| The Other Side of
the Coin
December 17, 2000
Comment: #398
Discussion Thread: #392
Reference:
[1] UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Report
of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human
Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories,
#A/54/325, Presented to the Fifty-fourth session of United Nations General
Assembly, 8 September 1999.
In Comment #392, Professor Harold
Gould argued that the events of the Al-Aqsa Intifada has acquired a life of
its own and have transcended the personalities of Israeli Prime Minister Barak
and Yasir Arafat. Fourth Generation Warfare exhibits a self-organizing,
self-reinforcing quality when irregular forces learn how to bypass the traditional
strengths of organized military forces to focus their attacks on the political
will of their adversaries. Gould's hypothesis suggests this quality
may be emerging in the ongoing Al-Aqsa Intifada. There is a tendency in America
and Israel to portray the Palestinians a simple terrorists, but Gould contended
in #392 that a better way of thinking about the Palestinian
revolt would be to view the Palestinian Question as something akin to a anti-colonialist
revolt being driven irreversible spontaneous forces, although one must recognize
that these forces are being inflamed by provocateurs and terrorists.
Gould is a visiting professor at the University of Virginia
and a frequent contributor to these Commentaries. His academic specialty
is anthropology and his field experience is in India, but he has written widely
on terrorism as well. India's anti-colonialist experience offers an
interesting background for viewing the Intifada as well as the latent
power of 4GW. There are similarities between the Palestinian Question
and the Indian experience. Notwithstanding the primitive racial stereotypes
peddled by Israeli and American hardliners, for example, the Palestinians,
like the Indians, have a well educated and cultured elite, a hard working
bourgeois class of entrepreneurial shopkeepers and craftsmen, and a diaspora
that could help to finance national development. On the other hand, analogies
can be carried too far if one is blind to differences. The Palestinians,
for example, have a large radicalized population of poorly educated, impoverished
refugees who can attribute their desperate condition directly to Israeli actions,
whereas the majority of India's impoverished masses could not blame their
condition on British policies. One must also remember that India's colonizer
- Great Britain - could leave the theater without fear for its existence,
whereas the colonizer of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan can not.
Notwithstanding these and other differences, I think Gould
may be on to something. If he is correct, it is crucially important
for the Israelis and their American allies to try to understand the intensity
of the anti-colonialist grievances fueling the Intifada from the point of
view of the Palestinian man at the bottom of the social pyramid.
From the perspective of the colonized, how might such a Palestinian man see
his condition?
One could argue that he might see or feel (1) a sharp decline in his living
standards during most of the 1990s, (2) a steady displacement from his land
by the continuing pace of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories,
(3) an increasing sense of vulnerability created by the canonization of areas
under Palestinian control and the building of Israeli controlled by-pass roads
to enforce the divisions, (4) omni-present restrictions on his freedom of
movement put into place by insensitive alien bureaucrats, (5) daily humiliations
from arbitrary search and seizure practices at Israeli checkpoints, (6) a
crippling psycho-economic dependence on the good will of the colonizer because
of the colonizer's control and regulation of his low-wage employment in Israel,
(7) Israeli control of and disproportionate consumption of the water resting
underneath his land in the crucial mountain aquifer as well as the poisoning
of his wells by the waste runoff from fortified Israeli settlements on the
high ground, (8) the "occupation" of his holy sites in Jerusalem, and so forth.
While some of these feelings might not be justified by
objective facts, some of the reasons why this man might nevertheless
have them can be deduced from information in the thirty-first report of
the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the
Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied
Territories, which submitted to the United Nations General Assembly in
September 1999, pursuant to paragraphs 5, 6 and 7 of General Assembly
resolution 53/53 of 3 December 1998. [Attached separately to this
comment as a Adobe Acrobat PDF file]
Readers can find general information, maps of settlements
and water resources, and chronology of events describing this Intifada at
here.
But it is also important to remember that Gould's point in #392
was that events had transcended the personality of Arafat as well as that
of Barak. This brings the problem of changing the outdated Palestinian
political structures now governing the life of our hypothetical man at the
bottom of the social pyramid. This is particularly true for the ossified
Fatah - which is susceptible to whim of extremists, is undemocratic, is riddled
with corruption, and is demonstrably incapable of nation building.
Gould introduces this side of the Palestinian coin in the attached essay,
which will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Hindu, one of India's
most influential newspapers.
Forthcoming in the Hindu:
Palestinian Statehood: The Other Side of the Coin
By Harold A. Gould
[Reprinted with Permission of author]
In a previous article (The Hindu, Oct 20), I stated that a major cause of
the recent eruption of violence in Palestine has been Israel's perpetuation
of what can only be called a colonialist model for dealing with the Arab populations
who came under its suzerainty after the June War of 1967. Admittedly there
were compelling reasons for the conquests that led to this state of affairs.
The armies of Syria, Jordan and Egypt had invaded Israel and, in concert with
the indigenous Palestinians, would have destroyed her had she not successfully
fended them off. The conquered populations are a legacy of these perilous
times.
The problem is that this colonialist style of governance, as was the case
with British rule in India, and other colonialisms around the world, inevitably
bred contempt for its subjugated populations. The longer it continued the
deeper the contempt grew. As the British and other colonialists realized,
lording it over a powerless people can be an intoxicating boon to one's cultural
vanity. And ironically, the Israelis, themselves the victims of mankind's
worst manifestation of racial oppression, fell prey to the very mentality
that had once enslaved them. For these very reasons it was a situation that
could not be indefinitely sustained.
Contemporary history has demonstrated over and over again that populations
held in conditions of political and economic servitude, regardless of the
circumstances which produced that state of affairs in the first place, eventually
just refuse to take it anymore. As resistance mounts, a point is eventually
reached where the cost of trying to keep the subalterns in line becomes prohibitive.
