Will Ariel Sharon negotiate with Mahmoud Abbas? What Sharon wants is to carve up the West Bank into Bantustans in which the only freedom the Palestinians will have will be to collect garbage and sweep streets. If Mahmoud Abbas does not opt for this, Sharon will drag on the talks process while ‘creating facts’
WHEN Mahmoud Abbas was the prime minister of Palestine (April 30-Sept 6, 2003), Ariel Sharon gave several reasons for not talking to the Palestinian Authority (PA). One of the reasons was that Yasser Arafat was undermining him. Now, with Yasser Arafat gone — much to Sharon’s relief — is there a possibility that Israel’s Likud hard-liner for whom “hawk” is an understatement will resume negotiations with the PA with Abbas at its head?
Abbas is one of the Fatah’s founding members still alive. Like all others in the Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, he was overshadowed by Arafat’s personality and never had the full opportunity to make his presence felt. He is not a hawk, and does not see eye to with Hamas and other rightwing groups pledged to fight Israel until victory. In fact, he was one of the first Palestinians to talk to liberal and left-leaning Israeli intellectuals and was the man behind Oslo. But moderate or hawk, Abbas is first and foremost a Palestinian, and as he said a few days before last Sunday’s vote, if “statehood talks” with Israel did not begin, the Palestinian people would be justified in resorting to armed struggle. This is a position which no Palestinian and no sane mind in the world will oppose.
Will, then, Sharon talk to Abbas, whose sweeping victory by a stunning 38 per cent margin must have surprised even him? Sharon has already congratulated Abbas on his victory and, in all possibility, the talks will begin — one does not know when. But, as with all the talks formulae and the peace processes in pursuit of the “land for peace” shibboleth, it is highly unlikely that the new round of talks will lead to success and end bloodshed in the holy land.
King Hussein was reportedly the first to use the words “land for peace” — al-ard muqabil as-salaam. Since then it has spawned a series of talks, summit conferences, partial agreements, ceasefire accords and wholesale treaties. The most important one was the Oslo process, with America and Russia being the co-sponsors, and Norway the host. Held away from the media glare in Washington or Paris and in the remote Norwegian capital, the talks led to the signing of the historic “Declaration of Principles” (DoP) on the lawns of the White House on Sept 13, 1993.
With President Bill Clinton watching, two central figures of the Middle Eastern drama — Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin — shook hands to begin what was supposed to be the beginning of the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the start of a new era, with donors pledging billions of dollars in aid to begin construction in the war-ravaged Palestine — historically the world’s most contested and blood-drenched land.
The accords provided for a timetable for an Israeli withdrawal, the establishment of an embryonic Palestinian government in Jericho, elections to a self-governing Palestinian council, and the beginning of talks for a final settlement of the city of Al Quds. If things had gone as provided for in the DoP, a final settlement would have been in place in September 1999.
Who, then, sabotaged the peace process and with what intentions?
After Israel had signed the accord did it occur to the hawks and fanatics — who had Rabin murdered — that the signing of the DoP negated the very raison d’etre of Israel. What was the basic assumption behind the Zionist movement and the founding of Israel? One historical falsehood of monumental proportions: that Palestine was a land without human habitation — a land without people — and for that reason “a people without land” (the Jews) had a proprietorial right to it.
Theodore Herzl (1860-1904), the founder of the Zionist movement, never touched upon the question of Palestine’s existing population when he published his book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish state) in 1896. More astonishing, British statesmen who offered Palestine to the Zionists on a silver platter behaved no differently, as is evident from the declaration signed by Lord Balfour in 1917. While viewing “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people”, the declaration was kind enough to declare that nothing would be done to jeopardize the rights of the “existing non-Jewish communities” — as if Palestine already had a Jewish majority which should look after “the civil and religious rights” of non-Jewish minorities like Muslim and Christian.
The truth was that when the declaration was issued — in the form of Lord Balfour’s letter to British banker Lord Rothschild — the Jews constituted less than 10 per cent of the population. This included the European Jews who had settled there during the Ottoman times. Thus, if the white settlers are removed from the statistics, then native Arabic-speaking Jews were only six per cent of the population. (The Arab Jews, incidentally, had no problem with Christian and Muslim Arabs and been living with them in peace since Saladin brought the Jews of Jerusalem back after the Crusaders massacred and uprooted them in 1099.)
Once the British occupied Palestine in 1917, Jewish migrations from Europe began in earnest, the aim being to occupy as much of Palestine’s land as possible and to create the paraphernalia of a Jewish state while the “mandate” lasted. This was done by setting up a Jewish Agency, operating with full British cooperation. Its ostensible aim was to look after the Jews arriving for settlement and to plan kibbutzim and undertake other municipal matters. In actual fact, it was a government all but in name, for it maintained well-armed militias of well-armed thugs who terrorized and massacred Arab civilians. The moment Britain pulled out in May 1948, this Jewish Agency converted itself into a government and proclaimed “the independence of Israel”.
