The
Light At The End Of
The Gaza-Ramallah Tunnel
By Omar Barghouti
21 June, 2007
The
Electronic Intifada
When
I saw some of the images coming out of the infighting in Gaza last week,
I suppressed my anguish and steaming anger, recalling the wise, almost
prophetic, words of the great Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, who
wrote:
"The central problem
is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate
in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover
themselves to be 'hosts' of the oppressor can they contribute to the
midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the
duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the
oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed
is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their
oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization."
Apparently, neither of the
two warring factions succeeded in transcending the being "like
the oppressor" part.
The lightening success of
Hamas in forcefully taking over the supposed symbols of Palestinian
power in Gaza cannot and ought not obscure the fact that, given the
overbearing presence of Israel's military occupation, the bloody clash
between the Islamist group and its secular counterpart, Fatah, and irrespective
of motives, has descended into a feud between two slaves fighting over
the crumbs thrown to them, whenever they behave, by their common colonial
master.
There is no doubt that a
faction within Fatah -- overtly funded, trained and steered by the US
and Israel -- is the primary suspect behind the flare-up of this bloody
internecine strife, which many observers view as a thinly veiled attempt
to destabilize Hamas's democratically-elected government, coercing it
into accepting Israeli dictates that it had so far balked from. Furthermore,
any decent legal expert will readily admit that the so-called "emergency
government," declared by the Palestinian Authority chairman, Mahmoud
Abbas, in response to Hamas's take-over in Gaza, violates several articles
in the Basic Law, the equivalent of the PA's constitution.
While the corruption, lawlessness,
profiteering and even betrayal of sections of Fatah have been known
and well documented for some time now, the brutal, reckless and in some
cases criminal tactics used by armed groups within Hamas were fresh
reminders to neutral bystanders who were willing to give the group the
benefit of the doubt that it, too, contains a strong, power-hungry faction
that is eager to sacrifice principles and human rights to reach its
political objectives. Hamas cannot be exonerated from the accusation
that, by participating in the legislative and municipal elections according
to laws and parameters set by the Oslo agreements, it has already contributed
to legitimizing the products of those agreements and forsaken its claim
to being a resistance movement that is primarily dedicated to realizing
the main tenets of the Palestinian national program of liberation and
self-determination. On top of that, and unlike the far more sophisticated
and responsible Hizballah in Lebanon, Hamas, in the last year and a
half of ruling at various levels, has revealed its inherent tendency,
like all Islamist movements, to impose its exclusionary ideological
and social order, and to dismiss and whenever possible suppress diverse
views and cultural outlooks that conflict with that order.
In the short term, the political
vacuum that will inevitably result from the growing rift between Ramallah
and Gaza and the steady collapse of the PA structures and remaining
authority on the ground is most likely to be filled by an all-out Israeli
reoccupation of the entire West Bank and Gaza. This would announce the
official death of the so-called Oslo peace process, which actually collapsed
long ago under the weight of Israel's incessantly expanding colonies,
apartheid wall -- declared illegal by the International Court of Justice
-- and intricate apparatus of oppression and humiliation of the Palestinians
under its control.
Such a scenario may either
lead to threatening the very survival of the Palestinian national movement
and the completion of the well-underway disintegration of Palestinian
society or trigger a renaissance of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.
For the latter to occur, however, two difficult but realistic conditions
must be met: first, Palestinian structural democratization and political
reform and resetting Palestinian national priorities; and second, a
critical review and revamping of the Palestinian resistance strategy,
both from moral and pragmatic perspectives. Both are urgently called
for, to realign the Palestinian struggle with the international social
movement and to put the question of Palestine back on the world's agenda
as essentially a morally and politically justifiable and viable liberation
struggle that can -- again -- capture the imagination and support of
progressives and freedom lovers the world over.
In order to counter Israel's
dual strategy of, on the one hand, fragmenting, ghettoizing, and dispossessing
Palestinians, and, on the other hand, reducing the conflict to a dispute
over a partial set of Palestinian rights, the PLO must be resuscitated
and remodeled to embody the claims, creative energies, and national
frameworks of the three main segments of the Palestinian people: Palestinians
in the OPT, Palestinian refugees, and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The PLO's grassroots organizations need to be rebuilt from the bottom
up with mass participation, and they must be ruled by unfettered democracy
and proportional representation. This process must entail a well-planned
transfer of power from the withering PA back to a rejuvenated PLO, including
the entire spectrum of the Palestinian political movement.
