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Where does the Palestinian cause stand?

Hamid Ansari

The difficulty lies in the unilateralist, rejectionist, approach of Israel and in the neocon ambition of reshaping West Asia. However, notwithstanding internecine conflict, the Palestinians will survive; so will their quest for statehood.

It is a sad commentary on contemporary Muslim leaders that agreements solemnly reached in the holy precincts of Makkah are often observed in the breach. This was true of Afghan factions some years ago; the open and violent split in the Palestinian ranks is the latest example. The first reactions to the events in Gaza last month were revealing. The Saudi Foreign Minister, whose government worked so hard to bring about the Makkah Agreement of February 8, 2007, said “th e Palestinians have come close to putting by themselves the last nails in the coffin of the Palestinian cause.”

At the other end of the spectrum, according to a report in The New York Times of June 16, “Israel and the United States seem agreed on a policy to treat [the two Palestinian territories] as separate entities, to support Fatah in the West Bank and squeeze Hamas in the Gaza Strip” in an effort to make the former “the shining model of a new Palestine.” U.S. and Israeli pronouncements and actions lend credence to this perception.

The Palestine story, since 1948, is well known. The 1967 war resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Security Council resolution 242 was based on the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war. The Intifada of 1987 focussed attention on the plight of the Palestinians in the occupied territories; the outside world ceased treating the Palestinians as ‘refugees’ and conceded the status of a ‘people’. Oslo raised hopes that were not realised. A second Intifada added a sense of urgency, but only temporarily. In June 2002, President George W. Bush outlined his vision of two states living side by side in peace and security. Details of implementation were spelt out in the still-born Quartet Plan.

Israel reacted to each of these through a calibrated policy of procrastination, on the one hand, and changing the ground reality, on the other.

American support to this approach was critical to its success at every stage; it was summed up neatly by President Bill Clinton’s policy architect Dennis Ross: “Any effort at peacemaking must be premised on a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship … Criticism [of Israeli policies] was legitimate, but creating a breach in the relationship was not.”

An attendant requirement was for the Palestinians to reshape themselves. Yasser Arafat was made to pay for his refusal to sign on the dotted line. In December 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell described his leadership as “flawed” and declared America’s preference for “new leaders” even if Arafat won the elections.

The Palestinian electorate responded to these manoeuvres, first in the municipal elections in 2004-05 and then in the legislative elections in January 2006. The vote, in the words of Haaretz correspondent Amira Haas, was a reaction to “three lies: that Oslo is peace; that the establishment of the Palestinian Authority is an accomplishment and a symbol, neutralising all its failings; that the PA is a state.”

The electoral success of Hamas was received with ill grace. Sanctions were imposed and the Hamas government was boycotted by Israel and the Quartet. According to Alain Gresh of Le Monde Diplomatique, “Hamas wanted to form a g overnment of national unity but U.S. pressure prevented any such agreement.”

The net impact of these moves was summed up in a report by the International Crisis Group: (a) Hamas survived but failed to govern since it received no cooperation from the Fatah-aligned civil service and security forces; (b) the impact of the economic crisis was acutely felt in every section of Palestinian society with two-third of Palestinians living in poverty, a rise of 30 per cent in one year; (c) Fatah, “obsessed with recovering power,” did nothing to reform its ways and restore its popular credibility; (d) sanctions did not achieve their objective; (e) Washington “promised security and economic aid to encourage Fatah to confront Hamas and help defeat it”; and (f) the western commitment to democracy in the region was discredited.

The frequency and intensity of factional violence propelled Saudi diplomacy to seek a reconciliation, somewhat on the lines of the Cairo agreement of March 2005. The Makkah Agreement enunciated four principles: (1) a ban on the shedding of Palestinian blood and resort to the language of dialogue; (2) formation of a government of national unity; (3) acceleration of reforms in the Palestine Liberation Organisation; and (4) “reinforcing the principle of political partnership in the Palestinian Authority on the basis of political pluralism.”

