Drama and expectation

In the northern West Bank town of Jenin on November 1, a boy waves the Palestinian flag during skimishes between Palestinians and Israeli troops. -

Israel is now at the start of a new game of playing for time. The road map will be revived or some other formula will be spun out; Palestinians, of course, will continue to suffer hardship and humiliation.

FOR days radio, television and the very air have been buzzing with the story of Yasser Arafat's slow death, his funeral in Cairo and burial in Ramallah, and numerous supposed experts offering evaluations of his career and speculation about the future of the Palestinian national movement, the so-called peace process, and the shape of West Asia.

The coincidence of the re-election of George W. Bush as United States President and Arafat's demise has heightened the speculation, which was already feverish owing to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's proposal for a withdrawal of Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip. People usually see what they want or expect to see, and the prognosticators are broadly divided into those who predict that the peace process will be revived, Israel will negotiate a satisfactory solution with Arafat's successors, and the region will get a well-deserved respite from violence; and those who state that while Arafat was strong enough to make major concessions to the Israelis, his successors will not dare to give an inch or their people will have their heads, and, consequently, expect the intifada (uprising) to erupt again with a vengeance.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is probably the most internationalised struggle of its kind. It is only natural that as soon as the results of the U.S. election were announced, their potential impact on West Asia came prominently to the fore. Likewise, when Arafat died, very strong pronouncements were made immediately in all the major capitals of the world.

Whether this is because the land in which this conflict has been raging on and off since the 1920s is holy to the three monotheistic (`Abrahamic') religions, or because the state of Israel arose after the Second World War and the Holocaust, or because of the powerful Jewish presence in the West is anybody's guess. Probably all three factors are responsible. Not only is the conflict internationalised, but it also arouses strong partisan feelings almost wherever you go, whomever you talk to. (Like all Leftist Israelis, I often wish it were possible to go somewhere, Beijing or Kamchatka, mention where I come from and encounter polite indifference rather than unwelcome sympathy or automatic distaste.)

One of the many disconcerting facts about Israel is that it is probably the only country in which the Left is more pro-American than the Right. This is not Israel's only anomaly, but it is the one that flummoxes foreign correspondents who try to draw its political map.

Until 1967 the U.S. maintained a more or less balanced attitude towards the West Asian conflict - it was the U.S. administration under President Dwight D. Eisenhower that forced Israel, Britain and France to withdraw from Egypt following the Suez war in 1956. When war broke out between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967 U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk declared, "We're neutral in word and deed" - probably the last time such a statement was made in Washington.

Six days later, the Israeli Army was on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal in Egypt, on the western bank of the Jordan River in the Kingdom of Jordan, and on the Syrian Golan Heights, and the United States gave up all attempts at neutrality. Since then it has supported Israel to the hilt, with money, arms and international backing, even in the face of worldwide disapproval.

Nevertheless, since those days the Israeli peace camp has been waiting for Washington to pressure the Israeli government to give up the occupied territories in exchange for peace with the Arab world. And for just as long, the Israeli nationalist Right - both religious and secular - has been warning against such a prospect. In the face of all the evidence - the U.S. vetoes in the United Nations Security Council to shield Israel from unfavourable resolutions, America's complacency about Israel's gross violations of international law and its turning of a blind eye to Israel's huge, undeclared stockpile of nuclear weapons - the Israelis continue to expect pressure from Washington.

Since the 1980s, every time an American President was re-elected to a second term, Israelis of all political stripes held their breath - now that he did not have to court the Jewish vote or the support of the Zionist lobby he would be free, so they hoped/feared, to compel Israel to abide by the numerous Security Council resolutions and international initiatives. Today, when the Republicans have not only swept back into the White House but have won unfettered control of Congress, the speculation has surfaced again. Will George Bush press Israel to return to the so-called road map, give up some of the settlements and make concessions to the Palestinians? And will he back it with coercive measures?

These discussions have been going on for so long that they resemble arguments about how many angels can dance on a pinhead. Yet, the truth is that the U.S. is unlikely to push Israel one inch further than it wants to go. There is no reason to expect any major change in this policy in the foreseeable future, regardless of the progress of the current war in Iraq and other neo-conservative initiatives for West Asia.

But in addition to the U.S. elections there has been another dramatic development - the departure from the scene of Yasser Arafat, Palestinians' number one leader, the Rais, who symbolised the struggle of the Palestinian people to recover some portion of their homeland and independence. History and future generations will judge the man and his career, but one thing is beyond doubt - Arafat put the Palestinian people and their plight on the international agenda.

