Peace In The Middle East: A Lost Opportunity

Editor's note: Eqbal Ahmad is a world renowned scholar and an eloquent and powerful political critic and activist. He is is currently a Professor of International Relations and Middle East Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science and Islamic Studies from Princeton University. He has written extensively on the Third World, comparative revolutions, and the foreign policies of the great powers. He was an outspoken opponent of the U.S. war against Indochina and the Gulf War. He is a fellow at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Program tor Peace and International Security. He also founded the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Professor Ahmad spoke on Nov. 10, 1994 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The event was sponsored by the Palestine Solidarity Committee and co-sponsored by Rackham Student Government, the Arab American Student Association, the Palestine Aid Society, and Solidarity. The text below is abridged from his talk.

A peace process between Israel and the Arab states is apparently in progress. It should be a matter of great joy for us to welcome such a development. That's the good news. But I have come to you bearing some bad news. The bad news is that this peace process is so deeply unjust that in the long run it will not produce peace.

I should begin by underlining that those of us who have argued for the last 20 years the centrality of a PLO-lsraeli agreement in opening the road to Israeli-Arab peace have proven to be right. For as soon as the chairman of the PLO and the Israeli Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin had shaken hands on the White House lawn, presided over by President Clinton, the mainstream Arab states began to follow suit and the door to normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab states was opened. By now, the Oslo and Cairo Accords have done what six wars between Arabs and Israelis did not do. The wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and even the war of 1990, the Gulf War, did not open the doors of peace between the Arab states and Israel, as the PLO-lsraeli accord did. Which really goes to prove that was the central issue.

Today the situation is that Jordan has reached an agreement with Israel; Egypt is at peace with Israel; Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have announced the end of their commercial boycott of Israel; Tunisia has established an interest section with Israel; Morocco has reached normal relations with Israel; and a large Arab-Middle Eastern economic summit in Casablanca has been attended by Israel, with eight of its cabinet members and 200 of its businessmen. In this short span of time, barely one year since the signing of the Oslo Accord, this is a remarkable progress. Camp David did not achieve this. The Madrid process did not achieve it. Oslo did.

What remains to be achieved is peace between Syria and Lebanon, on the one hand, and Israel on the other. Syria is holding out for terms that I think by and large the Israelis will end up meeting. And the terms appear to be based on the old "land for peace" formula. "You withdraw from conquered territories, you respect the United Nations Charter and the relevant UN resolutions and we recognize and normalize relations with you."

Assuming that the Syrians and the Lebanese get it all back Israel shall occupy all of Palestine without exception. And whatever the formula for that occupation, the one people that will remain dispossessed - in exile or under occupation, dispersed or subject to continued colonization - will be the very Palestinians whose leadership has opened the door to normalization of relations between Israel and the Arabs.

Treaty, Truce, or Surrender? The Declaration of Principles, signed between Israel and the PLO, in my view, is not a treaty. Taken together, the Oslo and Cairo agreements do not have the essential attribute of a treaty. The essential attribute of a treaty being that it be an agreement between two or more sovereign entities. It is not a truce either because a truce by definition is a temporary affair, pending the resolution of actual conflict and awaiting of a treaty. So what is it? I think that an objective examination of the Oslo and Cairo accords would lead us to reach one of two conclusions: It is either a surrender, pure and simple, by the PLO to the Israelis; or it falls somewhere between a truce and a treaty.

The most optimistic view we can take is that it is very much less than a treaty and little more than a truce. This optimism would rest on the hope that Israel would invest in these agreements a spirit of reconciliation and offer the Palestinians some incentive to welcome and honor their outcome. Evidence to date belies that hope. So I am at a loss as to why Arafat surrendered the Palestinian future so abjectly to the mercies of Israel. There seemed to me to be no objective reasons for having done that. Nobody in the Arab world at least was seemingly pressuring him to do so. If anybody was trying to pressure him, perhaps it was Egypt and the United States, but even that isn't totally clear. Arafat surrendered in a manner that allowed Israel to achieve its stated goals of peace, recognition, legitimacy, and normalization of relations with the Arab world while the Palestinians did not obtain even their most minimal goal which was to exercise nation and sovereignty over just 29% of historic Palestine.

This is what the final Palestinian demand had rested on. Had it materialized the Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza would constitute 29.6% of Palestine, and Israel would have held 70 percent. Instead Arafat gave it all and lost it all. While denying the Palestinians the exercise of self-determination and attainment of statehood, this peace offers no end to their exile status, no compensations for their dispossession, no fundamental rights of people, and above all, no respite from further dispossession, colonization, and pauperization. What Oslo and Cairo promise the Palestinian people is a very bleak future indeed.

Autonomy  Sovereignty Arafat has delivered his people to the mercies of Israel and the United States. Now the question worth asking is: "Is mercy forthcoming?" Tragically, there is no mercy there. What Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza and Jericho, and may give in the West Bank or portions of the West Bank, is autonomy. And the definition of autonomy is Israels, not Egypt's, and not Palestinians', and not Americans'.

