Fussing Over a Red Herring

Ghada Karmi

Blaming the Palestinians for their problems has been a weapon in the Israeli arsenal ever since the beginning of the conflict. To cite but a few examples: there is no Palestinian state today because the Arabs rejected UN Resolution 181 of 1947, which offered them a state of their own; the Palestinians lost their homes in 1948 because they obeyed their leaders' orders and ran away; it was their terrorist attacks in 1996 which ousted the peace-loving Shimon Peres and brought the right-wing Netanyahu to the Israeli prime ministership; and so on. Most recently, Palestinians are being held responsible for Israel's problems too. The opinion is prevalent that Ariel Sharon's election as Israel's new prime minister is the result of Palestinian rejection of Ehud Barak's "generous concessions" during the Camp David negotiations.

Writing in the Guardian on 8 February, Israeli novelist Amos Oz delivered himself of this view in bitter and accusatory tones. He laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of Arafat, who had inexplicably turned his back on the Israeli leader's brave initiative, thus confirming once again Abba Eban's famous judgement that "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." Nowhere in Oz's article was there the faintest awareness of what had actually happened during the Camp David negotiations, or of the failure of seven years of "peace-making" before that, which had tightened Israel's control over all aspects of Palestinian life, or of the brutal reality of an Israeli military occupation with no end in sight. This peculiar Israeli denial is in line with the other vicious calumny, that the Palestinians deliberately put their children in the line of fire just to give the Israeli army a bad name.

This campaign of disinformation has to be exposed for what it is: a deliberate attempt to evade Israel's own responsibility for the breakdown of the peace process and the subsequent killing of nearly 400 Palestinians, many of them children. The claim is that Israel offered 95 per cent of the West Bank during the Camp David negotiations and sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the Haram Al-Sharif. If that had been true then we might perhaps have wondered at the strength of Palestinian reaction, but it is not. The problem is that no one, including Amos Oz, knows for sure what Israel did offer. But this did not stop the plethora of leaks, American-inspired reports and second-hand speculation from painting a rosy picture.

At the beginning of January, the Palestinian negotiating team explained why it could not accept the American-mediated Israeli proposals, summarising them as vague, undefined and concerned mainly with general principles. Israel produced no maps to show its exact territorial plans for the West Bank or Jerusalem. No one was clear on what basis the "95 per cent" of the West Bank had been calculated, since the original borders have been gerrymandered and redrawn repeatedly to accommodate Jewish settlements and extend Israeli control over East Jerusalem. But what did emerge was that Israel would keep at least 10 per cent for its existing settlements and another 10 per cent for "security needs," in addition to having an army presence in the Jordan Valley. What land in Israel would be swapped to compensate the Palestinians for this was not specified. There were suggestions that this might be toxic waste land. The West Bank would not be contiguous but divided into three cantons separated by Jewish-only roads. The allocation of water and other resources did not even feature in the talks.

The formulations on East Jerusalem were equally unsatisfactory. Both sides would have control of their own areas. The Haram Al-Sharif would be under Palestinian sovereignty, but not the Western Wall and its adjoining parts. Israel could excavate "behind the Wall," that is, under the Haram, but the Palestinians could not. Israel's sovereignty would also extend to geographically undefined "religious sites." There is nothing here to support the claim, now constantly reiterated by Israelis and their sympathisers, that Barak ceded sovereignty over "the Temple Mount." All Israeli withdrawals, moreover, would be phased over three years, with the Israeli army presence on the Jordan Valley maintained for a further three years after that.

What these American-Israeli proposals really amount to is this: a non-contiguous territory on an undefined percentage of the West Bank; a retention of the majority of Jewish settlements; some sharing of control over East Jerusalem and the Haram Al-Sharif. But above all, it means a legitimisation of the acquisition of territory by force, contrary to UN Resolution 242, which the US affects to respect. The resulting truncated, divided entity offered to the Palestinians is a far cry from the effusive claim of Israelis that Barak made generous concessions which the Palestinians casually threw away. It seems not to strike Western commentators as ludicrous that returning something of what you stole to its rightful owners should be seen as a concession. Boasting that Barak had offered more than any other Israeli leader before him may be true but is even more ludicrous. It is like stealing �1,000 from someone to whom you offer �100 back; he rejects it and so your son increases the offer to �150, saying it is better than that of his father; and when the man rejects this too, your son gets angry at his ingratitude.

In fact, the concessions were all on the other side: in return for this dubious offer, the Palestinians were required to end forever their claims against Israel, including the right of return, affirmed by every law and held sacred for decades. It was this cynical Israeli disregard for the legitimate Palestinian demands of an end to occupation and a viable independent state that led to the Intifada.

And it is occupation that is the crux of the problem. The fuss over Ariel Sharon's election is a red herring -- a diversion from dealing with the immediate basis of the conflict, which is that an army of occupation continues to subjugate a whole population, plunder its resources and deny it a normal, independent life. International law is clear on the issue: Israel must vacate the territories acquired in 1967, including East Jerusalem; all its settlements are illegal, as are its numerous acts of human rights abuses against the Palestinians. Like all occupied peoples, the Palestinians have a right to resist the occupation by all means at their disposal. This essential fact is in danger of being bypassed in the froth over the Israeli elections and Israeli domestic politics. Is Sharon worse than Barak? What of the man's character, his past and future? Will he relinquish Jewish settlements as Begin did? Can he form a coalition government and how long will he be in office?

The Arabs must not be sucked into this soap opera. They must resist the temptation to play the Israeli game and refocus attention on the basic problem: that Palestinians are an occupied people resisting an illegal occupation that is a historical anachronism in the 21st century. It is an enterprise which should elicit the sympathy and support of the whole world.

* The writer is chair of the Palestine Community Association in the UK.