Archaeology Of The Roadmap

Early in May, while Colin Powell was on his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, he met withMahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Prime Minister, and separately with a small group of civil societyactivists, including Hanan Ashrawi and Mostapha Barghuti. According to Barghuti, Powell expressed surprise andmild consternation at the computerized maps of the settlements, the eight-meter-high fence, and the dozens ofIsraeli Army checkpoints that have made life so difficult and the future so bleak for Palestinians. Powell'sview of Palestinian reality is, to say the least, defective, despite his august position, but he did ask formaterials to take away with him and, more important, he reassured the Palestinians that the same effort put inby Bush on Iraq was now going into implementing the road map.

Much the same point was made in the last days of May by Bush himself in the course of interviews he gave tothe Arab media, although as usual, he stressed generalities rather than anything specific. He met with thePalestinian and Israeli leaders in Jordan and, earlier, with the major Arab rulers, excluding Syria's BasharAl-Asaad, of course. All this is part of what now looks like a major American push forward. That Ariel Sharonhas accepted the roadmap (with enough reservations to undercut his acceptance) seems to augur well for aviable Palestinian state.

Bush's vision (the word strikes a weird dreamy note in what is meant to be a hard-headed, definitive andthree- phased peace plan) is supposed to be achieved by a restructured Authority, the elimination of allviolence and incitement against Israelis, and the installation of a government that meets the requirements ofIsrael and the so-called Quartet (the US, UN, EU and Russia) that authored the plan. Israel for its partundertakes to improve the humanitarian situation, easing restrictions and lifting curfews, though where andwhen are not specified.

By June 2003, Phase One is also supposed to see the dismantling of the last 60 hilltop settlements (socalled "illegal outpost settlements established since March 2001) though nothing is said about removingthe others, which account for the 200,000 settlers on the West Bank and Gaza, to say nothing of the 200,000more in annexed East Jerusalem. Phase Two, described as a transition to run from June to December 2003, is tobe focussed, rather oddly, on the "option of creating an independent Palestinian state with provisionalborders and attributes of sovereignty" -- none are specified -- culminating in an internationalconference to approve and then "create" a Palestinian state, once again with "provisionalborders". Phase Three is to end the conflict completely, also by way of an international conference whosejob it will be to settle the thorniest issues of all: refugees, settlements, Jerusalem, borders. Israel's rolein all this is to cooperate; the real onus is placed on the Palestinians, who must keep coming up with thegoods in rapid succession, while the military occupation remains more or less in place, though eased in themain areas invaded during the spring of 2002. No monitoring element is envisioned, and the misleading symmetryof the plan's structure leaves Israel very much in charge of what -- if anything -- will happen next. As forPalestinian human rights, at present not so much ignored as suppressed, no specific rectification is writteninto the plan: apparently it is up to Israel whether to continue as before or not.

For once, say all the usual commentators, Bush is offering real hope for a Middle East settlement.Calculated leaks from the White House have suggested a list of possible sanctions against Israel if Sharongets too intransigent, but this was quickly denied and then disappeared. An emerging media consensus presentsthe document's contents -- many of them from earlier peace plans -- as the result of Bush's new-foundconfidence after his triumph in Iraq. As with most discussions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,manipulated clichés and far-fetched suppositions, rather than the realities of power and lived history, shapethe flow of discourse. Sceptics and critics are brushed aside as anti-American, while a sizeable portion ofthe organised Jewish leadership has denounced the roadmap as requiring far too many Israeli concessions.

But, the establishment press keeps reminding us that Sharon has spoken of an "occupation", whichhe never conceded until now, and has actually announced his intention to end Israeli rule over 3.5 millionPalestinians. But is he even aware of what he proposes to end? The Ha'aretz commentator Gideon Levywrote on 1 June that, like most Israelis, Sharon knows nothing "about life under curfew in communitiesthat have been under siege for years. What does he know about the humiliation of checkpoints, or about peoplebeing forced to travel on gravel and mud roads, at risk to their lives, in order to get a woman in labour to ahospital? About life on the brink of starvation? About a demolished home? About children who see their parentsbeaten and humiliated in the middle of the night?"

