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Ending
the Death Dance
By
Richard
Falk
Professor of International Law and
Practise
Centre of International Studies, Princeton University,
USA
TFF associate
August 2, 2002
Few would deny that September 11 unleashed a fearsome
sequence of reactions, and none so far worse than the
anguishing fury of this latest cycle of
Israeli-Palestinian violence. Surely the United States is
not primarily responsible for this horrifying spectacle
of bloodshed and suffering, but there is a gathering
sense here and overseas that the US government has badly
mishandled its crucial role for a long, long time, and
especially since the World Trade Center attack. As the
situation continues to deteriorate for both peoples,
there is a rising chorus of criticism that paradoxically
blames the United States both for doing too much on
behalf of Israel and not enough to bring about a durable
peace. Both lines of criticism seem justified.
There is little doubt that part of the recent
escalation can be traced back to President Bush's
overplaying of the antiterrorist card since Day One of
the response to Al Qaeda. By over generalizing the
terrorist threat posed by the September 11 attacks, Bush
both greatly widened the scope of needed response and at
the same time gave governments around the planet a green
light to increase the level of violence directed at their
longtime internal adversaries. Several important
governments were glad to merge their struggle to stem
movements of self-determination with the US war on global
terror, and none more than Ariel Sharon's Israeli
government. The Bush Administration has made several
costly mistakes. By not limiting the response to the Al
Qaeda threat, it has taken on a mission impossible that
has no end in sight; even worse, the Administration
embraces war in settings where it has no convincing
relationship either to US or human security. Related to
this broadening of the of the goal is the regressive
narrowing of the concept or terrorism to apply only to
violence by non state movements and organizations,
thereby exempting state violence against civilians from
the prohibition on terrorism. Indeed, this statist
approach has been extended so far that it calls non state
attacks on military targets such as soldiers or warships
terrorism, while not regarding state violence as
terrorism even when indiscriminately directed at civilian
society, as seemed the case at times during the Russian
response to Chechnya's drive for independence and with
respect to Israel's approach to occupation. Such a usage
is ethically unacceptable, politically manipulative and
decidedly unhistorical. It is important to recall that
the usage of the word terrorism to describe political
violence derives from the government excesses that spun
out of control during the French Revolution.
The issue here is not one of political semantics but
of analysis and prescription. By designating only
Palestinian violence as terrorism, Israel's greater
violence not only avoids stigma in the American context
but has been officially validated by being treated as
part of the struggle against terrorism. The point here is
not in any way to excuse Palestinian suicide bombers and
other violence against civilians, but to suggest that
when a struggle over territory and statehood is being
waged it can and should be resolved at the earliest
possible point by negotiation and diplomacy, and that the
violence on both sides tends toward the morally and
legally impermissible. This contrasts with the challenge
of Al Qaeda, a prime instance of visionary terrorism that
can neither be neutralized by negotiation nor deterred,
and must and can be disabled or destroyed in a manner
that is respectful of moral and legal limits. To conflate
these two distinct realities, as Bush has consistently
done, is at the root of the US diplomatic failure to
diminish to the extent possible the threats posed by the
September 11attacks and to offer the Palestinians and
Israelis constructive guidance.
There is another feature of the situation that infects
commentary from virtually every corner of the debate,
also reflecting the mindlessness of a statist bias.
Everyone from George Mitchell to George Bush seems
entrapped in the mantra that it is of course to be
expected that every sovereign state must react violently
and punitively against any significant act of terror
directed against it. Many of these commentaries also take
note of the degree to which such counter terror gives
rise to worse violence on the other side, revealing the
bankruptcy of the approach. It is truly a vicious circle.
At the same time, it never sees that the logic of such
vengeful violence works reciprocally. If the dominant
actor pursues such an approach, what of the weaker side?
When the Palestinians strike, their actions are never
understood here as reactive and understandable, always
provocative. Never has this been truer than with respect
to the horrifying Passover bombing at Netanya and the
equally horrifying Israeli incursion with tanks and
helicopters throughout occupied Palestine. If one is
essentially acceptable, and the other condemned, it
deforms our understanding.
The same dynamic applies to the endless discussion
about Yasir Arafat's role. It is condemned, to varying
degrees, while Sharon's bloody past is rarely mentioned.
He is usually treated with respect or, at most,
Palestinian intransigence is given as the reason Israelis
chose such an extreme leader in a democratic
election.
