There was something viscerally unsettling about the image, shown on television screens the day after the Aqaba summit concluded, where the Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas was reduced to pleading in his speech that his people under occupation “should be able to move, go to their jobs and schools, visit their families, and conduct a normal life.”
The image in question was of a bridal couple held up in a bottleneck at an Israeli checkpoint called Kalandia, with the bride, attired in her bridal gown and veil, being frisked by an Israeli woman soldier, before she and the bridegroom were allowed to go back into their vehicle and move on.
Who are these people doing the frisking and what are they doing in Palestine, ruling over the political destiny of a whole nation and how this nation’s citizens live their daily lives? And isn’t it about time they got their butts out of there after more than 35 years of brutalities?
The road map, at least as defined by the current Israeli government, offers the people of Palestine next to nothing. Ariel Sharon never ever used the word “settlements” in his speech at Aqaba, but spoke instead of removing “unauthorized outposts” — mostly a few trailers on hilltops — after, and only after, the Palestinian Authority cracked down on the resistance, and wiped out its cadres.
And whereas the road map compels Israel to commit itself to “an independent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state,” the Israeli prime minister is committed instead to his vision of it, as laid out in a speech he gave last December. “This Palestinian state,” he said, “will be completely demilitarized. It will be allowed to maintain lightly armed police and interior forces to ensure civil order. Israel will continue to control all entries and exists to the Palestinian state, will command its airspace, and not allow it to form alliances with Israel’s enemies.”
Note the 19th century colonial lingo, the brazenness in how Palestine will be “allowed,” and how Israel will “command.” I say give me apartheid and Botswana anytime.
Even more preposterous is how this man defines the issue of “territorial contiguity” of a Palestinian state — a contiguity that is physically impossible without the dismantling of at least 30 colonies in the West Bank. No, Sharon asserts, Israel is instead talking about “territorial continuity” created by “bridges and tunnels” that would connect Palestinian lands. Not that Washington has a different understanding of the issue. Asked about the American definition of a contiguous Palestinian state, the American secretary of state told reporters last week that a “contiguous state has to be a state that both sides accept and that is viable. It can have an economy, people can move back and forth freely.”
Gee, we can actually move back and forth freely? Golly!
This is over and above the “final status” issues of Jerusalem, refugees and the billions of dollars Israel owes the people of Palestine in reparations.
Meanwhile, humanity streams by at checkpoints manned by occupation soldiers, who hail from Kiev, Moscow, Ethiopia and Brooklyn, as they search women with children in tow, blue-collar workers, professional men, and truck drivers with produce already rotting because, held up for hours, sometimes days, they can’t get it to the market.
And, yes, a young woman too on her way to celebrate what seemingly should have been the happiest day in her life.
This columnist, no fan of Hamas and its crazy tactics, has to admit nevertheless that there was, undeniably, a kind of desperate logic to what the organization’s leading official had to say last Saturday as three militant groups, that have been in the vanguard of the uprising over the last 32 months, collaborated in mounting an attack against occupation soldiers that day, killing four. “All are agreed,” he said, “on our people’s right to resist occupation.”
When you’ve got nothing, and are offered nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. The sad but true story this last century of all oppressed peoples from Algeria to Vietnam.
- Arab News Opinion 12 June 2003
