by Azmi
Bishara
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The Israeli elections of 1996 brought to light the dilemma in Israeli-Palestinian relations - the imbalance of power and the inequality in the commitments on paper of the two parties. That is to say, in the final analysis and in the absence of mutually accepted principles like the right of self-determination or even the simple acknowledgement that the West Bank and Gaza are Occupied Territories, the Oslo Agreement depends on one party's commitment to it and the other party's interpretation of it. It is regulated mainly by the existing balance of power rather than by elements of relative justice derived from the above mentioned mutually accepted principles. To make matters worse, Oslo reverses the traditional relationship between means and ends. The objective has become the perpetuation of the peace process rather than the conclusion of a just peace. The 'process' has also bred the agents who have an interest in keeping it going.
In the absence of any agreement on the final objective, the whole process depends on the intentions of the Israeli government. If one chooses to ignore the historical injustices inherent in the agreement, this remains its basic difficulty. When the government of Israel changed, the reading of the agreement changed too. A new government came to power that was not committed to the objective that the Palestinians believed - or perhaps deluded themselves into believing - the agreement was leading to. The way the Palestinians threw themselves behind Labour during the elections, clinging to the hope of a Labour victory, demonstrates how they had become hostage to Israeli public opinion. This is a relationship of imbalance and dependency.
The tragedy is that, following the elections, the Palestinians became obsessed with one issue: making sure that the Likud would live up to the Oslo Agreement. They totally missed the point that the calamity could lie precisely in the Likud's adherence, not only to the agreement, but also to what was kept out of the agreement, and which depended on Labour's good will in the final status negotiations: settlements, refugees, Jerusalem, sovereignty and so on. In fact, it was clear that the Oslo Agreement would impose itself, in the formal sense, on the Likud as well, as the only game in town. But the Likud government is bound not to the spirit of the agreement, nor to the aspirations of the Palestinian side, nor the verbal promises made by the previous government, but rather to its own interpretations of the text of the agreement. All that was not put in the text, delayed until the 'final status negotiations', is not binding for the Likud government, which, since it came to office, has been involved in an effort aimed at dictating its version of the final status solution through the use of force, leaving the Palestinian side only two options: either to search for the components of their own power in this confrontation, or to accept the dictates of the Likud. The Likud is committed to maintaining the ring roads and the bypass roads that lay the infrastructure of future settlements; it is committed to expanding the settlements; it is committed to the absurd division of the West Bank into areas A, B, and C under Oslo II, a division which has severed the links binding the Palestinian population centres together.
For Netanyahu the Oslo Accord merely served as a mask to the above mentioned activities, which actually undermine all that remains from the agreements. He cannot openly abandon the process because of international and local considerations, including the fact that the commitment to Oslo was a major plank of his winning election programme.
In the negotiations that have taken place since the Likud returned to power, the Palestinians have concentrated on three issues in a way that shows they still cannot play the game like the Israelis. First, they made an issue of the redeployment of Israeli troops from Hebron. Of course, Palestinian insistence on what was agreed is crucial for the continuation of the peace process - we cannot just do what the Likud government wants - but the redeployment, actually initially delayed by the Labour government and not by its successor, was bound to take place in any case because of international and Arab pressures on Israel. Second, in Jerusalem the Palestinians have insisted on keeping open the Orient House - the unofficial Palestinian seat of government - which is not part of any written agreement and which in all likelihood would remain open in any event. While they were insisting on preserving the Orient House, Jewish settlement in Jerusalem continued unabated. Third, in the beginning the Palestinians made an issue of Netanyahu meeting with Arafat, which Netanyahu had deliberately avoided. Again, Netanyahu could not have put off meeting with Arafat indefinitely, but because of Palestinian insistence he succeeded in portraying the meeting itself as an Israeli concession. Arafat learned later to play by the same rules against Netanyahu, as a protest against Israeli refusal to meet its previous commitments or against Israeli new settlements in Jerusalem.