From the word go, the Zionist terrorist organizations — Haganah, Stern, Irgun and Zvei Leumi — went after Arab blood with a view to turning Palestine into a Jewish majority area. Among terrorists involved in these mass murders were men like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir who would later become Israel’s prime ministers.
Yet despite uninterrupted immigration — accentuated by the rise of Nazism in Germany — Palestine still had an Arab majority when the first Arab-Israeli war began. Among the massacres was the one at Deir Yassin, which even Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, considered a shame for Israel.
The massacre was thoroughly mishandled by Arab politicians and media, for it led to the mass flight of Arabs from Palestine — exactly the thing the Zionists wanted.
After coming into being, Israel, as a matter of state policy, denied the very existence of the Palestinian people. All that the world knew of was an Arab “refugee problem” — a myth shattered by Yasser Arafat when, following the battle of Karameh, he infused a new life into the movement and put the Palestinian question on the world’s front pages.
The signing of the DoP was a step in that direction, and its faithful implementation would have meant the coming into being of a Palestinian people. But that would have repudiated the very basis of Zionist philosophy.
We now come back to the question asked earlier: will Sharon negotiate with Abbas? Yes, he will, because America will egg him on to revive peace talks. President George Bush had shunned all contacts with Arafat for three reasons: Arafat had failed to control terrorism; there was corruption in the PA, and reforms had not been sincerely undertaken.
With Arafat sleeping in Ramallah — covered with soil from Jerusalem, the city where he was born — President Bush now has no reason to abjure the peace process anymore. Sharon will then be under pressure to resume talks, but the way the talks will be held will be no different from the way Shamir and Begin did. Both used to say that they would “create facts” while the talks dragged on.
By creating facts the Israeli leaders meant getting more Jewish migrants (the USSR’s break-up gave Israel one million settlers), establishing more Jewish settlements, shrinking or where possible uprooting Arab villages and farms, building highways and security installations through and in Arab lands, diverting water resources and doing that of which the western media has taken little notice: felling 150,000 olive and 50,000 citrus trees. (These statistics are at least half a decade old.) As pointed out by Arafat in an article in Dawn (Feb 8, 2002), the number of settlers in the occupied territories had doubled between Sept 1993 (when the DoP was signed) and February 2002.
This is in violation of Security Council Resolution 446 which says “...policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories ... have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to the achievement of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”
Few people know that a Palestinian cannot dig a well, and if he stores rain water in a pond Israeli authorities destroy it.
Sharon will, thus, negotiate in this fashion. He will prolong the peace process by obfuscating facts, focussing on non-issues and reopening settled issues. All along, the western media would blame Abbas for failing to clinch a peace deal, while Sharon goes about creating facts.
He has already said that the Gaza disengagement does not mean that he will quit the West Bank, because he intends to enlarge the existing Jewish settlements there and accommodate all those to be pulled out of Gaza. For this, he already has President Bush’s approval.
Negotiations assume mutual respect and a determination to strive for and live in peace. In this context, it is pertinent to know what some Israeli leaders, Sharon included, think of Palestinians and what their aims are:
Golda Meir, former prime minister: “There was no such thing as Palestinians; they never existed.”
Begin: The Palestinians are “beasts walking on two legs”.
Ehud Barak: “Palestinians are like crocodiles; the more you give them meat the more they want”.
Raphael Eitan, a former army chief of staff: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”
Lt-Gen. Dan Shomoron, former chief of staff: intifada cannot be crushed except by “starvation or physical elimination — that is genocide.”
What about the views of this Butcher of Beirut?: An Israeli court made Sharon “personally responsible” for the Sabra-Chatilla massacre” (article by Robert Fisk, Dawn , July 20, 2002).
In an interview with Gen Ouze Merham, in 1956, Sharon said: “I don’t know something called international principles. I vow that I’ll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child are more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child’s existence infers that the generations will go on...I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I have killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arab girls as the Palestinian woman is a slave for Jews and we do whatever we want to her ...”
It is with this kind of man that the good soul Mahmoud Abbas would be negotiating with.
If it were in Sharon’s power, he would create a Greater Israel by annexing the West Bank and the Gaza. The US and the European Union would make a lot of angry noise about it, and all one cares even the American-controlled Security Council may pass a resolution against the move. But in the long run, the US and the EU will accept the fait accompli.
The reason why Sharon will not actually do so is because demography is working against him. At present, Israelis enjoy a small majority if the occupied territories and Israel are taken together. But given the higher Arab birth rate, the Palestinians will be in a majority in a greater Israel. Which, of course, will be counterproductive.
What Sharon wants is to carve up the West Bank into Bantustans in which the only freedom the Palestinians will have will be to collect garbage and sweep streets. If Mahmoud Abbas does not opt for this, all Sharon will do will be to drag on the talks process while creating facts.
Will Ariel Sharon negotiate with Mahmoud Abbas? What Sharon wants is to carve up the West Bank into Bantustans in which the only freedom the Palestinians will have will be to collect garbage and sweep streets. If Mahmoud Abbas does not opt for this, Sharon will drag on the talks process while ‘creating facts’
