from Representations of the Intellectual
15
The Middle East “Peace Process”: Misleading Images and Brutal Actualities (1995)
Published in an abbreviated form in The Nation magazine in October 1995, “The Middle East ‘Peace Process’” articulates Said’s objections to the Oslo accords. Ceremoniously signed by Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, the Declaration of Principles granted the Palestinians autonomy but no sovereignty over land that Israel had illegally occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israel War. Said was among the few Palestinian intellectuals to speak against what he saw as a “deeply flawed and imperfect peace.” Oslo, Said has said, was a “peace of the weak,” an effort by the Palestinian leadership to preserve its authority and ensure its political survival.
With the stroke of a pen, Arafat signed an agreement that made no mention of the end of the Israeli occupation. Nor did it even address the predicament of the 3.5 million Palestinian refugees outside of Gaza and the West Bank, who were driven from their homes and dispossessed of their land in 1948. According to Oslo’s terms, Israel maintained control of 97 percent of the West Bank and 40 percent of Gaza; yet it left Israel in charge of borders, security, and air and water rights to such an extent that Said wrote, “even Yasir Arafat has to receive permission from the Israelis to exit and enter Gaza.” The results of the agreement were shocking. Palestinian unemployment skyrocketed to over 35 percent; the Israeli settlements continued to be built, while the demolition of Palestinian homes continued under the Israel Military Law of Occupation.
Said’s criticism of Oslo not surprisingly earned him the acrimony of the PLO leadership. On August 22, 1996, officials of the Palestinian Authority raided a number of bookstores in the West Bank city of Ramallan and in Gaza and seized copies of Said’s books, one of which included the Arabic translation of “The Middle East ‘Peace Process.’”
Under pressure from the Palestinian residents of Hebron not to sign an agreement that would give 450 Israeli settlers encamped in the center of town separate rights and an army to guard them, Yasir Arafat theatrically pulled out of his eleventh-hour meeting with Shimon Peres. “We are not slaves!” Arafat shouted. Moments later he was reached on the telephone by Dennis Ross, the U.S. State Department’s “coordinator” in charge of the Middle East peace process. “If you don’t sign now,” Ross was reported to have said, “you don’t get the $100 million”—a reference to America’s yearly pledge toward Palestinian development projects in the West Bank. Arafat signed, and the protests in Hebron continued.
As a negotiating turn, this was not unusual. Without maps of their own, without the requisite detailed knowledge of the facts or figures possessed by the Israelis, without a firm commitment to principle, the Palestinian negotiators have consistently yielded to Israeli and American pressures. What Palestinians have gotten in the latest agreement, initialed in Taba, Egypt, is a series of municipal responsibilities in Bantustans dominated from the outside by Israel. What Israel has gotten is official Palestinian consent to continued occupation.
What’s astonishing is that this agreement—popularly known as Oslo II—is now being celebrated in the West as an Israeli “withdrawal” from the Occupied Territories, as an honorable and serious move toward peace, when in fact there is neither occasion nor cause to justify such hand-clapping. Signed and saluted in the White House on September 28, almost two years to the day after the “historic handshake” that sealed Oslo I, the agreement enjoins Israel merely to redeploy its troops from the center of the main West Bank towns (excluding Hebron) to their outskirts. In this redeployment, Israel will establish sixty-two new military bases in the West Bank. As Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has put it, “The problem is not [the army’s] permanent presence but its freedom of action.” Israel will thus retain control of exits and entries to the towns, as it will control all roads on the West Bank.
Palestinians will have municipal authority over the towns and some 400 villages within the Israeli cordon, but they will have no real security responsibility, no right to resources or land outside the populated centers, and no authority at all over Israeli settlers, police, and army. Israel will continue to hold fifty or sixty Palestinian villages. The settlements will be untouched and a system of roads will connect them to one another, making it possible for settlers, like whites in the old South Africa, to avoid or never even see the people of the Bantustans, and making it impossible for Palestinians to rule over any contiguous territory.