There are three new factors that could restore some semblance of balance to the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. First, because of provocative Israeli attitudes, including an agreement on military cooperation with Turkey, which is directed against any Arab cooperation in the future and revives memories of the Baghdad Pact in the 1950s, the Arabs in general and the Egyptians in particular are in the thick of things again. Historically, Egypt always has had a role to play, but this time round it is bringing the other Arab countries (especially Syria and Saudi Arabia) in with it. This factor, together with the international solidarity which has been absent since Oslo, and only lately reactivated in the form of Resolution 134 of the General Assembly of the United Nations, can only be invested in a confrontational strategy; it cannot affect the negotiations in the narrower sense, because the only international player allowed in is the United States, which is also the host of the whole process. This fact became clear after the crisis caused by the Israeli settlement in Jabal Abu Ghneim, which was annexed to Jerusalem. The efforts that were undertaken at the international level, the meetings, conferences and declarations of the Islamic conference, the Arab League, the Non-Aligned States, the European Union, made a lot of reverberations but, in the absence of a clear strategy of escalation, could not themselves affect the negotiations. The American delegate to the region remained the gavel of the 'process'.
Second, the recent confrontations especially during the clashes of September 1996 between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Likud government, showed the Israelis that they cannot govern the West Bank and Gaza the way they govern the self-proclaimed Security Zone in South Lebanon; they learned that Antoine Lahd cannot be the model for the PA (1). So the meaning of the clashes of September 1996 is that Labour's expectation that it could create a quisling PA which it is entirely able to manipulate to suit its own purposes has collapsed. It is now clear to the Israelis that, even within the confines of its bantustan situation, the PA also has its own interests and purposes. The PA is neither historically nor culturally, and after all else is said, not even politically capable of playing the role of the South Lebanon quisling regime/security zone. This has opened up the possibility of a national Palestinian dialogue between the PA and the opposition Palestinian parties. The PA, however, has so far sought to use the dialogue only as an instrument to squeeze Israeli concessions. It does not see the genuine importance of a national dialogue to Palestinian society, because its internal policies, if they exist at all, are totally subordinated to the needs of the negotiations with Israel as the PA imagines them. The PA could not draw the appropriate conclusion from this: that in the confrontation with Israel, Palestinian civil socieis its strategic asset. Since territorial sovereignty is lacking, sovereignty over institutions and through elected national institutions will have to take its place. In situations such as this, democracy becomes the requisite condition for actual sovereignty.
Moreover, the outcome of the unbalanced negotiations with Israel can also be affected through winning some international respect for the Palestinian polity, but, for this to happen, the Palestinian polity needs to demonstrate through its actions that it is worthy of making the transition to statehood. This would increase the pressures on Israel very significantly. Of course, even this would not mean that liberation would be at hand or that a Palestinian state would be inevitable. It would merely create the possibility for such an outcome in the future. Democracy can save the PA from 'Lahdism', while the absence of democracy will turn its bantustan situation into the final status. The PA still prefers to leave civil society to the control of the different competing security apparatuses, who are gradually extending their control and monopolising the whole of public space.
Third, the right-wing religious government of Israel has abandoned the basic concepts of Oslo, and at the same time its room for manoeuvre became narrower due to internal political crises. The crisis which has befallen the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the aftermath of the Israeli renewal of settlement activities in Jerusalem in the first half of 1997 does not resemble any of its predecessors. In the recent past, crises revolved around issues concerning the implementation of the interim phase, the jurisdiction of the PA, the extent of the withdrawal from Hebron, the release of women prisoners, and so on. Compromise solutions were reached either with respect to these issues themselves or through concessions being made vis-a-vis other similar issues.
This crisis, however, involves the basic concept of the peace process, and the distinction between interim agreements and the permanent settlement insisted upon so firmly by Rabin and Peres, and opposed by Palestinians who criticised Oslo. Nowadays, it is the Israeli Likud government which has abandoned this distinction. In return for the implementation of its commitments under Oslo, Israel is demanding Palestinian concessions on final status issues. This is the significance of Jabal Abu Ghneim and Netanyahu's declared determination to proceed with the expansion of the settlements in the West Bank.
