The End of the Peace Process, page 33
Al-Khaleej, May 26, 1998
Al-Hayat, May 26, 1998
Al-Ahram Weekly, May 21, 1998
Chapter Forty-four
The Other Wilaya
MOST OF THE great liberation struggles of the twentieth century were unconventional in that they were ultimately won not by armies but by flexible, mobile political forces who relied more on initiative, creativity, and surprise than they did on holding fixed positions, the firepower of conventional armies, and the sheer weight of formal institutions and traditional establishments. During the 1968 Tet offensive the North Vietnamese risked, and lost, many men in all sorts of daring raids inside the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, which is where the American general command was also located. The purpose of these attacks was to draw attention to American and South Vietnamese vulnerability, and this was certain to be recorded on U.S. television. In other words the point was to influence American audiences in America, to provoke resistance and dissent in the United States, to demonstrate the weakness of the American political cause whose main purpose was to impose its will on Vietnam.
During the 1954–62 war of national liberation in Algeria, the FLN divided Algeria into six districts, or wilayas, each of which had its own command structure, field of operations, fighting forces. The seventh wilaya was metropolitan France itself. The idea was that given French military superiority it would be crucial for the liberation movement to conduct political operations behind the French lines, that is, to win as much opinion and gain as much support as possible from French civilians. And this proved to be a significant factor in the Algerian victory which, to repeat, was not military but political. Influential French public figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jean Genet, and others were won over to the Algerian side, even though as French citizens they were expected to oppose the insurrection defying French colonialism.
And in South Africa, it was a major component of ANC policy to make sure that white South Africans were directly involved in the struggle against apartheid. The policy was clear. Since it was necessary to convince whites that a victory for justice was not the beginning of a new form of injustice, whites were always promised that if they stayed, they would enjoy equality with blacks in the event of an ANC victory. Therefore it was a logical necessity for whites to be directly involved in the struggle against apartheid as members of the ANC. Without such a policy of actually getting white men and women to fight a policy that racially favored them, the ANC could not have won the battle inside South Africa. When the movement was at its lowest ebb inside the country, its leaders imprisoned, killed, or exiled, its cadres demoralized, the apartheid government’s forces in complete control, the focus of struggle shifted to the international arena and to influential whites. Similarly during the civil rights movement of the sixties in the United States, it was because the black leadership actively sought out intellectuals and public figures for their support as whites, going on marches, signing petitions, and so forth, that it achieved some measure of success.
Such a strategy demands extraordinary discipline and detail. A friend of mine who went to North Vietnam in the late sixties told me that when he visited the NLF’s political headquarters he was astonished to see an enormous map of the United States divided into each of the five hundred congressional districts. For each district the Vietnamese had drawn up a list of congressmen as well as ten issues—domestic as well as international—that each of the congressmen had voted on. In this way the Vietnamese were able to keep tabs on every voting record and each congressman who might be persuaded to change or reconfirm a vote bearing on the war in Vietnam. And this at a time when the United States was bombing the whole of Indochina on a scale that far outstripped anything in World War II or the Korean conflict.
The South Africans during the 1980s and early 90s organized a boycott of visiting academics, journalists, sports figures, entertainers, and businessmen, but lifted the boycott in individual cases. When I went there in May 1991 as a guest of the Universities of Cape Town and Johannesburg I had to be passed by the boycott committee, who reasoned that my presence would enhance the anti-apartheid struggle. In other words, there was never a total, undiscriminating opposition to every person assumed to be on the other side, neither in Vietnam, the United States, Algeria, nor South Africa. A subtle system of trying to involve people from the opposing camp on the side of liberation was an essential component of the battle.
Our position as Palestinians and Arabs generally in opposition to the abuses of Zionism must deal with the other side with equal knowledge and discrimination. The idea that we should boycott all Israelis as a way of opposing normalization is, in my opinion, far too blunt an instrument and in the end both impractical and self-destructive. In the first place there is practically no conventional Arab military or political force that truly opposes Israel. Even the PLO, to say nothing of states like Jordan and Egypt, have signed peace agreements with Israel. We have no credible military option of any sort, with the exception of a valiant guerilla struggle waged by Hizballah in South Lebanon. Secondly, there are many Israelis who are quite disgusted with the policies of the Netanyahu government and who can be effective in helping us with the struggle against apartheid, which currently disfigures the Israeli and Palestinian landscape. Thirdly, we have foolishly confined our “acceptance” of Israeli forces on our side only to those connected in some way to the government and establishment. This is as true of the PLO currying favor with the Labor Party as it is of independent intellectuals who are happy to meet with people like Mossad operative David Kimche in Copenhagen.