But the problems of US leadership cannot all be laid
at the feet of the Bush presidency. Just as crucial was
the insufficiency of the Oslo peace process, and the
blame game that has been played ever since the outbreak
of the second intifada in late September 2000. It has
been endlessly repeated, without any demonstration, that
the Israelis under Prime Minister Ehud Barak made a
generous offer at Camp David in the summer of2000. It is
then alleged that Arafat rejected an offer he should have
accepted, and resumed armed struggle. Further, it has
been alleged that Arafat's rejection was tantamount to
saying that the struggle was not about establishing a
Palestinian state but about ending the existence of the
Jewish state. It was this one-sided assessment, alongside
others, that led to Sharon's election, which meant that
Israel would hence forth be represented by a man with a
long record of uncompromising brutality toward
Palestinians and a disregard of their legitimate claims
for self-determination.
But was Arafat to blame for the failure of the Oslo
endgame? I think it was a most unfortunate failure of
leadership by Arafat not to explain to the Palestinians,
Israelis and the world why Barak's Camp David proposals
were unacceptable. It should be remembered that Arafat at
one point seemed on the verge of accepting them but
backed away only when confronted by the unhappiness of a
large proportion of his own people with the sort of
Palestinian state that would result.
It should also be remembered that the entire
negotiation concerned 22 percent of the original British
mandated territory of Palestine, about which the
Palestinians were expected to strike compromises while
leaving the 78percent that was Israel out of account.
Further, the future of the settlements in the occupied
territories was to be addressed by Israeli annexation of
half of them, including 80 percent or more of the
settlers, despite the settlements' illegality and the
degree to which their existence was a daily irritant to
Palestinian sensibilities.
And on refugees, there were evidently some signs of a
compromise in the making at the supplemental negotiations
at Taba in January 2001, but nothing was written down,
and it was far from clear that Barak could have delivered
on what was offered even if re-elected, so strong were
Israeli objections to any return by Palestinians to
pre-1967 Israel. Beyond this, it was expected that the
security of Israel was to be maintained in such a way as
to put any emergent Palestine in a permanent position of
subordination, thus denying the fundamental message of
any genuine peace: insuring equivalence between the two
states for the two peoples. The Palestinians would sooner
or later challenge such a solution even if their leaders
could be induced to sign on the dotted line. Many have
forgotten that a widespread fear among Palestinians at
the time of Camp David was that Arafat would sell his
soul and that of his people(especially the more than 50
percent who were refugees) for the sake of a state, any
state, as this was thought to be his sense of personal
mission.
Similarly, the widespread contention in American
circles that Arafat opted for terrorism is also seriously
misleading. Such thinking deforms perceptions of what is
reasonable. Arafat was up against more militant forces in
the Palestinian movement throughout this period, and was
generally viewed as the most moderate voice among the
Palestinian leadership, and had even shown an early
willingness to incur the wrath of Hamas and Islamic Jihad
militias by taking seriously his duty to prevent the
territories under the administration of the Palestinian
Authority from being used against Israel and Israelis.
Beyond this, it was Sharon's own provocative visit to the
Al Aqsa Mosque that started the second intifada. This
visit proceeded despite fervent warnings about the
explosion likely to happen, given privately to the Barak
leadership by the most respected Palestinians, including
the late Faisal Husseini, head of Orient House in
Jerusalem.
The Palestinian demonstrations that followed were
notably nonviolent at the outset. Israel countered from
the beginning by using excessive force, killing and
seriously wounding demonstrators in large numbers, and by
its practice of extra-judicial assassination of a range
of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. At this
point the escalatory spiral was initiated, with Israel
acting with ever more force at each stage, ratcheting up
the stakes to such a level that the Palestinians were
being attacked with among the most sophisticated weapons
of warfare, including very modern tanks and helicopter
gunships. It was in the course of this process that
Palestinian resistance gradually ran out of military
options, and suicide bombers appeared as the only means
still available by which to inflict sufficient harm on
Israel so that the struggle could go on. I was a member
of a human rights inquiry appointed by the UN Human
Rights Commission a year ago; our report fully supported
this line of interpretation in its study of the second
intifada, as did the overwhelming majority of the
Security Council membership. The basic conclusion of
these efforts at impartial understanding was that Israel
was mainly responsible for the escalations, and that its
tactics of response involved massive violations of
international humanitarian law.
There is the closely related matter of continued
Israeli effective occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, a
reality that has been fully re-enacted in the past few
weeks. It poses the question of what sort of right of
resistance is enjoyed by an occupied people when the
occupying power ignores international law and refuses to
withdraw. Such a right of resistance does not permit
unrestricted violence, but it certainly would seem to
legitimize some armed activities. It puts in a different
light the furor raised in January by the intercepted arms
shipment that was evidently intended for Palestinian use.
Should the opposition, in the context of the sort of
struggle that has gone on for decades, have no right to
gain the means of self-help while the occupying power can
arm itself to the teeth, all the while denying
international accountability and refusing UN
authority?