The right-wing religious government is no longer capable of implementing commitments made by Peres and Rabin independently from a final Palestinian-Israeli agreement that suits their own conception. This was also the motivation behind the contacts between Labour and Likud in early 1997 to form a national unity government on the basis of an agreement on 'the Nos' which should become the basis for an Israeli national consensus in the final status negotiations with the PA, and which would allow the Labour Party to provide an alibi internationally for justifying this deviation from the principles of Oslo. An agreement was reached between MPs Beilin (Labour) and Eitan (Likud) that included all four 'Nos': to withdrawal to the borders of June 1967, to the division of Jerusalem or sharing sovereignty over the city, to dismantling the settlements, and to the return of the refugees. All that remains can be called a Palestinian state à la Labour, while the Likud keeps only the option of extending the powers of the PA, including granting them the title of a state, open for negotiations: 'You wanted a state, here have your state.' Practically, under the umbrella of the Israeli national consensus - 'the four Nos' - nothing remains open for negotiation in the final status talks except for a modification of the agreements already reached at the interim phase, that is more redeployments and more authority for the PA.
Due, however, to internal developments in Israel that have more to do with the conflict between old and new elites over the control of the Israeli establishment than with the negotiations, a conflict that culminated in a judicial, moral and political scandal, Netanyahu lost the option of forming a national unity government.
As a consequence of this loss, he has also been deprived of his most important tool, one that kept the unity of his coalition while negotiating. With the assistance of such a prospect, he was able to threaten the more radical and smaller parties of his coalition; after the crisis he is more likely to be threatened by them. He has also lost the option that helped confuse the Labour opposition, and kept it waiting for such a possibility, while after this crisis the opposition is likely to become more prominent in Israeli politics. Netanyahu has become more vulnerable to international and local pressure that can export the crisis in the negotiations to Israel as an internal political crisis.
There are more political and social circles in Israel that can accuse Netanyahu of bearing the responsibility for any price that Israel may be obliged to pay due to the impasse of the negotiations. This presupposes, however, that there is a party which has the interest and the power to make Israel pay the price, except that certain currents in the PA are apprehensive about the PA's ability politically to endure a long period of time without 'the process'.
Skepticism here does not concern the Palestinian population, whose living conditions have anyway deteriorated, in almost all respects, since Oslo: standards of living, employment, the economy in general, human rights, freedom of movement and freedom of expression. It concerns the Palestinian elites, the so-called VIPs who are connected to Israel through a network of needs and interests that cannot be satisfied unless the negotiations, and the mediating role played by them, proceed uninterrupted.
An authority that is obsessively engaged in the search for a source of power that is independent of, and external to, its own society, and seeks to monopolise economic activity and public space while sabotaging the process of insitutionalisation of social and political spheres, cannot begin to conceive of the power of its own society except in the negative sense; that is, as a power that should be firmly suppressed before it turns into empowerment.
In this context the PA has woken up to the significance of representative elections only in this negative sense. The election of the Palestinian Legislative Council created an entirely new avenue for mobilising Palestinian civil society in the confrontation with Israel. It provided an opportunity to forge an authentic Palestinian political and legislative experience, and to unite civil society in support of a legislative council that shares power with the executive authority, sets up a system of checks and balances, and strengthens its hand in its dealings with Israel.
There could have been a parliamentary Palestinian opposition, just as there is an opposition in the Knesset. But the Palestinian opposition missed that opportunity by not fielding candidates in the elections, and, in so doing, it adopted a trivial and historically irresponsible role. A second opportunity to empower the Council is now being missed by the PA. The Palestinian delegation had fought hard during the negotiations with Israel to enlarge the membership of the Council and to grant it legislative authority, but now that the PA no longer sees the PLC as important to the confrontation with Israel, it is downgrading and marginalising it, instead of allowing it to play what could be a vital role in that struggle. Instead of Arafat and those around him taking on Israel on their own, there could have been a confrontation between the Palestinian people and Israel; not an Intifada, which today would simply lead to a Palestinian civil war, with Israel looking on from the outside. That was the whole point of the Oslo Agreement.
The point of Oslo was precisely to allow Israel to avoid dealing with a Palestinian popular uprising, making this instead the responsibility of the Palestinian police; otherwise, what did Israel stand to gain from Oslo? That was Labour's position, not just the Likud's. Given this situation, a new model for an Intifada of the Palestinian people, in their conflict with Israel, must be looked for. The basic strategy should be to mobilise Palestinian society, the Palestinian people and the Palestinian polity for the confrontation with Israel.
