ME peace: The road map is fundamentally flawed

The principal architect and custodian of the map chose to withhold its publication until certain agendas of his were fulfilled. Part of that agenda was to impose upon the Palestinians a new political dispensation. Whether the Palestinians liked it or not, the new order must be to the liking of America and Israel, the mediator and the other disputant. The ostensible purpose is to usher in democracy in Palestine, supplanting the existing regime that the Palestinians had elected to office. The prime condition for the new Palestinian democracy was the appointment of a Prime Minister and a Cabinet with full executive authority. One could question whether a Prime Minister and a cabinet are essential for democracy. Does America, said to be the citadel of democracy, have a Prime Minister and a cabinet with full executive power? The Americans and other people of the world know very well that the Presidential and ministerial forms are two different styles of democracy. The ministerial form may have a wider sway throughout the world, because the presidential form may easily lead to dictatorial tendencies as in present day America despite the Founding Fathers' extraordinary precautions to prevent or check such tendencies to arise.

The real purpose, as any one can see, has been to bring about a regime change. The intention has been to sideline Yassir Arafat, the democratically elected and internationally recognized most popular leader of the Palestinians. (Meanwhile other regime changes -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- have been planned and executed.). The American and the Israeli administrations have been saying in chorus that Arafat is unacceptable as a negotiating partner because he is a "terrorist", a "godfather" to the Palestinian "terrorists", a "liar" and "untrustworthy". Such calumny, abuse and filth thrown at Arab leaders, who were not easily pliable, is nothing new. The European imperialists have used such languages against many Arab leaders during the days of their scheming and manoeuvring to occupy Arab lands after the defeat of Ottoman Turkey in the First World War. The latest twist in that bizarre saga surrounding Yassir Arafat is the threat to expel him from the Palestinian territory or to eliminate him physically after vicious name callings for long and virtually imprisoning him since 2001.

America, the principal peace-maker-author of the road map, vetoed a resolution in the UN Security Council against the execution of the threat to Arafat, to block its passage. America has fully backed the Israeli demand to set aside Arafat. In his place should be found a pliable leader or set of leaders who would submit to coercion or be lured by bribery with some crumbs of power or lumps of money. That would then enable them to impose a solution on the Palestinians. Such impositions through so-called diplomatic efforts have been resorted to in the Middle East as elsewhere since the rise of western imperialism. Coercion, epitomised in the old notion of gunboat diplomacy, and bribery with the lure of money and/or power, is still alive and well today as principal instruments of western diplomacy in Third World countries.

The other prime condition attached to the road map is a complete cessation of Palestinian hostilities toward Israel. That has been a feature of all previous American peace plans a la Tenet, Mitchell etc. This condition is attached largely on Israeli demand, which America finds easily acceptable. Both the Americans and the Israelis insist on a 100 per cent guarantee of non-violence from the Palestinian Authority. Even the bursting of a firecracker by a Palestinian will negate the rest of the peace process; such has been the American and Israeli insistence. That 100 per cent guarantee must include the demolition of what America and Israel call terrorist infrastructures.

America and Israel know very well that Yassir Arafat is at best a municipal chairman presiding over a municipal council on an occupied territory on which the occupiers carry out at will murder, search and arrests. They demolish houses and the existing Palestinian infrastructures, including the security infrastructure that was allowed them. They know that Arafat is in no position to offer a 100 per cent guarantee of non-violence so long as the occupation and colonisation of the territories continue and that he cannot demolish the so-called terrorist infrastructures without provoking a Palestinian civil war. Yet he is blamed, vilified, imprisoned and threatened with exile or elimination for not doing what he is asked to do and is incapable of doing. Yassir Arafat ran into this predicament by agreeing to be such a municipal chairman in the hope of eventually being able to establish a mini-Palestinian state on the Gaza strip and the West Bank under the Oslo process. It serves well the Israeli purpose of continued occupation, colonization and eviction of Palestinians on the pretext that the Palestinian Authority fails to guarantee 100 per cent security to Israel. For running himself into this obvious Israeli trap and abandoning his dream of a democratic Palestine, late Edward Said, the renowned Palestinian intellectual and activist, had broken rank with Arafat after the Oslo agreement.