In numerical terms, the Palestinians will at first have civil control—without sovereignty—of about 5 percent of the West Bank. Israel will have exclusive control of 8 percent (the settlements, not counting those around illegally annexed East Jerusalem), plus effective control—security, water, land, air space and airwaves, roads, borders, etc.—of the whole.
Politically and economically this is disastrous, and I think it is absolutely legitimate to suggest that no negotiations, and no agreement, would be better than what has so far been determined. Oslo II gives the Palestinian National Authority the appurtenances of rule without the reality—a kingdom of illusions, with Israel firmly in command. Any West Bank town, under the new agreement, can be closed at will by the Israelis, as was Jericho during the last days of August, and Gaza in September. All commercial traffic between Gaza and the West Bank autonomy zones is in Israeli hands. Thus, a truckload of tomatoes going from Gaza to the West Bank town of Nablus must stop at the border, be unloaded onto an Israeli truck, then be reloaded onto a Palestinian truck upon entering Nablus. This takes three days, with the fruit rotting in the meantime and the costs going so high as to make such transactions prohibitive. (In the West Bank it is cheaper to import tomatoes from Spain than from Gaza.)
The idea, of course, is to impress upon Palestinians, in as humiliating a way as possible, that Israel controls their economy. Likewise, their future political process. The Legislative Council of eighty-two people is to be elected next spring, although candidates have to be approved by the Israelis. “Racists” and “terrorists” will be barred. (There is no parallel proscription on the Israeli side, where, for instance, Rafael Eitan, a war criminal of the 1982 Lebanon invasion and a man who has referred to Palestinians as “cockroaches,” sits in the Knesset.) Israel may veto any piece of legislation enacted by the Council, which has no jurisdiction over or representatives from East Jerusalem. Arafat, in any case, has won for himself the privilege of being called chairman/president, although the Israelis insisted that he name a vice president/chairman. He seems to have refused, insisting that anyone inferior to him must be known only as mutahaddith, or spokesman.
Much of what Oslo II prescribes so disadvantageously for Palestinians—and, in the long run, for Israelis as well—was set in motion by Oslo I. You wouldn’t know this from conventional “expert” opinion in the West. The prevailing belief underlying most analysis—from such dubious authorities as Bernard Lewis, Judith Miller, Steven Emerson, Daniel Pipes, and others—has been that now the only serious obstacles to peace are Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. In this, the experts have followed the politicians. The British journalist Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent on October 30, 1994, noted how frequently President Clinton used the words “terrorism” and “violence” while on a trip through the Middle East:
The use of that one corrosive word “terror” . . . crept through every speech the President made. He lectured King Hussein on “the face of terror and extremism”; he talked in Damascus of “terrorist infiltration” and “of murderous acts of terror,” he spoke in the Knesset of “the merchants of terror,” linking them in his Israeli speech with what he called “the plague of anti-Semitism.”
That the “peace” under which so many Palestinians have lost hope of any real freedom might be an undesirable state, that it might drive some people to suicidal violence, is a matter almost never looked at, much less debated and admitted.
Consider the situation in the two years s
ince Oslo I was signed. Gaza’s unemployment stands at almost 60 percent. Israel continues to control about 40 percent of Gazan land. It also unilaterally controls the border with Gaza, which is now closed to all but 8,000 Gazans, who must have a pass card showing that they work in Israel. In pre-Oslo 1993, 30,000 people were allowed to cross; in 1987, 80,000. Sara Roy, who more than anyone else in America has chronicled Israel’s systematic de-development of Gaza, wrote in The Christian Science Monitor this past April 12:
Israel will not allow any raw materials into the Gaza Strip. At present, for example, there is no cement in Gaza. Hence, $40 million in donor aid sitting in Gazan banks cannot be spent because needed project material cannot be transported into the strip.
Israel now allows only certain foodstuffs and consumer goods to enter Gaza, including benzene, cooking gas, and sand. Of the 2,000 trucks in the Gaza Strip, only 10 have permits to enter Israel.
