As blunders go, it was gargantuan.
When the Palestinian delegation opted to return empty-handed from Camp David, and later turned down the Clinton proposals in the waning days of the former president’s administration, the whole peace process suddenly stopped, as if a referee had blown a whistle. And when PA leader Yasser Arafat returned from the talks to rousing cheers from his supporters, and he clambered atop the roof of his Mercedes limousine in Gaza to holler, "Like it or not, Jerusalem is the capital of the Palestinian state, and whoever doesn’t like it can go jump in a lake," (which foreign reporters translated literally from Arabic as "go and drink from the sea"), he in effect created the ambiance for the current intifada, an uprising that has cost the Palestinian community dearly in human lives, economic destitution and social disruption, with no discernible political gains.
When, six months after the outbreak of this uprising, the Palestinian leader delivered a major speech in Gaza on March 10, in which he was reduced to calling for resumption of peace talks based on understandings reached in the same rounds of negotiations at Camp David, Ariel Sharon, the new prime minister, scoffed at the idea, and George Bush, the new American president, said no go, with both pronouncing those understandings as expired. (Inflation, you see, is a phenomenon not just in the financial but in the diplomatic world as well.) Meanwhile, the Palestinians were left adrift, confused and disoriented, their dream of an independent state now even more mockingly remote than at any other time in their modern history.
To be sure, that’s not to absolve the ruthless Sharon or his predecessor, Ehud Barak, whose much trumpeted "generous offer" at Camp David had been spurned by the Palestinian delegation. What was put on the negotiating table, you will recall, was not a contiguous state, but a set of cantons divided by Israeli settlements and roads crisscrossing Palestinian land, guarded by Israeli army units.
You will also recall that of the former, there had been an increase of 50 percent in the number of housing units as well as settlers since the Oslo Agreement had been signed in 1993; and of the latter, there had been an increase in the length to roads built for settlements used only by settlers, of 160 kilometers between 1997 and 1999. That’s a lot of housing units, a lot of settlers and a lot of roads in the tiny piece of territory we call the West Bank and Gaza. And that’s a lot of bad faith on the part of a community that wants to be a peace partner not just of the people of Palestine, but presumably the people of the Arab world as well.
But. And it’s a big but. The issue here is this: Has the Palestinian leadership had a strategy all along that guided its vision of the future and determined its policies in the wake of the turnaround at Camp David and the onset of the intifada? Or was this leadership driven by the same inertia and old political habits that had in the past taken the Palestinian people from one military defeat to another, one diplomatic disaster to another and one bloody massacre to another?
The struggle for Palestine has been arguably one of the most complex conflicts in the history of the 20th century, and it thus needed leaders to think with, not to think of; leaders, in other words, who do not tell their people what to think, but what to think of; leaders, in short, informed in the ways of the world, with a clear vision of their people’s potential and limitations, and whose every decision is made in a studied manner rather than precipitously or off-the-cuff.
Today, Yasser Arafat (and, by definition, the destitute nation he leads) finds himself in a bind, with everyone coming down on him like a ton of bricks — the Americans only figuratively, but the Israelis quite literally. Even the speech that he gave last Sunday in Gaza, in which he called for an end to all armed attacks against Israel, did not mollify anyone.
For his part, President Bush continued to put the blame squarely on the Palestinian leader for the failure of the administration’s first concerted peace initiative, demanding in effect that Arafat put a stop to the uprising and crack down on militant groups — as if the man could do it with the flick of a finger. The American president’s exasperation with Arafat was evident when he met last week with American Jewish leaders at the White House, and told them that the PA leader had been pressing (the leak is that the word used was "pestering") the United States to pressure Israel to take a more forthcoming approach toward negotiations. "Who is he kidding?" Bush reportedly told the gathering.
What is even more ominous is not just the absence from the State Department language of any call for restraint by Israel, putting the onus exclusively on Arafat even as Israeli warplanes dropped bombs on Palestinian towns in the West Bank last Friday, killing eight Palestinians, and swept into Gaza the following day, bulldozing houses and police outposts, killing another five people, two of them teens, but also the concerted effort by Colin Powell, the secretary of state, to press several European governments to issue no invitations to the Palestinian leader to visit their capitals. (If nothing else, this would be a blow to the itinerant and peripatetic Arafat.)
And the mood is equally ugly in the public debate as well. The Washington Post editorialized recently: "The authority and international credibility of the Palestinian leader are rapidly crumbling." He must launch a "convincing offensive" against Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and make the break between them and his Palestinian Authority "irrevocable," the editorial opined, adding: "It may be that Mr. Arafat is not capable of rescuing himself."
Dennis Ross, the former special Middle East coordinator under President Clinton, in an op-ed last Sunday, actually called for the Bush administration to "give Arafat an ultimatum" demanding that he take certain steps, including the arrest of the 33 individuals on the list that Zinni, the American envoy, had given him, and the shutting down of Hamas and Islamic Jihad offices. "Arafat should be told that he has 96 hours to take these steps." Ross wrote breathlessly, "with the understanding that his security representatives report to US officials every 12 hours on their progress."
And you don’t want to know what the likes of George Will, Charles Krauthammer, William Safire and Thomas Friedman have had to say about the issue in recent days.
How could it all have come to this?
The Palestinian people may want to continue fighting, and they may want to tell Israeli advocates like Dennis Ross to go fly a kite; they may continue to view Ariel Sharon as close to pond scum and they may want to cling on to that Patrick Henry slogan — "Give me liberty or give me death" — that seems to have come to embody their struggle recently, but they are entitled to an answer to that question from their leaders.
In other words, will someone, please, explain this mess to us? If these leaders are blameless, somewhat like Mr. K, the character in Franz Kafka’s novel, "The Trial," who was accused but didn’t know what he was accused of, we would like to know that too.
