The Old Men of Israel and Palestine must go

The madness consuming the Middle East demands we stand back, and find answers to this question: if history is the expression of the choices people make, what are the choices the Israelis and Palestinians have made and why did they make them?

And a central, perplexing question underpinning the dreadful mayhem is: ‘Why did Yasser Arafat seemingly snatch war from the jaws of peace, in July, 2000?’

Ehud Barak, then Prime Minister of Israel, made Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian people a significant offer: support for the creation of a State of Palestine within the boundaries of the UN Conventions, withdrawal of Israeli settlers, a capital in Jerusalem, and ‘religious sovereignty’ over the Temple Mount area.

It was more than many Israelis were even prepared to contemplate. Whilst the offer was not clearly delineated and could have been stronger, it was a considerable advance on the status quo, and any other previous Israeli offer.

Yet Arafat rejected the offer. Why?

Perhaps it simply reveals that a Palestinian state was never Arafat’s goal; perhaps he and the PLO are actually dedicated to the complete elimination of Israel; and that their rejection of Barak’s offer reveals this truth in an undeniable way. If the elimination of Israel is Arafat’s true agenda, it supports the Israeli response, which is ‘If it is us or them, it won’t be us!’ A scenario for the Israelis, then, of ‘Let loose then the dogs of war, close your ears to the screaming of the children, and make sure we have the biggest gun’.

This reality is self evidently wrong, in any moral or ethical sense. But what are the alternatives? Would a different analysis give rise to different options? This is not a question for academic musing or philosophical exploration; there are people dying on both sides every other day.

An Israeli soldier makes his decision to pull the trigger to kill the Palestinian in his sights through his telescopic lens in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. This decision is an expression of the decision he made when joining the Army. And his decision is the result of the decision made by his Government to go to war. A Palestinian teenager straps death to her stomach, and makes her decisions for the same reason, through the same chain of events.

We must therefore look to the highest context, to where the chain of events starts. There are people in control, the Old Men: Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat.

Arafat

Arafat is a general-of-war, not a governor-of-peace. He and his cabal know best how to wage war; it is all they have ever done the whole of their lives. Arafat started his career with the founding of the Fatah organisation in 1965, later merged with the PLO. He and his cabinet do not know how to sustain peace; they have tried this and failed.

When Arafat accepted the humiliating 1994 Peace Accord, of the segmenting of his people into the Gaza Strip and ghettos of the West Bank, he achieved respite for an exhausted and defeated people He, with Rabin and Peres also won a Nobel Peace Prize. Fatally, however, it did nothing to alter the status of the Palestinian people as victims, and the role of Israel as the oppressor. The Peace Accord did not dissolve the glue, which binds the Palestinian people, and binds the Arab world to the Palestinians. For his part, Rabin was short-sighted in not seeing that he had done no more than had been achieved by the Treaty of Versailles: planting the seeds of a new war in the battle grounds of the old.

Having brokered a poor peace, Arafat then made a poor governor. The Palestinian Authority under his leadership made a hash of government: the transition from Army to Civilian Authority failed.

The Palestinians quickly found that socially and economically life was unsustainable, and Arafat and the PLO leadership found they did not know how to govern. Basic services were not maintained; soldiers made poor policemen; corruption was rife; poverty endemic. The Arab elites, and their dollars, stayed away. Western welfare support was sporadic, not always welcome and inadequate. The pattern of the history of decolonisation was repeated: the previously oppressed could not manage the peace.

How did Arafat and the PLO handle the deterioration of the embryonic Palestinian state into chaos? They blamed Israel for their failure to cope with the dull yet complex need for effective government to create and sustain order, economic opportunities, and provision of social services. Soon enough, the boys went back to doing what they did best: hating and fighting and killing. The Intifada was proclaimed

This was the context in which, in September 2000, Barak made his offer, which sought to redress the inadequacies of the 1994 Peace Accord. The devil lies in the detail, of which little is known directly. But it seems that Barak saw the chances of success for the Palestinian Authority were slim. A Palestinian State with a capital in Jerusalem was needed, joining together significant territory in which the Palestinian people could live was needed, and their religious ownership of the Temple Mount was needed. This would create the opportunity for the Palestinian people to achieve a sustainable peace, in which they could shape their own future and be self-defining.

