ARE we being pushed into making a U-turn in our Kashmir policy? Of late, concern on this score is being articulated even in quarters other than those at loggerheads with Gen. Musharraf’s government. Some critics are of the view that it is not Indian war-mongering but Pakistan’s partnership with the US-led coalition that has driven us into this situation. And as Islamabad endeavours to go the extra mile in a bid to extricate itself from the so-called ‘jihadi culture’ the evolving scheme of things calls for a strategic shift in our approach to the cause of Kashmir’s freedom.

The rationale for the crackdown on religious extremism had at one stage seemed to be sectarian violence which was singled out as the bane of our society. With the banning of Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Mohammad the scope of the government’s action has been enlarged to target militant outfits which prima facie did not pose a threat to public peace or internal security.

Let us not arrogate to ourselves the divine mission of waging jihads all over the world, Gen. Musharraf said, as he warned against assuming the role of ‘Allah’s warriors’. We must be guided by good sense and refrain from undertaking ventures which are beyond our capability or reach was, needless to say, the intended message. Nevertheless, the two outlawed jihadi groups were associated with the freedom struggle in Kashmir, and on the hit list of the Indians demanding an end to what they call ‘cross-border terrorism’. No matter how the government tries to present its offensive against religious extremism as part of its own agenda and not in response to either India’s browbeating or the American pressure, the action against jihadi groups has been largely seen as a logical corollary to Islamabad’s decision to join the US-led war against international terrorism. If breaking away from the Taliban was deemed as making a virtue of necessity, the same could be said about Islamabad’s new disposition vis-a-vis the adherents of jihadi culture in Pakistan.

If the Americans have been obsessed with eliminating Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, they have been rather ambivalent in their response to New Delhi’s relentless campaign against ‘Pakistani-sponsored terrorism’ in Kashmir. No wonder, opinion leaders in India have all along been arguing that the US will turn its attention to Kashmir once it is free of its preoccupation with Afghanistan. The Indians have since been pursuing a two-fold strategy: an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Pakistan, and putting across the message to the Americans that it was time for them to pressure Pakistan into abdicating its support and assistance to the militant struggle in Kashmir. They have obviously been not satisfied with the measures taken by Gen. Musharraf to indicate his commitment to fight out ‘terrorism in all its forms and manifestations’. The general has not gone far enough is the message driven home by New Delhi’s refusal to de-escalate tension.

The ‘jihadi culture’ did not come out of the blue. The Afghan Jihad against Soviet occupation was instrumental in cultivating and promoting its conceptual basis with official patronage under Ziaul Haq. Gen. Musharraf wants to revert to the ideals of the country’s founding father and transform Pakistan into a modern, liberal and tolerant welfare state. On the face of it, the Americans seem quite willing to buy Musharraf’s reform package as a substantive evidence of his ‘honourable intentions’. But they may in due course be a little more demanding in asking for safeguards against ‘Talibanization’ of the Kashmir struggle.

Several Kashmiri militant groups, in particular the ones operating from Pakistan, share the Taliban worldview and are committed to a similar agenda. Hoisting the Pakistani flag on Delhi’s Red Fort is just one illustration of the jihadi groups’ mindset. Little wonder, the Indians have been constantly hammering in the jihadi groups’ nexus with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

The Indian refrain of ‘cross-border terrorism’ is premised on the formulation that there has been a steady flow of infiltrators from across the LoC, largely Pakistani warriors raised by the jihadi groups, but also of other nationalities, Afghans in particular, inducted from the Al Qaeda recruitment and training facility in Afghanistan. Ironically, some Indian observers say that the destruction of Osama bin Laden’s apparatus in Afghanistan will not stop the process of recruitment of Islamic warriors for jihad in Kashmir. According to them, the contrary is likely to happen, as the remnants of hard-core Taliban and Al Qaeda loyalists will find it convenient to converge on Kashmir.