Arafat himself still cannot enter Gaza without a permit; nor is there any free passage between Gaza and Jericho. One thousand one hundred military laws still pertain in “autonomous” Gaza; 1,400 in the West Bank. A system of fifty-eight roadblocks prevents Palestinians from going from north to south in the West Bank, especially as the “Judaization” of Jerusalem (imagine the outcry if Jews were forced to endure “Arabization”!) prohibits Arabs from entering the now greatly distended boundaries of the city. Four hundred Gazan students of Bir Zeit University and twelve professors were unable to go to school for about three months. Not only is East Jerusalem cut off from the West Bank and Gaza, which is closed to the outside world like an enormous prison, but Arab life in the Old City is being choked off. People there are being forced out of their houses, and residents of outlying areas like Beit Hanina, Shoufat, and Silwan watch powerless as settler housing projects rear their grossly out-of-proportion dimensions, ruining the city’s natural contours, its air, and its environment. This year has seen a boom in such construction outside East Jerusalem: 1,126 units in the first quarter of 1995, as against 324 in the whole of 1994. All of this occurs with practically nothing being done to resist or prevent the deliberate transformation of an Arab city into a Jewish one.
The wonder of it—given twenty-eight years of military occupation, the deliberate wrecking of the economy and infrastructure, the active humiliation of an entire people, the enormous number of murdered Palestinians (more than 2,000 during the intifada alone, 18,000 to 20,000 during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon)—is not that there is terrorism but that there isn’t more of it.
The Israeli novelist David Grossman, writing in Ha’aretz on April 4, chastised the Jewish left for its shallowness of understanding and “almost complete paralysis” since Oslo I:
Does our very silence constitute a dereliction of historical proportions which will have bitter consequences for Israel for generations to come? . . . I would suggest that we not despise the anxieties of the Palestinians, with whom I have talked. Perhaps they are able to feel on their skins, long before we can, what is actually happening on the ground: it may be that the “entity” that Rabin is willing to “grant” them will in fact be a weird hybrid between autonomy and confederation, crisscrossed by “Israeli” roads and fences, and spotted with numerous settlements at strategic points, in a way which will perpetuate the settlements. An as-if state.
Now with Oslo II, this “as if” status has been certified. Yet every leader responsible for its creation—whether Israeli, Palestinian, or American—as well as their intellectual adjuncts, insists publicly that a series of fractured cantons is really a governable “entity,” and that subservience is self-determination. The dishonesty of it all is breathtaking.
Israel’s settlement policy, for instance, is not discussed; like the question of Jerusalem, it has been placed behind a screen pending final status negotiations, supposed to begin in May of 1996. Yet it is intimately tied to the fate of the “autonomous” areas, as Hebron illustrates. There, the presence of 450 settlers occupying Arab buildings in the center of town has resulted in mass punishment—curfews (one lasting three months), killings, housing demolitions, imprisonments—of the town’s 100,000 Palestinian residents. Elsewhere the situation may be less dramatic, but the pattern of land seizure through expropriation, defoliation, uprooting of trees, and refusal of permits to build or enhance existing Palestinian structures will continue to shape Palestinian life.
If one includes the area around East Jerusalem, Israel has stolen and asserted a presence upon roughly 75 percent of the land of the occupied territories. The settler population now stands at about 320,000. There were ninety-six recorded confiscations and assaults on Palestinian land between October 1993 and January 1995, and there have been more, unrecorded, since. On April 28, 1995, The New York Times reported the confiscation of 135 acres of land (later temporarily “frozen”) in the East Jerusalem sections of Beit Safafa and Beit Hanina but characteristically failed to report what the Arab press and the Monitor reported: that those 135 acres were part of a bigger projected land grab of almost 450 acres. According to the Washington-based Report on Israeli Settlements, the authoritative non-Israeli source on these matters, Rabin has continued building and adding to settlements as a matter of policy.
