What Price Oslo?

The television images on Al-Jazeera have been burningly clear. There is akind of Palestinian heroism in evidence there that makes this the storyof our time. An entire army, navy, and air force supplied munificently andunconditionally by the United States have been wreaking destruction on the 18per cent of the West Bank and 60 per cent of Gaza afforded Palestinians afterten years of negotiations with Israel and the US. Palestinian hospitals,schools, refugee camps and civilian residences have been at the receiving end ofa merciless, criminal assault by Israeli troops huddled inside their helicoptergun-ships, F-16's and Merkavas, and still the poorly armed resistance fighterstake on this preposterously more powerful force undaunted and unyielding. In theUS, CNN and newspapers like The New York Times fail, to their discredit,to ever mention that "the violence" is uneven and that there aren'ttwo sides involved here, but only one state turning all its great power againsta stateless, repeatedly refugeed, and dispossessed people, bereft of arms andreal leadership, with the aim of destroying this people, "dealing them aterrible blow" as the war criminal who leads Israel shamelessly put it. Asan index of how deranged Sharon has become, I might quote here what he said to Ha'aretzon 5 March: "The PA is behind the terror, it's all terror. Arafat isbehind the terror. Our pressure is aimed at ending the terror. Don't expectArafat to act against the terror. We have to cause them heavy casualties andthen they'll know they can't keep using terror and win politicalachievements."

Besides symptomatically revealing the workings of an obsessed mind bent ondestruction and sheer, unadulterated hatred, Sharon's words indicate thefailures of reason and criticism loosed on the world since last September. Yes,there was a terrorist outrage, but there's more to the world than terror. Thereis politics, and struggle, and history, and injustice, and resistance and yes,state terror as well. With scarcely a peep from the American professorate orintelligentsia, we have all succumbed to the promiscuous misuse of language andsense, by which everything we don't like has become terror and what we do ispure and simple good -- fighting terror, no matter how much wealth, and lives,and destruction is involved. Swept away are all the Enlightenment precepts bywhich we attempt to educate our students and our-fellow citizens, replaced by adisproportionate orgy of vindictiveness and self-righteous wrath of the kindthat only the wealthy and the powerful, it would seem, have the right to use andact upon. No wonder then that a fourth-rate thug like Sharon feels entitled (byemulation and derivation) to do what he does when in the greatest democracy onearth, laws, constitutional rights, writs of habeas corpus and reason itself areconsigned to the rubbish bin in the pursuit of terror and terrorism. Aseducators and as citizens, we have failed in our mission by allowing ourselvesto be bamboozled in this way, without so much as an organised public discussionabout a defence budget that has shot up to $400 billion while 40 million peopleremain without health insurance.

Israelis, Arabs and Americans are told that love of country requires suchexpenditures and such destruction because a good cause is at stake. Nonsense.What is at stake are material interests that keep rulers in power, corporationsmaking profits, people in a state of manufactured consent, just so long as theydon't get up one morning and start to think about where, in this madtechnologised rush to bomb and kill, we are going.

Israel is now waging a war against civilians, pure and simple, although youwill never hear it put that way in the US. This is a racist war, and in itsstrategy and tactics, a colonial one as well. People are being killed and madeto suffer disproportionately because they are not Jews. What an irony! Yet CNNnever refers to "occupied" territories (always rather to"violence in Israel" as if the main battlefields are the concert hallsand cafes of Tel Aviv and not in fact the ghettoes and besieged refugee camps ofPalestine that have already been surrounded by 150 illegal Israeli settlements).For the past ten years, the great fraud of Oslo was foisted on the world by theUS, with hardly an awareness that only 18 per cent of the West Bank were givenup, and 60 per cent of Gaza. No one knows geography and it's better not to know,since the reality on the ground is so astonishing, considering the verbal hooplaand self-congratulation.

