BY AHMAD NIMER
As the current Palestinian uprising enters its fourth year, many commentators appear puzzled by the duration and tenacity of the intifada (meaning "shaking off").
If the intifada was "orchestrated" by Palestinian Authority (PA) president Yasser Arafat as a pressure tactic on Israel and its US patron, wouldn't the Palestinian population have finally tired of the daily humiliation and hardship it has brought and quietly gone back to their normal lives?
If the intifada is merely the act of a small group of "terrorists" and "extremists", as the Israeli rulers have repeatedly claimed, surely the arrest and detention of some 10,000 Palestinians and the killing of another 2470 over the last three years would have crushed the alleged tiny minority of "extremists" and restored calm to the West Bank and Gaza Strip?
The announcement by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government of its intention to "remove" Arafat — including through assassination — at a time and place of Israel's choosing indicates that it is unwilling to face up to the real answers to these questions.
Quite simply, the intifada — as the name suggests — is about throwing off a colonial occupation that has continued for 36 years. The resistance to this occupation has a deep and popular support from the Palestinian people, who, despite the enormous difficulties they encounter on a daily basis, will quite simply not give up. This is why each layer of grassroots activists who are killed or arrested by the Israeli occupiers is immediately replaced by a new layer of those determined to keep fighting.
The support of the Palestinian population for the intifada is why — almost 18 months after Israel placed all the major cities of the West Bank under curfew, arresting thousands and killing more than 300 people over the last two months — the Israel military remains embroiled in all of these areas, attempting to enforce daily curfews, carrying out assassinations and mass arrests.
But, as apologists for Israel always object when faced with the question of the occupation, what else is the Jewish state supposed to do when faced with "Palestinian terrorism"? This argument is wearing thin, even among sections of the Israeli population. It is abundantly clear that the strategy of the Israeli government has not made Israelis any safer or brought them any closer to peace.
This is not simply a question of a cycle of tit-for-tat armed attacks between Palestinian resistance fighters and the Israeli military, as the Western media so facetiously describe it. Israel's illegal military and civilian presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the root cause of the violence.
The massive concrete wall which Israel is now constructing to imprison Palestinians in isolated islands of land surrounded by electric fences and military checkpoints is worse than anything ever witnessed under South Africa's apartheid system.
Faced with the strongest military machine in the Middle East and the walls of the concrete prison fast closing around them, the only weapons of armed self-defence available to Palestinians are their own "human bombs". This is an unpleasant fact, but it remains one nonetheless. It is something that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip understand completely and it is why any move to "dismantle the terrorist infrastructure" (as US and Israeli officials repeatedly demand) is absolutely rejected by the Palestinian population.
Understanding this point is key to the riddle of Arafat. It is patently obvious to anyone on the ground that Arafat is not orchestrating attacks against Israelis. Nor is he the head of the "terrorist pyramid", as Israeli officials brazenly claim. What Arafat has done is refuse to turn the Palestinian security forces against the Palestinian population, as Israel and the US have demanded.
Whether Arafat's motivations for this lie in his own political survival — realising that if he were to act as head of a surrogate Israeli police force in the Palestinian cantons his political future would undoubtedly be short — or whether they stem from his unwillingness to go down in history as the leader who sold out the Palestinian national cause, is unclear.
The 7000 people who turned out in support of Arafat in Ramallah in the wake of Israeli government death threats against him represented nearly one-third of the town's population. They did so because Arafat's refusal to obey Israel's dictates have struck a strong popular chord.
This turn out in Ramallah, as well as the hundreds of thousands of people who marched all over the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Lebanon in solidarity with Arafat, proved once and for all that the intifada has deep popular support and is not merely composed of the actions of a few "fanatical extremists".
Israel is desperately seeking to find a Palestinian leader who will halt the popular resistance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Israeli rulers need this not because they want peace, but because the logic of occupation demands it.
Since 1967, Israel has followed the same basic strategy of attempting to relinquish control of the Palestinian towns in the West Bank and Gaza to a Palestinian leadership willing to do Israel's bidding in policing the Palestinian population. At the same time, Israel seeks to assure itself of ultimate control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip through constructing a complicated network of Israeli settlements, roads which only Israelis are allowed to use and Israeli military checkpoints.