This is what clearly took place in the fighting of September 1996, which began as a spontaneous uprising imposed on the PA by its own party Fatah, among others. Later, the PA utilised the events in the negotiations on the Hebron issue. Given Palestinian circumstances, however, there is a limit to how far escalation can be taken. Israel is applying counter pressures and the confrontation between the Palestinian people and Palestinian Authority on the one side and Israel on the other cannot achieve results in the absence of Palestinian democracy - this is where the Council comes in.
The tragedy is that while there is a large bloc of Council members who are trying to carve out a role for it, they have no real decision-making power or say in matters with real relevance to Palestinian political life. Their efforts at formulating basic laws, or at drafting a constitution, remain fruitless verbal exercises. The PLC also has no say in matters concerning relations with Israel, including the negotiations, the issue of the settlements and so on. The Council can protest. The purpose of legislative assemblies, however, is not to protest but to provide direction for the executive branch. In the Palestinian case, the order is reversed. The legislative branch should be the source of authority and the symbol of sovereignty, but here we find that neither the legislature nor even the executive authority embodies sovereignty. A single person, Yasser Arafat, does that, or thinks he does. Such a situation cannot contribute to a more balanced relationship with Israel.
In my opinion, the Palestinian ruling elite either does not understand, or does not want to understand, that the issue of empowering the Legislative Council is no longer a luxury but a dire necessity, as is the freedom of the press, political pluralism, the rejection of the use of torture against prisoners and orderly democratic life.
The Palestinian ruling elite will not have an indigenous power base unless these conditions are satisfied. They cannot resist Israeli pressures by saying that their hands are tied, that the people will not accept this or that, and so on, because both Israel and the United States are aware of how insignificant Palestinian public opinion is for the PA. As a consequence, Palestinian society will not be mobilised as it could be for the confrontation with Israel for a long time to come. In any case, Palestinian youth does not seem eager to be instrumentalised in the face-off with Israel, or driven to the checkpoints to face Israeli soldiers each time there is a crisis in the negotiations. In any case, the negotiations lack any transparency regarding how this sacrifice would be used - would the sacrifice be used for national purposes, or used instead for the promotion of elite interests? In the absence of democracy and with the deterioration of living conditions under a strangling closure, popular mobilisation could be deflected into a catastrophic confrontation with the Palestinian Authority instead of Israel. Recent events have shown that only a mobilised Palestinian society is capable of making an impact on the international situation, or the Arab world or Israel; when activated, it becomes the basic strategic reserve for the Authority in its struggle with Israel.
The New Palestinian VIPs
A new Palestinian elite emerged from the womb of the 'process'. It is composed of individuals in Palestinian leadership circles who have become part of the fabric of Israeli-Palestinian relations, who approach matters that relate to the general interest from the narrowest of perspectives - that of their own vested interests. Certain matters rest in their hands, and their commitment to the Palestinian cause has become conditioned by their need for permits to pass through Israeli military checkpoints and by the commissions they get, thanks to their Israeli connections. Having good connections in Israel can make you rich. This group of co-opted individuals - which includes also some former militants and prisoners - has become, in a way, a clientelist network, and for them the main issue is how to keep the peace process alive under all circumstances. In the process itself their privileges can become a source of pressure on them; for example, after any 'terrorist' action or during Israeli holidays a hermetic closure in the Occupied Territories is imposed by Israel. During this closure all permits to pass the checkpoints are cancelled including those granted to the so-called VIPs. Only members of the exclusive status (VIP 1) - a new category invented by Israel - are allowed to keep the permits. Only Israel defines who is and who is not a VIP 1.
My estimate is that the hard core of the new elite consists of a few hundred individuals, but the circle of people who have ties with them, and who therefore benefit from the situation, number in the thousands. The group has a hierarchical structure, with several channels connecting them to Israel, from officials in the smallest ministry to those responsible for security, the economy or civilian coordination. The importance of any given individual varies according to Israeli calculations; one moment this individual is important, then, suddenly, someone else is.
This pyramid of VIPs is a new phenomenon for Palestinian society. We have had PLO militants and bureaucrats who controlled the purse strings for the disbursement of contributions to the resistance movement. There have always been those with ties to Jordan, or other Arab countries, and their agendas. But being a VIP is something new. Israel decides who is a VIP, who has freedom of movement and who has the power to make deals.