While the Indians have grudgingly acknowledged that there is an ‘indigenous component’ of the militant groups in Kashmir (L. K. Advani found it expedient to admit that Hizbul Mujahideen was made up of 90 per cent locals and only ten per cent outsiders as his alibi for agreeing to talk to an agency officially called by his government a terrorist outfit), their accent has been on projecting the Kashmiri militants as surrogates being manipulated by Pakistan-based jihadi organizations in collaboration with the ISI.

Whether or not the ISI has fallen in line with the government’s policy shift vis-a-vis the jihadi forces, New Delhi refuses to find a whipping boy other than the ISI which was, with the usual indecent haste, accused of having a hand in the terrorist attack on the American Centre in Kolkata. If the purpose is to discredit Pakistan’s bonafides and drive a wedge in its alliance with the US, the underlying idea of the continuing campaign is to put across the message that Gen. Musharraf has not gone far enough to rein in the ISI and its covert operations in collusion with Islamic extremists.

Whether as a free choice or in response to compulsion of circumstances, if the drive against religious extremism ends up in the dismantling of the jihadi groups, it will obviously be seen as a setback for the Kashmir freedom struggle. Some crucial questions are likely to be raised. For instance, is material support and assistance from outside necessary to sustain a particular level of resistance in Indian-held Kashmir? Are the outsiders involved in fighting for a fraternal cause an asset, or a liability for the freedom struggle — more so in the wake of the current global drive against terrorism. If militancy were to decline what other viable options would be available for the Kashmiris to resist Indian occupation. Needless to say, the evolving global scenario and its ramifications in the region call for the formulation of a new Kashmir strategy by Islamabad.

Whether or not the newly set-up president’s National Kashmir Committee has the capability to rise to the occasion, the move nevertheless recognizes the need for a policy review and a new initiative to chart a viable course of action. President Musharraf has been trying to reassure the people that there would be no sell-out on Kashmir. No compromise is possible on our solidarity with the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination, he said as he declared “Kashmir runs in our blood”. Nonetheless, he is required to perform a delicate balancing act as he proceeds to unfold his agenda for neutralizing the ‘Islamic warriors’ and to establish the writ of the state all across the land.

He has repeatedly made it clear that in Pakistan’s view the Kashmiris are freedom fighters and not terrorists, and this is precisely what he wishes to convey to the whole world. However, as he pleads for a differentiation between a freedom struggle and terrorism, he himself has to draw a line between an endeavour to outgrow the ‘jihadi culture’ and an action likely to undermine the Kashmir struggle.

As we endeavour to make a break with jihadi culture, reorientation of the struggle in Kashmir is all the more necessary. ‘Azadi’ is a universally acclaimed right of the people. No one can grudge the Kashmiris if they are fighting for freedom from a regime which they do not acknowledge as just and legitimate. The struggle for freedom may not necessarily be prone to using violence as a political instrument. And it could also be a combination of political agitation and militant action depending on which form of struggle is more appropriate in a given situation.

THE general criticism of Pakistan’s Kashmir policy is that it is too rigid and does not allow much room for a flexible response to new circumstances. Therefore, the critics demand, Pakistan needs to change its Kashmir policy and make it more adaptable to the needs of new times.

However, the reality is exactly the opposite. The problem of Pakistan’s Kashmir policy is not rigidity, or continuity, but rather too much change. It is strange but true that for all the slogans of “not budging an inch from our position on Kashmir”, which successive governments in Pakistan have mouthed for public consumption, Pakistan’s Kashmir stance has always been changing easily. Too easily for the good of our very strong case on the issue.

Take the example of the twin matters of keeping a ‘singular focus on Kashmir while talking to India’ and ‘Kashmir is not a bilateral problem’. Even in the formative years of the conflict Pakistan was keen to bracket the issue with all other outstanding problems with India and desired a simultaneous focus on everything that bedevilled relations between the two countries.

From the occupation of Junagarh, Manavadar and other states in Kathiawar that had acceded to Pakistan to the refusal of the Indian government to implement agreements on the payment of finances and equitable division of military assets.

