After eighteen long months
of tantalising inertia, interspersed with sporadic initiatives that were almost
stillborn anyway, US President George W Bush unveiled last Monday his long-awaited
strategy for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The build-up
toward this first major policy statement by the incumbent US Administration had
been dramatic. In fact, no less dramatic perhaps than the moments preceding the
Balfour Declaration of 1917 when the British government promised a down-trodden
Jewish people an internationally-recognised national home under British
stewardship. This visionary speech was meant to build upon previous
presidential declarations and set out a detailed roadmap and timetable for a
Palestinian state within the context of a two-state solution.
When President Bush finally
spoke, he called for the establishment of a ‘provisional’ Palestinian state,
and for negotiations on a final settlement to be concluded within three years.
However, the key condition he inserted - and the central point that will be
remembered after everything else is forgotten - was a call for ‘a new and
different Palestinian leadership’. Could it be that Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon was given at long last the green light to eviscerate Chairman
Yasser Arafat from the Palestinian territories and end once and for all the
Palestinian Authority?
Presidential
Highlights
I believe that the plan
unfurled by President Bush held some positive and encouraging notes to it. In
its concluding paragraphs, for example, it referred to the need for an Israeli
full withdrawal from positions held prior to 28 September 2000, and a stop to
all Israeli settlement building consistent with the Mitchell Committee Report.
It also called upon Israel and the Palestinians to ‘address the core issues
that divide them’ adding that ‘the Israeli occupation that began in 1967 will
be ended through a settlement negotiated between the parties, based on UN
Resolutions 242 and 338, with Israeli withdrawal to secure and recognised
borders’. The speech further emphasised that the parties should also ‘resolve
questions concerning Jerusalem [and] the plight and future of Palestinian
refugees’.
President Bush concluded his
speech by expressing understanding for ‘the deep anger and anguish of the
Israeli people’ who have lived too long with fear and funerals and who have had
‘to avoid markets and public transportation, and forced to put armed guards in
kindergarten classrooms’. Equally, he also expressed understanding for ‘the
deep anger and despair of the Palestinian people’. He said they have for
decades been treated as pawns in the Middle East conflict and their interests
‘have been held hostage to a comprehensive peace agreement that never seems to
come, as [their] lives get worse year by year’. The Palestinians, the President
segued, ‘deserve a life of hope’ for their children.
Presidential
Strokes
But is the plan workable?
Does it hold the kernel of promising ideas, or does it erect roadblocks that
will make diplomatic progress even harder? Will the words of President Bush allow for ‘liberty to
blossom in the rocky soil of the West Bank and Gaza’? Will it ‘inspire millions
of men and women around the globe who are equally weary of poverty and
oppression’ to taste the fruits of an occupation-free, sovereign and viable
state they may call their own?
I agree with many
Palestinian and non-Palestinian analysts that a top to bottom reform of the
Palestinian Authority is long overdue. The system is nepotistic and corrupt,
and the high-profile Palestinian cabinet ministers and politicians seem to have
done rather well out of the bloodshed visited upon their constituents let alone
upon their Israeli neighbours. Whilst at least two-thirds of the Palestinian
population is bereft of any economic subsistence and lives under harsh
conditions, intelligence agencies estimate that the PLO holdings amount to $10
billion, yielding an annual income of $1 million. Besides, it is alleged that many
prominent Palestinians have raked in massive fortunes, and that the slush funds
at their disposal amount to staggering sums that have contributed toward
private real estate holdings.
However, I also believe that
the unequivocal Bush demand for Arafat to exit from the political scene is
fraught with many dangers - some of them quite imponderable too. Not only does
this high-handed presidential exhortation smack of interference in the inner
workings of another people or entity that elected its own leader, it also
imports many dangers with it. It is true that many peoples - including 57% of
Palestinians according to a recent poll - have come to consider Chairman Arafat
a highly unsatisfactory Palestinian leader. Not only has he not managed to
nudge forward in any tangible way the Palestinian national aspirations, he also
has acquired a seasonal habit of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat as
consistently as snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!
