| Azmi Bishara’s ethical resistance by
Rime Allaf
Passion can be highly contagious, especially when it is contracted from Azmi Bishara.
One could feel the enthusiasm linger long after the London crowd reluctantly left the man
who had just spoken to them about the situation in the Occupied Territories. It was clear
that, two hours and two standing ovations later, they still had not had enough.
Even as the most difficult time of his political career approaches, the Arab-Israeli MP is
ever the charmer, making the serious topic of the intifada accessible from not only the
human aspect, but also from rational and philosophical perspectives. Like his own battle
with the Knesset, the intifada is a cause he supports intelligently and fervently.
Bishara’s trip to London this week included an appearance on BBC’s Hard Talk,
where he told Tim Sebastian that the situation in Israel was one of apartheid, and that he
“couldn’t go far enough in condemning the atrocities of Israel in Lebanon and
the Occupied Territories.” On Wednesday, he elaborated on the subject to an audience
invited by the Arab Club of Britain and the Association of Palestinian Communities,
finding points of reference in Britain’s history to drive his arguments home.
“The Palestinian question is a colonial question,” said Bishara, even though the
settlers were not sent by an empire. But with colonial practices and structure so close to
home, Israel cannot sustain this “schizophrenia” much longer, he argued.
“The English people could do that: You could be a colonialist in India and a
gentleman here.” Bishara went on to say that “in Tel Aviv you can’t do
that. It’s a settler society through and through, and internal colonialism is
apartheid.”
Bishara described how a South African delegation he once accompanied in the Occupied
Territories took offense at his comparison of Israel’s practices with those of South
Africa’s apartheid period: “No, in South Africa, it wasn’t so bad!”
It is this apartheid and occupation that the Palestinians were now fighting, said Bishara.
And they were fighting it as one people, regardless of the separation of 1948 or 1967.
“If you ignore the Green Line, half of the inhabitants of historical Palestine are
Palestinian. We are about 5 million today, exactly like the number of Jewish
Israelis.”
Bishara took time to explain the concept of “terrorism” and who defined it,
making pokes at “ex-leftists” like British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw or
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (who he described as a “terrorist in the 70s,
when he used to play cat and mouse with the Frankfurt police”). “Normal
right-wing is better,” he joked.
The problem with the concept of terrorism was that it was now defined according to one
country’s parameters only and Bishara, to the delight of his audience, explained that
“public officers like Blair convinced the whole world. He is more convincing than
George Bush. I think he convinced many Americans that George Bush is right.”
But for all his witty remarks, Bishara takes terrorism seriously. Its definition has
changed, he says, emphasizing the action against civilians, actions that are taken to
affect the decisions of the government of these civilians. Following that logic, and given
that it was done for political purposes when the victims were civilians, Bishara argued
that before Sept. 11, “the biggest, the most important and the most tragic terrorist
action that was done was the United States’ decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.”
Straight from the basis of rationalism, Bishara continued, it is terrorism if the victims
are targeted and this makes a very clear case for occupation being terrorism.
“Occupation in essence is a kind of terrorism,” he argued. “The moral side
of terrorism has to do with the nature of the victims, not the nature of the people who do
it.” As occupation is “violence against civilians on a daily basis in order to
try to rule them, to break their will, to subdue them,” it is terrorism.
Occupation and terrorism call for resistance. However, this was not only what the intifada
was all about, explained Bishara. The Palestinians, for the first time, had chosen
resistance as a first, strategic, total option and not only as a counter-reaction to the
occupation, which is how “some people try to justify the Palestinian
resistance.” For Bishara, the intifada is an organized political action “in
reaction to the brutal attempts of US and its public officers in Europe to dictate a
solution at Camp David.”
Bishara blamed the Europeans for having literally slammed the door in the face of
Palestinians when they refused what was called the most generous proposal ever given to
them (while some Europeans now acknowledge that Ehud Barak simply lied).
After a difficult beginning with a bad public image, the intifada faced an even harder
second phase “with which a golden opportunity was thrown to Sharon to push the
Palestinian issue into the square of terrorism.” Bishara recalled how Sharon had
tried to present the Palestinian Authority as Israel’s Talebans, but failed, since
“the industry of images has limits.”
While the current situation is difficult, Bishara feels change brewing. “The days we
are witnessing are dark days, but I believe that the darkest hours of the night are the
last hours of the night.” This is not because he has confidence in outside factors;
Bishara does not quite believe in George W. Bush’s “endorsement” of the
Saudi Peace Plan. In fact, he said, “Bush is pushing Arabs to say yes, and then
negotiate,” making the peace initiative nothing but a ceiling for negotiations.
Bishara refused any possibility of negotiating on the right of return. “Nobody has
the right to give up the right of return of these people. They still live!”
While addressing European public opinion, which he thought one of the most needed steps at
the moment, Bishara stressed that the notion of “mutual violence” (only slightly
better than that of “terrorism”) was a notion that needed to be corrected for
the Palestinian cause, for there is no moral equivalence.
Rime Allaf is The Daily Star’s London correspondent
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