Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1999 13:58:40 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Edward W. Said: An Incitement to Revolt (fwd)


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Subject: Edward W. Said: An Incitement to Revolt 


An Incitement to Revolt
By Edward Said
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1998/410/op1.htm

	Bill Clinton's two-day visit to Gaza, Bethlehem and Israel was
intended to save the peace process and to make him look more noble to his
impeachers.  It's too early to tell about the second mission, though I must
say that his speech to the Palestinians for the first time expressed a
humane sympathy for what they have endured; the first was a dismal failure,
despite the media-hype (more misleading than usual) and the super-ignorant
gushing by media commentators. As soon as Clinton arrived, Benjamin
Netanyahu announced that there would be no further Israeli army troop
redeployment as stipulated by the Wye River Plantation Accords of last
October. Since in any event Israel was to redeploy from a minuscule amount
of land (five per cent from Israeli-controlled Area C to jointly-controlled
area B, which is under Israeli security anyway), the snub was just that,
designed to humiliate both the Palestinians and Clinton.

	  The "unrest" reported in the Occupied Territories for the past
several weeks was provoked both by Israeli cynicism in releasing only about
100 car thieves and common criminals (the agreement having been that 750
political prisoners would be freed), and by Palestinian anger at Arafat's
limitless appetite for concessions and a careless, not to say heedless,
negotiating style. (Several members of his team in the past weeks have
threatened to resign for that reason). Far from peace being assured,
therefore, the combination of Netanyahu's arrogance, Clinton's
vulnerability, and Arafat's by now non-existent support wasn't alleviated by
the picturesque, hokey ceremonies patched together by the Americans and
Palestinians, bagpipes, flower maidens, Mrs Arafat and all. 

	  What puzzles me is how many times Arafat can bring himself and some
of his people to go through the motions of repealing the notorious Charter
just to satisfy Israeli demands. There was of course no real PNC meeting,
since in effect that body lost its legitimacy and independence when Arafat
returned to Gaza in l994. He brought a bunch of people together in l996 to
change the Charter, but this time only made a perfunctory effort to round up
officials, businessmen, and some hangers-on for the great occasion. 

	  I was invited (by mistake) to attend when a fax from the Arafat-run
Palestinian Commercial Services Company came to my office asking me to
present myself at Amman Airport at a given time, then to link up with a
special charter flight to Gaza, to attend the meeting, then to come back by
charter the same evening. I had resigned my membership in 1991. So much for
the idea of a legitimate quorum and roll call. At the same time, I was also
invited to a meeting of the opposition led by George Habash and Nayef
Hawatmeh in Damascus; through the ever-efficient rumour mills (one of the
few things that still work in Palestinian politics), it was widely reported
that I was in attendance. 

	  The low comedy of the Gaza proceedings -- which elicited a
rapturously ill-informed piece by the Times's new Israel correspondent
Deborah Sontag about how much nicer and more democratic life is for
Palestinians than for other Arabs -- was belied by what was going on
outside. In the first place, the expropriation of Arab land through Israeli
colonisation continues at a furious pace as old settlements grow and new
ones expand rapidly. About 40 per cent of Gaza is held by settlers and the
Strip itself is surrounded on three sides by an Israeli electronic fence
(side four is the Israeli-patrolled sea). Clinton seems not to have noticed
how his security was assured. 

	  According to the authoritative Washington-based Report on Israeli
Settlement, "diplomacy fails to address Israel's transformation of the
Occupied Territories"; thus Israel's settlement policy all through the peace
process "is well on its way toward achieving an objective pursued by a
succession of Israeli leaders during the last three decades:  to obstruct
the creation of an independent, truly sovereign Palestinian political entity
west of the Jordan River. Israel's objective, on the face of it, is the
antithesis of popular notions about the goal of the negotiations begun at
Oslo in l993." (September/October 1988). 

	  Each time one of the much touted summits occurs, the Palestinians
fail at curtailing Israeli settlement drives; Wye was no exception, as Lamis
Andoni shows in Middle East International (11 December l998), since there
the negotiators failed to grasp that "Israel only agreed not to carry out
the expansion of settlements until all current construction had been
completed, which means that 'contiguous areas' [accepted by the
Palestinians] could end up including hundreds and hundreds of acres." A
chilling account of how one such settlement, Efrat, near Bethlehem, is
expanding and choking off every Arab village in its vicinity is found in
Ha'aretz (27 November); I filmed there last February, but villages like Wad
Rahal and Khadr have since lost most of their land. 

