Yet Another
Historic Day
By Ali Abunimah
10 January, 2004
The
Electronic Intifada
Once
again, the media and the international peace process industry have declared
that it is an "historic day" for the Palestinian people. The
occasion this time is the election of Mahmoud Abbas as head of the Palestinian
Authority in the occupied territories. Yet most of these Palestinian
people, for whom this day has been declared historic, do not live in
the occupied territories; the majority of Palestinians live in diaspora
or as refugees outside their homeland, a direct result of the ethnic
cleansing which created Israel in 1947-48, and of the occupation of
the remainder of Palestine in 1967.
For Palestinians
in the diaspora, such historic days feel like everyone is having a party
that is supposed to be in your honor, except that no one invited you,
or perhaps it is like watching a television movie of your life that
bears little resemblance to reality. The feeling I have now is exactly
what I felt on that other big historic day, September 13, 1993, when
the Oslo Accords were signed in Washington by a beaming Yasir Arafat
and the recalcitrant Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, under the
beatific gaze of President Bill Clinton. I feel a mixture of exasperation,
hopelessness and determination.
For days now, I
have done hours of talk radio about the elections, trying to explain
as best as I can why replacing Yasser Arafat with Mahmoud Abbas will
not lead to peace, why Palestinians aren't ecstatic, how the Israeli
occupation makes democracy impossible. But for the most part, the script
has been written and Palestinians are only called upon to read their
lines. So the TV and newspapers are full of happy Palestinian voters
who debate only whether Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) or Mustafa Barghouti
is right for them. Herds of international observers are on hand to certify
that a few irregularities notwithstanding, this was a model election
of which Palestinians can be proud.
John Sununu: Reading the US script
U.S. Senator John Sununu, who was part of the US observer delegation
read from the official script: "It's a democratic election in the
Arab world, and that in itself is somewhat historic," the New York
Times quoted him as saying. Sununu added that the Palestinian leadership
will now have "a new level of credibility to talk to the Israelis
and impose reform and reorganization of the security forces, so there's
a reason to be optimistic."
The reports I heard
directly from associates on the ground only add to the disconnect between
what Palestinians are experiencing and how the story is being told.
EI's Arjan El-Fassed, an accredited election monitor posted in Gaza
reported shortly before polls were scheduled to close that in the Shaaf
area of Gaza City, a little more than 1,000 of 20,000 registered voters
had voted -- a turnout of about seven percent. Chaos had broken out,
he said, after Palestinian election officials had changed the rules
at the last minute to allow voters to vote at any polling station in
a desperate bid to raise the turnout and perhaps to open the possibility
of a person casting multiple votes. The Palestinian Centre for Human
Rights immediately announced it was appealing what it called an illegal
decision.
EI's Maureen Murphy,
monitoring the elections in the Hebron area with the Al-Haq human rights
organization reported that many people who turned out to vote did so
despite feeling resigned to the fact that whoever wins will have no
power to improve their lives or change the reality Israel has imposed
on them.
In the ghost-written
screenplay that the Palestinians are being forced to act out, the election
is "good news." This means that any information that interferes
with this agreed narrative that we are at the cusp of a new era
of peace, democracy and reform has to be carefully filtered out.
As I sift through
the deluge of election news, I find I am still unable to stop thinking
about the murder by the Israeli army of seven Palestinian children in
Gaza, literally blown to pieces by a tank shell on 4 January. This was
barely reported in the US media. National Public Radio, supposedly the
paragon of in-depth and nuanced reporting, actually covered up the story,
reporting only that Mahmoud Abbas had called Israel the "Zionist
Enemy" without mentioning the killing of the children at all, even
though Abbas had made his statement in direct response to the atrocity.
A few days earlier,
I had emailed a New York Times reporter to ask why in a lengthy article
about the election campaign, the news that the Israeli army had killed
nine Palestinians in a single day, including two children and a man
living with Down's Syndrome, had been mentioned only in the final paragraph.
I pointed out that whenever the victims are Israelis, his newspaper
gives their deaths great prominence, and asked whether we should therefore
understand that Palestinian lives are viewed as less valuable. The reporter
wrote back: "Your point is very well taken ... the problem is more
with the nature of daily stories than with differential humanity, but
I will bear your good letter in mind. No life is worth less than any
other." At first I felt satisfied by this answer, but the more
I thought about it, the angrier I became.
Actually differential
humanity is precisely the issue. The entire "peace process"
and the discourse about Palestine today is structured around the absolutely
inverted claim that Israelis are the principal victims of violence and
Palestinians the principal perpetrators and aggressors.
So it would appear
that in the mind of this reporter, and many others, the daily killing
of Palestinians is not newsworthy because it is routine. Whereas in
any period where the killing of Israelis was routine, it was that very
fact which made the story newsworthy. It is the claim that the killing
of Israelis is routine or threatens to become routine which is used
to justify and provide context for all of Israel's actions, from assasinations
to the mass demolition of homes in Gaza's Jabaliya and Rafah refugee
camps to the construction of the apartheid wall inside the occupied
West Bank.
In order to maintain
this fiction, other crucial facts must be routinely screened from public
view. While the peace process scriptwriters insist that Mahmoud Abbas
can bring peace where Arafat failed, the Israelis at least know better.
The day before the
election, Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper published a lengthy report by
Aluf Benn headlined "Quietly carrying on building," about
how Israel's settler colonies are growing apace across the West Bank.
Israel is drawing up construction plans in over 120 settlements across
the occupied West Bank with the full approval and knowledge of incoming
US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Benn says. According to an Israeli
government source quoted in the article, "If the U.S. recognizes
your claim that the [settlement] blocs will remain yours forever, why
should it make a fuss when you build on your own property?" Ha'aretz
added that according to Peace Now, an Israeli group that meticulously
documents settlement activity, "the main building effort in the
Jewish settlements in the West Bank is now focused on the area between
the Green Line [1967 border] and the separation fence [apartheid wall],
and it is aimed at turning the fence into Israel's permanent border."
So in the long-running
Palestine soap opera, Abbas, the understudy who has been hired to replace
the deceased lead actor Arafat, is being offered the choice of two roles
by the Israeli-American scriptwriters. He can play the obedient native
administrator of a defeated people who gets to wear a suit and call
himself president of a fictional state, or he can don Arafat's kaffiyeh
and assume the role of the Palestinians' unreformed "terrorist"
leader. If he chooses the former role, he may get the political equivalent
of an Oscar -- the Nobel Peace Prize.
But like in all
soap operas, repetiveness and increasingly absurd plot twists eventually
wear out even the most faithful audience. And when this episode is over,
the Palestinian people will still be there, steadfastly, patiently,
determined to regain their usurped rights and see justice done, come
what may.