The Palestinian negotiators are busy not with the momentous issues of land, refugees or the capital but with negotiating small obstacles that are capable of destroying everything. Everyone is trying to solve the issue of 20 people who sought refuge in President Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah after an agreement with Israel that the Palestinian Authority would either imprison them in its own prison or in Jericho in return for their not being killed by Israeli forces.
Imprisonment in Jericho or living with Arafat in his office in Ramallah, — the Palestinian issue is being squandered on solving relatively small problems. Dealing with the 20 people holds up the vastly more pressing concerns of five million Palestinians.
Israel enjoys stirring up Palestinian dissent because it knows that the Palestinians have the attention of the White House, which wants to solve the greater issue peacefully — partly in order to manage the reverberations of both the Bin Laden and Saddam battles. Israel thinks the answer is to try and replace Washington’s enthusiasm with exasperation by riddling the road map with what it hopes will look like petty Palestinian complaints: The security wall, the checkpoints and the prisoners. With very little effort, they can take the Bush administration to the point of giving up — because the current Palestinian structure is a prime example of time wasting. No matter how hard Mahmoud Abbas tries to seem tenacious, the signs of despair resulting from the constant mutiny he faces from the Arafat camp and, more specifically, from those who have lost their authority, are difficult to conceal. A lot of time and energy have been squandered, and national unity has gone down the drain, and with them has gone the hope of a stronger negotiating position than the one that exists today. This is especially upsetting since, with the fall of Saddam’s regime, the Israeli position has weakened because it can no longer claim that a threat from that quarter forces it into belligerence.
The current Palestinian model is regretfully incapable of neutralizing these internal disagreements and enabling all sides to coexist. Negotiations with Israel require exceptional collaboration from the opposition, whether inside the Palestinian Authority, where the struggle for power is ongoing, or from the outside — the various armed and unarmed Palestinian groups.
The Palestinians should learn from the example of the Israelis. If the Labour party opposes the Likud party, it will simply not participate in the government, and that keeps disagreements inside the Parliament. And when a politician such as Benjamin Netanyahu is hostile toward the leader of his own government — Ariel Sharon — he too limits his opposition to words on television or keeps them inside the party.
It is true though that this is the first time Palestinians experience the phenomenon of opposing political camps working in the same area and being governed by the same authority. But it is also the first time that we have seen a Palestinian government with two heads. The upshot of this situation is that the two sides are, almost automatically, getting bogged down in marginal differences and having no time and energy left for the far more momentous issue of the negotiations.
Arab News Opinion 9 August 2003