As to resistance strategies,
one cannot and should not strictly separate means from ends. If the
struggle for freedom in Algeria, Northern Ireland and South Africa taught
us anything, it is this fact. Irrespective of the right of Palestinians
to resist foreign occupation by all means, as granted in international
law, we have a moral duty to avoid tactics that indiscriminately target
innocent civilians and inevitably corrupt our own humanity. Concurrently,
and with full deference to the first principle, we have a political
obligation to select methods that maximize our gains. Given the ongoing
nihilistic abuse and utter futility of Palestinian armed resistance,
the uniquely harsh geo-political context of the Palestinian resistance
movement, and the de facto fragmentation of the Palestinian people and
isolation of its resistance core from potential sources of supply and
logistical support, civil resistance that has the potential of engaging
and mobilizing the Palestinian grassroots seems not only morally but
also pragmatically preferable.
The young Palestinian campaign
for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, modeled
after the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, has already shown
ample evidence that it has the potential of unifying Palestinians and
international solidarity movements in a resistance strategy that is
moral, effective and sustainable. In the last few years alone, many
mainstream and influential groups and institutions have heeded Palestinian
boycott calls and started to consider or apply diverse forms of effective
pressure on Israel. These include the British University and College
Union (UCU); Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists;
the Church of England; the Presbyterian Church (USA); top British architects
led by Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP); the
National Union of Journalists in the UK; the Congress of South African
Trade Unions (COSATU); the South African Council of Churches; the Canadian
Union of Public Employees in Ontario; and dozens of celebrated authors,
artists and intellectuals led by John Berger, among many others.
The intensification of Israel's
colonial and racist oppression of the Palestinians, particularly in
Gaza, with unprecedented impunity was the main trigger for the spreading
boycott. With its wanton destruction of Palestinian infrastructure,
willful killing of civilians, particularly children, apartheid wall,
Jews-only colonies and roads, incessant confiscation of land and water
resources, and horrific denial of freedom of movement to millions under
occupation, Israel has shown the international community its total disregard
to international law and fundamental human rights.
This latest dose of American
-- Israeli-inspired -- "constructive chaos" in the occupied
Palestinian territory may well wreak havoc on US-Israeli policy in the
region. With the imminent dissipation of the illusion that a national
Palestinian sovereignty can be established under the overall colonial
hegemony of Israel, many Palestinians are now seriously questioning
the wisdom of the two-state mantra and considering to repose their plight
as one for equal humanity and full emancipation, within the framework
of a unitary, democratic state solution in historic Palestine. After
almost three decades of "searing into the consciousness" of
Palestinians that only a two-state solution can deliver any of their
demands, the US and Israel are harvesting what they sowed: the collapse
of any semblance of independence and integrity of the PA -- which was
all along charged with relieving Israel's colonial burdens vs. the inhabitants
of the occupied West Bank and Gaza -- and the mounting Palestinian discontent
with, if not yet revolt against, the game of unilateral Palestinian
compromise leading only to insatiable Israeli demands for further compromise,
with the simultaneous loss of land, resources, freedoms and the bleak
-- and real -- prospects of social breakdown.
The demise of the two-state
solution should not be mourned. Besides having passed its expiry date,
it was never a moral solution to start with. In the best-case scenario,
if UN Resolution 242 were meticulously implemented, it would have addressed
most of the legitimate rights of less than a third of the Palestinian
people over less than a fifth of their ancestral land. More than two
thirds of the Palestinians, refugees plus the Palestinian citizens of
Israel, have been maliciously and shortsightedly expunged out of the
definition of the Palestinians.
It is now clearer than ever
that the two-state solution -- other than being only a disguise for
continued Israeli occupation and a mechanism to permanently divide the
people of Palestine into three disconnected segments -- was primarily
intended to induce Palestinians to give up the inalienable right of
their refugees to return to their homes and lands from which they were
ethnically cleansed by Zionists during the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe).
A secular, democratic state
solution is increasingly being perceived by Palestinians and people
of conscience around the world as the moral alternative to Israeli apartheid
and colonial rule. Such a solution, which promises unequivocal equality
in citizenship, as well as individual and communal rights, both to Palestinians
(refugees included) and to Israeli Jews, is the most appropriate for
ethically reconciling the ostensibly irreconcilable: the inalienable,
UN-sanctioned rights of the indigenous people of Palestine to self-determination,
repatriation, and equality in accordance with international law and
the acquired and internationally recognized rights of Israeli Jews to
coexist in the land of Palestine -- as equals, not colonial masters.
Omar Barghouti is an independent
Palestinian political analyst.
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