Wanted: A Reawakening Among Palestinians, Ramzy Baroud

Aljazeerah Info Center needs your support

Send donations by check to: Al-Jazeerah Info Center, P.O. Box 724, Dalton, GA 30722-0724, USA.

AMMAN, 26 December 2003 — An awakening in happening in Israel, and less conspicuously among Jewish intellectuals elsewhere. It comes with a dramatic shift in terminology. Suicide bombings, militants, and Molotov cocktails are giving way to greater apprehensions — demography, Jewish identity, democracy vs. apartheid. Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership swarms with confusion, unable to unify its ranks behind a single idea. In an attempt to be politically shrewd, they are yielding to further ideological disintegration.

In the 55 years since its creation, Israel has never appeared so uncertain. In the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt, a scholar and essayist, described Israel’s current status as an anachronism. “The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ — a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”

Such audacity, not surprisingly, resulted in Judt being classifieds as belonging to a “Nazi Left”, and his contemplation of a binational, democratic state was “pandering to genocide.” Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz equated the idea with Adolf Hitler’s “one-state solution for all of Europe.”

Such intellectual scuffling could be discounted as temporary, harsh yet necessary self-examination. But in Israel, the debate is much more accentuated and real. Such characters as Ehud Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem and today’s deputy prime-minister who is known for his far-right vision of a Greater Israel, is calling for unilateral withdrawal from parts of the West Bank, to preserve as much land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. The status quo was “destroying Zionism” he said in an interview with a Hebrew daily. Jews must make “hard and fateful decisions sooner rather than later, because later could be too late.”

Olmert’s “political bomb” inflamed emotions; a right-wing group sprayed Jerusalem’s walls with graffiti where the devout Zionist was caricatured as a “self-hating Jew” wearing Nazi insignia. “For the first time in the history of the Likud (of which Olmert is a central figure), one of our ministers is proposing we flee our very soul, the western land of Israel,” Likud Minister Tzhai Hanegbi said.

Considering the long-lasting consensus in Israel over the Jewish entitlement to the Occupied Territories — uniting as it did Zionist ideologues and religious zealots — this call for unilateral withdrawal by a right-wing politician constitutes a startling departure. This emerging realization in Israel must eventually find its way into the government’s policies. The likelihood, after all, is that demographics will eventually win over the compulsion to maintain the futile military dominion over Palestinian land.

But while Israel is beginning to wake up, the rift between the Palestinian leadership and society, at home and in the diaspora, is widening.

Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have nourished a genuine uprising, reflecting their enduring commitment to an end to the military occupation of their land. And yet, the Palestinian leadership has repeatedly expressed its willingness to return to the “negotiation table”, without conditions and based on Israeli and American terms.

Ordinary Palestinians remain the ultimate victims of this conflict, whether living at home or in refugee camps in Lebanon and elsewhere; yet they are the last to be consulted on the most important matters. The signing of the unofficial Geneva Accord, which was endorsed by Yasser Arafat, is a case in point.

The Palestinian leadership is addicted to double-talk. On the one hand, Palestinians are assured that the right of return is a prime objective and a cause that can never be forgotten, while on the other hand, top officials are assuring Israel that discarding the right of return can also be forfeited for the sake of the ever misrepresented “comprehensive solution” to the conflict.

“Does it ever dawn on Palestinian leaders that they might have an easier time winning the hearts and trust of their own people if they would just be upfront about what they plan to do instead of making empty promises they do not intend to keep?” writes Palestinian-American Sherri Muzher. The question reflects a mounting sense of betrayal among the ranks of Palestinian intellectuals everywhere.

While the Israeli debate emphasizes that the foundations of Zionism and racial superiority of the Jews are beginning to disintegrate, recklessly trying to integrate a “late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on,” the Palestinian leadership is at odds with its own people.

The old guard of Zionism desperately needs a Palestinian side that validates the exclusivist vision of a Jewish state; the Geneva accord and the growing recognition in a powerful segment within the Palestinian leadership that Israel should exist as a “state for the Jewish people” are all an attempt to reconcile the fading Zionist dream with a qualified two-state solution. That, according to Labor leader Shimon Peres, is the “paramount Zionist interest.”

The Palestinian leadership must redefine its priority and stop playing into the hands of Israel’s apartheid plans.

Palestinians need their own awakening, before the small crack turns into a rift that cannot be mended. While ordinary Palestinians appear to agree on many of their aspirations, influential elements within their leadership seem to be oblivious of them. They have long forgotten that these aspirations were never intended as bargaining chips.

— Ramzy Baroud is editor in chief of the Palestine Chronicle online newspaper.