Pakistans policy makers wanted every item in the catalogue of Indian chicanery to be taken up by the United Nations. In fact, the letter of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan to his Indian counterpart as early as December 30, 1947, made a strong plea for referring not just Kashmir but all issues to the United Nations.

“I trust you will agree that the intervention of the United Nations, whatever form it is to take, should be invited in respect of all these matters so that all pending differences may be speedily resolved”, wrote Liaquat Ali Khan. Perhaps justifiable under the peculiar nature of circumstances of that time, when the country was grappling with multifaceted challenges of nation- and state- building, this approach was not suited to establishing the centrality of the Kashmir issue in Pakistan’s relations with India.

It also diluted the singular-policy-focus-on-Kashmir claim that all governments later repeatedly made in public. Indeed it led many in India to subsequently argue that Pakistan did not even want Kashmir to be raised at the United Nations and was quite happy to settle it bilaterally.

The policy zigzagging on both these scores continue even after the United Nations Security Council had passed its resolutions on Kashmir, turning the matter into an international dispute. The Liaquat-Nehru correspondence on the much-talked about No War Pact idea in 1950 reflected a flexible approach towards the Kashmir issue, including the possibility of taking up the issue bilaterally.

Pakistan proposed referring all outstanding disputes between India and Pakistan to international arbitration only after “negotiations” had failed. Throughout the sixties, the government stance that Kashmir was a central issue to be resolved in accordance with the UN Security Council resolutions continued along with occasional bilateral initiatives for a settlement. Bilateral commitments were made to “renew efforts to resolve all outstanding issues” between the two countries.

The talks between Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then Pakistans foreign minister and his Indian counterpart, Sardar Swaran Singh, on Kashmir was bilateral in nature. President Ayub Khan’s speech on the occasion of the signing of the Tashkent Declaration did not even mention Kashmir; the Declaration itself only talked about discussions on Kashmir; there was no reference to Kashmir being an international dispute.

Then came the Simla agreement of 1972. Negotiated in the aftermath of the East Pakistan debacle and the defeat in the 1971 war, Simla agreement went a step further in practically altering the Pakistan’s earlier stance that Kashmir was an international dispute as defined in the United Nations Security Council resolutions.

Instead, it specifically said that “the two countries are resolved to settle their differences by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by any other peaceful means mutually agreed upon between them”.

This armed the Indians with the argument that Pakistan itself had agreed to bilaterally settle the Kashmir dispute. The disclaimers from Pakistan that the wording of the Simla agreement “...through bilateral negotiations or by any other means...” protected Pakistans position have been effective only as a counter-argument.

The subsequent rounds of talks at the foreign secretaries’ level, including discussions (fruitless as these turned out to be) on Kashmir throughout the nineties also indicated an inclination towards bilateralism. Indeed, the Lahore Declaration did not even refer to Kashmir as a “dispute”. Instead, it preferred the term “issue”. There was no mention of the United Nations Security Council resolutions.

Instead, it spoke of a resolve to “intensify their composite and integrated dialogue process for any early and positive outcome of the agreed bilateral agenda.”

Similar confusion has persisted in our characterization of the Kashmir dispute. Sometimes it has been called “an unfinished agenda of partition”, sometimes an extension of the two nation theory, sometimes it has been termed the “sole question of the right of the Kashmiris to live freely”, or it has called a territorial dispute. At other times, it has been described as a flashpoint of nuclear conflict, a human rights concern, and a question of the survival of Pakistan.

Our governments have also been quite flexible in trying various possible solutions for the Kashmir problem. From freezing and neglecting it (as in the late ’70s and the ’80s) to fighting wars over it (1947-48, 1965, 1999), to actively backing militant campaigns against the territorial division of the Kashmir state (in the ’90s) to talking about its virtual division (the Chenab solution taken up seriously by the Nawaz Sharif government in 1999), our stance has lacked a well-defined bottom-line.

