Michael Shaik
Yasser Arafat, the guerrilla-turned-statesman, granted the Nobel Peace Prize before being condemned by the Israeli and US governments as a terrorist and obstacle to peace, died of a blood disease in a Paris hospital on November 11, .
US President George Bush declared that his death had provided "an opening for peace", while his secretary of state, Colin Powell, announced that the US was "ready to seize this opportunity aggressively".
Not to be outdone, Australian Prime Minister John Howard denounced the late Palestinian president for his failure to make peace with Israel at the 2000 Camp David summit.
"I think history will judge him very harshly for not having seized the opportunity in the year 2000 to embrace the offer that was very courageously made by the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, which involved the Israelis agreeing to about 90% of what the Palestinians had wanted", Howard said in a radio interview.
Given that the prime minister seems to regard history as a negotiable phenomenon, he might well be right. In an obituary in the New York Times on November 12, Judith Miller claimed that Barak had offered 94% of the West Bank, while the Australian foreign editor Greg Sheridan cited Denis Ross, chief negotiator under the US administration led by Bill Clinton, to state that "the Israeli offer ultimately came to include 97% of the West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and some territory from Israel proper".
As the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq demonstrates, formulating Middle Eastern policy on the basis of politically inspired perceptions and wishful thinking rather than historic and contemporary facts can be a dangerous business. It is therefore necessary to examine the factual basis of these claims before deciding whether Arafat's death has indeed provided an "opening for peace".
The Final Status Map offered by Barak in May 2000 can be found at <http://www.fmep.org/images/maps/map0007_2.jpg> and clearly shows that Israel proposed to formally annex 25% of the West Bank as well as maintaining "security control" over another 14%. The alienation of these areas, which included East Jerusalem, the West Bank's main aquifers, its best agricultural land and the Jordan valley, would have left the Palestinians with five tiny and unconnected territories that were totally surrounded by Israel upon which to build the Palestinian state.
"If I accept the proposals that have been made here, then you will have to come to my funeral", Arafat told Clinton, underscoring the fact that peace must be reached between peoples, not their leaders.
This awkward truth belies the popular myth that peace can be won through the elimination of "bad apples" such as Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein, "Baath remnants", "insurgents" and "terrorists" while sidestepping issues of occupation and colonisation.
The Palestinian leadership has announced that it intends to hold elections for a new president in 60 days. Marwan Barghouti, whom Palestinians refer to as the "Palestinian Mandela", is the only Palestinian with the popularity and stature to win the mandate needed to represent his people in peace negotiations, but is currently serving a life sentence in Israel on trumped up charges of terrorism.
So far Israel has refused to release Palestinian political prisoners and has resolutely opposed Palestinian elections, believing that it has more to gain from sidelining the Palestinians while pressing ahead with Ariel Sharon's "unilateral disengagement" initiative.
The two pillars of this initiative are the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip (to be resettled in the West Bank) and the construction of the separation barrier that Israel is building through Palestinian lands on the West Bank.
While Israel is being coy about what the final form this barrier of concrete walls, razor wire and sniper towers will take, land expropriation orders issued to Palestinian farmers indicate that it will be about 700 kilometres long and confine the Palestinians to about 50% of the West Bank in a series of enclaves which, with the Gaza Strip, will probably be offered to the Palestinians as the land upon which to form a Palestinian state.
The last time such a project was attempted was in the 1980s when apartheid South Africa created a series of "Bantustans" that it claimed were independent states for its Black population. Ultimately, these fictions proved a costly failure because other countries refused to recognise them.
Israel and its supporters in the Bush administration feel that times have changed. International law, as the invasion of Iraq demonstrated, will need to adjust to the realities of the New American Century. Eventually, they believe, a "moderate Palestinian" leader will emerge to administer the new statelet on Israel's behalf.
Yet events in Iraq have demonstrated that human nature is less flexible than international law. Yasser Arafat was a symbol of his people's resistance but the intifada is a grass roots uprising that will continue without him. His replacement by a Palestinian Allawi will not lead to peace in the Middle East.
[Michael Shaik is a coordinator for the International Solidarity Movement and a member of Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 17, 2004.
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