The
New Palestinian Unity Government
By Uri Avnery
23 March, 2007
Gush Shalom
Not only the Palestinians must
be breathing a deep sigh of relief after the swearing in of the Palestinian
National Unity Government. We Israelis have good reason to do the same.
This event is a great blessing,
not only for them, but also for us - if indeed we are interested in
a peace that will put an end to the historic conflict.
* * *
FOR THE Palestinians, the
immediate blessing is the elimination of the threat of civil war.
That was a nightmare. It
was also absurd. Palestinian fighters were shooting at each other in
the streets of Gaza, gladdening the hearts of the occupation authorities.
As in the arena of ancient Rome, gladiators killed each other for the
amusement of the spectators. People who had spent years together in
Israeli prisons suddenly acted like mortal enemies.
That was not yet a civil
war. But the bloody incidents could have led there. Many Palestinians
were worried that if the clashes were not stopped immediately, a fully-fledged
fratricidal war would indeed break out. That was, of course, also the
great hope of the Israeli government - that Hamas and Fatah would annihilate
each other without Israel having to lift a finger. The Israeli intelligence
services did indeed predict this.
I was not worried on that
account. In my view, a Palestinian civil war was never in the cards.
First of all, because the
basic conditions for a civil war are absent. The Palestinian people
are unified in their ethnic, cultural and historical composition. Palestine
does not resemble Iraq, with its three peoples who are distinct ethnically
(Arabs and Kurds), religiously (Shiites and Sunnites) and geographically
(North, Center and South). It does not resemble Ireland, where the Protestants,
the descendents of settlers, were fighting the Catholic descendents
of the indigenous population. It does not resemble African countries,
whose borders were fixed by colonial masters without any consideration
of tribal boundaries. It certainly had no revolutionary upheaval like
those that brought on the civil wars in England, France and Russia,
nor an issue that split the population like slavery in the USA.
The bloody incidents that
broke out in the Gaza Strip were struggles between party militias, aggravated
by feuds between Hamulahs (extended families). History has seen such
struggles in almost all liberation movements. For example: after World
War I, when the British were compelled to grant Home Rule to the Irish,
a bloody struggle among the freedom fighters broke out at once. Irish
Catholics killed Irish Catholics.
In the days of the struggle
of the Jewish community in Palestine against the British colonial regime
("the Mandate"), a civil war was averted only thanks to one
person: Menachem Begin, the commander of the Irgun. He was determined
to prevent a fratricidal war at all costs. David Ben-Gurion wanted to
eliminate the Irgun, which rejected his leadership and undermined his
policies. In the so-called "season", he ordered his loyal
Haganah organization to kidnap Irgun members and turn them over to the
British police, which tortured them and put them in prison abroad. But
Begin prohibited his men from using their weapons to defend themselves
against Jews.
Such a struggle among the
Palestinians will not turn into a civil war, because the entire Palestinian
people oppose this strenuously. Everybody remembers that during the
Arab Rebellion of 1936, the Palestinian leader at that time, the Grand
Mufti Hadj Amin al-Husseini, butchered his Palestinian rivals. During
the three years of the rebellion (called "the Events" in Zionist
terminology) Palestinians killed more of each other than they killed
of their British and Jewish opponents.
The result: when the Palestinian
people came face to face with their supreme existential test, in the
war of 1948, they were split and splintered, lacking unified leadership
and dependent on the mercies of the bickering Arab governments, who
were intriguing against each other. They were unable to stand up to
the much smaller organized Jewish community, which rapidly set up a
unified and efficient army. The result was the "Naqba", the
terrible historic tragedy of the Palestinian people. What happened in
1936 still touches the life of every single Palestinian to this very
day.
It is difficult to start
a civil war if the people are against it. Even provocations from outside
- and I assume that there has been no lack of these - cannot ignite
it.
Therefore I did not doubt
for a moment that in the end a Unity Government would indeed come about,
and I am glad that this has now happened.
* * *
WHY IS this good for Israel?
I am going to say something that will shock many Israelis and their
friends in the world:
If Hamas did not exist, it
would have to be invented.
