The Peace Process: From Breakthrough to Breakdown

I

The PLO

The challenge and the response

1

Strategically located at the crossroads of three continents, Palestine was throughout the ages coveted by external powers. During the twentieh century, British colonialism was only a transition beween Ottoman (Turkish) domination and Zionist penetration.

Yet Zionism has its specificity. Unlike previous occupations, it has imposed on Palestine a double human migration: the massive expulsion of the Palestinians to the periphery of their homeland was coupled with the massive arrival of settlers to replace them.

It is an irony of history that all settler colonies were demographically composed of persecuted individuals and groups who migrated in search of more hospitable shores. They were Catholics from predominantly Protestant societies or Protestants fleeing an intolerant Catholic environment. They were republicans from the European monarchies or royalists from newly born republics. To take Algeria as an example, the pieds-noirs were mainly the descendants of migrants from regions of Alsace and Lorraine annexed by Prussia (i.e. nationally oppressed), or descendants of the defeated revolutionary communards from Paris (i.e. economically exploited or ideologically persecuted).

In each case, a reversal of roles was operated, the needs of the newcomers gradually trespassing on the rights of the indigenous population until totally negating their existence.

Israel is no exception. Zionism has transformed the oppressed of one continent to the oppressors of another continent. The State of Israel to which it gave birth had, from its very first day, an elastic conception of its frontiers resulting from an insatiable territorial appetite. Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, explaining the absence of a constitution and any delimitation of frontiers, stated that the borders of Israel will go as far as ‘the Israel defence army’ will reach.

Today, the Palestinians are the heirs of the Jewish sufferings, the sufferings of Treblinka, Dachau and Auschwitz. The Jews were the direct victims of Nazism. The world recently discovered that the Palestinians were the Nazis’ indirect victims. Zionism took advantage of the Nazi atrocities and from a minority tendency within the Jewish communities, it emerged as a hegemonic organisation systematically exerting moral and intellectual terrorism on reluctant Jews.

But each hegemonic movement secretes its own dissidents. I should say fortunately, because Jewish, and later on Israeli, dissidents helped the Palestinian people to reject all the theories abusively assimilating Zionism with Judaism. The role of those dissidents, in spite of their numerical weakness, is potentially great. By denouncing the long-term strategy of the State of Israel as well as its daily practices, they prove that there is no Jewish collective guilt vis-à-vis the ordeal of the Palestinians and thus they save the future possibilities of pacific cohabitation.

Pacific and harmonious cohabitation in Palestine has been the objective of the Palestinian revolution since its inception. Rebellious against the intolerable prevailing situation in which the Palestinians had become ‘the Jews of the Zionists’, the Palestinian freedom fighters pledged that the Jewish community would not, when the balance of power inevitably changed, be transformed into ‘the Palestinians of the Palestinians’.

This is how the project of a democratic, secular, pluri-confessional and multi-ethical state in Palestine should have been perceived. By recognising the accomplished demographic fact, the PLO demonstrated that it was not seeking any historical revenge but, on the contrary, was sincerely yearning to break the dialectics of oppression.

Arnold Toynbee has explained human history in its unity and in its diversity through the individual and collective responses to the challenge of the environment, the natural and the human environment.

A homeland occupied, a people diasporised, a capital, Jerusalem, mutilated, a civilisation at the same time denied and plundered, an Arab nation balkanised, into multiple states which imperialism constantly tries, often successfully, to antagonise; these are the challenges that the PLO has to cope with.

From 1948 until 1965, the Palestinian people resorted to what can be called the arms of criticism. But their complaints, expressed through petitions or street demonstrations, gave birth only to compassion and charity. It is only when the Palestinians opted for armed struggle, criticism by arms, that their national identity and aspirations were recognised and the claim for their necessary satisfaction endorsed by the international community.

The battle of Karameh in March 1968 was a turning point. Only months after the humiliating defeat of 1967 and the Arab armies’ discredit because of their poor performance, the Palestinian resistance movement proved its military credibility by heroically facing a massive Israeli attack intended to wipe it out of existence.

The next day, Le Monde’s main article was on the political resurrection of the Palestinians. In fact, that very day the people joined its vanguard. In February 1969, even the classical political elite admitted that radical changes had occurred in the Palestinian scene, and Yasser Arafat, leader of the major guerrilla movement, Fateh, was elected chairman of the PLO. The Palestinians had recuperated the historical initiative; no more a mere object of history whose destinies were decided upon in foreign capitals, they had become the subject of their own history.