From demanding everything to agreeing to anything, we have been flitting from one extreme position to another.

The result is that our Kashmir policy has been a rolling stone of change that has gathered no moss of steady international support. This has undermined our position on Kashmir, whose substance has been marred by thoughtless military adventures and crass diplomatic opportunism of shortsighted politicians.

Against this background, the need is not to change Pakistans Kashmir policy, but to give it a stable character and make it consistent — both in terms of the goal and the strategies applied to achieve the goal.

WHEN account is finally taken of the brutalities to which the people of Afghanistan were subjected by those who claimed to rule in the name of a religion that places compassion and tolerance among the highest virtues, one wonders what their apologists in Pakistan would have to say. A Zionist conspiracy? A CIA plot? An American disinformation smear? An Indian concoction? Or perhaps all four?

The Taliban movement was an aberration and in the name of restoring Islam to its early purity, it performed the greatest imaginable disservice to it. Decades will pass before Islam and those who follow it are able to restore their image in the eyes of the world.

The Taliban took away the dignity of the people of Afghanistan. Their vandalism, exhibited at its most shocking in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, one of the world’s most enduring cultural and religious legacies, will be remembered long after their other misdeeds are forgotten.

If the Taliban were following the ways of God, as they and their apologists kept claiming, why were they so cruel? They showed no mercy to anyone, least of all to their women whom they relegated to the status of animals. The Taliban are gone but they have destroyed much that was of value. It is hard to forgive them.

In the next weeks and months, more and more stories of what the Taliban did to their people will come out and one hopes those who saw in them the best hope of Islam’s revival will come to recognize the scourge that this throwback to medievalism was. One of the most shocking stories that I can remember having read in a long time is that of Sayed Abdullah, a 26-year old Afghan who is living evidence of the curse that the Taliban period was. It is to the credit of Kevin Sullivan, a ‘Washington Post’ reporter, who recently brought it to light.

It all began one afternoon as 1999 was coming to a close. Abdullah says before the Taliban disappear down some dark alley of history, he wants the world to know what they did to him for no other sin except that they thought he was a Christian. About fifteen Taliban soldiers carrying their trademark AK-47 assault rifles surrounded his home that day where he lived with his wife, two girls aged three and one and his mother. The leader of the group said to him, “We are suspicious of you. We want to ask you some questions.”

He couldn’t understand what they wanted from him. He had a steady job with the International Committee of the Red Cross. He was a popular and friendly man.

He had learnt English at school and he had collected a library of five hundred books that he loved to read. He was particularly fond of European history and he had pictures and short biographies of all US presidents. He loved to travel, but was too poor to do so. His books were his escape into the world he could not otherwise see.

The Taliban threw him into one of their hallmark Toyota pickups, took him to a dreaded building that housed the regime’s Intelligence Division No.1, and pushed him into a cell so small he could not even lie down in it. It was dark and the floor was wet. Hours later, a guard came and took him to a large room where there was a table with metal legs and a wooden top.

Next to it sat the commander. Abdullah’s books were lying in their bookcase which had been ripped from the wall and brought over. The commander held up two copies of the Bible, one in English, one in Darri to him.

The commander told him that he had converted to Christianity from Islam and he would have to tell them what country he was working for.

“I am a good Muslim,” Abdullah replied. “I have these books for information, for learning, not for changing religions. Everyone should know about other religions and other parts of the world.” The commander told him to shut up. At this point, several guards moved in, put him face down on the table, tied his hands and feet to his legs and began to beat him with sticks andv heavy plastic ropes, punching, pounding, whipping. He passed out after two or three hours.

When he came to, he was back in his cell. He ached everywhere and his face and clothes were caked with blood. A group of Taliban soldiers came in and began to taunt him for abandoning Islam.

The soldiers then pulled him out of his cell, kicked and punched him and spat on his face. They also asked the commander if they could have the “privilege” of slashing this infidel’s throat with their knives. They were sure God would reward them for such a pious act.

