Palestine: Immediate imperatives

Edward W. Said The Dawn Asia News Network Karachi

The daily haemorrhage of Palestinian lives and property accelerates without respite. Both the Arab and western media report horrifically sensational suicide bombings.

These efforts are morally repugnant and politically disastrous. But what is just as awful is the fact that Israel kills a far larger number of mostly unarmed Palestinian civilians -- a 90-year-old man here, a whole family there, a mentally disabled youth -- and refuses to stop or place restrictions on its troops who have visited mayhem on the Palestinians unremittingly for far too many recent months.

Most of the time, however, these dreadful slaughters are reported on the back pages of newspapers, and never mentioned on television. As for continued extra-legal assassinations, Israel is allowed to get away with phrases from journalists who use words like "alleged" or "officials say" to cover their own irresponsibility as reporters.

The fact that illegal Israeli practices continue to deliberately bleed the Palestinian civilian population is obscured, hidden from view, though it continues steadily.

Sixty-five per cent unemployment, 50 per cent poverty (people living on less than two dollars a day), schools, hospitals, universities, businesses under constant military pressure: These are only the outward manifestation of Israeli crimes against humanity. Over 40 per cent of the Palestinian population is malnourished, and famine is now a genuine threat to the entire society.

Non-stop curfews, the endless expropriation of land and the building of settlements (now numbering almost 200), the destruction of crops, trees, houses have made life for ordinary Palestinians intolerable. Many are leaving, or must leave because settlers' terror against them, the burning of their houses, and threats against their lives make it impossible to stay.

Why this kind of arrogance goes unanswered or is not immediately associated with the kind of thing for which Slobodan Milosevic is now being tried for in The Hague, is a sign of how mendacious the international community has become. With U.S. cover, Sharon kills Palestinians at will under the guise of fighting terrorism.

There is in addition the sorry state of Palestinian and Arab politics, many of its leaders and elites never more corrupt, rarely more injurious to their people as now. Neither collectively nor individually have these people put up any systematic strategy, much less even a systematic protest against the U.S.' announced plans to redraw the map of the Middle East after the invasion of Iraq. All these regimes can do now seems to be either to market themselves as indispensable to the U.S. or to suppress any sign of dissent in their midst. Or both together.

The unseemly bickering and disorderliness of the Iraqi opposition in London -- under the watchful eye of the U.S.'s Zalmay Khalilzad, now a neo-conservative protege of Cheney and Wolfowitz -- gives an excellent idea of where we are as a people.

Representatives who represent only themselves, the imperial patronage of a power that is about to destroy a country to grab its resources, the tyrannical, discredited local regimes (of which Saddam's is the worst) ruling by terror. The absence of any semblance of democracy within, and without, such regimes -- these are not reassuring prospects for the future.

Everything in the Arab world is done either from above by unelected rulers or behind a curtain by undesignated albeit resourceful middlemen. Resources are bartered or sold without accountability; political futures are for the convenience of the powerful and their local sub-contractors; compassion and care for the citizens' wellbeing have few institutions to nurture them.

The Palestinian situation embodies all this with startling drama. As the culmination of its 35-year-old military occupation. The Israeli army has spent the last nine months destroying the rudimentary infrastructure of civilian life on the West Bank and in Gaza: people there, in effect, live in cages, with electrical and concrete fences or Israeli troops to guard and interdict their free movement.

Yasser Arafat and his men, who are at least as responsible for the paralysis and devastation because of what they signed away in Oslo, and for having given legitimacy to the Israeli occupation, seem to be hanging on anyway, despite extraordinary stories of their corruption and illegally acquired wealth.

Many of these men have recently been involved in secret negotiations with the EU, with the CIA, with the Scandinavian countries on the basis of their former credibility as surrogates and servants of Arafat.

What could be more preposterous than the call for Palestinian elections, which Arafat of all people, imprisoned in an Israeli vise, announces, retracts, postpones, and re-announces. Everyone speaks of reform except the very people whose future depends on it -- Palestine's citizens who have endured and sacrificed so much even as their impoverishment and misery increases all the time.

Surely the Swedes, the Spanish, the British, the Americans and even the Israelis know perfectly that the symbolic key to the future of the Middle East is Palestine, and that is why they do everything to make sure that the Palestinian people are kept as far away from decisions about the future as possible.

And this during a heated campaign for war against Iraq, for which numerous Americans, Europeans and Israelis have openly stated that this is the time to re-draw the map of the Middle East and bring in "democracy."

The time has come for the emperor who claims to be wearing new clothes, which he calls democracy, should be exposed for the charlatan he really is. Democracy cannot be imported or imposed: It is the prerogative of citizens who can make it and desire to live under it.

Ever since the end of World War II, the Arab countries have been living in various states of "emergency" -- a licence for their rulers to do what they want in the name of security. Even the Palestinians under Oslo had a regime imposed on them that existed first of all to serve Israel's security, and second, to serve (and help) itself.

For all sorts of reasons, among them that the cause of Palestine (like the liberation of apartheid South Africa) has always served as a model for Arabs and fair-minded idealistic people everywhere. Palestinians must take steps right now to restore the fashioning of their destiny to their own hands.

The political stage in Palestine is now divided between two unattractive and unviable alternatives. On one side, there is what is left of the Authority and Arafat. On the other side are the Islamic parties.

The Authority is so discredited, its failure to build institutions so basic, its corrupt and cynical history so compromised in every way as to render it incapable of being entrusted with the future.

The Islamic parties lead desperate individuals into a negative space of endless religious strife and anti-modern decline. If we speak of Zionism as having failed politically and socially, how can it be acceptable to turn passively to another religion and look there for worldly salvation? Impossible. Human beings make their own history, not gods or magic or miracles.

Purifying the land of "aliens", is a defilement of human life as it is lived by billions of people who are mixed by race, history, ethnic identity, religion or nationality.

But a large majority of Palestinians and, I think, Israelis know these things. And fortunately a political alternative already exists that is neither Hamas nor Arafat's Authority -- an impressive formation of Palestinians in the occupied territories who in June of this year announced a new Palestinian national initiative (moubadara wataniya).

Among its leaders are Dr. Mustafa Barghuti and Dr. Haidar Abdel Shafi, Rawia al Shawa, and many more independents who understand that in its weakened state, Palestinian society is being targeted for "reform" by parties whose real interest is to liquidate Palestine as a political and moral force for years to come.

Idle talk of elections by Arafat and his lieutenants is meant to reassure outsiders that democracy is on the way. Far from it, since these people simply want to continue their corrupt and bankrupt ways by any means possible, including outright fraud.

The 1996 elections were conducted on the basis of the Oslo process, whose main aim was to continue Israeli occupation under a different title. The Legislative Assembly was in reality powerless before both Arafat's edict and the Israeli veto. What Sharon and the Quartet now propose is an extension of the same unacceptable regime.