This is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of our battle for equal rights and for self-determination. As was the case in South Africa, we cannot be ambiguous about making it clear to Israelis that our fight does not envision driving them out of the Middle East altogether. We cannot turn the clock back to pre-1917 or pre-1948 days, but we can assure them, as Mandela regularly assured the white South African community, that we want them to stay and share the same land with us on an equal basis. There is therefore an appeal to be made to Israelis on the grounds of civil, human, and political rights for all the peoples of Palestine. What we oppose is that Israelis should dominate us, and continue to occupy and deprive us of our land. If we were to say to democratic elements in the Israeli population that we want the same things, equal rights and a decent life in peace and security, we can then enlist each other’s help in the struggle. But we must do this with attention to the exact nature of Israeli civil society, just as the Vietnamese did with the United States or the Algerians with France.
I emphasize this notion of acting and taking into consideration the existence of other wilayas as a way of criticizing the ineffective notion of an absolute demarcation between us and every single Israeli or Jew. This is why in a previous article I spoke about the need for Palestinian intellectuals to address Israeli students, professors, intellectuals, artists, and other independent people directly, rather than to say that we will never talk to or deal with any Israeli. In the absence of a real military option, in the absence even of a real front dividing Palestinians from Israelis (the two populations are mixed despite the dreams of Zionism to separate them) there is no way for Palestinians to gain their rights without actively involving Israelis in their struggle. A well-organized international campaign against the settlements; a major march, including Israelis and Palestinians, on one of the settlements; public meetings in which common goals are articulated: in such efforts it is we, not the Israelis, who must take the intiative, and we must do so at the same time that we speak openly and candidly about putting our own house in order. As a people we can no longer endure quietly the tyranny and corruption of the present Palestinian regime. Make no mistake about it, the Israeli government wants a weak, corrupt, and unpopular Palestinian Authority. It has no use for democracy or a dialogue between equals. This is why we must take our cause to the very heart of the Israeli wilaya, to speak both of peace and of democracy for two peoples. Until we can do this and do it without complexes about speaking with “the enemy,” until we can make distinctions between the real forces of peace in Israel and the Labor Party, we will continue to drift and suffer the costs of occupation and undemocractic Palestinian rule. We must speak the truth to power.
Al-Hayat, June 4, 1998
Al-Ahram Weekly, June 4, 1998
Chapter Forty-five
Breaking the Deadlock: A Third Way
NOW THAT OSLO has clearly been proven the deeply flawed and unworkable “peace” process that it really was from the outset, Arabs, Israelis and their various and sundry supporters need to think a great deal more, rather than less, clearly. A number of preliminary points seem to suggest themselves at the outset. “Peace” is now a discredited word, and is no guarantee that further harm and devastation will not ensue to the Palestinian people. The Roman historian Tacitus says of the Roman conquest of Britain that “they [the Roman army] created a desolation, and called it peace.” The very same thing happened to us as a people, with the willing collaboration of the Palestine Authority, the Arab states (with a few significant exceptions), Israel, and the United States.
Second, it is no use pretending that we can improve on the current deadlock, which in the Oslo framework as its stands is unbreakable, by returning to golden moments of the past. We can neither return to the days before the war of 1967, nor can we accept slogans of rejectionism that in effect send us back to the golden age of Islam. The only way to undo injustice, as Israel Shahak and Azmi Bishara have both said, is to create more justice, not to create new forms of vindictive injustice, i.e., “They have a Jewish state, we want an Islamic state.” On the other hand, it seems equally fatuous to impose total blockades against everything Israeli (now in fashion in various progressive Arab circles) and to pretend that that is the really virtuous nationalist path. There are after all one million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. Are they also to be boycotted, as they were during the 1950s? What about Israelis who support our struggle, but are neither members of the slippery Peace Now or of Meretz or of the “great” Israeli Labor Party led by Ehud Barak, widely presumed to be the murderer of Kamal Nasir and Abu Iyad? Should they—artists, free intellectuals, writers, students, academics, ordinary citizens—be boycotted because they are Israelis? Obviously to do so would be to pretend that the South African triumph over apartheid hadn’t occurred, and to ignore all the many victories for justice that occurred because of nonviolent political cooperation between like-minded people on both sides of a highly contested and moveable line. And we must cross the line of separation—which has been one of the main intentions of Oslo to erect—that maintains current apartheid between Arab and Jew in historic Palestine. Go across, but do not enforce the line.