FOR 20 years after the naqba (catastrophe) of 1948, Palestinians were mentioned in international bodies only as refugees. At the U.N. the Arab League's Ahmad Shukeiry would describe the refugee camps in pathetic terms and demand a solution to their plight. Only in the late 1960s Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), in the person of their leader Yasser Arafat, changed the terminology and the concept. Palestinians, they made it clear, were a dispossessed people who had been cheated of their share in partitioned Palestine and the injustice must be rectified. To the Israelis this was anathema. Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, insisted more than once that there was no such thing as a Palestinian nation.

It was this conceptual transformation of the Palestinians, from hapless refugees into a nation with national demands, much more than the PLO's responsibility for bloodshed, which infuriated the Israelis and their allies and supporters. This was evident especially in the past few days, when Israeli spokesmen sputtered with rage and contempt at the sight of French President Jacques Chirac visiting Arafat in the hospital outside Paris, and the anger reached a climax when a French presidential aircraft took the coffin bearing Arafat's body to Cairo, where the funeral was attended not only by Arab leaders but by senior representatives of the world's leading governments.

Here lies the paradox of Israel's attitude towards Arafat - on the one hand he was declared irrelevant and on the other he was described as an obstacle to peace. He was dismissed as being out of touch with reality and excoriated for encouraging terror attacks on Israel - as though the activists needed his encouragement or approval - even while he himself was confined by the besieging Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to two shabby rooms in the half-demolished Muqataa in Ramallah. Now the Israeli media are blaring the dawn of a new era in the conflict, while the `irrelevant' Arafat is being buried and the more militant groups are preparing for the struggle to achieve what the Rais failed to achieve - a viable solution for the Palestinian people.

Arafat did not want to take part in the Camp David meeting called by President Bill Clinton in 2000, where he was coerced to support the pretence that Israel, under Ehud Barak's premiership, was offering great concessions - 92 per cent of the territories, it was said. Perhaps he hoped that he could gain time by playing along and that the dialogue under American auspices would eventually lead to a more acceptable outcome.

It was not to be. A few weeks after the meeting in the U.S., Barak allowed his old rival Ariel Sharon to visit the Haram al Sharif (`Temple Mount') with 2,000 armed soldiers, and the second intifada broke out. Now Israel's spokesmen and supporters could repeat Abba Eban's famous quip that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

The reality was, of course, quite different. What was on offer was not anything that could be described as the launch of a viable state, however small, but a series of enclosures in the West Bank and Gaza, surrounded by Israeli settlements and army posts, without outside borders and without control of the water resources or even the airspace - on 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of Palestine that was left.

One quality that Jews and Arabs share - testifying perhaps to their ancient brotherhood - is that both believe in gaining time. An Arab proverb says that he who avenges a killing after 40 years has acted in haste; the Jews have a parable about a rabbi who undertook to teach the Gentile's dog to speak, because `either the dog will die or the Gentile will die, and meantime we're alive.' Yitzhak Shamir, Israel's Prime Minister from 1983 to 1984 and from 1986 to 1992, said he was always willing to take part in peace processes and drag them out to the maximum, because, in the meantime, Israel was entrenching itself all the better.

Israel is now at the start of a new game of playing for time. The road map or some other formula will be revived and spun out in Europe, the U.S., in the international space station.... Meanwhile, Israel will build more settlements, develop even more long-range missiles, produce tactical nuclear weapons - so practical in case it needs to attack Syria or Iran - and bring in more immigrants from wherever. The Palestinians, of course, will continue to suffer all kinds of hardship and humiliation, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) will continue to keep them from starving, film-makers will make more documentaries about their wretched lives amid the ruins left by Israeli tanks and bulldozers, and so it will go on.

The two militant Islamic organisations, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, have already announced that they will seek to take part in the Palestinian Authority, and many people hope that the next elections to be held among Palestinians will be more convincing than the last one. Unfortunately, group work has not been a Palestinian strong suit - witness the suicide bombers and other individual `shaheeds' (martyrs), but never an action by a unit of 30 or so armed men, which might be able to overrun a settlement or an army post. It remains to be seen if anything changes. There is no reason to think that the George Bush administration in its second term in Washington, Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah and the Sharon/Netanyahu/Barak administration in Israel will change the underlying power play.

It remains to mention Sharon's proposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Israel's cockeyed political map produced another anomaly - the Left parties congratulating the unspeakable old General and the Right, which had always worshipped him, accusing him of treason. The truth is that (a) the withdrawal may never take place; (b) if it does, it will leave the Gaza Strip even worse off; (c) it will strengthen Israel's claim to the West Bank, as Sharon has made clear. Given that President Bush has already described Sharon as a man of peace, this egregious move will be used to shield him once again from any consequences, at the U.N. or any other international body.

Expect more of the same, more of the same.

Yael Lotan is a writer and peace activist based in Tel Aviv.