had built the structure without a license. Where in the world, except under Israeli authority, are people required to have a license (which is always denied them) before they can build on their own property? Jews can build, but never Palestinians. This is racist apartheid in its purest form.
I once stopped on the main road from Jerusalem to Hebron to record on film an Israeli bulldozer, surrounded and protected by soldiers, plowing through some fertile land just alongside the road. About a hundred meters away stood four Palestinian men, looking both miserable and angry. It was their land, I was told, which they had worked for generations, now being destroyed on the pretext that it was needed to widen an already wide road built for the settlements. “Why do they need a road that will be 120 meters wide; why can’t they let me go on farming my land?” asked one of them plaintively. “How am I going to feed my children?” I asked the men whether they received any warning that this was going to be done. No, they said, we just heard today and when we got here it was too late. What about the Authority? I asked. Has it helped? No, of course not, was the answer. They’re never here when we need them. I went over to the Israeli soldiers, who at first refused to talk to me in the presence of cameras and microphones. But I kept insisting, and was lucky to find one who clearly seemed troubled by the whole business, even though he said he was merely following orders. “But don’t you see how unjust it is to take land from farmers who have no defense against you?” I said, to which he replied, “It’s not their land really. It belongs to the state of Israel.” I recall saying to him that sixty years ago the same arguments were made against Jews in Germany, and now here were Jews using it against their victims, the Palestinians. He moved away, unwilling to respond.
And so it is throughout the territories and Jerusalem, with Palestinians powerless to help each other. I gave a lecture at the University of Bethlehem in which I spoke about the continuous dispossession that was taking place, and wondered why those fifty thousand security people employed by the Authority, plus the thousands more who sit behind desks, pushing paper from one side of their desks to the other, cashing handsome checks at the end of each month, were not out there on the land helping to prevent the expropriations, helping the people whose livelihood was being taken from them before their eyes? Why, I asked, don’t villagers go out to their fields and simply stand in front of the bulldozers, and why don’t all our great leaders give support and moral help to the poor people who are losing the battle? One night I came back from filming all day and discovered that the hotel restaurant was sponsoring a Valentine’s Day dinner at $38 (yes, $38) per person. I was told that since I didn’t have a reservation I couldn’t be served, but I insisted that as a guest in the hotel I was at least entitled to a sandwich or something equally simple. I was shown a table in the corner and duly served a plate of rice and vegetables. A moment or two later I saw a Palestinian minister enter the room with seven guests, and sit at a prominent table weighted down with the seven-course Valentine’s Day menu, plus wine, and drinks for all. I was so sickened by the sight of this large, fat, smiling man who spends so much time “negotiating” with donor countries and with the Israelis, eating away happily while his people were losing their livelihood a few meters away, that I left the room in disgust and shame. He had arrived in a gigantic Mercedes; his bodyguards and driver—three of them—were sitting in the hotel lobby eating bananas, while their great leader sat in the dining room and stuffed himself. This is one reason why wherever I went, whomever I talked to, whatever the question, there was never a good word for the Authority or its officers. Basically it is perceived as guaranteeing security for Israel and its settlers, furnishing them with protection, not at all as a legitimate, or concerned, or helpful governmental body vis-à-vis its own people. That at the same time so many of these leaders should think it appropriate to build ostentatious villas during a period of such widespread penury and misery fairly boggles the mind. If it is to be anything today, leadership for the Palestinian people must demonstrate service and sacrifice, precisely those two things so lacking in the Authority. What I found staggering is the absence of care, that is, the sense that each Palestinian is alone in his or her misery, with no one so much as concerned to offer food, blankets, or a kind word. Truly one feels that Palestinians are an orphaned people.
Jerusalem is overwhelming in its continuing, unrelenting Judaization. The small, compact city in which I grew up over fifty years ago, has become an enormously spread-out metropolis, surrounded on the north, south, east, and west by immense building projects that testify to Israeli power and its ability, to change the character of Jerusalem. Here too there is a manifest sense of Palestinian powerlessness, as if the battle is over and the future settled. Most people I spoke to said that after the tunnel episode of last September they no longer felt the need to demonstrate against Israeli practices, nor to expose themselves to more sacrifice. “After all,” one of them told me, “sixty of us were killed, and yet the tunnel remained open, and Arafat went to Washington, despite having said that he would not meet with Netanyahu unless the tunnel was closed. What is the point of struggling now?” Few Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank (i.e., from cities like Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jenine, and Nablus) can enter Jerusalem, which is cordoned off by Israeli soldiers. Apartheid once again.