	  Second, the economics of peace have driven Palestinians into
poverty, as Sara Roy shows in an impressive new study just published by the
Emirates Center for Strategic Studies, "The Palestinian Economy and the Oslo
Process: Decline and Fragmentation". At all levels of society, productivity
is down, markets have shrunk, there is greater dependency on Israel.
Unemployment is now at an all-time high yet Arafat's Authority, with its 14
or so security services, its bloated bureaucracy, its thousands of informers
and enforcers is the largest, and the least productive, employer. Each
ministry now employs hundreds of managers and directors who do absolutely
nothing except draw down handsome salaries.  The World Bank figure for
Arafat's labour force is 120,000 people, which, multiplied by the number of
dependents, accounts for almost half the Palestinian residents of the West
Bank and Gaza directly in thrall to Arafat. But discontent rages anyway. 
Thousands of refugees demonstrated in Syria and Lebanon. Four Palestinians
were wounded by Israeli forces when the latter made a group of Palestinian
labourers crawl on the ground.  And the Palestinian rock-throwing and
Israeli shooting with "rubber bullets"  continue. Still, Netanyahu rants on
about incitement when a Palestinian holds up a sign demanding free access to
holy sites in Jerusalem, which is off limits to West Bank and Gaza
Palestinians (as described by Ha'aretz, 14 December). 

	  The main burden of the Wye Accord, therefore, was neither to give
Palestinians more freedom, nor to allow the US and Israel to "help"
Palestinian independence, but quite the contrary: with the Authority's help,
to increase the restrictions and conditions under which Palestinians live so
that they remain docile and taken care of in the best colonial manner. A
perfect symbolic example of this is the promulgation on 19 November of a
presidential decree by Arafat entitled "to strengthen national unity and
forbid incitement".  Obviously the result of Netanyahu's remorseless
obsession with Israeli security (and Arafat's reciprocal neglect of
Palestinian security), the decree states that its legal references and
precedents derive, among others, from "the Palestinian penal code number 74
for 1936 and its amendments". 

	  For the uninitiated, this code is nothing less than the Emergency
Defence Regulations issued by the British Mandatory Authority as a way of
punishing Palestinian resistance; it was then adopted by the Israelis after
1948 for the same purpose. And now Mr Arafat uses it to threaten his own
people. For what? To interdict incitement to violence, insults, racism. The
decree also forbids "illegal organisations" as well as "undermining the
quality of life, agitating the masses to bring about change by illegal
methods of force, incitement to civil strife, incitement to violate
agreements made between the PLO and Arab and foreign countries".
Implementing this remarkable new law will be a committee made up equally of
Palestinians, Israelis and (the number varies according to reports) one or
more Americans who might, or might not be members of the CIA. Their mandate
is nothing less than every utterance -- written, spoken, printed or
broadcast -- made by Palestinians and, as a West Bank friend explained it to
me, his voice alternately sad and cheerful, school text books, newspapers,
and magazines. 

	  This bizarre document has yet to be noted by the US, Arab, or
European media, who are falling all over each other in prophesying the
advent of Palestinian statehood. Never mind of course the total absence of
territorial contiguity for areas of Palestinian self-rule. Never mind that
Arafat has refused to ratify either the constitution or the basic law
proposed by his Legislative Council. Never mind, that thanks to US and
Israeli pressure, Palestinian life is governed by state security courts
which forbid the presence of witnesses, defence lawyers, or audience.  Never
mind that the large sums of money pledged by European and American donors
are still controlled by Arafat, who answers and is accountable to no one,
despite widespread evidence of massive corruption. But that Israel and the
US should require Palestinians to submit fawningly to a law against
incitement -- with a Stalinist-type committee to decide unilaterally what is
or is not incitement: this is scarcely a forward step in the search for
peace or Palestinian self-determination. 

______________________________________________________________________________

			Source: Al-Ahram Weekly
			URL: http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/
			Email: weeklyweb-AT-ahram.org.eg
			Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time
			Issue: No. 410; 31 December 1998- 6 January 1999




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