Then they took him back and handed him a piece of paper which they wanted him to use to write his “confession”. When he said he was innocent, they tied him to the same table, poured water on his feet, wound electric wires around his big toes which they then turned live. This went on for an hour. He says it was as if some great force was lifting him high off the table and slamming him down, over and over again.

Then they left him and did not return for several days. He stayed in his dark, cold and wet cell with swarms of bugs crawling all over the floor and the walls.

He was unable to move. His toe nails had turned blue. The toilet was a hole in the ground in the next cell and to get to it he had to crawl as he was unable to walk.

One morning, he was put in a truck and taken to a walled compound with barred windows. A soldier told him, “We do not want to torture you, just confess.” “I swear to God, I swear on the Quran, I am not the man you’re looking for.” In reply, they began to beat him, pounding him a piece of meat, while chanting, “God will reward us.”

Ultimately, it has been said, everyone breaks, and so did Abdullah. To bring his torture and, if it came to that, even his life to an end, he “confessed” that he had indeed converted to Christianity. He was told that since he had confessed, he stood convicted.

The file would go up to Mulla Omar for sentencing. His mother in the meanwhile had been running from one Taliban office to another but without luck, until one day an official said to her that if she could bring him $5,000, maybe he could help, since she said her son was innocent.

She somehow raised the money and handed it to the official. After some weeks, Abdullah was released.

He spent the next six months in hospitals in Kabul and Pakistan. The orthopaedic surgeon who operated on him said that the Taliban had broken several bones in his back. He still wears a brace. He has bad hearing and bad vision and his memory has been affected. He has chronic kidney problems and his back, legs and arms are scarred. His doctor said Abdullah’s case was typical of many Taliban torture cases. “They were animals,” the doctor said.

Abdullah has his old job back at Red Cross. This is only one story. There are thousands of similar or even more horrifying stories. Some will be told, some the world will never hear about. But what happened to Sayed Abdullah is enough to condemn the system and the people who were committed such inhuman acts without the least sense of guilt.

IF nothing else, Enron’s difficulties have not only given us a lesson in Economics 101, but they have told us how Washington operates.

Everyone in Enron has played their role — from the executives in the company and their accounting firm to the lawyers who served them so well. But none of them could accomplish what they did without the Washington lobbyists. They are the ones who protect companies from a government that cannot be trusted.

Lobbyists are just like you and me, and they put on their golf shoes one foot at a time.

You have to be qualified to be a lobbyist. Many, but not all, are recruited from Congress. They have decided they are fed up with politics and want to make some big money for a change, or have lost an election and are not fit to do anything else.

Lobbyists are very friendly people. They call lawmakers and administration officials by their first names: “Ted,” “Terry,” “George.” Theirs is the only profession, except for the FBI, that makes house calls.

The job of the lobbyist is to stop a law that will hurt his clients and lobby for a bill that will make everyone rich.

This is an example of how it works: The Hidden Valley Gas and Energy Co. has ex-Senator Glad Handle on its payroll to lobby for them in Washington. Glad Handle is a Republican, and he replaced ex-Congressman Taylor Bluewhistle, a Democrat, who was fired after Al Gore lost the election.

Glad moves between the Capitol, the White House, and any agency that can affect Hidden Valley business.

Let’s say Congress wants to pass a law forbidding Hidden Valley from delivering natural gas and smoking cigarettes at the same time.

What Congress doesn’t know is that Hidden Valley owns a cigarette company as well as a gas company. Banning smoking near a gas plant will seriously hurt their tobacco business.

Glad invites Sen. Carl Fiddle to Burning Tree Country Club. Fiddle is in charge of the Smoking and Energy Committee. He is greeted warmly by Handle, who says, “Remember when we filibustered an equal rights bill together?”

They play 18 holes, and then Glad asks Fiddle, “How’s the election campaign going?”

“We could use a $100,000 in soft money to buy sweatshirts for our volunteers.”

Glad takes out his checkbook and says, “Why didn’t you say that before?”