In August 1996, Ha'aretz quoted a former legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry just before he left office as saying something to the effect: 'We control electrical power, water resources, telecommunications and so on. We control everything. There are a number of natives who serve as middle men. What could suit our purpose better?' His advice to the Likud Cabinet was to read the Oslo Agreement carefully, and he added: 'If you read it, you not only will accept it, you will become its enthusiastic supporters. The power imbalance between us and the Palestinians never served our interests better in the past, not even before the Intifada.'
No doubt the old Israeli plan to create a co-opted Palestinian leadership has succeeded to a large extent. Tragically, the price of all this is that Palestinian society has been neutralised and is resentful. Palestinians cannot travel, they cannot satisfy their daily needs without the services of this elite group. Palestinian society has been penetrated from top to bottom by its clientelist network. Had the Legislative Council been effective, it would have supervised the activities of these VIPs. Montesquieu understood that the system of checks and balances characteristic of democracy worked not because of altruistic or even democratic motives but because of vested interests, because factions balanced each other out. It is possible to institute a system in which one branch of power acts as a watchdog over the other and serves as a counterweight to it, not for reasons of democracy, but because it is in the interest of one branch to limit the power and authority of the other.
The frustration accompanying the 'process' and the formation of its social, political and security agents contributes to the emergent character of a new Palestinian individual who is acquiring a dual personality: a private persona that is skeptical and derisive, and a public persona that is scared and sycophantic, much as in Eastern Europe, where this phenomenon allowed the communist regimes to last as long as they did there. This civic culture, which can be termed dualistic, accepts a schizophrenic split between the public sphere, as the sphere of authority, and the private sphere as the sphere of freedom; it allows undemocratic regimes to prosper. Such regimes can turn a blind eye to what goes on behind closed doors. In fact, they understand that hypocrisy in public life is a source of strength for them.
Separation without sovereignty or a bi-national state?
There are no possible routes available for the development of a national option leading to sovereignty unless the indigenous Palestinian factor can be brought in through politicising civil society by making room for political pluralism, and a democratic system. Political pluralism means an active party system. The old Palestinian party system, which had taken the form of PLO factions, disappeared with the collapse of the PLO and of the leftist ideologies that had linked themselves to the socialist bloc. The Fatah organisation, which is supposedly the ruling party of the PA, discovered only recently that it is being marginalised by it, and that the PA has produced a new 'party', that of the VIPs. These are searching for an alignment with the security apparatuses, which have absorbed into their ranks many Fatah militants. Such an alignment, if it succeeds, would totally marginalise what is left of the party system, including Fatah which is beginning a fight for its political and institutional survival as a ruling party. Again, if it succeeds, this alignment, and not the Legislative Council, will be the decision maker of the future, including in issues such as who will succeed Arafat.
Full national sovereignty was historically the precondition for the gradual development of democracy. But since democracy was institutionalised as a political system, the question of democracy presents itself wherever there is authority and power. Wherever there is political power, even if it is less than sovereign, there is a question of its misuse. Full national sovereignty is not a sufficient condition of democracy, as is commonly believed in the Third World, nor is sovereignty real, that is, the sovereignty of a people, unless it is expressed in a democratic system.
The view that delays raising the issue of democracy until full national sovereignty is achieved turns the historical process of the birth of democracy into a structural theory, while in the Palestinian case the opposite is true. There is need of an active public opinion, an active parliament, of political pluralism, that is, a party system, with the dynamism and power to effect change, and to create new Arab and international alignments. But if the current situation continues, if Israel continues to control the political game, there is only a dead end in sight. The current Palestinian leadership cannot, for historical and cultural reasons, sign an agreement embodying the kind of permanent settlement that Netanyahu wants. Without an active and politicised Palestinian public sphere to pressure the PA, this grim reality will not provoke the reaction, indeed the explosion, that it should.
The new government of Israel, which is unable and unwilling to find a common language with the prevailing Palestinian elites as Labour did, together with the anti-democratic activities of the PA, undermine slowly but surely the national option incorporated in the two-state solution. The most important factor in this context is the process of building and expanding settlements. As long as the national option remains viable and is sustained by people's yearning for national independence in a state, the settlements remain a colonial activity that impinges upon the sovereignty of one side. Settlements in this case are a kind of theft or even armed robbery; they cannot be tolerated, because sovereignty on land is indivisible.
