“If they are interested in peaceful dialogue, they ought to do everything they can to stop the terrorist activity that has accelerated in recent months.” Such is the harsh assessment by George W. Bush, given in Texas last Friday, of the struggle by Palestinians to end Israeli occupation of their land and the stranglehold the Israeli Army has had on their lives for the last 35 years.
No word of criticism here, by way of evenhandedness, of Israel’s demolition of homes, assaults by Apache helicopters on populated centers and armored raids into Palestinians-controlled towns, the uprooting of orchards, the relentless checkpoints that have turned territories into a large prison, the destruction of Palestinian economy to a point where the majority of people have been reduced to paupers surviving on less than a subsistence level, and of course that criminal policy of “selective assassination”, a policy that no civilized nation in the world today would ever pursue without finding itself beyond the pale in the international community.
But then, as any Palestinian from the West Bank would tell you, Israel is neither civilized nor a nation.
Those us of us progressive Palestinians who had thought, up till recently, that peace between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land was possible and desirable are beginning to have second thoughts. Maybe Zionism is, after all, what is its detractors have been saying that is all a long (and not just in the Arab world), a “form of racism and racial discrimination.”
Maybe Israel is, after all, a predator state that, to define itself, must constantly expand, rob and ravage. And maybe we are indeed at a point of no return in a conflict that appears to have taken a momentum all its own, beyond anybody’s ability to control.
Ariel Sharon’s tactics are plain: To extinguish any hope that Palestinian independence is possible in the immediate or foreseeable future. (No one close to Sharon has said he is prepared to offer the Palestinians much more than the scattered patchwork of land they currently control fully or partially, amounting to 42 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, separated by zones of Israeli Army occupation.) But these tactics, embodied in the use of brute force, will only open the way for sustained and wider resistance.
A people who have nothing, you see, have nothing to lose.
It could very well be, however, that it is Sharon who is up against the wall here, not the Palestinians. He has put himself in that position (and by definition the Jews of Palestine) because he belongs to that generation of Zionists who believe that an occupied people have to learn to accept their occupiers, not get uppity by going around demanding their freedom.
To be sure, this man is clearly being encouraged to adopt that posture by none other than President Bush himself, whose statements, including the one he made last Friday, must have given Israel much gratification, as well as the green light to go ahead and continue using its American-supplied weapons anyhow it sees fit.
The US position on the conflict is equally plain: Washington accepts Israel’s argument that the onus is on the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, to end the violence by “cracking down on suicide bombers.”
It is doubtful, even were that to be true, that Arafat can do it.
Living under siege, with nothing to hope for, Palestinians have come to accept the bomber’s creed that when a man cannot choose the way he lives, then he will choose the way he dies. Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the two militant groups behind the bombing operations, and whose cadres have committed themselves to martyrdom, do not only have a popular base in society, but operate totally independently. Moreover, these two organizations have linked up, from the outset of the intifada, with cadres from the nationalist elements, including Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), to form the National and Islamic Forces (NIF), whose militants have not been known to check in with the Palestinian Authority before they mount their operations.
It was from the NIF ranks that those guerrilla fighters (“terrorists” to Sharon and Bush) have made life miserable, not to mention dangerous, for settlers. (Their logic here is this: occupied territory is a battle zone, and you must be insane to bring your women and children to a battle zone if you don’t want them shot at and killed.)
Recently Yasser Arafat invited Hamas and Islamic Jihad to join the PA in a “national unity government”. That may or may not happen; but the fact that he feels compelled at this time to extend such an invitation to the leaders of these two groups, rather than lock them up, as he had done before the intifada, shows how political power in the West Bank and Gaza is devolving from the PA to the Islamist and the nationalist factions, and from accommodating the occupation to confronting it.
It is doubtful then, should Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres ever meet to arrange a cease-fire, as they are expected to do at some unspecified time soon, that the Palestinian leader could convince his people to lay down their arms unless they are offered meaningful concessions, such as lifting the siege on Palestinian towns, and the wanton repression of the entire Palestinian population, and the opening of Orient House.
Orient House is of special significance to both Palestinians and the wider Arab world as a symbol of the hope that East Jerusalem would one day become the capital of a future Palestinian state.
Outside that, no one is going to listen.
Israelis, as occupiers, may be arbiters of how Palestinians should live. They are not of how Palestinians should die.
A martyr who dies struggling for freedom is not wasting a life, for his sacrifice will demand from those he leaves behind not just obeisance but live echo, a sacrifice whose energies and instigations will animate in society new modes of thought, new poetics of insight into human being.
It is not for nothing that we say that when a man dies, his life ends; when a martyr dies, his life begins.