And that pseudo-pundit -- the insufferably conceited Thomas Friedman -- stillhas the gall to say that "Arab TV" shows one-sided pictures, as if"Arab TV" should be showing things from Israel's point-of-view the wayCNN does, with "Mid-East violence" the catch-all word for the ethniccleansing that Israel is wreaking on the Palestinians in their ghettoes andcamps. Has Friedman (or CNN for that matter) ever tried to point out thedifference between an attacking army fighting a colonial war on the territory ofthe people it has occupied for 35 years, and the people defending themselvesagainst that butchery? Of course not, for indeed why should Friedman ever botherto say honestly that there is no Palestinian occupation, there are noPalestinian F-16's, no Apache helicopters, no gunboats, no Merkava tanks, inshort, no Palestinian occupation of Israel. So much for Friedman's credentialsas an honest commentator and reporter who has utterly failed, in unadornedterms, to explain the US view or to understand the Arab and Palestinian cause.Can he not see that he and his writings are part of the problem, that in theirmaundering self-justifications and the dishonesty in which he shows no sign ofthe self- criticism he keeps hectoringly expecting of others, he actuallyaggravates the ignorance and the misperceptions rather than reducing them? Poorjournalist and educator, he.

The picture you get here is that Israelis are battling for their livesinstead of for their settlements and military bases on the occupied lands ofPalestine. No maps have been run for months in the American media. On 8 March,hitherto the bloodiest day for Palestinians of the 16-month Intifada, CNN's mainevening news specified the death of 40 "people" and failed even tomention the death of several Red Crescent workers killed while their ambulanceswere prevented by Israeli tanks from getting to the wounded. Just"people," and no pictures of the hell they've been living in this the35th year of military occupation. Tul Karm is undergoing a siege of sieges with24 hour curfews, electricity and water cut-off, systematic round-ups and theremoval of 800 young men, the wanton smashing of refugee houses, wholesaledestruction of property (and I'm not speaking of nightclubs or sports facilitiesbut of shacks and lean-tos that furnished twice displaced refugees with hovelsfor bare subsistence) and limitless cases of sadistic cruelty to unarmed andundefended civilians who are pushed and beaten and left to bleed to death, womenallowed to give birth to stillborn babies while they wait needlessly at Israeliroad-blocks, old men made to strip and take off their shoes and walk barefootfor a gum-chewing 18-year-old waving around an M-16 that my taxes have paid for.

Bethlehem, its town center and university destroyed, flattened at 5,000 feet byvaliant Israeli bombers swooshing in with their marvelous F-16's which I've paidfor too. Balata camp, Aida and Dheheisheh and Azza Camps, the tiny villages ofKhadr and Husam, all battered into rubble without even a mention by the USpress, whose New York editors so obviously have no problems with it, with a fewexceptions here and there. The uncounted dead and wounded, the unburied andunassisted, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of lives maimed,distorted, catastrophically marked by wantonly caused suffering, all of itordered at a safe distance from the action in leafy, calm West Jerusalem by menfor whom the West Bank and Gaza are distant rat holes filled with insects androdents that must be "subdued" and driven out, taught a lesson in theaccepted jargon of Israel's superb military. On Tuesday, in the biggest attackof all, Ramallah has been invaded and is being ravaged by 140 Israeli tanks,thus completing Israel's re-conquest of the already-occupied Palestinianterritories.

The Palestinian people are paying the heavy, heavy unconscionable price ofOslo, which after 10 years of negotiating left them with bits of land lackingcoherence and continuity, security institutions designed to assure theirsubservience to Israel, and a life that impoverished them so that the Jewishstate could thrive and prosper. In vain during those 10 years did some of uswarn that the distance between the US-Israeli language of peace and theappalling realities on the ground was never bridged, never even intended to bebridged. Words and phrases like "peace process" and"terrorism" took hold without reference to any real referent. Landconfiscations were either overlooked or referred to as "bilateralnegotiations" that were taking place between a state consolidating its holdon territory it wanted at all costs, and a mediocre set of uninformednegotiators whom it took four years to acquire, much less use, a reliable map ofthe land they were negotiating over.