Before seeking international recognition, the PLO had already obtained internal legitimacy. It unified the political expression of a geographically/demographically dispersed people and began channelling their struggles towards the common goal: the right of return and independent statehood. If the intoxicating Israeli propaganda has emphasised the military aspect of the Palestinian struggle, the PLO’s non-military fields of interest are not of lesser importance in the Palestinian revival, survival and – some day, hopefully soon – victory.

Today, the PLO is a pre-governmental organisation which is already assuming the responsibilities of a state. Each Executive Committee member is in charge of a specific department: the political department, economic department, information department, health department, cultural department, department for the occupied territories, etc.

As a political system, the PLO carries the following characteristics: it is a multi-party system, with freedom of expression for all its components, in which eventually internal opposition is not only tolerated but legal. It is to be noted that decisions are rarely adopted by a unanimous vote. The supreme decision-making organ in the PLO is the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the parliament-in-exile.

Its last session, the 15th, was held 11–20 April 1981 in Damascus.

Its current composition is as follows:

Guerilla movements: 94 members

Fateh: 33

Saika: 12

Popular Front: 12

Democratic Front: 12

Arab Liberation Front: 9

Popular Front-General Command: 8

Front of Palestinian Struggle: 4

Palestinian Liberation Front: 4

Mass movements and trade unions: 60 members

General Union of Palestine Workers: 21

General Union of Palestine Women: 8

General Union of Palestine Teachers: 7

General Union of Palestine Students: 7

General Union of Palestine Writers and Journalists: 3

General Union of Palestine Lawyers: 3

General Union of Palestine Engineers: 3

General Union of Palestine Medical Professions: 5

General Union of Palestine Youth: 2

General Union of Palestine Artists: 1

Representatives of the Palestinian communities in the diaspora: 62 members

Jordan: 17

Lebanon: 9

Syria: 7

Kuwait: 9

Saudi Arabia: 8

The United Arab Emirates: 2

Qatar: 2

Iraq: 1

The American continent: 7

Personalities expelled by Israeli occupation authorities: 20 members

Scientist and intellectuals of international reputation: 13 members

Independents: 66 members

Total: 315 members, including 32 women

The representatives of the guerilla movements, of the trade unions and of the Palestinian communities in the diaspora (i.e. 207 members) are directly elected by their respective constituencies. The others (108 members) are co-opted by the elected members of the PNC.

There are 122 additional members from the occupied territories. The Israeli military governor having threatened each of them with expulsion if they ever took part in any session of the PNC, the Palestinian leadership advised them not to attend. However, they regularly send their evaluation of the prevailing situation to the leadership and petitions are addressed to the United Nations and other intergovernmental organisations, reaffirming that the PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. This unfaltering national unity has foiled all the attempts aimed at promoting an ‘alternative leadership’ for the Palestinian people.

If, and perhaps I should say because, Zionism as a colonial movement had its specificity, the Palestinian national liberation struggle is unique. In the game of nations, until recently monopolised by states and only states, the PLO (‘a non-territorial state’ – Hisham Sharabi) emerged as a dynamic actor. Contrary to the claim of the Zionists, the PLO was not propelled on the international arena by the energy crisis but because it had proved, on the terrain, that it was an irreversible political and military factor.

It is today a full, active and effective member in the League of Arab States, in the Conference of Islamic States and in the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries. All the socialist countries have officially recognised the PLO, and successive presidents of the European Council of Ministers, in preparation for an eventual European initiative, met with the chairman of the PLO as a major party concerned in an endeavour for the solution of the Middle Eastern crisis. Last but not least, the PLO enjoys an observer status in the United Nations Organisation and in its specialised agencies, having all the privileges of a full member except the right of voting and of directly submitting project-resolutions or amendments.

In the last four sessions of the Palestinian National Council (1974, 1977, 1979, 1981) resolutions were adopted calling for the implementation of international legality. Regarding the international body as capable of reconciling ethics with politics, the PLO considers that the United Nations is the most adequate forum for the solution of the conflict.

