The first and second Intifadas in the West Bank and Gaza steered the Palestinian liberation project away from unity with the rest of Palestine. In his second instalment on Israel's historic options,
Azmi Bishara argues that there is no reason now why that unity cannot be recaptured
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Negotiations on the "two-state solution" have been voided of all substance.
The Palestinian national liberation movement has lost all its sources of strength as a liberation movement, including its ability to rely on the Arab community instead of the "international community". It lost and forfeited its sources of strength before ever becoming a state and securing national sovereignty. It became the Palestinian Authority, an entity totally dependent upon negotiations, America's and Israel's good intentions, Israeli public opinion and other such factors. Negotiations over the Palestinian state have been reduced to a process of blackmail in which concessions are demanded and offered and fundamental rights are bartered away.
From the attitude that negotiations are an alternative to resistance, as opposed to the culmination of resistance, a new Palestinian leadership was born, a leadership so bound to the negotiating process that it is existentially dependent upon it. Israel knows that; we know that. Moreover, in this process, what is most essential to the concept of negotiation has been drained and replaced by Israeli handouts and the tokens of good intention that this leadership needs in exchange for laying siege to, hunting down and killing those Palestinian forces that have chosen and adhered to the path of resistance.
As a result, things that were taken as givens under occupation, such as electricity, water, freedom of movement, jobs, food and medicine have become aspects of the negotiation process. They have become prizes flaunted in the face of those forces that "provoke" or "upset" Israel by "exposing themselves and their society to a blockade" for their refusal to give up on resistance, thereby depriving their society of those "great achievements" that, in fact, had been the legal responsibility of the occupation to provide.
In the national liberation struggle phase, Palestinians who offered themselves as intermediaries with the occupation, for the issuing of travel and work permits, or distribution of electricity and fuel supplies, would be regarded as agents. They were seen as lending themselves to an Israeli strategy for creating an alternative Palestinian leadership to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which at the time was viewed as a national resistance leadership because it refused to accept services as a solution, instead insisting on the end of the occupation itself. In the current phase of negotiating over the creation of a state, the provision of fundamental services has become an Israeli-Palestinian instrument for rewarding a moderate leadership that deserves to be supported by such services and punishing an extremist leadership by withholding these services from Palestinians in order to force them to turn against this leadership because it adhered to the path of resistance.
However, while the Palestinian state component of the "two-state solution" is being voided of all substance, the Palestinian resistance front, which currently consists, for the most part, of forces -- such as Hamas and the Palestinian Jihad -- that espouse an Islamist ideology, does not appear inclined to a democratic alternative that would offer a choice to Israelis, such as the "one-state solution". The idea of a single democratic state for all its citizens, Arabs and Jews alike, has never been taken up in a serious, practical way in the history of the struggle. The Arabs, rightfully, regarded Zionism as a colonialist movement and they saw Zionists, who were not indigenous inhabitants in Palestine, as colonisers bent on the goal to found a state on a land belonging to another people. The Balfour Declaration was no secret and the Zionist project to create a Jewish state in Palestine had been declared for all to hear.
There would also have been some practical conceptual problems. Zionism in practice meant, as it still does, drawing as many "pioneers" as possible to settle in Palestine; the boundaries of who would qualify for citizenship in a single state were never clear. Equal citizenship is the basis and essence of the idea of co-existence in a single state not dominated by Zionist ideology. It is also the message the Arabs should send out in order to offer Jewish society an alternative to the concept of a Jewish state, this alternative being the prospect of legitimising that society's presence in Palestine on the grounds of the principles of citizenship.
This is the message of co-existence; it is the antithesis of genocide, expulsion, or "throwing the Jews into the sea" (that famous quotation that is harped on by -- and to a large extent the invention of -- Zionist propaganda when, in fact, it is Israel that threw the Palestinians into the sea and the desert). But for the Arabs to try to pinpoint a specific cut-off date after which immigrants should not be considered legitimate residents is not only unrealistic, it is an unacceptable, and indeed absurd, way to define the boundaries of citizenship.
more, more, more...
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/890/op1.htm
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