The
Result Of Bad Politics
By Hasan Abu Nimah
24 May, 2007
The
Electronic Intifada
Bad politics create bad consequences,
but because linking the effect with the cause implicates the initiators,
the tendency is often to attribute man-made disasters to unrelated circumstances.
It is easier, therefore,
to blame the tragic fighting amongst the Palestinians in Gaza on a foolish
and selfish struggle for positions, rather than the rotten politics
of Oslo, cooked a decade and a half earlier. Indeed, and in many ways,
it is a fierce struggle for power, but the roots of even that should
be traced further back than the election results that swept Hamas into
power at the very high cost for the party which had hitherto secured
an unchallenged monopoly on power since Oslo, under the umbrella of
perpetual Israeli occupation.
Those who have been describing
the current carnage as the second Palestinian catastrophe, or Nakba
as commonly known, are absolutely right in expressing their deep pain,
but the real second catastrophe was the Oslo Agreement in 1993. In 1947,
the tragedy that befell the Palestinians was the result of a combination
of international and regional factors that neither the Arab people of
Palestine nor the Arab states combined had the means to confront; it
was an inevitable injustice fiercely and forcefully imposed. The Oslo
agreement, on the other hand, was a self-inflicted disaster by leaders
who had for long placed themselves at the top of the "Palestine
Liberation Organisation", leaders who had hitherto shamed and accused
of treachery anyone who ever dared contemplate any settlement with the
"Zionist enemy" that did not reverse the course of history
to the pre-1947 era.
Here, and according to the
appalling Oslo arrangement, Israel succeeded for the first time in its
history to secure the voluntary, if not enthusiastic, consent of the
widely recognised "sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian
people" to legitimise its occupation and to consolidate all its
war gains, practically at no cost.
Israel had for years objected
very strongly to any trend of recognising or dealing with the "terrorist"
PLO. As a result, the PLO was excluded from the Madrid peace process
launched in late 1991. It could not have occurred to the Israelis at
the time, obviously, that any wholesale concessions such as the ones
the PLO representatives easily made in Oslo, would bear more political
weight coming from a recognised, rather than a rejected PLO. Probably
Israel never thought the PLO would be so conciliatory or generous in
selling out an entire cause.
It was Oslo, in fact, which
divided the Palestinians. It did indeed take time before the depth of
the split assumed such a violent nature, but problems have been building
up, and there is always an ignition point.
Oslo was an Israeli opportunity,
if not an Israeli device altogether, to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict without many -- indeed any -- changes on the ground. Rather
than removing the occupation and liberating those suffering under it
for decades, the acclaimed "liberators" opted to slip under
it too, and to join those they loudly crowed they were determined to
liberate. Under Oslo, the Palestinian Authority and its security forces
were meant to act as an extension of the occupation, and to only relieve
the occupiers of their burdens.
Palestinian soldiers, rather
than Israeli, would deal with any Palestinian disorderly behaviour or
unrest. Money would pour in from the so-called international community,
the EU in particular, to finance the occupation by proxy, and via the
PA. And that required blind eyes on corruption, profiteering or accountability
with the certain result of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid money
going into private "liberator's" pockets. The whole point
was to allow the PA operatives to swim in oceans of individual privileges
and all kind of material temptations, and to forget about the "cause",
and they did.
In the meantime, and during
the assigned five-year interim period, Israel put on high gear its campaign
to create more of the planned facts on the ground: more colonial settlements,
more Jewish only bypass roads linking the settlements to Israel, more
land confiscation, and more arrangements for cantonising the Palestinians
in isolated, truncated enclaves which would never form any reasonable
basis for statehood, or even for continued existence in place.
Many Palestinians were opposed
to the "Oslo sellout", but they either opted to patiently
keep quiet in the hope that things may improve and that the promise
of peace would one day materialise, or raised their voices in protest
and were harshly dealt with by the many-faceted Palestinian security
forces, for being "enemies of peace" and saboteurs.
The crackdown on the opposition
was severe, as there were flagrant violations of human rights. The occupation
atrocities had in fact been compounded, with many under it suffering
both Israeli and PA oppressive measures. The level of frustration kept
rising, with Israel continuing to obliterate Palestinian rights, on
the one hand, and the PA sinking deeper in corruption and incompetence,
on the other.
Voting Hamas in office in
the last general election was a major step towards polarising Palestinian
politics, with the gap becoming clearly wide and deep between those
who wanted to stay the course of Oslo and enjoy their privileges to
the end and the others who came up with redefined terms of reference
for a possible peaceful settlement. The split became all the more grave,
with the Oslo side gathering external support from the entire so-called
"international community" (a misnomer for those who either
support Israel or fear it) and the other side, led by Hamas, instantly
put under tight economic and diplomatic sanctions had generally enjoyed
scant moral support which could barely translate into practical help.
The current clashes in Gaza,
not the first, and certainly not the last, once placed in their proper
context, should reveal a deeper clash between two contradictory trends,
not simply two competing factions. It is not easy to put an end to this
clash without agreement on one Palestinian approach to the issue of
peace and settlement. The agreement in Mecca has achieved very little
in that sense, by appealing only to the need to avoid fighting between
brothers for the sake of the "sacred cause". The goal was
reduced to a mere gloss over, but varnish does not long last.
Instead of following up on
the modest achievements of Mecca with serious efforts to build Palestinian
consensus and reconcile policies, rather than allocate Cabinet seats
and shares, ominous attempts to enable the PA presidency and Fateh to
wipe out Hamas continued openly, with arms and money pouring in that
direction. The one fruit of the Mecca agreement, the national unity
government, was rejected by the international community and the financial
boycott continued. That government was not given any chance to function,
as if, it were, like the election results before, the exact undesirable
outcome which needed to be annulled.
Why should anyone holding
the can, pouring oil on the fire, scream with surprise that there is
fire or that the fire is raging? The raging fire in Gaza is the inevitable
outcome of occupation, siege and starvation, of years of humiliation
and suffering, of frustration and desperation, of injustice and oppression,
of resulting lawlessness and chaos, of absence of leadership, and vicious
foreign intervention and senseless incitement. With such ingredients,
all planned and premeditated, the Gazans should deserve all the respect
in the world for only behaving that badly.
Efforts have been exerted
all along to create in Gaza conditions that turn everyone against everyone.
It is not Palestinian foolishness and selfishness; it is rather mission
accomplished for those who planned this state of affairs for debilitated
Gaza.
EI contributor Hasan Abu
Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United
Nations. This article first appeared in The Jordan Times.
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