Articulating a Just Peace: Whose Responsibility?

Speech for Stockholm Conference 16-19 March 2007

By Ramzy Baroud

In my speech today, I will refrain from stating the obvious: those who are yet to recognize the injustices committed daily against the Palestinian people, have either succumbed completely to Israel’s propaganda or are simply uninterested in the whole matter.

Although confronting both groups - one plagued by misinformation or misplaced sympathy, and the other plagued by indifference and apathy - is vital, to say the least, I am addressing neither of these groups today.

There are various reasons behind what I am about to say: but most importantly, one particular episode, where I was invited to speak at some European country by a group that introduced itself as Marxist. I, of course, readily obliged, when I was faced with the following question: where do you stand on the one state solution?

I was not sure why I was urged by the head of the group to delineate my position regarding an issue that is of no particular consequence, at the time being, considering what Israel has done and is doing to ethnically cleanse large swathes of the West Bank, and is actively, with American, and less energetic, but real European support, starving Palestinians mostly in the Gaza Strip, but elsewhere in the Occupied Territories.

According to the World Food Program (WFP) forty-six percent of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are food insecure, I was quick to cite. Though I thought that a one state solution, if ever possible, is an honorable and dignified solution to the conflict, I thought this was neither the time nor the place for such discussion.

Our focus, should hardly be diverted to intellectual and technical scuffles over a subject whose relevance to the current happenings in Palestine is most uncertain, to say the least. Moreover, this is something that should be decided through a national Palestinian consensus. If I must address the one state solution topic, this is how I would approach it, I told my potential host.

After some hesitation, and a clear loss of enthusiasm, I was told that the group, who had decided amongst itself that this is the most suitable solution for Palestinians and Israelis was not able to afford my ticket, and the invitation was revoked.

A day later, I met with a long time American activist for Palestine. Sharing with her the story, with a bit of disillusionment, that I, a Palestinian whose family still dwells a refugee camp in Gaza should be censored by a group of activists for questioning the timing and the method of making sweeping solutions to the conflict, she confronted me with something even more disheartening: in New Jersey among other areas, she says, some Palestine groups determine their relationship with one another, whether to participate in joint rallies or organize joint conferences, based on their self proclaimed solution to the Palestine Israel conflict: whether a secular democratic state, bi-national state, two states, etc.

This is the backdrop of what I am about to declare: I would neither rail against anyone, nor go on a personal crusade promoting one solution vs. the other. But I would rather to use this as an opportunity for self reflection, introspection and self critique.

It is never easy to admit that the Palestinian front, both at home and abroad, remains more fragmented and self-consumed, thus ineffective than ever before.

Such a realization wouldn’t mean much if the inference concerned any other polity; but when it’s made in regards to a nation that is facing an active campaign of ethnic cleansing at home and an international campaign of sanctions and boycott, the problem becomes both real and urgent.

Palestinians in the West Bank, especially in areas penetrated by the formidable Israeli imprisonment wall, are losing their land, their rights, their freedom and their livelihood at an alarming speed, unprecedented in their tumultuous history of military occupation. The 700-kilometre wall, once completed, will further fragment the already splintered West Bank; Israel’s settlement project since 1967 has disfigured the West Bank using Jews-only bypass roads, military zones and so forth, to ensure the viability of the country’s colonization scheme, but split or isolate Palestinian areas, making the two-state solution, or any other solution that is predicated on a viable exchange of land for peace simply inconceivable.

Gaza, which Yitzhak Rabin had once wished would sink into the sea and which Israel has labored to dump on anyone foolish enough to take responsibility for it as long as it is not part of any comprehensive agreement that would include Jerusalem and the West Bank, maintains its “open air prison” status.

Palestinians there are being reduced to malnourished refugees, manipulated into violence and discord, a spectacle that Israel is promoting around the world as an example of Palestinian lack of civility and their incapacity to govern themselves.

The Israeli government insistently refuses to consider Jerusalem an issue that warrants negotiations; nothing to talk about, according to Israeli officials who see Jerusalem as their state’s undivided and eternal capital.

Vital movement from and into Jerusalem is increasingly impossible for West Bank Palestinians. Muslim and Christian properties in the city are continuously threatened, targeted or desecrated.

The most recent targeting of Al Aqsa Mosque was intended to further exacerbate Muslim fury and emphasize the point that Israel retains the upper hand in its relations with the Palestinians.

Other major issues such as settlements, water, refugees, borders, continue to be subjected to unilateral Israeli actions, while the Palestinian role is relegated to that of a hapless, submissive and often angry victim.

If such decisive matters go largely unchallenged by a solid, popular Palestinian strategy, one mustn’t be surprised if other issues, such as the need to restructure the progressively more fragmented Palestinian national identity, the need for a powerful, sustained and articulate Palestinian voice in the media and an influential body that unites and channels all Palestinian efforts around the world to serve a clear set of objectives, are receiving little or no attention whatsoever.