Today, it seems to me that an acceptable mechanism could be the following three-phased formula:

1. The speedy withdrawal of Israel from all the territory occupied in 1967;

2. In the Palestinian territories evacuated, and in coordination with the PLO, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, the United Nations assumes responsibility for an interim period between Israeli occupation and Palestinian sovereignty;

3. An international conference is convened under the auspices of the United Nations to which are invited all the parties concerned, including the State of Palestine, to agree upon all pending issues.

But the desirable is still impossible, and the possible (Camp David) totally unacceptable.

One might wonder why the PLO, which has already achieved national consensus, then international consensus, has not yet succeeded in materialising its political objectives on the geographical map.

Alas, the impotence of the United Nations on the one hand, and first the complicity, then the complacency, and now the abdication of Western Europe on the other hand are part of the answer. So is the insufficient mobilisation of Arab potentials. But the unlimited and so far unconditional support, military and financial (from flour to Phantoms), abundantly delivered to Israel by the United States remains the determining factor. Israel is in crisis. The Promised Land has not kept its promises. But the economic and social vulnerability of Israel is for the moment largely compensated for by an overwhelming military superiority.

Yet just a few weeks ago, the Palestinian guerrilla forces, in a direct Palestinian-Israeli war (10–24 July 1981) successfully confronted this huge war machine equipped to defeat all the Arab armies combined. One might now expect the American administration to draw some evident conclusions, and this dialogue by arms to inaugurate another phase in the confrontation, that of the arms of dialogue.

All Middle East specialists and observers have underlined the realistic approach of the PLO. The Israeli leadership knows by now that it is totally erroneous to confuse realism and resignation. My personal hope is that the international community, friends and foes alike, will act in a manner to contradict Hegel’s pessimistic vision – pessimistic yet so often justified: from history we learn that we have not learned from history.

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1. This paper was presented in a United Nations symposium held in Colombo, Sri Lanka in August 1981 and was first published in Monday Morning, a Lebanese weekly. I was then staff member in President Arafat’s office in Beirut, in charge of Europe and UN institutions.

II

One people too many?

1

Vivant Univers: What does it mean to be Palestinian?

Afif Safieh: You know, there is a popular saying, ‘happy peoples have no history.’ The Palestinian people – should they congratulate themselves, or should they be regretful? – are burdened by a history several thousand years old.

To be Palestinian today means to have been deprived of the elementary right to live in one’s country. It means having been displaced by force, time after time, from one place to another, and under conditions of complete destitution. It means having lost one’s property, the plot of land which one cultivated, and the home one lived in. It means helplessly witnessing the gradual Judaisation of one’s homeland, and the removal of the Arab influence and presence from it.

It means having no identity papers like all the other citizens of the world have. It means having administrative problems throughout one’s life, from birth to death, a death which is often caused by arms and bombs which have been prohibited by international law but which have been discharged indiscriminately, with a preference for civilian targets, in order to terrorise the population. It means unimaginable complications when one sets out to search for a job, and interminable waits in airports and at borders.

To be a Palestinian means belonging to a family which has been broken up and scattered to all corners of the world. My family, for example, which consists of five people, lives in three different continents. My parents and one sister are in Jerusalem, my brother in Brazil and I am in Belgium. At the time of my father’s death two years ago, I could not return to his side because of the military occupation.

Those who have been able to remain in the country feel unwanted there. They are subjected to daily harassment; they are pushed into an emigration which has nothing voluntary about it. Juridicial harassment (expropriation), economic harassment (unbearable taxes, pillage of hydrological resources), police repression . . . The overwhelming majority of Palestinian adults have already been imprisoned at least once by the occupation authorities. In the prisons, the practice of torture is frequent. When there are protest demonstrations, it often happens that the forces of ‘order’ which ‘officially’ receive orders to fire into the air, prefer to aim at the air which is to be found in the lungs of the demonstrators . . .

Vivant Univers: How many Palestinians are there today? Where do they live?

Afif Safieh: There are about five million Palestinians. Seven hundred thousand are in Israel, within its pre-1967 boundaries. One million live in the West Bank and 700,000 in the Gaza Strip; these two territories having been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. One and a half million live in Jordan, 400,000 in Lebanon, 300,000 in Kuwait and 250,000 in Syria. Half a million Palestinians are spread throughout the two Americas. In every country of the world you will find Palestinian communities of different sizes.2

But whether they live in occupied lands, are stuck in refugee camps or are experiencing exile in a far-off country, all Palestinians share common sufferings and aspirations: to be able to exercise their right of return, their right to self-determination and to national sovereignty.

