Palestinian reforms, yes, but not according to
Israel’s formula
David Hirst
There must be Palestinian reforms. That is the great new prescription for Middle East
peace-making, supposedly to come back to life, after almost expiring under the
hammer-blows of Palestinian intifada and Israeli repression, in the form of an
international conference.
Rarely has there been such a show of unanimity. Everybody wants them Israelis and
Americans, Palestinians and Arabs. For who, in principle, could object to the desirable
things that reforms would bring democracy, due process, accountability, efficiency, an
end to corruption? Surely not the Israelis, who call themselves “the only democracy
in the Middle East” and contend that only when their adversaries become democratic
too will true peace break out; or the Americans, who deem it their business to spread
these blessings to all peoples.
Unfortunately, it is an outward unanimity only. The ironic truth is that, in the vast
disparity of what all these parties actually mean by reforms, it is the Palestinians
their public, political organizations, and some, at least, within the Palestinian
Authority which would be the target of them who most sincerely seek them, in any true,
progressive, universally recognized sense of the word while, for the Israelis and in
varying degrees Americans and Arab regimes, they are just a means and a cover for
altogether less exalted ends.
Never mind that this whole, sudden enshrinement of reforms as the indispensable
prerequisite for further peacemaking came first from their most detested enemy, General
Ariel Sharon himself, and that it was quickly endorsed by Israel’s friend and backer,
the
United States: The Palestinians had no inhibitions about joining the general clamor, for
the very good reason that demands for reform have been an almost continuous theme of their
internal politics since, in the 1960s, Yasser Arafat
and his Fatah guerrillas took control of the national struggle.
What was important before the Oslo Accords of 1993 became even more so after it. With his
“return” to a West Bank and Gaza still under full Israeli military control,
renunciation of armed struggle, dependence on US-sponsored diplomacy, and commitment to
Israel’s security above the Palestinians’ own, Arafat had to conjure up any
possible resource to offset a balance of power weighted overwhelmingly in Israel’s
favor. The chief architect of Oslo, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), said at the outset that it
would “lead either to the Palestine state or to the liquidation of the Palestine
cause.” Everything hinged on whether, through good governance, Arafat made proper use
of the talent, education and goodwill of the people who inhabited this
state-in-the-making. In other words, reform became not merely desirable for its own sake,
it was the indispensable tool for the successful pursuit of the liberation struggle.
Unfortunately, no sooner had the guerrilla chieftain who, in exile, had continuously
trumpeted the contrast between his “Palestinian democracy” and Arab despotisms
acquired a polity of his own than he set about emulating them. That had long been
clear, but it became overwhelmingly, intolerably so, in his people’s eyes, with
General Sharon’s pacification campaign in the West Bank, during which the resistance
and heroism of an unofficial few only dramatized the long-accumulated flaws of
officialdom. “The all but universal belief,” said Palestinian commentator Mouin
Rabbani, “that the absence of structural transformation is intimately related to
Israel’s political and military victories unleashed the torrent of Palestinian
demands for change.” Obviously, change that would strengthen his adversary’s
ability to confront him is not what Sharon wants. Ideally, in fact, he would destroy
Arafat and his Palestinian Authority altogether, on the ostensible ground that Israel, as
he puts it, cannot deal with a “corrupt terror regime which is rotten and
dictatorial,” but on the real one that he has always abhorred any legitimate
representative institution that embodies Palestinian national identity and eventual
statehood on territory he and the Israeli right deem to be an inalienable, exclusive part
of “Greater Israel.”
He has not managed that. But the reforms which as the next best thing he has in mind
are the precise opposite of what the Palestinians have in theirs: They would not empower
the Palestinian people, through a democratically installed regime, they would subject them
to one that, of necessity, would be more tyrannical and unrepresentative than before. In
effect, far from advancing the peace process, he would take it back to the point it was at
least a generation ago, when neither Israel nor the US so much as contemplated the idea of
a Palestinian state on Palestinian territory, or recognized the Palestinians’ right
to a leadership of their own choosing.
His notion of a peace plan, so far as it is known, repudiates all the progress made via
the 1991 Madrid Conference, Oslo, and subsequent accords and negotiations; it would
consecrate all existing “Zionist facts on the ground” under yet another
“interim” agreement of indefinite duration during which Israel would be free to
create ever more new ones. His notion of a Palestinian leadership is one that acquiesces
in these conditions; if neither Arafat nor anyone else comes forward to do so, Israel will
promote a leadership of its own choosing, just as it did the so-called Village Leagues,
apparently the model for what Sharon has in mind today, when, in the 1970s, he was in
charge of settlement policy in the territories.
Since an international conference originally Sharon’s idea too is to furnish
the framework in which, with the Palestinian Authority duly reformed, the peace-making
resumes, he also arrogates to himself the right to decide who will attend it; thus no
Syria or Lebanon will be there, not at least until they carry out a whole series of
“reforms” such as the disbandment of Hizbullah as drastic as those
required of the Palestinians.
Like the Israelis, the Americans showed little objection to Arafat’s corruption and
oppression when, with at least a semblance of a peace process still in being, he was
exploiting them to do what they both wanted of him: fighting the “terror” which
they are now accusing him of tolerating, or sponsoring outright. They don’t want to
get rid of Arafat their deference to Israel has not gone that far, or at least not yet
they want to keep him as a national figurehead, in nominal charge of a Palestinian
Authority whose security services and finances have been “reformed” in
accordance with their own specifications. They seek the assistance to this end of
pro-American Arab regimes for which the outbreak of real Palestinian democracy would be at
least as disturbing, if for different reasons, as for them and the Israelis.
These rival concepts of reform are impossible to reconcile, though Arafat, the focus of
them, is trying, as is his contortionist’s wont, to do so in his person. It makes for
as fiendish a predicament as he has ever faced, and could be his final undoing. The more
ground he cedes to his own people the more that will prove to the Israelis that, if they
really expect yet greater pliancy from their adversaries, Arafat the corrupt dictator
would have been far better able to supply it than an Arafat confronted by Hamas deputies
in a properly elected Parliament. The more he accommodates the Israelis, the more he will
persuade his own people that violence, in defiance of himself as well as Israel, is the
only solution.
But whatever does eventually come of Palestinian reforms, they won’t, on their own,
advance the peace process. For that there would have to be far-reaching Israeli reforms
too, not about democracy, but about the means of achieving what, since Israel came into
being, has, or should have been, its overriding national purpose: winning the acceptance
of the Palestinians whose conquest or displacement are the root cause of all its woes. But
there
is little chance of that. As the Likud Party’s
latest repudiation of the very idea of a Palestinian state showed, a repudiation that
almost cast Sharon in the astonishing role of a “centrist,” Israel’s
democracy now translates into the very opposite an ever greater extremism of what,
in theory, it expects democracy to do for the Palestinians. David Hirst, a veteran Middle East correspondent, wrote this commentary for
The Daily StaR
Copyright © The Daily Star |