However, three serious
observations come up regarding the political fate that has been
‘pre-determined’ for Chairman Arafat by the neo-conservative hard-liners of the
Bush Administration.
·
How would the US Administration deal with the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict if Arafat were re-elected in January 2003 and succeeded to renew his
mandate? Would they just wash
their hands off the whole conflict and exacerbate further the perils facing the
whole region - including those appended to the future of friendly Arab countries?
·
For another, the Bush speech does not necessarily accelerate Arafat’s
departure. Even if it were not to make Arafat more popular within his own
constituency, it renders the position of any successor much more untenable by
making him appear from the outset like an American stooge.
·
Worse still from an American - and broader - perspective, it could well
generate a populist reaction that brings into power an ‘extremist’ leader from
another less secular persuasion that could make a settlement even more remote.
Presidential
Assumptions
The basic premise of
promising Palestinians a ‘provisional’ state is a non-starter. This is an
innovative and highly creative departure from any principle of International
law or jurisprudence I am acquainted with, and leaves untackled all the
fundamental issues relating to the conflict. What about the final borders of
this future state let alone its capital and the question of its refugees and
resources? It seems that this is a graduated process smacking of American fiat
and Israeli diktat, and cannot seriously help push the negotiations forward or
end the bloody chapter of violence.
In a presidential speech
that focused on interim assumptions, what was sorely lacking was the clear
articulation of an end game, alongside a road map that would lead to that end
game. The speech should have delivered a political vision that would have
encouraged the parties to comply with the interim requirements and build upon
them with the realisation that those difficult steps would lead to the
fulfilment of the dream of self-determination for the Palestinians.
The core issue of this whole
drama as it has unfolded in the past twenty-one months is still left pending!
It is quite timely for President Bush to refer to the global fight against
terrorism and to decry the violence that has claimed so many Israeli and
Palestinian lives. However, the USA and Israel still seem to misread the
picture. They only look at the suicide bombers in abstract terms, never even
bothering in their absolute certainty to explore further the reason why so many
young men and women are willing to die for their cause. They prefer to condemn
them as misguided and false idealists who have been brainwashed to become the
instruments of their puppet-masters. They label them as wholesale terrorists,
disregard their deaths as futile and denounce them as aberrant fanatics.
However, in another place
and another circumstance, these Palestinians are admired for their
self-sacrifice and selfless valour. They have been deprived for long years of
land, water, medicine, education, free movement, self-government and the
wherewithal to develop a self-sufficient economy with half their population
driven into exile and the other half living in dire poverty. They are angry and
resentful, resorting to acts of ghastly recklessness. Until the free world
addresses the motivation behind their violence, I fear there can be no lasting
political remedy. Until the USA allows itself to realise that the inconsistency
of Palestinian violence with the fight against terrorism is because they were
never given a fair deal for peace, the presidential assumptions remain vacuous.
This is not moral equivalence or equivocation, but rather a sad and costly
reality that has been borne out by history time and again - in Europe and
elsewhere.
Presidential
Conclusions
President Bush concluded his
speech by referring to a ‘moment of opportunity and a test for all parties in
the Middle East’. He expressed the hope that his speech would provide ‘an
opportunity to lay the foundations for future peace, a test to show who is
serious about peace and who is not’. I fear that short of a political vision
giving impetus to his bare ideas, this hope might well prove to be another
bloody and unfulfilled hiccup in the Middle East.
President Bush also reminded
the parties of the biblical quotation, ‘I have set before you life and death;
therefore, choose life’ (Deu 30:19). As I contemplate his speech and pray that
it will help the parties in the conflict to choose peace, hope and life, I also
recall another scriptural verse, ‘Thou shalt not hurt nor destroy in all my
holy mountain’ (Is 65:25). Or could it be that my exegetical interpretation of
the Holy Bible is discomfortingly less selective?
© harry-bvH @ 25 June 2002