If a Palestinian government
had been set up without Hamas, we should have to boycott it until Hamas
was included.
And if negotiations do lead
to a historical settlement with the Palestinian leadership, we should
make it a condition that Hamas, too, must sign it.
Sounds crazy? Of course.
But that is the lesson history teaches us from the experience of other
wars of liberation.
The Palestinian population
in the occupied territories is almost evenly divided between Fatah and
Hamas. It makes no sense at all to sign an agreement with half a people
and continue the war against the other half. After all, we shall make
serious concessions for peace - such as withdrawing to much narrower
borders and giving East Jerusalem back to its owners. Shall we do so
in return for an agreement that half the Palestinian people will not
accept and will not be committed to? To me this sounds like the height
of folly.
I shall go further: Hamas
and Fatah together represent only the part of the Palestinian people
that lives in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. But
millions of Palestinian refugees (no one knows for sure how many) live
outside of the territory of Palestine and Israel.
If we strive indeed for a
complete end to the historic conflict, we must reach out for a solution
that includes them, too. Therefore I strongly question the wisdom of
TzipI Livni and her colleagues, who demand that the Saudis drop from
their peace plan any mention of the refugee problem. Simply put: that
is stupid.
Common sense would advise
the exact opposite: to demand that the Saudi peace initiative, which
has become an official pan-Arab peace plan, include the matter of the
refugees, so that the final agreement will also constitute a solution
of the refugee problem.
That will not be easy, for
sure. The refugee problem has psychological roots that touch the very
heart of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, and it concerns the fate
of millions of living human beings. But when the Arab peace plan says
that there must be an "agreed upon" solution - meaning agreed
upon with Israel - it transfers it from the realm of irreconcilable
ideologies to the real world, the world of negotiations and compromise.
I have discussed this many times with Arab personalities, and I am convinced
that an agreement is possible.
* * *
THE NEW Palestinian government
is based on the "Mecca agreement". It seems that it would
not have been possible without the energetic intervention of King Abdallah
of Saudi Arabia.
The international background
has to be considered. The President of the United States is now busy
with desperate efforts to bring his Iraqi adventure to a conclusion
that will not go down in history as a total disaster. For this purpose
he is trying to bring together a Sunni Front that would block Iran and
help to put an end to the Sunni violence in Iraq.
That is, of course, a simplistic
idea. It disregards the enormous complexity of the realities of our
region. Bush has presided over the setting up in Iraq of a government
dominated by the Shiites. He has tried to isolate Sunni Syria. And Hamas
is, of course, a pious Sunni organization.
But the American ship of
state is beginning to turn around. Being a giant ship, it can do this
only very slowly. Under American pressure, the Saudi king has agreed
(perhaps unwillingly) to take upon himself the leadership of the Arab
world, after Egypt has failed in this task. The king has persuaded Bush
that he has to speak with Syria. Now he is trying to persuade him to
accept Hamas.
In this picture, Israel is
a hindrance. A few days ago Ehud Olmert flew to America and told the
conference of the Jewish lobby, AIPAC, that a withdrawal from Iraq would
be a disaster (contrary, by the way, to the opinion of more than 80%
of American Jews - who support early withdrawal.) This week, the US
ambassador in Tel-Aviv hinted that from now on the Government of Israel
is allowed to conduct negotiations with Syria - and it may be assumed
that this hint will turn into an order before long. In the meantime,
no change in the position of the Israeli government is noticeable.
* * *
UNFORTUNATELY, JUST at this
moment, with a newly formed Palestinian government that has a good chance
of being strong and stable, the government of Israel is becoming more
and more destabilized.
Olmert's support rating in
the polls is approaching zero. The percentage points can be counted
on the fingers of one hand. Practically everybody speaks about his political
demise within weeks, perhaps after the publication of the interim report
of the Vinograd commission on the Second Lebanon War. But even if Olmert
manages to survive, his will be a lame duck government, unable to start
anything new, and certainly no bold initiative vis-à-vis the
new Palestinian government.
But if Bush supports us on
one side, and the Saudi king on the other, perhaps we shall after all
take a few steps forward. As people in this region say: in sha Allah,
if God wills.
Click
here to comment
on this article