Here is the essential point: The Palestinian
mainstream learned via Oslo that its cease-fire would not
produce a fair solution in the form of sovereign and
equal states, and that its real interests had been
sacrificed on the altar of geopolitics. In effect,
negotiations would be bargains reflecting the realities
of power and control rather than either a pathway to some
mutually acceptable form of parallel states or what many
Palestinians had expected--namely, resolution by
reference to international law. It is important to
appreciate that on virtually every issue in contention,
the Palestinians have international law on their side,
including the Israeli duty to withdraw from land taken
during a war, the illegality of the settlements under
Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the right
of refugees to a safe return to the country that
wrongfully expelled them and the generalized support for
a Jerusalem that belongs to everyone and no one. In other
words, if fairness is understood by reference to
international law, the outcome would look nothing like
what was offered in the Barak/Clinton proposals. Such a
result would come nowhere close to satisfying the right
of self-determination as understood by almost all
Palestinians, and as achieved long ago by the Israelis.
The failure of the US government to uphold Palestinian
rights and the inability of the UN to implement its
authority was extremely disillusioning for moderate
Palestinians, and this tended to shift attention to the
ouster of Israel from southern Lebanon through the use of
force by Hezbollah.
What is worse, virtually all of the discussion about
reviving the peace process, including that of the
Palestinian leadership, is a matter of going back to a
reconstituted Oslo--that is, negotiations between the
parties after a cease-fire has been agreed upon. The
Mitchell Commission report moves in this direction, as
does the Tenet plan for putting a cease-fire into
effective operation. Even these rather flawed initiatives
have been stymied primarily by Sharon's hostility to the
whole idea of peace negotiations under international
auspices that would draw into question the settlements or
address the grievances of the refugees and the
sovereignty of Jerusalem in any way that would satisfy
even the most moderate Palestinian expectations. The
Palestinian Authority can also be faulted on the opposite
basis, for too readily subscribing to the ; honest
broker; claim of the United States in relation to the
peace process, despite abundant evidence over the years
of the degree to which the US government pursues an
unabashedly pro-Israeli foreign policy that is
underpinned by massive annual foreign assistance, mostly
for weapons purchases. At the very least, Palestinian
leaders should point to the problem, and possibly seek
more neutral auspices for these matters of life and death
for their people. If real peace is the goal, we cannot
get there from here!
It is this tragedy that continues to be played out in
the most reprehensible ways. To say this is not to
underestimate the difficulty of a good-faith peace
process that meets the needs of both peoples. It would be
a mistake to pretend that international law provides all
the answers, although it does give guidance as to what is
reasonable given the overall controversy. On refugees,
for instance, implementing international law would surely
doom any agreement, since almost all Israelis would
regard an unrestricted Palestinian right of return as
tantamount to the destruction of the Jewish state. My
conversations with many Palestinians suggest that there
would be a great willingness to find a formula that both
sides could accept, possibly relying on an Israeli
acknowledgment of the wrongfulness of the expulsions,
especially in 1948, provisions for compensation for lost
property and limited opportunities for return phased in
over time. If the Israeli leadership were prepared to
work for the establishment of a Palestinian state equal
to their own, I would anticipate an outpouring of
Palestinian efforts to reassure Israel of its own
sovereign identity.
Oddly, despite its record of partiality, only the
United States seems to have the current capacity to put
the two states on such a genuine peace track, but it is
not likely to do so until pushed hard from within and
without. An American civic movement of solidarity with
the well-being of both peoples is essential, as is a more
active independent European and Arab involvement. Both
latter possibilities are becoming more plausible with
each new atrocity. The belated yet still welcome Saudi
initiative, offering normalization of Arab diplomatic
relations in exchange for Israeli withdrawal to 1967
borders, is an important contribution. And Europe seems
ready to propose a more independent alternative to what
Washington has been offering if the White House cannot do
better. Bush's call for Israel to withdraw its military
forces from Palestinian areas; without delay; was
somewhat encouraging, although it was immediately
neutralized by Sharon's insistence on finishing the
operation; and by the fact that Bush sent Secretary of
State Colin Powell to exert pressure but allowed him to
adopt the most non-urgent itinerary, including several
intermediate stops in North Africa. Such a diplomatic
pattern has been widely criticized as incoherent; at
best, but at least it is a modest improvement over
backing Sharon's recent criminal assault on Palestinian
cities and towns.
If the United States does do better, then these new
forces of engagement could at last begin to draw the line
between a process that puts the weaker side in the
position of either accepting what is offered or getting
blamed for not doing so, and a process that gives both
sides what they need: security and sovereignty. Of
course, it will be difficult to move forward with the
present cast of leaders and mainstream assumptions. But
we should at least be clear that Sharon is a much bigger
obstacle to real peace than Arafat is or ever was.
©
TFF & the author 2002
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