As the long shadow of Arafat era are drawing to a close over the Occupied Palestine and the badly fractured territory (it is far from a nation yet) is going to elect its new leader on January 9, Arab and the Islamic world need to think anew about wriggling out of the theatre of conflict which the Middle East has become due to the manipulative politics of the Jewish state of Israel and the United States. Arafat was doubtlessly the most noted face in the Middle East politics, an area sans democracy and human rights. Yet the very ambience from which he arose did not allow him opportunity to nurture the democracy among his folk as his engagements with Israeli aggression was a consuming preoccupation.
Oslo Accord of 1993 was one of his major failings. Palestinians were misled into it by deceitful Israelis and the State Department working in tandem with the Zionist lobby. Enclaves have rendered the Palestinians immobile. Their envisioned State has become unachievable and the Apartheid Wall which Israel is building in defiance of the fiat of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), promises to virtually imprison them. Ehud Barak (the former prime minister of Israel) and Company was bargaining for a badly fractured State of Palestine for an ‘End of conflict’ declaration which would have nullified the UN resolution (no. 194, 242 and 338) all calling for rolling back the Israel’s expanded frontiers to 1948. Against this, Arafat and the Palestinians were demanding two-state solution to the conflict, based on June 4, 1967 borders. It also contained the deceitful offer of giving the Palestinian control over the village of Abu Dis, adjacent to East Jerusalem and renaming it Al-Quds as the City of the third holiest shrines of Islam is known. The UN Partition Plan had given only 55 per cent of Palestine to Israel, but Oslo Accord enhanced it to 78 per cent. Arafat was left with only 22 per cent with all the water resources being usurped by Israelis.
A significant change that could be noted during the last decade is that during Chairman Arafat’s ‘peace process years’, the entire Israeli strategy was to isolate, defame, imprison and if possible murder peace activists and eliminate moderates. Yasser Arafat (imprisoned in his Ramallah compound in his terminal years) was the most shining example of it. Marwan Barghouti, one of the most important persons in the peace dialogue, was kidnapped, tried and imprisoned in Israel. Barghouti was even teased by his critics as ‘member of the Israel’s Labour party’. The strategy was aimed at bemoaning the fact that Israel had no one to talk to and encourage the forces of extremism and weaken the process of reform and destroy the Palestinian National Authority.
Post-Arafat, the Palestinians face the formidable challenge of keeping the unified focus of Palestinian struggle and putting in place a course-correcting mechanism which would time and again refocus the movement. Israel’s current strategy is not to deny the Palestinian the right to a homeland, but to provide them a non-viable homeland, which consists of several Bantustans with virtually no sovereign rights. They will have to think as to how to keep the fragile unity between different sects, groups and liberty outfits that all have the common goal of statehood for Palestine. Ways for broad based unity must be thought of.
It should alongwith Arab states take steps to dismantle the Apartheid Wall Israel is building through the heartland of the Palestine. The Presidential polls slated for Jan. 9, 2005 for the election of the new successor to Arafat will pose a challenge to the nascent democracy as militant Hamas is also demanding a share in the Country’s governance. How to vacate East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza and make them into a viable State should be the foremost concern.
Scenario that is emerging is that the conflicts in two flanks, armed resistance against the US occupation of Iraq and struggle against Israeli occupation in the West Bank are joining hands across the middle east and may assume contours of a civilisational conflict because the wounded Arab sentiments look at the situation as totally an aggression by the Americans and their stooges.
The only way the West can placate the simmering discontent in the Islamic world is by helping the little though insufficient Palestinian State and putting the badly bruised Iraq under UN mandate. The US which occupied Iraq in a whirlwind invasion, is finding itself embroiled in the quagmire of Falluja, Tikrit or Sadar City.
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January 2005 |