And, crucially, it would have enabled Israel to be transformed from oppressor to something more akin, to peace maker. It would remove from the PLO leadership, and the Arab world, the grounds on which to blame Israel for their personal and institutional failures.

It seems it was too big an offer, too much of a challenge, for Arafat to accept. To accept it meant his PLO leadership accepting their own end, not through defeat in war, but through a peace in which the Palestinian people would again be dependent on their own resources, and in which the incompetence of Arafat and his cabinet would be finally exposed.

It seems to me that Arafat and his lieutenants responded to Barak’s offer by choosing their own political survival and their known path of war, rather than the survival of the Palestinian people and the complexities of governing a peace.

Sharon

Sharon, too, is a man of war, not a man of peace. Sharon went to the Temple Mount on September 28^th, 2000, at the time Barak was making his offer, as his way of ensuring that the war would be back on. It was as cynical as it was successful. Arafat uttered his dismay, Barak was dismissed, and that most lauded of the old soldiers, Sharon, was elected.

Sharon, like Arafat, earned his reputation as an army leader. In 1982, when the Israeli army entered Lebanon he was appointed Defence Minister, then, as now, to uproot the PLO. After shelling Beirut, he succeeded, unlike this time, in forcing Arafat into exile in Tunis. Under his watch, and with his agreement, Lebanese Christian militiamen massacred hundreds of civilians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, an act many regard as a war crime. An Israeli inquiry found Sharon ‘indirectly responsible’ for the atrocity and, as a result, his political career was regarded as over.

In 1999 he returned to the leadership of Likud, the right wing party he forged in the early 1970’s. Since becoming Prime Minister , Sharon has resumed his life’s work: to invade, to destroy, to kill the enemy he has devoted his entire adult life to destroying. He grasped the Bush inspired ‘war on terror’ as his rationale for the killing of more Palestinians.

Whither the Middle East?

Sharon has had his soldiers razing Palestinian towns with unrestrained ferocity; Arafat has regained glory as the brave general holed up in Ramallah. The Arab world has, once again, rallied to the Palestinians. The US administration is, again, caught in the deeply divisive dilemma, of balancing political imperatives of the American people with its international economic imperatives, this time balancing on the Bush anvil of the ‘war on terror’.

If nothing else is clear, it is this: peace will not be found by Sharon and Arafat brokering a detailed peace accord. The Old Men, it seems to me, must go.

This website provides a remarkably well designed tool for tracking the respective histories, and parallels of these two men.

If these two men, together, cannot find a way to peace, then what is the pathway out of this continuous warfare? I certainly hope that the emergent solution works.

Firstly, Barak’s offer has been re-invigorated and upgraded, this time in the form of the proposal made by the Saudi Arabian monarchy. Remarkably, there appears to be broad consensus between moderates on both sides of the conflict on arrangements which are necessary for peace.

Secondly, the US proposal for a multi-lateral conference may provide a forum for detailing and signing off on this arrangement. The US has proposed a forum inclusive of the EU, significant Arab States, UN representatives, as well as widespread representation of the two peoples in the conflict. The forum proffers the prospect of dialogue, for the path to peace can only be found through dialogue, short of one or the other side ‘winning’. Most importantly, it could be a forum in which new voices can be heard, and the Old Men moved from centre stage.

Finally, the international community is engaging in nation building, such as in East Timor and in Afghanistan. This is what the fledging State of Palestine will most certainly need when it comes into existence.

Conclusion

I believe history will judge Sharon and Arafat as umbilical twins who embraced each other, all their lives, in a sick dance of death on the graves of so many of their peoples. Surely, and please god, that this judgement be brought upon them soon, so that new leaders can be found, and a start made towards a new Middle East before too many more people die.