At the crossroads of three continents (Asia, Africa and Europe), Palestine has been throughout time the object of external desires. My father’s generation, for example, witnessed three distinct and successive phases of national oppression: Turkish domination until 1917, followed by the British Mandate (1917-1948) which then favoured Zionist penetration (1948). But the last distinguished itself from the preceding aggressions. Zionism, an imported ideology, also recruited its followers abroad. With the aim of transforming Palestine into ‘a country just as Jewish as England was English’, it could not succeed in its enterprise except through the subordination or expulsion of the indigenous population. The Zionist movement, and then the State of Israel, imposed a double human migration on Palestine: on the one hand, the massive expulsion of the Palestinians to the periphery of their national soil and, on the other, the arrival – just as massive – of settlers to replace them. In this way then, Israel constituted the last colonial project – accomplished paradoxically in the age of decolonisation.

Vivant Univers: But a certain ‘History’ insists on presenting Palestine as ‘a land without a people’ which was to have been offered to a ‘people without a land’. What truth is there in this? Was Palestine really nothing but an uncultivated and arid desert?

Afif Safieh: The Zionist movement is a master in the art of fabricating myths and it appears that the Palestinian people were condemned, not only to have their rights despoiled, but to be systematically denigrated as well. It was in order to legitimise its visions regarding this monstrosity; that is, the ‘demographic vacuum’ in the country, which would therefore be colonisable without injustice and without remorse. This is a conceptual genocide.

As a matter of fact, many Zionist colonisers left Palestine once they discovered a people like any other, made up of city-dwellers, countryfolk and nomads, all of whom aspired to independence. But that was nothing but the reaction of a tiny minority.

The majority, with full prior knowledge, were to pursue their colonial project and continue to attract new waves of immigrants. And this with the support of Great Britain. Lord Balfour, Minister for Foreign Affairs, was to write, ‘in Palestine we do not envisage undertaking the consultation of the will of the present inhabitants,’ explaining that Zionism was, for Great Britain, of greater importance than ‘the desires and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now live in this ancient land’.1

As acknowledged by the British themselves then, 700,000 Palestinians lived in Palestine in 1917. On such grounds as these and according to this logic, how many states which are today members of the United Nations, could be considered ‘lands without people’, available for enterprises of domination and monopoly?

An Israeli intellectual, Saul Friedlander, unable to deny the demographic evidence, was to speak of the confrontation between the ‘subjective right’ of the Jews to Palestine and the ‘objective right’ of the Palestinians in Palestine.2 Interesting formulation! Yet, while I might understand what an ‘objective right’ is, I cannot keep from finding the notion of a ‘subjective right’ strange and even dangerous. It paves the way for so many crimes.

As to the second formula, ‘the people without a land,’ would require a lengthy elaboration the limits of this interview render difficult. Nevertheless, permit me to dissipate and refute some of the ‘admitted truths’ which are the most contestable. Above all, the majority of today’s Jews cannot be among the descendants of the ancient Hebrews of Palestine. Many of them converted to other religions. On the other hand, many people and tribes converted to Judaism. The best known example is that of the Khazars, a tribe of half a million people who massively adopted Judaism in the seventh century.3 Is the argument of ‘the historic right’ valid then? Is the colonisation of Palestine really ‘the return after two thousand years of exile’?

Now, many scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson to cite only one of them, inform us that the present Palestinians have more ‘Hebrew blood’ in their veins than most of today’s Jews.

As to the notion of ‘divine right’, since there has been the ‘divine promise’ made to the ‘chosen people’, I – like many Jews moreover – cannot admit this image of a God who would commit the sin of ‘favouritism’, of a God who would be a ‘discriminator’. I prefer to refer to what Golda Meir says to us in her memoirs: ‘The Jews were the first to have chosen God.’ She has not always shown such subtlety and sophistication, but I must admit that this interpretation is by far preferable to that of the ‘chosen people’, keeping in mind that it was in fact the dignitaries of Pharaonic Egypt who were the first to preach monotheism.