Sen. Fiddle replies, “You’re a lobbyist, so we hated to ask you for something. If we take your money, what can we do for you?”

“Nothing much. If you want to hold up the Anti-Smoking Gas Bill in committee, that would be fun.”

“It’s done.”

“What about getting the oil rights to West Point?” Glad asks.

“I know the person at EPA you should ask for.”

Glad says, “Can I buy you a beer?”

“You know, Glad, that’s against Senate rules.”—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

HISTORY has no mercy. There are no laws in it against suffering and cruelty, no internal balance that restores a people much sinned against to their rightful place in the world. Cyclical views of history have always seemed to me flawed for that reason, as if the turning of the screw means that present evil can later be transformed into good. Nonsense.

Turning the screw of suffering means more suffering, and not a path to salvation. The most frustrating thing about history, however, is that so much in it escapes language, escapes attention and memory altogether. Historians have therefore resorted to metaphors and poetic figures to fill in the spaces, and this is why the first great historian, Herodotus, was also known as the Father of Lies: so much in what he wrote embellished and, to a great extent also, concealed the truth that it is the powers of his imagination that make him so great a writer, not the vast number of facts he deployed.

Living in the United States at this moment is a terrible experience. What is readily available to the average American drowned in a storm of media pictures and stories almost completely cleansed of anything in foreign affairs but the patriotic line issued by the government, the picture is a startling one. America is fighting the evils of terrorism. America is good, and anyone who objects is evil and anti-American. Resistance against America, its policies, its arms and ideas is little short of terrorist.

What I find just as startling is that the influential and, in their own way, sophisticated American foreign policy analysts keep saying that they cannot understand why the whole world (and the Arabs and Muslims in particular) will not accept the American message, and why the rest of the world including Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America persists in its criticism of American policies in Afghanistan, for renouncing six international treaties unilaterally, for its total, unconditional support of Israel, for its astonishingly obdurate policy on prisoners of war. The difference between realities as perceived by Americans on the one hand and by the rest of the world on the other, is so vast, and irreconcilable as to defy description.

Words alone are inadequate to explain how an American secretary of state, who presumably has all the facts at his command, can without a trace of irony accuse Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for not doing enough against terror and for buying 50 tons of arms to defend his people, while Israel is supplied with everything that is most lethally sophisticated in the American arsenal at no expense. Do not be surprised tomorrow if Arafat and his people are accused of besieging Israel while blockading its citizens and towns.

As for Israel on the US media, its spokesmen have become so practised at lying, creating falsehoods the way a sausage-maker makes sausages, that nothing is beyond them. Yesterday, I heard an Israel defence (even the name sticks in one’s throat) ministry official answering an American reporter’s questions about house destruction in Rafah: those were empty houses, he said, without hesitation, they were terrorist nests used for killing Israeli citizens; we have to defend Israeli citizens against Palestinian terror. The occupation wasn’t even referred to by the journalist, and neither was the fact that the “citizens” referred to were settlers. As for the several hundred poor homeless Palestinians whose pictures appeared fleetingly in the US media after the (American-made) bulldozers had done their demolition, they were gone from memory and awareness completely.

As for the Arab non-response, that has exceeded in disgrace and shamefulness the already abysmally low standards set by our governments for the past fifty years. Are the Arab leaders so fearful of offending the US that they are willing to accept not only Palestinian humiliation but their own as well? And for what? Simply to be allowed to go on with corruption, mediocrity, and oppression. What a cheap bargain they have made between the furtherance of their narrow interests and American forbearance!

No wonder that there is scarcely an Arab alive today for whom the word “regime” connotes little more than amused contempt, unadulterated bitterness, and (except for the circle of advisers and sycophants) angry alienation. At least with the recent press conferences by high Saudi officials criticizing US policy towards Israel there is a welcome break in the silence, although the disarray and dysfunction concerning the upcoming Arab summit continues to add to our already well-stocked cupboard of poorly-managed incidents that demonstrate a needless disunity and posturing.