Israel, with America's wholesale backing, refuses to see Palestinian "terrorism" for what it is -- a struggle to free from Israeli occupation some 20 per cent or so land of the old British Mandate of Palestine. That much was left after the Israeli grab of 1948 and that was occupied later in 1967. The Palestinians have accepted the inevitability of the loss of 80 per cent of their land through the partition imposed on them in the name of the United Nations in 1947 and the 1948 Israeli conquest. They have abandoned their earlier aspirations for the establishment of a single "non-sectarian, democratic, Palestinian state in which Muslims, Christians and Jews could live together in equality". That idea was unacceptable not only to the Jews who claim exclusivity as the "chosen people of God" and the right to the "Promised Land", but also to their western creators and backers who subjected the Jews to extreme persecution and inhuman cruelty for centuries. These present day guardians of democracy, freedom and justice were "complicit in history's biggest fraud that resulted in the Israeli state being set up" by snatching away the Palestinian homeland as Mr. Naqvi, has pointed out (DS 2 Oct.) They find Israel as the only democratic outpost in the Middle East and are now set to establish more, which would uphold their "values" and of course protect their "national interests". If one were to ask why Israel, with its Jewish exclusivity based on Biblical myths, should not be regarded as a theocracy rather than a democracy, few answers could probably be found.

The Palestinians are now pinning their hopes for a living space on the 20 per cent of their ancestral land that Israel lately occupied. Israel has not only occupied the land but has been colonising it with the not so concealed intention of driving away the Palestinians or submitting to virtual slavery those who refuse to leave. That is the grand design to establish Greater Israel on the so-called "Promised Land" only for the Jews. Israel interprets with America's vocal support, the Palestinian dream and demand of a democratic Palestine as demolition of the Israeli State, though the demand is no more than a change in the character of the state. That change of character is not acceptable to Israel and the western angels of democracy. The issue has been long dead any way.

The simple need of a peace plan since then has been the vacation of occupation and the establishment of a fully sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, with an international guarantee of peaceful borders between the two states with the appropriate share of responsibilities assumed by both. In a speech delivered in London recently, the French Foreign Minister reiterated the need for collective efforts to implement such a peace plan. It will probably go unheeded since Israel does not care for the French or any one else so long as it is sheltered under America's protective umbrella. The core issues on which any would be negotiator can have a major role are the vacation of occupation, de-colonisation of occupied lands, halt to continued eviction of Palestinians from their hearths and homes, and at least a fair compensation to those who were evicted more than fifty years ago. Instead of seriously addressing any of them, the American peace plans keep insisting on guaranteeing security to Israel by a Palestinian non-entity. The issues are left to the parties to negotiate knowing fully well the Israeli reluctance to negotiate them.

The UN Security Council resolution 242 could provide a solution a long time ago. Israel however rejects the UN's resolutions and its negotiating role, for which it is not punished as others are. Israel accepts only American mediation offers -- an America that sees no wrong in whatever Israel does and everything wrong in what the Palestinians do. America cries in pain when a young Palestinian woman sacrifices herself by detonating a bomb in Haifa in revenge for Israelis killing her brothers and cousins. America sees nothing in daily killings, arrests, humiliations, tortures, bombing and destruction of homes and refugee camps of the Palestinians, and even an attack on a third country, or sees in them Israel's exercise of the right to self-defence. Palestinians have no right to defence, no right to buy or possess weapons, no right to resist repression; their only right seems to be to submit meekly to occupation and all that goes with it and is forgotten as they were until the rise of Intefada.

America sees nothing in the frustration and despair of the Palestinians as a result of the continued brutal repression under occupation and denial of their right to freedom. America sees nothing in the imprisonment of Yassir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian people. America vetoes resolutions asking Israel to desist from exiling or assassinating Arafat and condemning the construction of a so-called security wall through the Palestinian territories which amounts to further land grab and isolation of Palestinian communities from one another. America casts the only negative vote other than Israel (two other tiny island states which voted against are virtual American colonies) when the proposals are placed before the General Assembly. Such has been America's behaviour and its sense of impartiality in peace negotiations in the Middle East. A road map with hardly any clear direction and destination, drawn up by such an 'impartial' cartographer can only lead to nowhere. The Palestinians had accepted the map like a drowning man catching a straw in attempts to survive. The straw seems too thin for their support or comfort. The chorus of demand to dismantle their capacity for armed resistance looks like being targeted to hasten the drowning.

Dr. Abul Hashem is retired section chief, Development Research and Policy Analysis Division, UN-ESCAP, Bangkok.