Please recall Anwar Sadat's negotiations with Israel. He ended the autonomy negotiations on the issue of Israel's definition of autonomy which was that it would apply to people and not to the land under occupation. Under that definition, Palestinians will be completely free to clean out their garbage, register their marriages, run their schools, do nearly everything that has to do with administering people. But they will not have the control of land, or water, or defense, or foreign relations. lt is that unique definition of autonomy, one that applies to people and not to land, that applies in the present agreements.

That precisely is the autonomy Mr. Arafat is exercising at the moment in Gaza. He is presiding over 60% of this barren, desert strip. I was there last September. 870,000 Palestinians are living there; they are predominantly refugee families from areas now in Israel. Gaza makes Soweto look like Fifth Avenue. And the other 40% of land serves Gaza's 4,000 Zionist settlers. Palestinians', including Arafat's, entries and exits into Gaza are controlled by Israel. Frankly, I do not care whether Arafat gets out of there or not. But it is truly a scandal that a Palestinian father, residing in Gaza must obtain a permit to visit his sick daughter a few miles across that arbitrary boundary.

Gazan fishing boats are not allowed to fish beyond 12 miles off their coast; the fish along the Gazan coast is greatly polluted yet they have no choice but to eat. Two Scottish-American engineers surveying Gaza for U.S. AID told me that the Israelis had tapped the best aquifers in the Strip, and the native people were using hopelessly polluted semi-drainage water. Gaza's agricultural products have lost their West Bank market. Most Gazan men who had before this agreement jobs in Israel now have lost their jobs. Unemployment in that miserable strip of desert is 50% of the male labor force. I do not wish to go on with the human disaster that Gaza is. The point I am making is that under the Israeli definition of autonomy the Palestinian future, like that of Gaza, is sealed.

Is Israel showing any mercy, since it is occupying all the land and Arafat is administering the people in parts of it? The answer is a resounding "no" and a major scandal. The scandal is the American media, the American government, the Arab governments, and of course, the government-controlled Arab media. What is most remarkable, and I have seen this with my own eyes, is that the Israel is are still expropriating Palestinian land after the signing of Oslo and Cairo agreements. l'll give you exact figures. As of the day before yesterday, Nov. 8 - 310,000 dunums of land have been expropriated since the Oslo accords. Many settlements are being expanded in violation of the promise that the government of Israel gave to the American government in return for receiving a $10 billion loan, and so far two new settlements, one in Gaza and one in the West Bank, have been established. There was five weeks ago one short story in the New York Times about this. With the exception of the Christian Science Monitor, no newspaper has been publishing these facts; the TV channels are totally mum. It is a human rights and international law scandal of far reaching importance yet the media here suppresses it.

And the media alone is not guilty. Even at the meeting the other day on the Gaza border between Rabin and Arafat, Arafat did not raise the issue of continued Israeli assault on Palestinian land and water. What he is continuously asking for is more money and extension of autonomy to the rest of the occupied people. I can't explain, and no one I spoke with could explain, Arafat's abject submission to Israel's will. He begs Israel for understanding and beseeches foreign donors for money. The Israeli government is likely, of course, to dole him small doses of "autonomy," and western governments shall pay their miserly "peace money" so it would look like they are doing something important and peaceable, save sheikhly faces, and draw screens on their gross inhumanity toward a people who did no one any harm.

So what is this place going to look like in a decade or two? There are about two and a half million people in the Occupied Territories alone, and a nearly equal number in exile. What is their future? I fear that what we are witnessing in Palestine and Israel from this labor of peace process is the rebirth of South Africa in the MiddIe East. I hope you do not take this statement to be a hyperbole. Never mind the media's insistent 120 figure; there are nearly 300 Zionist settlements in Arab Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza, and they are expanding. In itself, that does not mean apartheid. It could mean that a Jewish population shall also live there along with Christian and Muslim Arabs. But Israel's policies are not designed to create a multicultural, multi-religious community in Palestine. It aims at creating two categories of inhabitants: one Jewish, the other non Jewish; one privileged and the other proletarianized; one enjoying superior rights and privileged access to the country's resources. And as the occupying power which has U.S. support Israel has the might and means to carry out its policies.

Palestinians are being fragmented and proletarianized at a rapid pace. I do not know if any of you have studied the Israeli settlements. They have been most cleverly planned, with careful strategic consideration. In the West Bank, they have been constructed in such a way that they delink significant Arab population centers from each other, and break the continuity of communal life that had developed over many centuries. Around Jerusalem, the settlements form a ring based on the principle of maximum possible exclusion of native people. (One of the things that I have always admired about the Zionist movement and Israel and I have always not admired about the Palestinian movement is that one has the discipline of detail and the other does not, and that defines the difference between victor and vanquished.)

