If the US can't fix it, it's the wrong kind of democracy

[Englander]

Without Arafat, a Middle East peace settlement is in fact far less likely

Seumas Milne
Thursday November 18, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1353692,00.html


The more George Bush and Tony Blair evangelise about the need to spread democracy, the clearer it becomes that they mean something quite different by the word from the rest of the world. Bush and Blair's response to the death of Yasser Arafat - the Palestinian leader who unified and championed a dispersed and occupied people for 35 years - has been a particularly instructive case in point.

Bush was unable even to mention Arafat's name last Friday, when the pair hailed what most Palestinians consider a devastating loss as a marvellous opportunity for Middle East peace. But, they cautioned, progress towards a Palestinian state would only be possible if the Palestinians were prepared to embrace democracy. The fact that Arafat was elected with an overwhelming majority in internationally supervised elections, and continued to command majority support until his death, was evidently beside the point. He was the wrong kind of democratically elected leader.

snip..
In the Palestinians' case, the crimes stretch back more than half a century - and the US and Britain have been complicit at every stage, from their original dispossession and ethnic cleansing in 1948 to the acquiescence in Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, from the blind eye turned to 37 years of illegal Israeli settlements to the pressure to replace the elected Palestinian leader with somebody more pliant. Bush's demand in 2002 for the Palestinian president to be ousted not only gave the green light to Israel's incarceration of Arafat in the dank rubble of a former British army compound in Ramallah, but also offers a clue as to what he and Blair really mean by Palestinian democratic reform.

For it is simply an affront to common sense to claim that the Palestinians' plight - or, for that matter, Israel's problems with the Palestinians - stems from a lack of democracy. The Palestinians have a tradition of political pluralism stretching back decades, while the Palestinian authority in the occupied territories barely has the powers of a proper local authority, let alone those of a state - and the scope for meaningful democracy under military occupation is severely limited. The authority's failures arose largely from the weaknesses of the Oslo peace process, which gave it the role of middleman and security contractor for Israel, while closures and settlement expansion made Palestinians' lives ever more grim. The Palestinian problem is instead primarily one of colonisation and occupation - and the denial of self-determination and refugee rights. Those are the issues, rather than democracy, that the US and its allies have to address if they want to draw the poison of the conflict.

[Violet_Crumble]

1. Democracy = quislings...

Freedom and democracy = being ruled by quislings who work in the interests of others (in this case, Israel and the US) rather than in the interests of their own people. Any Palestinian leader who places importance on the interests of the Palestinian people is going to get the big smear job happening from Bush and his cronies before too long...

Violet...