His government’s “exceptions committee,” headed by Nach Kinarti, a senior official in the Defense Ministry, “has permitted housing construction in every settlement,” according to the Report’s Geoffrey Aronson, who states further:
The massive construction occurring under the auspices of the Rabin government is being undertaken by private contractors, working on the basis of proposals put out for bid by the Ministry of Housing. Most of the residential construction in greater Jerusalem and in settlements along the Green Line is being executed in this manner. In Ma’ale Adumim, for example, “the Ministry of Housing is pushing the city’s development with all its ability,” according to a report in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot.
The construction proceeds on the basis of a decision in principle made by the minister of housing or by the prime minister himself. The exceptions committee later approves formal plans along with the settlements’ planning committee. The government then allocates “state land” for construction . . . [and] assists with the development of infrastructure.
In a settlement just outside Jenin, one of the towns covered by Oslo II, Israel recently approved an expansion project for five new factories, with land provided free to investors, who also got substantial tax breaks. Will this industrial zone ultimately revert to Palestine? Will it be annexed by Israel, its managers simultaneously taking advantage of cheap Palestinian labor? Will Palestinians demand reparations for this and all the land illegally appropriated by the Israeli occupiers? Reparations, a fairly common element in other international peace agreements, have never been raised as an issue for Palestine.
The Clinton Administration, meanwhile, has said or done nothing to oppose these policies, even though U.S. taxpayers are still providing about $5 billion a year to Israel, no strings attached, plus $10 billion in loan guarantees. U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk, former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbyist, former head of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, was asked during his confirmation hearings this year whether there was any U.S. policy vis-à-vis Israeli settlement activity. He said only that he thought the settlements “complicated” the negotiations, though “terrorism has a much more complicating impact.” A few moments later, when asked whether the Rabin government had added to the settlements or permitted new ones since 1993, he said “No,” an outright falsehood.
At Congressional hearings in 1993, Secretary of State Warren Christopher refused even to characterize the territories as occupied. A year later his department’s deputy press secretary, Christine Shelley, when asked by reporters if there was a “clear statement of policy on settlements,” replied:
It certainly comes up from time to time in the context of, you know, testimony and other things. We do—the briefers also from time to t
ime get those questions as well. As to—you know, nothing has changed on that in terms of our position and, you know, I think it’s— you know, I can refer you to, you know, to probably to previous statements by officials on that. But I don’t have anything—you know, I mean, you know, our—I think—I don’t have—you know, I—we— usually we try to have, you know, a little bit of something on that. I’m not sure that it’s going to be, you know, specifically what you’re looking for. You know, generally speaking, our position that on settlements that it’s the Palestinians and Israelis have agreed that the final status negotiations will cover these issues and, you know, that’s— that’s also our view.
There is a causal relationship between this sort of talk and Israel’s emboldened land expropriation. Indeed, silence and the wanton murder of language evident in the phrase “peace process” are central to the Israeli (and American) project. As Peres said in January of this year, “We will build, but without declaring it in public. . . . The Labour Party always knew how to do things quietly . . . but today, everybody announces everything they do in public.” Thus, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics estimated in 1993 a net increase of 10,900 in the settler population; in October 1994 the settler’s council claimed a larger figure (23,600 more than the CBS’s) for the total settler population in the territories, excluding Jerusalem. Israel’s Peace Now reported that there was an increase of 70 percent in government and private investment in settlements in the year following the famous handshake.
In Washington, no one paid attention. Indeed, in the wake of Oslo II, an Arab journalist in the capital told me it is virtually impossible to get any direct answer on U.S. policy positions regarding the occupied territories.
Where Washington has been busiest is in the enfeeblement and marginalization of the United Nations, historically a forum for Palestinian protest, from these proceedings. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright has importuned member states to rescind, modify or otherwise ignore resolutions that might prejudice or in any way affect bilateral negotiations between Israel and Yasir Arafat. All of these resolutions either urged consideration of Palestinian claims for self-determination or denounced unlawful Israeli occupation practices (most of them in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention or of UN principles forbidding the annexation of war gains). Although these were paper resolutions, for Palestinians as a people they represented the only international guarantee that their claims would not be ignored.