On the Israeli side, the situation is not as bleak as one would have expected. I conducted a long interview with Professor Ilan Pappe of Haifa University. He is one of the new Israeli historians whose work on 1948 has challenged Zionist orthodoxy on the refugee problem, and on Ben Gurion’s role in making the Palestinians leave. In this, of course, the new historians have confirmed what Palestinian historians and witnesses have said all along—that there was a deliberate military campaign to rid the country of as many Arabs as possible. But what Pappe also said is that he is very much in demand for lectures in high schools all over Israel, even though the latest textbook for classes on Israel’s history simply make no mention of the Palestinians at all. This blindness coexisting with a new openness regarding the past, characterizes the present mood, but deserves our attention as a contradiction to be deepened and analyzed further.
I spent a day filming in Hebron, which strikes me as embodying all the worst aspects of Oslo. A small handful of settlers, numbering no more than about two hundred people at any one time, virtually control the heart of an Arab city whose population of over 100,000 is left on the margins, unable to visit the city center, constantly under threat from militants and soldiers alike. I visited the house of a Palestinian in the old Ottoman quarter. He is now surrounded by settler bastions, including three new buildings that have gone up around him, plus three enormous water tanks that steal most of the city’s water for the settlers, plus several rooftop nests of soldiers. He was very bitter about the Palestinian leadership’s willingness to accept the town’s partition on the entirely specious grounds that it had once contained fourteen Jewish buildings dating back to Old Testament times but no longer in evidence. “How did these Palestinian negotiators accept such a grotesque distortion of the reality,” he asked me angrily, “especially in that at the time of the negotiations not one of them had ever set foot in Hebron when they negotiated the deal?” The day after I was in Hebron three young men were killed at the barricade by Israeli soldiers, and many more injured in the fighting that ensued. Hebron and Jerusalem are victories for Israeli extremism, not for coexistence, or for any sort of hopeful future.
Perhaps the highpoint of my experiences with Israelis was an interview with Daniel Barenboim, the brilliant conductor and pianist who was in Jerusalem for a recital at the same time I was there for the film. Born and raised in Argentina, Barenboim came to Israel in 1950 at the age of nine, lived there for about eight years, and has been conducting the Berlin State Opera and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—two of the world’s greatest musical institutions—for the last ten years. I should also say that over the past few years he and I have become close personal friends. He was very open in our interview: regretting that fifty years of Israel should also be the occasion of fifty years of suffering for the Palestinian people. During our discussion he openly advocated a Palestinian state, and after his Jerusalem recital, to a packed audience, he dedicated his first encore to the Palestinian woman—present at the recital—who had invited him to dinner the night before. I was surprised that the entire audience of Israeli Jews (she and I were the only Palestinians present) received his views and the noble dedication with enthusiastic applause. Clearly a new constituency of conscience is beginning to emerge, partly as a result of Netanyahu’s excesses, partly as a result of Palestinian resistance. What I found extremely heartening is that Barenboim, one of the world’s greatest musicians, has offered his services as a pianist to Palestinian audiences, a gesture of reconciliation that is truly worth more than dozens of Oslo accords.
So I conclude these brief scenes from Palestinian life today. I regret not having spent time among refugees in Lebanon and Syria, and I also regret not having many hours of film at my disposal. But at this moment it seems important that we testify to the resilience and continued potency of the Palestinian cause, which clearly has influenced more people in Israel and elsewhere than we have hitherto supposed. Depite the gloom of the present moment, there are rays of hope indicating that the future may not be as bad as many of us have supposed.
Al-Hayat, March 26, 1998
Al-Khaleej, March 26, 1998
Al-Ahram Weekly, March 1998
Panorama, March 27, 1998
The Nation, May 4, 1998
Al-Hewar, April/May 1998
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998
Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1998
Chapter Forty
End of the Peace Process, or Beginning Something Else
DENNIS ROSS’S LATEST “return” from the Middle East to Washington brought the usual results: absolutely nothing new by way of advancing a moribund “peace process.” Israel has refused the United States’s modest proposal of an additional 13 percent withdrawal, and the Palestinian Authority has refused the refusal. As a confirmation of the hard-line Israeli position, Netanyahu declared in a speech on March 26 (reported by Ha’aretz on March 27) that “we are making a constant effort to preserve the maximum [in terms of land], including territories I would fight for even if they had no security value.” Then he added, “the permanent settlement will follow negotiations on the territorial dimension and on the functional dimension. The functional dimension would include limitations on the powers that would accrue to the Palestinians, such as a prohibition on their concluding international alliances, using Israel’s water sources, threatening Israeli air space, flooding the area with refugees.” So truculent and aggressive has Netanyahu become that he seems to prefer talking exclusively to himself and to his right-wing accomplices than to anyone outside that tight little circle. The wonder of it is that he is still perceived by some American supporters of Israel—the Clinton administration among them—as making some sense. Whereas the reality is that Netanyahu lives in an Alice in Wonderland construction of his own making, sounding off like the March Hare or the Queen of Hearts with scarcely a concern for facts, possibilities, and the existence of other interests in the world besides his. I think it is obvious he believes that in the long run the Palestinian leadership will settle for 9 percent plus the 3 percent already under Palestinian self-rule, and just leave Israel alone, as if the deal had been concluded happily to everyone’s satisfaction.
