Seeing
The Forest For The Trees
By Rima Merriman
02 October, 2006
The Electronic Intifada
The Quartet (along with the international
community generally) has failed to enable the Palestinian president
to act credibly towards the goal of making "progress towards a
two-state solution through dialogue and parallel implementation of obligations."
Anyone following the news
from the occupied Palestinian territory would think that it is the Hamas-led
government that is preventing the Palestinian president from achieving
"credible" progress towards a two-state solution. In the present
charged political divisions among Palestinians, even a large percentage
of the economically deprived and hounded population is being persuaded
to clutch at this straw.
In fact, Palestinians had
been faced with the exact same general stalemate that characterizes
the situation today long before the January 2006 elections. The only
difference between then and now is that people could eat better then
and fewer of them had been killed.
Exactly six years ago this
month, the Palestinians rose up in arms while a unilateral Israeli plan
to determine the final status of the region (Ehud Barak's plan) was
swirling around them. It was the plan rejected by the Palestinians at
Camp David, a plan that "called for cantonization of the territories
that Israel had conquered in 1967, with mechanisms to ensure that usable
land and resources (primarily water) remain largely in Israeli hands
while the population is administered by a corrupt and brutal Palestinian
authority," as Noam Chomsky summed up.
Nevertheless, this plan is
now in its final stages of implementation. The only tenet the Israelis
are still engineering is the establishment of a "corrupt and brutal
Palestinian authority" to aid it in stamping out Palestinian resistance
to this and other variations on the plan.
Long before the ostensible
excuse of standing in the way of "credible progress towards a peace
settlement", Palestinians have watched as Israel unilaterally and
through the use of superior force annexed East Jerusalem and West Bank
lands; as Israel defined new borders along the Jordan Valley and through
the erection of the separation wall, as Israel continued to expand and
consolidate its Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem
and to put the finishing touches on the separate network of roads that
connect these settlements to Israel based on what it intends to keep
in accordance with the latest variation of the unilateral plan (Ehud
Olmert's this time).
Israel's actions along the
lines described above are all illegal under international law and acknowledged
as such by the international community. But the international community
has been reduced as a spectator that exercises its muscles only by pressuring
Palestinians and putting sanctions on the Palestinian population even
as Israelis advertise for tenders to build more illegal settlements
and the illegal wall.
The international community
has criminally failed the Palestinian people, an occupied people who
started their resistance having to use stones to protect their rights.
They have failed where it counts - in exerting legal discipline on Israel
through their civilized international regime, the regime they are so
eager for the "uncivilized" world to join.
Since the occupation, Israel
has consistently and demonstrably harmed the Palestinian population
in a way disproportionate to its security needs. That is because Israel
hasn't been after security as much as it has been after establishing
"facts on the ground" demographically and geographically at
the expense of the Palestinian population in pursuit of a peace agreement
that would force these "facts on the ground" down Palestinians'
throats.
What's more, everyone knows
this! The international community knows this in the same way that everyone
knows cigarettes cause cancer. In the US, there is a warning right there
on the cigarette packet by the Surgeon General attesting to this fact.
However, making the cigarette companies legally accountable is another
matter.
If the Quartet (as a representative
of the international community) is sincere in its desire to see a two-state
solution to the conflict materialize as it says it does, then it must
act in two ways. First, it must do the equivalent of putting a warning
on the cigarette packet - it must label Israeli actions, forcefully
and repeatedly, for what they are - illegal under international law.
Second, third-party states that subscribe to the international regime
must take up their responsibilities under the Geneva Convention to create
an environment for the Palestinians and Israelis in which successful
political negotiations could take place.
This environment is the kind
where illegal activities under the Geneva Convention are not put on
the table for negotiations, where illegal activities of the sort Israel
is practicing must immediately cease and desist. Such an environment
means the exercise of legal discipline - i.e., the re-establishment
of the legal regime to which third-party states already subscribe and
which Israel has broken in an egregious fashion and continues to do
so.
As for the Palestinian president,
he should be saying and keep on saying: "We can no longer accept
to negotiate interim questions while Israel continues to violate, under
the law, certain of its obligations towards the civilian population."
This is the only credible conditionality for the success of future negotiations.
The double standard will
not serve any of the parties involved. It will further erode the Quartet's
credibility with the Palestinians, and it will fail to save Israel from
itself.
Rima Merriman is a Palestinian-American living in Ramallah
in the occupied West Bank.
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