Palestinians must learn from mistakes

By Martin Woollacott

LONDON: Not far from Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah is an area of newly built office buildings and apartment blocks, faced with the honey-colored stone which is one of the redeeming features of the urban landscape in the Holy Land. Some of them do duty as ministries and departments of the Palestine Authority.

Just a few hundred yards away is one of the road junctions, now deserted, where Israelis and Palestinians have regularly clashed in the past eight months. It is blackened by many fires and littered with debris. Under a glassy sun, nothing stirs, either in the offices or at the crossroads. The scene epitomizes the sad contrast between the government-in-waiting of a year ago and the dark prospects for the Palestinian cause today.

"Welcome to the unified capital of Israel" were Ariel Sharon's first words to Kofi Annan when the UN secretary general met him in Jerusalem. He followed them up by vetoing a meeting that Annan had wanted to hold with Arafat and Shimon Peres. Sharon has restated his positions on his visit to the U.S.: no significant Israeli moves until Arafat ends all violence, no action on settlements until that has been maintained for many weeks, no political negotiations for a lengthy further period and, if and when negotiations should start, no chance that they could touch Jerusalem or large portions of the territories.

In practice, the U.S. and Europe may be able to soften this at the edges but, at least with the present level of commitment, only at the edges. No wonder one man with a view of Arafat's compound brings in his camera every day because he thinks it likely that the Palestinian leadership will fail to deliver, either deliberately or otherwise, the complete cessation of violence Israel is demanding.

Then, he fears, in will come the helicopters with their raiding parties, hit men and explosives squads. The only alternative to this smashing up of the Palestinian infrastructure, it may seem to Palestinian leaders in their more pessimistic moments, is its more gradual collapse as they hold to a ceasefire that brings no rewards.

To what extent Palestinian decisions contributed to this dismal pass is a politically delicate question. It involves accepting that the Israelis were not alone to blame, it involves criticism of Arafat and of the leadership in general, it involves controversies about strategy, both political and military, which are still being fought out, and it involves the question of who is to be Arafat's successor.

The reputations of leading contenders could rise or fall significantly if such issues were opened up in a public way. What debate there is, as a result, is muffled, and not easily followed by outsiders.

Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian minister for planning and international cooperation said at a recent UN conference in Paris that the Palestinian failure to oppose settlement expansion was a fundamental error. "We should never have moved one inch in 1994 without a total stop to settlement activities."

It is true that if the Palestinians had been able to take a harder line on settlements Ehud Barak would not have arrived at Camp David thinking that he could annex 12 percent of the territories with no compensation. But it is easy to admit that one should have been tougher on what is now the dominant issue. The broader argument is whether some Palestinians helped the Israelis up the garden path by suggesting, in or out of formal negotiations, that the Palestinian side would be prepared to settle for less than was in fact the case.

This is certainly the view of some Israeli experts. Palestinian negotiators contradicted one another and sometimes undercut one another. That, says the radical Israeli journalist Haim Baram, correspondent of Middle East International, made it easier for the Israeli peace camp to delude itself into believing that "peace was on for a minimal price".

At Camp David itself, it is common to both sides that the Palestinian negotiating style was ragged, and their public relations lamentable. Both contributed toward Clinton's decision to represent the meeting as a failure for which Arafat was largely to blame.

The democratic defects of the Palestinian Authority have been well documented. The London-based Guardian newspaper's David Hirst broke the taboo on reporting Palestinian corruption and misgovernment, and he has been followed by many others. There are Palestinian figures who will speak of it bluntly. Where, says Dr Mahdi Abdul Hadi, the head of a Jerusalem thinktank, was the pressure for "more accountability, more action against corruption, stricter democratic standards?" Arafat, writes Khalil Shikaki, a leading intellectual who has argued for a non-violent intifada, "let the process of national building founder, at the expense of good governance and the rule of law."

Some Israelis were quick to decide that the resulting disillusion among ordinary Palestinians was a more important cause of the intifada than Israeli policy. Yet Israel had done little to reinforce democracy and human rights in the territories and much to weaken them, and in any case, logic suggests that the daily humiliations and privations caused by Israeli actions were more important. But Palestinians cannot escape the fact that, whatever the relative weight of the two factors, it was their combination which proved explosive.

The failures of the Palestinian Authority, and their need to compete rhetorically with their political opponents to the left and right, did contribute to what Israelis call incitement -- the flow of extreme statements which, when punctuated by actual attacks and bombings, sent the worst kind of signals to Palestinians and the Israeli public.

Compared to Sadat and King Hussein, as one Israeli analyst has written, Arafat made little attempt to reach out to Israelis, although certain other Palestinians did.

In what is so far a pretty muddled assessment of their own behavior since before Camp David, Palestinians seem to understand that the failure to influence Israeli public opinion in the right way, and, by extension, Palestinian public opinion, too, is a lesson that must be learnt properly this time.

Ghassan Khatib, the Palestinian pollster and media expert, notes hopefully that Israeli public opinion has emerged from periods of regression before, each time to a better understanding of what is necessary for peace. Dr Mahdi Abdul Hadi says: "I think we have to work on the Israeli people. We have to awaken them like we did in the first intifada."

His formula for this includes confronting settlers, showing the Israelis that "they are dealing with a civil society -- our people are not in one man's briefcase -- and building bridges between the ruled and not so much the rulers, which has been the story of the past 10 years." The odds on building such bridges are daunting, but some Palestinians have concluded there is not much else to do except to try.

-- Guardian News Service