The Clinton administration is too concerned with the president’s domestic agenda to do very much about the declining American position in the Middle East. For the time being, then, United States policy will be left to the handful of small, mean-spirited men, most of them former functionaries of the Israeli lobby, whose main purpose seems to be to keep themselves in business. Robin Cook’s confrontation with the Israelis may have signalled a change in European Union policy, but it is still too early to tell. In any event there is no gainsaying the central tension, which is between Palestinians and Israelis over the land. That contest will continue, and in the absence of a credible Arab military deterrent, or a serious American dispute with Israel, it is imperative that we think of what is within our means at present.
For Palestinians, one of the first imperatives is somehow to prevent disadvantaged Palestinians from taking jobs constructing Israeli settlements. Obviously such jobs are taken out of desperation. Three weeks ago when I asked a Palestinian truck driver why he was working for an Israeli contractor, he replied, “I need to put food on my table. Find me another job, and I’ll stop right away.” With the cooperation of the Authority we need immediate attention to this problem, the answer to which is to set up an unemployment fund to prevent, or at least discourage, men from taking these jobs. I see no reason why the Legislative Council cannot challenge Arafat on this point, putting it in the context of the continuing debate over PA corruption. The fact is, for example, that somewhere between forty and fifty thousand men are employed in security services, most of them as informers and supererogatory guards. Why can’t this expenditure be revised so as to divert money from security to land preservation? Additionally, there are four million Palestinians living abroad, quite a few of them well-off and able to contribute a monthly sum to this unemployment (or alternative employment) fund. This is an urgent necessity, which in our addiction to pointless theoretical debate over “strategy” is left out completely.
Along with restraining Palestinians from building Israeli settlements, we have to think over the whole matter of civil disobedience campaigns. I do not refer to a new intifada, since that would be to repeat something that cannot be repeated. But I do think a sustained series of peaceful marches on settlements undergoing construction, blocking traffic, demonstrations, etc. must be considered as part of a general strategy for containing Israel’s daily expansionism. Since we cannot for obvious reasons reproduce the southern Lebanese situation, which has given Hizballah an important victory, we have to plan for what we can do, and more important, for what we can win. Rebuilding demolished houses falls in the same category of disobedience and resistance. But none of this can be contemplated unless the leadership, under pressure from the Palestinian population, is driven to raise these matters, forced to concede publically that the whole Oslo process no longer has any substance and that more urgent matters of self-preservation are our new priority.
Lastly an international campaign must be mounted against settlements and for self-determination. This would help the European Union to determine its priorities more crisply, and at last would put the United States on notice that we can no longer tolerate the slow erosion of our territorial sovereignty as a people. I have been surprised during the past few months that wherever I have spoken or written the response has been enthusiastic: Arabs, Europeans, Americans, Asians, and Africans are waiting to hear from us, are looking for ways to support a struggle that diminishes Israel’s power and extraordinary arrogance. Yet unless we once again assume the responsibility for conducting our fight against apartheid as a just one, nothing very much can happen. We have been bogged down for so long in the minutiae of a fraudulent peace process that we have been unable to utter or even recall our own first principles. Netanyahu’s Israel has made no secret of wanting to fight a war of attrition against us, so surely the time has come for us to admit this and disrupt the wearying charade that has involved us in five years of fruitless haggling over less and less.
We have to be able to engage Israeli public opinion on our own terms, not as providers of security but as seekers after justice. I have no doubt that outside the main channels provided by the establishment— Labor, Likud, or religious—there are numerous avenues for communicating with Israelis who are prepared to fight against apartheid and theocracy in their country. And here we must courageously welcome such people and not hide behind Jesuistic casuistry about being opposed to “normalization.” We must normalize with Israelis who share our goals, that is, self-determination for two peoples in Palestine. And we must be prepared to meet and visit with people like Daniel Barenboim—who has made no secret of wanting to perform for Palestinian and Arab audiences—who correctly perceive that the only real avenue open for reconciliation is culture, not politics, nor economic schemes. What can be wrong with having him perform in Ramallah or Cairo or Damascus, a great artist who speaks of peace and justice for the Palestinians openly? There are others like him whom out of fear and timidity we have avoided. The time has come to make justice a common topic for us and for Israelis.