The worst misrepresentation of all is thatin the 54 years since 1948, never has a narrative of Palestinian heroism andsuffering been allowed to emerge. We are all depicted as violent fanaticextremists who are little more than the terrorists that George Bush and hiscabal have imposed on the consciousness of a stunned and systematicallymisinformed population, aided and uncritically abetted by an entire army ofcommentators and media stars -- the Blitzers, Zahns, Lehrers, Rathers, Brokaws,Russerts, and their ilk. The Israeli lobby is scarcely needed with such faithfuldisciples trailing happily in its ranks.

But now that the Saudi peace proposal has become the point of discussion andof hope, it is necessary, I think, to put it in its real, as opposed to itssupposed, context. First of all, this is the re-cycled Reagan plan of 1982, theFahd Plan of 1983, the Madrid plan of 1991, and so on: in other words, itfollows a series of plans many times put forward which in the end both Israeland the US have not only refused to implement, but have actively torpedoed. Theway I see it, the only negotiations worth having should be on the phases of atotal Israeli withdrawal and not, as was the case with Oslo, bargaining overwhat pieces of land Israel was willing very grudgingly to give up.

There's beentoo much Palestinian blood spilled, too much Israeli contempt and racistviolence dispensed for any serious return to Oslo-style negotiations brokered bythat most biased of honest brokers, the United States. Everyone is aware,however, that the old Palestinian negotiators haven't given up on their dreamsand illusions, and that meetings have been occurring throughout the raids andbombings. But I would argue that due weight be given to decades of Palestiniansuffering and the real human costs of Israel's destructive policies before anynegotiations accord undue status to Israeli governments that have trampled onPalestinian rights the way they have demolished our houses and killed ourpeople. Any Arab-Israeli negotiations that do not factor in history -- and forthis task a team of historians, economists, and geographers with a conscienceare needed -- are not worth having, just as Palestinians must now elect a newset of negotiators and representatives in the hope of salvaging something fromthe present calamity.

In short, in whatever meetings that now occur between Israeli and Palestinianrepresentatives, the gravity of Israeli depredations against our people has tobe given attention and not simply brushed aside as so much past history. Oslo,in effect, pardoned the occupation, excusing it for all the buildings and livesdestroyed over the first 25 years of occupation. After so much furthersuffering, Israel cannot be excused and allowed to walk away from the table withnot even a rhetorical demand that it needs to atone for what it did.

I will be told that politics is about what is possible, not about what isdesired, and that we should be grateful to get even a small Israeli pullback. Idisagree strongly. Negotiations can only be about when the totalwithdrawal will take place, not what percentage Israel is willing to concede. Aconqueror and a vandal cannot concede anything: he must simply return what he'staken and pay for the abuses that are his responsibility to bear, just as SaddamHussein should and did pay for his occupation of Kuwait. We are still aconsiderable distance from that goal, although in the meantime the extraordinaryunbowed bravery of all Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has in effectpolitically and morally defeated Sharon, who will lose his seat in the not toodistant future. But, that in two decades his armies can invade Arab cities atwill, killing and sowing destruction without so much as a collective Arab peepspeaks reams for the Arab world's leaders.

Lastly, what the various Arab rulers who are so delicately silent now whilePalestine is being raped on TV think they are doing, I don't know, but I canimagine that deep in their souls they must feel no small amount of shame anddisgrace. Powerless militarily, politically, economically and above all morally,they have little credibility and no real standing, except as obedient pawns onthe American-Israeli chessboard. Perhaps they feel they are playing a waitinggame. Perhaps. But they (like Arafat and his men) haven't learned the power ofsystematically disseminated information as a way of protecting their people fromthe onslaughts of those who consider all Arabs militant, extremist, terroristfanatics. The good news is that the time for that sort of irresponsible andcontemptible behavior is very short. Will the new generation do any better?

It is for a whole new attitude toward secular education to decide the answer,whether collectively we go down again to disorganisation, corruption andmediocrity or whether at last we can become a nation.