Finally, anti-Semitism is above all a Christian and essentially a European phenomenon. The solution to it must be sought in the same countries where it rages, through the struggle for equal rights and responsibilities, through the fight for the right to be different and for freedom of religion, and through inter-community integration. But anti-Semitism and Zionism are two currents which go together and feed each other reciprocally. Thus Israel, through its practices and alliances – which often go so far as to include active support for bloody dictatorships – has come to reinforce if not to arouse anti-Semitism in regions where it was almost nonexistent, for example in the countries of Latin America or the Arab World. Now, both anti-Semites and Zionists try to lead us to believe that anti-Semitism is an uneradicable and eternal feeling. I dare to believe, I dare to hope that it is not.

But let us go back to the alibi of the barren, uncultivated Palestine. It is necessary to read the accounts of the Crusades. In them we learn that the Crusaders admitted having learned enormously from the techniques of agriculture and irrigation used in Palestine in that epoch. It would be necessary to look at the figures for external commerce before the twentieth century, where we would see that Palestine was not only self-sufficient in food, but exported fruit and vegetables to Europe. That Israel would have increased the agricultural capacity of the country is not surprising considering the enormous injection of foreign capital and the superior qualifications of the Zionist settlers who came from Europe. But here a great moral question is posed: in the name of what, and since when, does the planting of a tree justify the uprooting of a human being? Since when does the decision to plant a forest justify the uprooting of an entire people?

Vivant Univers: What do you think of the attitude of international public opinion towards the Palestinian problem?

Afif Safieh: I would limit myself to Western opinion. Lately it has evolved considerably. It finally recognises that the Palestinians have suffered an historic wrong and wishes to see them recoup certain rights previously trampled on. But its vigilance and the pressure which it sometimes decides to exercise, are well below that which could be expected of it.

The Palestinians cannot but remember with sadness and bitterness that the enterprise which led to their dispossession and their dispersion was followed by Western public opinion with an admiring, never reproving, regard towards lsrael. Insensitive to the trials of the Palestinians, it applauded the exploits – above all the ones of war – of Israel.

This can be explained by the painful and sometimes guilty memories of the atrocities committed during the Second World War. But if the Jews were the direct victims of Nazism, then the Palestinians are its indirect victims. Without Hitler, Zionism would have remained a minority current within the Jewish communities. Without Hitler and his attempts at exterminating the Jews, the Zionist movement would not have benefited from this capital of sympathy which it has used and abused. From this indulgence, this complacency touches on complicity.

It is important to point out that the first in the West to dare to rebel against Israel’s false propaganda were Jews: Maxime Rodinson, Ania Francos, Alfred Lilienthal . . . They believed themselves safe from intellectual terrorism and the accusation of anti-Semitism, but they were mistaken: they were harshly attacked, reviled and threatened. They were accused of ‘self-hatred’ and betrayal.

Over the decades, solving the ‘Jewish problem’ was a high priority objective for Western opinion, even if it meant paying for it with a ‘Palestinian problem’. One would have wished that the Palestinians did not exist, that they would have disappeared before the arrival of the settlers. In short, they had committed the wrong of existing.

The Zionist colonisation of Palestine enjoyed great popularity in the West and it was the resistance of the people who were the victims of this dispossession which was to be condemned. The Palestinian was to be described as a brute, a fanatic and a terrorist. At best, a potential terrorist.

Paradoxically, the Zionists themselves judged this resistance to be normal. Jabotinsky, the master thinker of the Israeli right, was to write, ‘has any people ever been seen to give up its territory of its own free will? In the same way, the Arabs of Palestine will not renounce their sovereignty without violence.’4

Ben Gurion said to Nahum Goldmann: ‘If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal, we have taken their country. It is true that God promised it to us, but how could that possibly interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?’

In the West, on the other hand, this clarity of perception was forbidden. Phillipe de Saint Robert tells us that a reader reproached him for his ‘impartiality which is intolerable when Israel is in question’.5 Jean-Paul Sartre was to write, ‘Without a doubt they (the Arabs) are right, but can they keep these Israelis from being, for us, also Jews?’6 This is why impartiality becomes intolerable and objectivity unwelcome.

Vivant Univers: Why have many Palestinians left their country and their lands?

Afif Safieh: You have probably asked me this question because there are those who claim that the Palestinians left their country of their own accord. This is absolutely contrary to historic reality. But it seems to me that they who have propagated this version as well as they who have let themselves be