Questions and Futility of the Arab Vision
The situation in the Middle East
has raised a million questions and a million possible answers. What
does Sharon want? How will the Arabs respond to the popular street
demands they are facing? And more importantly - where are we all
heading? One can be sentimental and say, "we are heading towards
war." The sentimentalists, who are many, can listen to revolutionary
music all day long, take part in parades, throw stones at their own
armed forces, and chant, "Open the borders, we want to die for
Palestine." The latest Hizbullah attacks on Mount Hermon and Kiryat
Shmona have managed to send emotions soaring, with Arab citizens
demanding that their governments do the same. They do not know how
dangerous the attacks can be, to both Syria and Lebanon, and how
ineffective they be in damaging the Israeli war machine.
The word "war" is being used interchangeably
and freely with "confrontation" but nobody knows its psychological,
financial, and political impacts. This new generation of Arabs, born
between the years 1965-1985, does not know the meaning of war. This
is a generation that was too young to remember 1967 and 1973. War
will lead to defeat and nobody knows that better than Arab leader,
who despite all that is being said, are nevertheless rational in
their stance. We do not need another Gamal Abdul Nasser to drag us
into defeat. We are not here to judge the Arabs on why their armies
are weak.
We are not here to ask our leaders, how is
it that after so many years of arms-build up, they are not prepared
for war? Why has 85 per cent of most regional taxes gone to the
armed forces? Ariel Sharon, it must be noted, wants radical Arabs to
rise to power and foolishly declare war on him. He would love
another 1967. He has tried repeatedly to provoke the Arabs,
declaring his intention to bomb the Aswan High Dam in 2000, flying
constantly into Beirut airspace, and shelling a Syrian radar station
in Lebanon in April 2001. Still, to his dismay, the Arabs have not
reacted.
Sharon believes in the policy of "might
makes right" and knows better than everyone that he has unlimited
powers to do as he pleases. He knows that if an Arab-Israeli war
were to erupt, he will be leading the winning army and, unlike in
1967 and 1973, the Arabs are on their own and there is no USSR to
help them. He wants to militarize the conflict and has succeeded in
transforming it from a stone-throwing campaign, which had the entire
world on its side, into an array of suicide bombers who have aroused
pro-Israeli sympathy from the international community. Sharon was
embarrassed by the image of his soldiers shooting down young
Palestinian stone-throwers but justifies himself when Palestinians
are blowing themselves up in Israeli populated civilian territory.
Sharon has worked relentlessly since September 11 to portray the
Palestinians as terrorists and depict his war against them as
similar to the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. Yasser Arafat was seen
as another Osama bin Laden and the PA were seen as the Taliban.
Bush had his own reasons to strike at the
Arabs. First, he wanted to "punish" them for their refusal to
endorse the U.S. campaign against Iraq. More importantly, however,
he wanted to voice his resentment to the Iraqi-Gulf rapprochement
that was agreed to at the Arab Summit in March 2002.
Sharon came storming into Ramallah on March
29 with a clear nudge from President Bush, and had he wanted, Bush
could have gotten him to withdraw within hours from the invasion.
Having secured U.S. backing Sharon did not seem to mind what the
rest of the world thought of him.
To move on, the Palestinians must forget
that salvation is to come from the Arabs and realize that they are
in a war on their own. TIME magazine ran a story this week entitled
'Worse Case Scenario' claiming that if the killing continues,
Egyptian President Husni Moubarak would call his army into Sinai,
forcing the Israelis to freeze their atrocities and prompting Syria
to move its forces to the Golan Heights.
Other Arab states, mainly Iraq and Jordan,
would follow in a confrontation that would erupt into an all-out
regional war. I personally find that very hard to believe - knowing
perfectly well how reluctant, unable and unwilling the Arabs are to
sustain such a war. The policy Sharon
has laid out for the Arab world is an ugly one. He wants to push
deeply into the Palestinian territories, kill anything that moves,
and break the spirit of the Palestinian people.
He wants to inflict maximum pain, without
any regard to UN resolutions, or Israeli opinion, and force the
Palestinians to surrender. In doing so he wants to re-occupy all the
Palestinian territories given at Oslo and negotiate a peace
agreement from scratch. This time, however, negotiations will be
different.
In 1993 the Palestinians were the victorious
ones, after the triumph of the first intifada. Arafat
presented his conditions for peace and was received promptly by what
today seems to be the relatively moderate Yitzhak Rabin and Bill
Clinton. Unlike the first intifada,
the Palestinians would emerge from this war in defeat, tormented by
so much blood and anguish that their negotiating stance would be
weak. No matter how brave they may be, too much death can cripple
the most courageous of nations. Negotiations will be conducted with
a gravely wounded Palestinian side. In reaching that, Sharon would
have weakened the Palestinians' will and destroyed their aspirations
for statehood and independence. At first, we thought he was out to
kill Yasser Arafat. Today it is clear that Arafat is the safest
Palestinian citizen alive - he is being protected by the Israeli
Army itself! However, Arafat will emerge weak and humiliated like
his people and would be disenchanted by the Arabs than ever before.
In a battle of nerves, Sharon might succeed in breaking Arafat's
spirit and making him hopeless, defeated, forgotten, and weak. Once
this is achieved, international pressure will be applied on the PNA,
forcing Arafat to sign any agreement laid out before him or suffer
prolonged massacres against his people. Given such a choice he would
accept proposals that he had turned down in the past.
Step Two of Sharon's plan would be to offer
Arafat the same proposals made by Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the
Camp David talks in 2000. The Palestinians would be given 95 per
cent of the West Bank and Gaza, with parts of East Jerusalem, the
right of return for a limited number of refugees, and compensation
up to $30 billion. In return the PNA
would sign an agreement declaring an end to the state of war with
Israel and offer full-recognition to the Jewish state, which would
be accompanied by economic deals that would keep the Palestinian
economy forever dominated by the Israeli one.
The strings to such an agreement, which led
Arafat to reject in 2000 are that the Israelis would continue to
have settlements, and would continue to control the border with
Jordan. The holy sites in East Jerusalem, which include the Wailing
Wall, would remain in the hands of a joint Palestinian-Israeli
authority. In addition the time of
the Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territory and East Jerusalem
would be left for the Israelis to decide. Gush Shalom, the Israeli
peace movement, described the agreement and its proposals as
"humiliating."
The romantic outcome to the bloodbath in
Palestine would be for Arafat to appear on the rooftop of his
Ramallah compound, and right before the whole world, raise the
Palestinian flag and declare the establishment of the State of
Palestine. He would denounce the Israeli campaign as invasion of a
sovereign state and declare war, along with 21 Arab nations, against
the Jewish state. Hizbullah would declare war from Lebanon and
official Arab armies would march into Israel while voluntary Arab
forces would be sent to Palestine to protect its people. Syria would
retrieve the Golan Heights, Lebanon would retrieve the Shebaa Farms,
and the Arabs would occupy all of Jerusalem and hand it over to the
Palestinians. Then, all 22 Arab
leaders would go to the holy city, as Arafat had long hoped for, and
pray side-by-side at Al Aqsa Mosque.
Beautiful as it is, this vision is a dream. As Arab intellectuals,
however, the most we can hope for today is that the brave
Palestinians are able to benefit from this genocide, just as the
Israelis did under Nazi Germany, to market their plight and
materialize their aspirations for statehood.
Beirut
Gulf News
April 10, 2002