This point has now been reached in Palestine. Civil disobedience has transcended
the capacity of Israel to contain it and has, as well, exceeded the ability
of what there is of responsible Palestinian leadership to control it. Yasir
Arafat can no longer flip a rhetorical switch and compel his followers to
obey him; Ehud Barak can no longer persuade either the Palestinians or his
fellow Jews to accept his bona fides as a peace-maker. The latter is attested
by the fact that Mr. Barak has been compelled to resign his post and seek
a fresh mandate, which it is clear he will fail to obtain.
The situation, in short, has spun out of control. Emeritus Professor Don Peretz
of the State University of New York (Binghamton), himself a noted Jewish scholar,
recently stated at a Potomac Institute colloquium in Washington that Israel
as early as the 1970s should have moved toward complete political separation
between the two populations, with Jewish settlers no longer enjoying extraterritorial
rights on the Arab side of the designated frontier. That is what should have
happened then; that is what should be happening now. Indeed the ferocity and
persistence of this second eruption of Intifada makes it clear that in the
end the only practicable option left for Israel will be to facilitate genuine
statehood for the Palestinians, unfortunately on terms far less favorable
than would have been possible years ago.
As the inevitable approaches, however, another challenge
to the prospects for real peace and rapprochement between Arabs and Jews in
Palestine looms on the horizon. This is the Palestinian side of coin.
Fundamental institutional changes are also needed on the West Bank and in
Gaza. Kids shouting slogans, throwing rocks and hurling Molotov cocktails
in the streets just won't do it once real Palestinian statehood is conceded
and the business of establishing mature relations between two separate states
commences in earnest. Statesmanship, not confrontational politics, will have
to prevail once this stage has been reached. This can be accomplished only
when genuine representative government supercedes the existing corrupt, authoritarian
political leadership that currently holds sway in the Arab territories. Put
simply, the insistence that Israel democratize its external relations with
the occupied territories as a prelude to peace has got to be matched by a
corresponding democratization of Palestinian domestic political institutions
in order for mature diplomacy to work. Otherwise there is little hope that
a stable peace can ever be achieved.
New York Times columnist, Thomas L Friedman, in a recent article pertaining
to the Arab League emergency summit meeting held in Cairo on October 21st,
called attention to the troubling absence of democracy anywhere in the Middle
East. He wondered "why the Arab east is the only region in the world, including
sub-Saharan Africa, that is still ruled by dictators, autocrats and kings,
without one real democracy."
Israel, by contrast, whatever may be its faults, is a functioning democracy
in which a wide range of political interests and ideological convictions are
represented. There now exists a vocal, though admittedly beleaguered, opposition
to the current return of the hard-line policies which got Israel into the
pickle it is in the first place.. This diversity of political voices will
have a crucial moderating influence on the dialogues that will follow the
establishment of Palestinian statehood.
The Palestinian Authority, by contrast, is essentially a political monolith
where Yasir Arafat makes all the key decisions largely in response to the
whims of radical and extremist elements, both within and outside Fatah, who
occupy center stage. Moderate voices are nowhere to be heard in the present
political environment. This absence of countervailing moderation, as Friedman
says, pervades the Arab Middle East. Jordan, while admittedly a "moderate"
Arab state, is nevertheless a monarchy where King Abdullah is the final voice.
Syria, now ruled by the son of the late Hafez-al-Asad, remains a totalitarian
state with minimal respect for human rights at home, that supports terrorism
abroad, and itself perpetrates colonialism in Lebanon. Egypt is a one-party
state run by a benevolent dictator. On the periphery, and always factors in
Middle East affairs, are Iraq and Saudi Arabia, where democratic institutions
are a furtive dream, and Iran, where they are no more than a flickering ember.
This is where the United States comes in. Clearly America lacks the capacity
to transform the entire Middle East region into a democratic wonderland overnight,
given the power of radical nationalism and ethno-religious fundamentalism
in the Arab world. But the US can play a decisive role in the outcome of a
bi-national political settlement for Palestine. If successful, this could
set a precedent which in the long run would enormously contribute to greater
stability for the entire region..
The United States possesses the influence and wherewithal to play such a role
here. Politically, it would have to aggressively support separate sovereignty
for the Palestinians, while still maintaining its special relationship with
Israel. This should be the starting point for a fresh American approach to
the region, possibly just the right departure for an incoming Bush administration
unencumbered by the ethos of its predecessor. Admittedly, it would not be
an easy row to hoe, but by no means an impossible one. Its implementation
would be abetted by significant support from Third World countries like India
and from members of the European Union who have long advocated Palestinian
statehood.
From this vantage, the US would be free to employ its
powers of persuasion to promote democratization processes in the newly created,
sovereign Palestinian state, both through bilateral diplomacy, and through
the exercise of its formidable economic power. This formula is already in
place as a means of encouraging democratization and liberalization in China,
Mexico and elsewhere on the grounds that it is in America's strategic interests
to strengthen and give voice to moderate elements in all societies. The chances
of such policies being successful in Palestine are especially good, in fact,
because Palestinians, the racist stereotypes propagated by Israeli hardliners
to the contrary notwithstanding, are actually one of the most culturally advanced,
entrepreneurially gifted populations in the Middle East. Encouraging their
prosperity and corresponding political importance would set in motion the
democratization processes so sorely needed on the Palestinian side of the
coin as the guarantor of an equal, constructive political dialogue capable
of ending the debilitating colonialist structure now inhibiting the pathway
to peace and security for both Israelis and Palestinians.
[Harold Gould is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia .]
Chuck Spinney
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