It must also be acknowledged, as uncomfortable as this may be to some, that the Palestinian democratic experience is rapidly succumbing to Israeli pressures, American meddling — tacitly or otherwise, coordinated with other governments — and the fractious Palestinian front that has been for decades permeated with ideological exclusivism, cronyism and corruption.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), since its formation by the Arab League in 1964, but most significantly since its reformation in the early 1970s under Palestinian leadership, was for long regarded as the main body that eventually brought to the fore the Palestinian struggle as — more than a mere question of a humanitarian issue that needed redress — a national fight for freedom and rights.

There was, more or less, a national movement that spoke and represented Palestinians everywhere. It gave the Palestinian struggle greater urgency, one that was lost, or willingly conceded, by Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in September 1993, and again in Cairo in May 2004, and yet again in Paris, Sharm al-Sheikh and so forth.

Aside from snuffing out the Palestinian national project, reducing the territory to self-autonomous areas, rendering irrelevant millions of Palestinians, mostly refugees scattered around the world and thus demoting the international status of the PLO to a mere symbolic organization, Oslo gave rise to a new type of thinking among Palestinians who see themselves as pragmatic and whose language is that of real politic and diplomacy.

This is the most woeful case of self-defeatism, and it continues to infuse most Palestinian circles whose new “strategy” is limited to acquiring funds from European countries which eventually dotted the West Bank with NGOs, mostly without a clear purpose, agenda and coordination.

Involving oneself in such useless projects is ineffectual, while rejecting them without a clear alternative can be frustrating or demoralizing.

An official in President Mahmoud Abbas’ circle chastised me during a long airplane ride once for subscribing to Edward Said’s school, whose followers, I was told, wish to parrot criticism from the outside and refrain from “getting their hands dirty”, i.e., getting involved in the Palestinian Authority’s institution building, and so forth. Such a claim is utterly baseless; and no viable institution can possibly come out of the current setting, an amalgam of a most violent occupation, and internal corruption sanctioned, if not fed, by both Israel and the US government.

It is true that there have been no serious collective Palestinian efforts to redress the Oslo mistakes and to breathe life into the PLO. The Intifada was a popular expression of Palestinians disaffection with Oslo and the occupation, but, alone, it can hardly be considered a sustainable strategy.

Neither a religious movement like Hamas nor a self-exalted one like Fateh is capable of approaching this subject alone, nor are they individually qualified to alter the Palestinian course, which seems to be moving in random order.

The problem is indeed bigger than mere ideological or even personal quarrels between two rival political parties; rather, it is the expression of a prevailing Palestinian factionalism that seems to consume members of various Palestinian communities regardless of where they are based.

In the absence of centrality everywhere, individuals hoping to fill the vacuum are offering their own solutions to the conflict, once more without any serious or coordinated efforts and without a grassroots constituency either in the occupied territories or among major Palestinian population concentrations in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, etc.

Others, like the Geneva Initiative enthusiasts, find it acceptable to negotiate a solution on Palestinians’ behalf — without any mandate whatsoever — and obtain sums of money to promote their ideas, though the whole enterprise is run by a few individuals who have no support from the Palestinians.

Oslo has lost its relevance as a peace treaty, but the individualism it espoused among Palestinians still prevails; its legacy was self-preservation at the expense of the collective good, and I believe no Palestinian party, including Hamas, is immune from subscribing to its luring values.

To avoid further debacles, Palestinians must ditch their factionalism and quit thinking of their relationship with their struggle in terms of funds, ideology (at times so flexible as to fit political interests) or religious interpretations.

They are in urgent need of a new collective strategy that pushes for specific principles which can only be achieved through national consensus. Waving flags in the face of passersby and the proverbial preaching to the choir alone will lead nowhere.

Individual initiatives will further confuse the Palestinian ranks. Only a consistent, cohesive and reasonable strategy that emanates from the Palestinians themselves can engage international public opinion — with the hope of breaking the patronage system that unites the West, especially the United States to Israel — and possibly slow down the Israeli army bulldozers currently carving up the West Bank into a system of cantons and high-walled prisons.

While for Palestinians, I believe that reforming and revitalizing the PLO is not an option, but a must, I call on groups that work for a just peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis to continue to emphasize and expose the injustices committed against the Palestinian people, to highlight that self determination for Palestinians, everywhere, is an imperative for that just peace and to continue to push for serious governmental shifts in their respective polities, to entertain whatever needed pressure, through boycotts, media campaigns, and so forth, but to kindly refrain from imposing specifities on the Palestinian people: who, to avoid the mistakes of the past, must be the ultimate definer of its own destiny and whose articulation for a just peace has been the most overlooked, yet vital imperative. Without it, there will neither be peace, nor justice.