By Munir K. Nasser
Chief Correspondent, Washington, DC
Albawaba.com
Palestinian American thinker Edward Said declared that “the peace process” has run off track and now it is time for “an alternative peace plan and leadership,” and called for a mass movement against “Israeli apartheid.”
In an essay published in the Guardian on October 12, Said noted that such an alternative peace plan “is slowly emerging among Israeli, West Bank, Gaza and Diaspora Palestinians.” He said the plan would drop the Oslo framework, including any compromise on the original UN resolutions (242, 338, and 194), removal of all settlements and military roads, evacuation of all the territories annexed or occupied in 1967, and boycott of Israeli goods and services.
Said wrote, “A new sense may actually be dawning that only a mass movement against Israeli apartheid (similar to the South African variety) will work.”
He fiercely criticized the Palestinian leadership for continuing with the peace process. “With his own corrupt and stupidly repressive regime supported both by Israel's Mossad and the CIA, Yasser Arafat continued to rely on US mediation, even though the US peace team was dominated by former Israeli lobby officials and a president whose ideas about the Middle East were those of a Christian fundamentalist Zionist with no exposure to, or understanding of the Arab-Islamic world.”
Said noted that some of the new Palestinian Intifada is directed at Arafat, “who has led his people astray with phony promises, and maintained a battery of corrupt officials holding down commercial monopolies even as they negotiate incompetently and weakly on his behalf.”
Said added: “Compliant, but isolated and unpopular Arab chiefs (especially Egypt's President Mubarak) were compelled humiliatingly to toe the American line, thereby further diminishing their eroded credibility at home. Israel's priorities were always put first, as was its bottomless insecurity and its preposterous demands. No attempt was made to address the fundamental injustice done when Palestinians as a people were dispossessed in 1948.”
Said was equally critical of the American role played by the Clinton administration: “Behind the peace process were two unchanging Israeli-American presuppositions, both of them derived from a startling incomprehension of reality. First was that given enough punishment and beating over the years since 1948, Palestinians would ultimately give up, accept the compromised compromises. Arafat did in fact accept, and call the whole Palestinian cause off, thereafter excusing Israel for everything it has done.”
Said added: “Isolated in the UN and unloved everywhere in the Arab world as Israel's unconditional champion, the US and its lame duck president have little to contribute any more. Neither does the Arab and Israeli leadership, even though they are likely to cobble together another interim agreement.”
Said declared that the “misreported and hopelessly flawed Oslo peace process has entered its terminal phase - of violent confrontation, disproportionately massive Israeli repression, widespread Palestinian rebellion and great loss of life, the vast majority of it Palestinian. Labor and Likud leaders alike made no secret of the fact that Oslo was designed to segregate the Palestinians in non-contiguous enclaves, surrounded by Israeli-controlled borders, with settlements and settlement roads punctuating and essentially violating the territories' integrity.”
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