Third and perhaps most important: there is a great difference between political and intellectual behavior. The intellectual’s role is to speak the truth, as plainly, directly and as honestly as possible. No intellectual is supposed to worry about whether what is said embarasses, pleases, or displeases people in power. Speaking the truth to power means additionally that the intellectual’s constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a career interest: only the truth unadorned. Political behavior principally relies upon considerations of interest— advancing a career, working with governments, maintaining one’s position, etc. In the wake of Oslo it is therefore obvious that continuing the line propagated by the three parties to its provisions—Arab states, the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government—is political behavior, not intellectual. Take for example the joint declaration made by Egyptian and Israeli men (mostly men) on behalf of the Cairo Peace Society and Peace Now. Remove all the high-sounding phrases about “peace,” and not only do you get a ringing endorsement of Oslo, but also a return to the Sadat-Begin agreements of the late seventies, which are described as courageous and momentous. But what does this have to do with Palestinians whose territory and self-determination were removed from those courageous and momentous Camp David documents? Besides, Egypt and Israel are still at peace. What would people think if a few Israelis and Palestinians got together and issued ringing proclamations about Israeli-Syrian peace that were meant to “appeal” to those two governments? Crazy, most people would say. What entitles two parties, one who oppresses Palestinians and the other who has arrogated the right to speak for them, to proclaim peaceful goals in a conflict that is not between them? Moreover, the idea of appealing to this Israeli government, expecting solutions from it, is like asking Count Dracula to speak warmly about the virtues of vegetarianism.
In short, political behavior of this sort simply reinforces the hold of a dying succubus, Oslo, on the future of real, as opposed to fraudulent, American-Israeli-Palestinian peace. But neither, I must also say, is it intellectually responsible in effect to return to blanket boycotts of the sort now becoming the fashion in various Arab countries. As I said earlier, this sort of tactic (it is scarcely a strategy, any more than sticking one’s head in the sand like an ostrich is a strategy) is regressive. Israel is neither South Africa, nor Algeria, nor Vietnam. Whether we like it or not, the Jews are not ordinary colonialists: they suffered the Holocaust, and they are the victims of anti-Semitism. But they cannot use those facts to initiate and continue the dispossession of another people that bears no responsibility for either of those prior facts. I have been saying for twenty years that we have no military option, and are not likely to have one anytime soon. And neither does Israel have a real military option. Despite their enormous power, Israelis have not succeeded in achieving either the acceptance or the security they crave. On the other hand, not all Israelis are the same, and whatever happens, we must learn to live with them in some form, preferably justly, rather than unjustly.
Therefore the third way avoids both the bankruptcy of Oslo and the retrograde policies of total boycotts. It must begin in terms of the idea of citizenship, not nationalism, since the notion of separation (Oslo) and of triumphalist unilateral theocratic nationalism, whether Jewish or Muslim, simply does not deal with the realities before us. Therefore a concept of citizenship, whereby every individual has the same citizen’s rights, based not on race or religion, but on equal justice for each person guaranteed by a constitution, must replace all our outmoded notions of how Palestine will be cleansed of our enemies. Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing whether it is done by Serbians, Zionists, or Hamas. What Azmi Bishara and several Israeli Jews like Ilan Pappe are now trying to strengthen is a position and a politics by which Jews and those Palestinians already inside the Jewish state have the same rights; there is no reason why the same principle should not apply on the occupied territories, where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live side by side, together, but with only one people, Israeli Jews, now dominating the other. So the choice is either apartheid or justice and citizenship. We must recognize the realities of the Holocaust not as a blank check for Israelis to abuse us, but as a sign of our humanity, our ability to understand history, our requirement that our suffering be mutually acknowledged. And we must also recognize that Israel is a dynamic society containing many currents—not all of them Likud, Labor, and religious. We must deal with those who recognize our rights. We should be willing as Palestinians to go to speak to Palestinians first, but to Israelis too, and we should tell our truths, not the stupid compromises of the sort that the PLO and PA have traded in, which in effect is the apartheid of Oslo.
The real issue is intellectual truth and the need to combat any sort of apartheid and racial discrimination. There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric. One thing must be clear: we are not fighting the injustices of Zionism in order to replace them with an inviduous nationalism (religious or civil) that decrees that Arabs in Palestine are more equal than others. The history of the modern Arab world—with all its political failures, its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing production, the fact that alone of all modern peoples we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development—is disfigured by a whole series of outmoded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that the Holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the elders of Zion is one that is acquiring far too much, currency. Why do we expect the world to believe our sufferings as Arabs if (a) we cannot recognize the sufferings of others, even of our oppressors, and (b) we cannot deal with facts that nullify the simplistic ideas of the sort propagated by bien-pensants intellectuals who refuse to see the relationshp between the Holocaust and Israel?
But to support the efforts of Garaudy and his Holocaust-denying friends in the name of “freedom of opinion” is a silly ruse that discredits us more than we already are discredited in the world’s eyes for our incompetence, our failure to fight a decent battle, our radical misunderstanding of history and the world we live in. Why don’t we fight harder for freedom of opinions in our own societies, a freedom, no one needs to be told, that scarcely exists? When I mentioned the Holocaust in an article I wrote here last November, I received more stupid vilification than I ever thought possible. One famous intellectual even accused me of trying to gain a certificate of good behavior from the Zionist lobby. Of course I support Garaudy’s right to say what he pleases and I oppose the wretched loi Gayssot under which he was prosecuted and condemned. But I also think that what he says is trivial and irresponsible, and when we endorse it it allies us necessarily with Le Pen and all the retrograde right-wing fascist elements in French society.
