Twenty Palestinian citizens of the West Bank and Gaza, nearly all of
them extremely popular and prominent, issued a bitingly pointed denunciation
of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, accusing it of massive "corruption,
humiliation and abuse", selling out the Palestinian people in the
"peace process" as it is still quaintly known, and generally
allowing the Palestinian common weal to deteriorate on every level. Oslo
is blamed for much of this, but the statement specifically (and justifiably)
named Arafat himself as the most responsible party for the whole sorry
mess; he is cited as having himself opened the doors to financial corruption,
misled the people as to Oslo's achievements, and promised them a Singapore
instead of the stagnant morass in which almost three million people, with
the exception of two or three hundred around him who have officially designated
VIP status and are doing brilliantly, thank you very much, have sunk.
With characteristic subtlety, the Authority responded by arresting nine
of the 20, and placing two more under house arrest; several others have
been called in for interrogation, all under the orders of Ghazi Jabali,
head of Arafat's main police force, who cameto Palestine with his chief
in 1994, having sat out the Intifada in comparative luxury in Tunis.
The New York Times and a few other mainstream papers picked up the story
on 29 November, but none of them put it in its real context, or interpreted
it for what it is, a tip-of-the-iceberg sign of how totally unpopular Arafat,
his partners the US and Israel, and their peace have now become, not just
among the "Islamic enemies of peace" that Bill Clinton sees around
every corner, nor among the "Syrian agents" that Arab clients
of the US love to blame for discordant noises about Oslo, nor "isolated"
people like myself, but among nearly all ordinary Palestinians and their
Arab counterparts.
It isn't at allwhat Thomas Friedman recently suggests is the problem, that
the Arab governments that have signed on to the peace process haven't sufficiently
educated their populations into "the culture of peace," a fatuous
phrase if there ever was one, but that "peace" is being made
by undemocratic, profoundly unpopular and isolated governments who have
charged ahead with it because of US support for their precarious regimes,
and because Israel's blatantly explicit unwillingness to abide by the two
UN resolutions that stipulate land for peace has made it clear that the
settlements will continue and grow larger, Jerusalem will remain under
exclusive Israeli sovereignty, borders and securityas well as water will
be under Israeli control, and whatever meaningless Palestinian "state"
will emerge is as contemptibly unviable, as it was always planned to be.
Add to that the horrible deterioration of Palestinian quality of life,
plus Israel's utter refusal to accept any significant return or compensation
of the refugees that it created in 1948, and one has something of an idea
of how desperate and disgusted all Palestinians feel now that the "final
status negotiations" approach their culmination, with the Western
media already celebrating the millennial peace and the World Bank forking
over more and more money directly into Arafat's greedy little hands.
The misrepresentations of "peace" extend still further, as
a closer look at the signatories will reveal. Bassam Al-Shakaa is not simply
the former mayor of Nablus, but a genuinely admired hero who lost both
of his legs when an Israeli-set booby trap exploded in his car in 1980.
Known as a fearless champion of Palestinian independence, he refused to
allow Arafat to visit him in his home in 1994, and when I spoke to him
last week he told me that despite his house arrest he routinely leaves
his house in his wheel-chair to buy bread and defy Jabali to arrest him.
Rawya Al-Shawa is a strikingly brilliant and articulate member of the Legislative
Council who comes from Gaza's leading family; her husband is Gaza's mayor
but she has made no secret of her opposition to Arafat's dreadful regime.
Tactfully, the bully Jabali didn't even try to arrest her, obviously preferring
not to take on someone so formidable but settling instead for easier targets.
Ahmad Kattamesh, who was arrested, has only just been released by the
Israelis after being the longest held prisoner in administrative detention,
i.e. without trial. Abdel-Jawad Saleh is a former PLO minister, Fatah member
(like several of the other signatories), and Council member. Adil Samara
and Abdel-Sattar Qasem are respected,independent academics; Adnan Odeh
is head of the Parliamentary Research Unit, Abdel-Rahman Kitani is a well-known
physician, as is Yasser Abu Saffiyeh, who is also a board member of the
Union of Health Work Committees. Arafat also tried to strip the nine legislators
oftheir parliamentary immunity, raiding homes and offices with stunningbrutality.
Even as I write these lines, hundreds, and even thousands more Palestinians
are speaking out, signing petitions, openly calling for new elections and
Arafat's ouster. The scandal is that the Chairman is being kept around
simply to sign this convenient peace, in the meantime employing no less
than about 125,000 people as part of hissecurity and bureaucratic apparatus
(almost 70 per cent of the budget) while spending only two per cent on
the infrastructure. Especially hated lieutenants of his -- celebrated in
Israel and Washington as brave advocates of peace -- have built ostentatious
multi-milliondollar villas on the Gaza beachfront (in full view of Jabalya,
a 90,000-person refugee camp criss-crossed with open sewers), their wives
go to Paris on shopping sprees, and their children and relatives manage
monopolies of nearly everything, with Israeli bank accounts to squirrel
away their money in. Unemployment fluctuates between 20 and 40 per cent,
the house demolitions and land expropriations continue unimpeded, while
Ehud Barak, that famous champion of peace, continues to increase military
and settlement spending beyond even Netanyahu's.
Even the combined talents of Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh couldn't
have invented anything more stupid and doomed to failure than the current
peace juggernaut. It will certainly hurtle forward but just as certainly
bring more instability and bloodshed for Palestinians and Israelis alike.
But neither the enlightened Israeli nor the Westernliberal Left seems to
want to step forward and state the obvious, as if the word "peace"
has become a mantra that has hypnotised them all into stupefaction.
What policy makers should at very least sense, however, is that Palestinians
and Israelis are too politicised and savvy a pair of peoples to be fooled
for long by their cowardly leaders, or to accept schemes for separation
that are little more than apartheid given a new name.
The scandal of this recent protest should awaken people to what has been
happening all along in this most grotesquely misnamed of all "peace"
processes. But, alas, it won't, so stay tuned for more of the same until
some eyes are opened, and Arafat is finally removed, which he most certainly
will be once he has fulfilled his purpose. Then the upheaval may be too
great to stop, and Oslo will be exposed forever as the lamentable mockery
it has been for so long.
For the present, an international conference of politically active and
independent Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, Israel and all
the refugee populations is being planned. Its platform will include an
alternative peace process, democratic elections, and representative institutions.
One hopes that such an initiative will at last succeed in allowing Palestinians
to represent themselves.
But matters on the ground have considerably worsened, with several of
the jailed protesters now being denied the right to see lawyers and family
members, street demonstrations increasing and, not least, Palestinian negotiators
at long last facing an inevitable reality:that Israeli final-status negotiations
do not include any plans for either dismantling or curtailing the expansion
of most of the settlements. So much, then, for the "advantages"
of peace.