This vision of occupation — encapsulated in the 1967 Allon Plan and demonstrated in the patterns of Israeli settlement growth and successive incarnations of the 1993 Oslo Accords over the last decade — means that Palestinian life would be completely restricted to the isolated cantons under "Palestinian self-rule" while all borders and natural resources would remain under Israeli control.
The Israeli strategy is clearly illustrated by the contours of the concrete wall that Israel is now constructing, its path coinciding almost exactly with the various plans drawn up by Israeli governments for the Palestinian cantons since 1967.
The US-backed "Road Map for Peace" was the latest version of these plans. With no mention of the wall whatsoever, the Road Map was focused almost completely on fostering a Palestinian leadership that would be willing to suppress the intifada.
For a while it seemed that Abu Mazen (aka Mahmoud Abbas) would be willing to fulfil this role. However, popular opposition to any move aimed at targeting the Palestinian resistance coupled with Arafat's insistence that the Palestinian security forces remain under his control led to Abu Mazen resigning as PA prime minister.
There are some analysts who claim that the current situation is a result of Sharon's obdurate unwillingness to try to accept the Road Map. They even go so far as to claim that Sharon wants to provoke suicide bombings by targeting militants in assassination attempts and continuing to demolish homes, impose curfews and confiscate Palestinian land.
This kind of analysis misses the point however. The violence of the Israeli army is not the result of Sharon's short-sightedness or desire to provoke a violent response from Palestinians; it is inherent in the very system of occupation. In order to achieve the goal of Palestinian bantustans within an Israeli apartheid system, it is absolutely necessary for Israel to destroy the Palestinian resistance.
This is not just a new strategy invented by Sharon; it has been the strategy of successive Israeli governments for the last 36 years. And it is precisely the reason why no Israeli government can agree to a genuine truce with the PA without the latter suppressing the Palestinian resistance.
Israel's goals in the Occupied Territories can only be achieved through violent means, and as long as the resistance remains intact these goals will prove impossible to achieve.
So, will Israel actually move to deport or even murder Arafat? There are two questions that really need to be answered here. The first is, can Israel find a Palestinian leader who is willingly to crush the resistance and allow the system of Israeli apartheid to be consolidated? Secondly, will this person (or group of people) be successful?
There are undoubtedly a range of figures within the Palestinian elite who are willing to play the role of a Palestinian quisling. However, Abu Ala, the new Palestinian PM and speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, is even less likely to play that role than Abu Mazen.
While Abu Ala is not widely respected in the Occupied Territories and has been strongly criticised for corruption during the Oslo Accord years, he has less of a base within Fatah (the main Palestinian political movement) than Abu Mazen and relies completely on Arafat for his support. It is extremely unlikely that Abu Ala would move against the intifada without Arafat's approval.
The second question is much more difficult to answer and herein lies the tactical divergence between Sharon and Washington.
While the US also wants to politically eliminate Arafat, it is wary about any move by Israel to physically remove Arafat from the West Bank, either through deportation or assassination. This caution stems from the escalating losses being inflicted on the US occupation army in Iraq and the fear that "removing" Arafat with US public approval might generate even more hostility among the masses across the Arab world to the US and its Arab client regimes.
The danger that Israel faces in "removing" Arafat is that, rather than making it easier to install a politically stable Palestinian quisling regime, it would provoke an intensification of the Palestinian population's opposition to any Palestinian leadership that seeks to politically collaborate with the Israeli apartheid system.
On the other hand, Israel is in desperate need of a solution to the intifada. It is faced with an absolutely unprecedented economic crisis that preceded the intifada but has only intensified because of the economic costs of maintaining a massive military presence in the Occupied Territories for the past three years, as well as the losses of foreign investment and tourism resulting from repeated Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel proper.
However, there can be no end to the intifada within the logic of Israel's occupation strategy without the defeat of the Palestinian resistance. The Israeli rulers realise that they cannot achieve this without the assistance of a Palestinian collaborator regime willing to unleash its security forces on the Palestinian population. If Arafat continues to refuse to do this and no other leader is able to do this while Arafat remains in control of the Palestinian security forces, then the Israeli rulers may well decide to take their chances by deporting or killing him.
Washington's September 17 vetoing of a UN Security Council resolution calling on Israel to "desist from any act of deportation and to cease any threat to the safety of the elected president of the Palestinian Authority" was a signal to the world that Israel's US patron does not rule out supporting this option.
From Green Left Weekly, September 24, 2003.
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