And now there is a new phenomenon, not yet visible. You shall hear about it in about two years. The Israeli government is now planning roads, major highways and communication networks, which link the Jewish settlements to Israeli cities and ports and leave the Palestinian communities out. So you have these autonomous zones which are to be administered by the Palestinian Authority, over which this Authority has no sovereignty - can't control the land, can't protect the water, and can't even set up industries without Israel's permission. So you have a series of Bantustans called autonomous Palestinian Authority. Israel is absolving itself of responsibility for the occupied population while keeping the occupation. It's a brilliant scheme and it is so far succeeding. Arafat is a party to this tragedy. What we are witnessing is the institutionalization of a system of exclusion, a fully contracted apartheid - separate municipalities, separate schools, separate health systems, a native economy, and an indigenous substratum on the margins of the Israeli state, beneath the privileged settler society.

This is a bad dream. A racialist utopia being constructed ironically by one of the most enlightened and historically humane people. And this with the agreement of a secular, native leadership. If the trend holds, during the next decade Israel/Palestine shall look very much like what has just passed - South Africa of the apartheid era. There has been much talk in recent months of the fundamentalist Hamas' successes and excesses. But rarely has a commentator noted the realities on which Hamas now feeds.

The Destruction of Arabism & the Rise of Islam There is of course more to the rise of Muslim fundamentalist movements than this. I should mention another factor that applies throughout the Middle East. All societies have their dialectic or at least most societies do. The Middle Eastern dialectic has been a historic tension between particularistic and universalistic tendencies. There, people have often had pluralistic identities. The Middle East is an urban civilization on the one hand and tribal on the other. Settled and nomadic peoples converge there; for millennia cultures have preserved their identity on this crossroad of civilizations; great religions of universal claims were both there, and particular sects thrived there. The particularist and the universalist reside in the Middle Eastern personality; people yearn for the dual linkage. When it is made civilization thrives; when it is absent people seek restlessly, painfully, sometimes violently.

There was always a particularistic formation to which the Middle Easterner attached himself. How many of you who come from the area know somebody named Baghdadi, Damashki, Fasi? People named themselves after their towns and tribes. That's how primal those loyalties were. At the same time they sought a larger identity; embraced universal ideologies - Christianity, Islam - and discovered trans-tribal, intra-city identities.

In our time, a major expression of particularist identity is the state. We are Syrians, they say; happy because they are Syrians. Since when have you become Syrians, my friend? They say we are Lebanese, Palestinians, Egyptians, Iraqis. The truth is that these nation states have come up in the last 65 years. People call themselves Saudis, for god's sake, there never existed a thing called Saudi Arabia. You laugh but I am not ridiculing. What I am saying is that there are these particularistic loyalties that are attached to statehood. And then there is the yearning for the universal, for breaking out of the narrow confines of particularist statehood. In the 19th and 20th centuries that yearning found its expression in Arabism, a secular movement to forge unity among Arabic speaking peoples. The west, which waged a decades long war on Arabism, appears to have finally succeeded. But then we are inheriting another wind.

I wrote in the Los Angeles Times immediately after the Gulf War and a longer essay in Mother Jones magazine arguing that while the United States and its allies have defeated Arabism, they must now prepare to battle Islamism. My argument was that this civilization has had particularistic identities, on the one hand, and always a compulsion to connect itself to a universal identity. This has been the story since the Persian Empire, since the Byzantine Empire, since the Sumarian times even. Islam's lasting appeal lay in its extraordinary resolution of the particular/universal dialectic. A universalistic religion, Islam accommodated particularistic identities through a complex pattern of legal, administrative, and social arrangements.With the decline of the last great Muslim empires - the Mughal, Iranian, and Ottoman - and start of western colonial domination, the quest for the universal was expressed through nationalism, Arabism among the Arab people.

Arab nationalism is actually quite unique in the history of nationalism because it tried to connect itself beyond boundaries. It came close to imagining a universal community linked by word and sentiment alone: Kullu man kaanu 'Arabaan fi lughatihim, wa thaqaafa tihim, wa wala 'ihim, fa huml- 'Arab . "Anyone who is an Arab in his feelings, in his language, and in his culture, is an Arab." So a Jew is an Arab, a Christian is an Arab, a Muslim is an Arab, a Kurd is an Arab. I know of no national movement which defined itself so broadly.

American and Israeli policy, like that of Britain and France earlier, has been based on promoting the particularistic in the Middle East and assaulting the universal. For now they have succeeded. State-based particularism has climaxed in the Arab world. The Saudi, Kuwaiti, Egyptian, Moroccan, Algerian, etc. states have forsaken the Arab. But for how long? When history returns to its course, the turning points are likely to be provided by the pain of peoples like those of Bosnia and Palestine. For they would symbolize the weakness and the failure of the particularistic alternative.