When it becomes fully apparent that an independent and democratic state occupying every inch of the West Bank and Gaza Strip free of Israeli settlements is not realisable, it will be time for the Palestinians to re-examine their entire strategy. We will then begin to discuss a bi-national state solution that will do away with the system of apartheid that is anchored in the realities of Oslo. Apartheid means separation without sovereignty. The coming future awareness of an apartheid system in effect here will have to produce new options and strategies for action. Awareness of the reality counts even more than the reality of apartheid itself, and as long as the consciousness of this is absent, so are the political attitudes that it potentially will give rise to.
This could possibly mean that the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and the Palestinians in Israel will opt in the future for a single political unit within a bi-national state. There could be, for example, a Jewish-Israeli political unit and a Palestinian-Arab political unit, which together will constitute a Jewish-Arab polity with two separate legislative chambers as well as a common parliament. I believe this could become a programme in the future. I am not referring to a democratic secular state which is supposed to be non-national, nor to an Arab secular democratic state, but to a secular democratic state which is bi-national, a federal or confederate system comprising two national communities. The South African project of building one multicultural South African nation as their antithesis to apartheid is not viable in our case, because here we already have two developed national identities, and it is too late to dream about merging them into one nation. Only in such a context will it be possible to resolve such problems as the refugees and the settlements. Settlements will no longer pose an insurmountable obstacle within the context of a single bi-national state. If the Israelis should choose to settle in the West Bank, then so be it; we Palestinians, too, will have the right to set up residence in Tel Aviv for instance.
Until now the bi-national option has been a rhetorical exercise, an argument against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It merely stated that Israel should either annex the Palestinians or give them independence, it cannot deny them both citizenship and national independence. The bi-national option, which is still only an idea for now, presupposes the impossibility of a separation into two states. If the only alternative is an independent Palestinian state which is fragmented and truncated, then we should go for a bi-national state. Only under such circumstances, or if it becomes clear that there is no possibility of dismantling the settlements, will the bi-national option become a political possibility. Settlements cannot continue under the national option, that is, if there are two separate states; borders cannot be permeable in one direction only; that would constitute usurpation and theft.
The bi-national option is still not a political programme, but a project with cultural and intellectual aspects, opposed to the racist implications that accompany all national separatist projects. Notice, for example, the racist demographic arguments used by Labour to convince Israelis how important separation is. Among the peoples and the elites of both sides the bi-national approach is still not viable as a political programme, for the national option is not exhausted yet. It is also still less acceptable for the Israelis than for the Palestinian state. It has no political agents and no organisational expression. Actually it is still more of a political discourse than a political programme or even project. Nevertheless, it only indicates a shift from the national discourse which has dominated the political culture of both sides, the victims and the victimisers. The Palestinians refused to accept Israel as a fact, and later capitulated to it as a fact too. But between rejection and capitulation there was no room for recognising the nationality of the Israelis. Such a recognition can only be consistent with itself as bi-national if it refuses to accept the historical process that led to the formation of this Israeli nationality, because this would imply a Zionist re-reading of Palestinian history.
The struggle for such a vision in the future will require patterns of organisation, probably more akin to the organisation and thinking of the African National Congress, than to that of the PLO. It would involve the restructuring of Palestinian political life, opening whole new avenues for struggle.
Between hard facts and
absent consciousness, all we can do is turn back to rhetoric. Regardless of how
strong Israel may be today, in the long run it has only two options; a national
solution or a bi-national solution: that is, either an independent Palestinian
state as part of a two-state solution involving separation, genuine sovereignty
and territorial integrity, or a bi-national state requiring annexation. There is
no viable third option. Of course, the Likud's intention is to convince us that
there is a third solution - perpetuating or merely introducing cosmetic changes
in the status quo. That is the key to Netanyahu's rise to power.
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Note
(1) Antoine Lahd was
leader of the Southern Lebanese Army
which was established and continues to be maintained by
Israel in occupied Southern Lebanon, designated 'the
security zone' by the Israelis. Lahd is widely viewed by
most Arabs as a collaborator and quisling.
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