The framework, credible in itself, left much to be negotiated in terms of details; above all, it required a commitment to do so. Given the ill will on both sides, the success of the agreement depended on international support. This was not forthcoming because the United States, Israel, and the EU set conditions of compliance that would have amounted to surrender by a political group on the morrow of its undisputed electoral success.

The Western rejection of Hamas is premised on the latter’s ‘ideology.’ The Israeli-American demand (endorsed by the Quartet in its statement of January 26, 2006) is threefold: Hamas should disown the use of force, recognise Israel’s right to exist, and disarm. Negotiating experience with liberation movements the world over shows that a transition of this nature is the product of a political process, of negotiations, and cannot precede it.

Senior American negotiators like Dennis Ross concede that “neither side can impose an outcome on the other” and that the two sides “must recognise that their fate is intertwined.” If so, practical and innovative approaches, based on resolution 242 and the Arab peace initiative, need to be explored. The Taba document of January 2001 and the unofficial Geneva accord of October 2003 are good examples of what focussed discussion can achieve.

What then is the difficulty? It lies in the unilateralist, rejectionist, approach of Israel and in the neocon ambition of reshaping West Asia. The former has made no headway despite 40 years of occupation because, as Rousseau said, the strongest man is never strong enough to be always master; as for the latter, it lies buried in the blood-soaked sands of Iraq.

Two independent quarters have shed light on the impact of distorted perceptions. The first is the End of Mission Report in May 2007 by Alvaro de Soto, UNSG’s Special Coordinator for Middle East Peace Process; the second is an address on July 3 by Gareth Evans, President of the International Crisis Group, to the Socialist group in the European Parliament.

Mr. De Soto cautions against the effort by the U.S. to beef up the capability of the Fatah segment of Palestinian forces to deal with inter-factional strife. His prediction that this could be “a self-fulfilling prophecy” has come true. He considers Hamas deep-rooted but is less sanguine about Fatah who “seem to have lost their compass long before their rout in the January 2006 elections.” He reports that with the decline in the negotiating capacity on both sides, support for the so-called ‘one State solution’ is gaining ground in some quarters.

On the latter point, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has expressed her concern this week over “the process of delegitimization of Israel as a Jewish state.” Others too have drawn attention to the element of doubt that has replaced Israeli certitude.

Mr. Evans draws attention to three missed opportunities: the failure to recognise the significance of the Arab Peace Initiative, the failure to support Abu Mazen in 2005 after his landslide victory, and the failure to comprehend the impracticality of incremental and sequential solutions. He dilates on Western double standards of “setting the bar higher for the Palestinians than the Israelis” and gives six specific examples which have played into the hands of the extremists. Where do options lie? The support base of Hamas is a fact. Its core membership constitutes 20 per cent of the electorate; its actual vote share was 43 per cent. The authenticity of the electoral process has not been questioned. Fatah has to reckon with this and not seek ways of undoing it through external pressure. Hamas has to concede (and has in fact conceded) that Israel within pre-1967 war borders is an international reality.

Israel has to commit itself unambiguously to the two-state solution, implement it now, move simultaneously on the Syrian and Lebanese tracks, and disown Jabotinsky’s dictum that Zionism “is a colonising venture and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force.”

As for the Western world, mired in eight decades of deceit and duplicity, a mere acknowledgement of the six sins enumerated by Gareth Evans would mark the beginning of a just approach to the Palestinian question. It can use its collective weight to make the Arab Initiative the engine of a new effort to seek comprehensive peace.

Where then does the Palestinian cause stand? A people do not cease to exist even if subjected to genocide and holocaust. Notwithstanding internecine conflict, the Palestinians will survive; so will their quest for statehood and their struggle to end the occupation.

As for ideologies and doctrines, they are induced by circumstances and undergo adjustment and change accordingly; they do not respond to diktat.

(The writer is a former Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations.)

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