I do think that the adjective “wicked” (shar) is the correct one here for what is being done to the truth of the Palestinian experience of suffering imposed by Sharon collectively on the whole of the West Bank and Gaza.

That it cannot adequately be described or narrated, that the Arabs say or do nothing in support of the struggle, that the US is so terrifyingly hostile, that the Europeans are (except for their recent declaration, which has no measures of implementation in it) so useless, all this has driven many of us to despair I know, and to a kind of hopeless frustration that is one of the results aimed for by Israeli officials and their US counterparts. To reduce people to the heedlessness of not caring anymore, and to make life so miserable as to make it seem necessary to give up life itself, comprise a state of desperation that Sharon so clearly wants.

This is what he was elected to do and what, if his policies fail, will cause him to lose his office, whereupon Netanyahu will be brought in to try to finish the same dreadful and inhuman (but ultimately suicidal) task.

In the face of such a situation, passivity and helpless anger —-even a kind of bitter fatalism—-are, I truly believe, inappropriate intellectual and political responses. Examples to the contrary still abound. Palestinians have neither been intimidated nor persuaded to give up, and that is a sign of great will and purpose. Looked at from that point of view, all of Israel’s collective measures and constant humiliation have proved ineffective; as one of their generals put it, stopping the resistance by besieging Palestinians is like trying to drink the sea with a spoon. It just doesn’t work.

But having taken note of that, I also firmly believe that we have to go beyond stubborn resistance towards a creative one, towards getting beyond the tired old methods for defying the Israelis but not sufficiently advancing Palestinian interests in the process. Take decision-making as a simple case in point. It’s all very well for Arafat to sit out his own imprisonment in Ramallah and to repeat endlessly that he wants to negotiate, but it just is not a political programme, nor is its personal style sufficient to mobilize his own people as well as his allies.

Certainly it is good to take note of the European declaration in support of the PA, but surely it is more important to say something about the Israeli reservists who refused service on the West Bank and Gaza. Without identifying and trying to work in concert with Israeli resistance to Israeli oppression, we are still standing at square one.

The point of course is that every turning of the screw of cruel collective punishment dialectically creates a new space for new kinds of resistance, of which suicide bombing is simply not a part anymore. It isn’t new and it isn’t up to what is now being done by opponents of Israel’s military occupation in both Palestine and Israel. Why not make a specific point of singling out Israeli groups who have opposed house demolitions, or apartheid, or assassinations, or any of the lawless displays of Israeli macho bullying?

There is no way that the occupation is going to be defeated unless Palestinian and Israeli efforts combine to work together to end the occupation, in specific and concrete ways. And that, therefore, means that Palestinian groups (with or without the PA’s guidance) have to take initiatives that they have been shy of taking (because of understandable fears of normalization), initiatives that actively solicit and involve Israeli resistance as well as European, Arab and American resistance.

In other words, with the disappearance of Oslo, Palestinian civil society has been released from that fraudulent peace process’s strictures, and this new empowerment means going beyond such traditional interlocutors as the now completely discredited Labour party and its hangers-on, in the direction of more courageous, innovative anti-occupation drives. If the PA wants to keep calling on Israel to return to the negotiating table, that’s fine, of course, if any Israelis can be found to sit there with the PA. But that doesn’t mean that Palestinian NGOs have to repeat the same chorus.

Yes, the screw turns, but it not only brings more Israeli repression, it also dialectically reveals new opportunities for Palestinian ingenuity and creativity. There are already considerable signs of progress in Palestinian civil society: an intensified focus on them is required, especially as fissures in Israeli society disclose a frightened, closed-off and horrifyingly insecure populace badly in need of awakening.

It always falls to the victim, not the oppressor, to show new paths for resistance, and in this the signs are that Palestinian civil society is beginning to take the initiative. This is an excellent omen in a time of despondency and instinctual retrogression. —Copyright Edward W. Said, 2002