Another chilling omission from the roadmap is the gigantic "separation wall" now being built inthe West Bank by Israel: 347 kilometres of concrete running north to south, of which 120 have already beenerected. It is 25 feet high and 10 feet thick; its cost is put at 1.6 million dollars per kilometre. The walldoesn't simply divide Israel from a putative Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 lines borders: itactually takes in new tracks of Palestinian land, sometimes five or six kilometres at a stretch. It issurrounded by trenches, electric wire, and moats; there are watchtowers at regular intervals. Almost a decadeafter the end of South African apartheid, this ghastly racist wall is going up with scarcely a peep from themajority of Israelis or their American allies who, whether they like it or not, are going to pay most of itscost.

The 40,000 Palestinian inhabitants of the town of Qalqilya in their homes are on one side of the wall, theland they farm and actually live off of is on the other. It is estimated that when the wall is finished --presumably as the US, Israel and the Palestinians argue about procedure for months on end -- almost 300,000Palestinians will be separated from their land. The roadmap is silent about all this, as it is about Sharon'srecent approval of a wall on the eastern side of the West Bank, which will, if built, reduce the amount ofPalestinian territory available for Bush's dream state to roughly 40 per cent of the area. This is what Sharonhas had in mind all along.

An unstated premise underlies Israel's heavily modified acceptance of the plan and the US's evidentcommitment to it: the relative success of Palestinian resistance. This is true whether or not one deploressome of its methods, its exorbitant cost, and the heavy toll it has taken on yet another generation ofPalestinians who have not wholly given up in the face of the overwhelmingly superiority of Israeli-US power.

All sorts of reasons have been given for the emergence of the roadmap: that 56 per cent Israelis back it,that Sharon has finally bowed to international reality, that Bush needs an Arab-Israeli cover for his militaryadventures elsewhere, that the Palestinians have finally come to their senses and brought forth Abu Mazen (Abbas'smuch more familiar nom de guerre, as it were), and so on. Some of this is true, but I still contend that wereit not for the fact of the Palestinian stubborn refusal to accept that they are "a defeated people",as the Israeli chief of staff recently described them, there would be no peace plan. Yet, anyone who believesthat the roadmap actually offers anything resembling a settlement or that it tackles the basic issues iswrong. Like so much of the prevailing peace discourse, it places the need for restraint and renunciation andsacrifice squarely on Palestinian shoulders, thus denying the density and sheer gravity of Palestinianhistory. To read through the roadmap is to confront an unsituated document, oblivious of its time and place.

The roadmap, in other words, is not about a plan for peace so much as a plan for pacification: it is aboutputting an end to Palestine as a problem. Hence the repetition of the term "performance" in thedocument's wooden prose, -- in other words, how the Palestinians are expected to behave, almost in the socialsense of the word. No violence, no protest, more democracy, better leaders and institutions, all based on thenotion that the underlying problem has been the ferocity of Palestinian resistance, rather than the occupationthat has given rise to it. Nothing comparable is expected of Israel except that the small settlements I spokeof earlier, known as "illegal outposts" (an entirely new classification which suggests that someIsraeli implantations on Palestinian land are legal) must be given up and, yes, the major settlements"frozen" but certainly not removed or dismantled. Not a word is said about what since 1948, and thenagain since 1967, Palestinians have endured at the hands of Israel and the US. Nothing about thede-development of the Palestinian economy as described by the American researcher Sara Roy in a forthcomingbook. House demolitions, the uprooting of trees, the 5000 prisoners or more, the policy of targetedassassinations, the closures since 1993, the wholesale ruin of the infrastructure, the incredible number ofdeaths and maimings -- all that and more, passes without a word.

The truculent aggression and stiff-necked unilateralism of the American and Israeli teams are alreadywell-known. The Palestinian team inspires scarcely any confidence, made up as it is of recycled and agingArafat cohorts. Indeed, the roadmap seems to have given Yasser Arafat another lease on life, for all thestudied efforts by Powell and his assistants to avoid visiting him. Despite the stupid Israeli policy oftrying to humble him by shutting him up in a badly bombed compound, he is still in control of things. Heremains Palestine's elected president, he has the Palestinian purse strings in his hands (the purse is farfrom bulging), and as for his status, none of the present "reform" team (who with two or threesignificant new additions are re-shuffled members of the old team) can match the old man for charisma andpower.

Take Abu Mazen for a start. I first met him in March 1977 at my first National Council meeting in Cairo. Hegave by far the longest speech, in the didactic manner which he must have first perfected as a secondaryschool teacher in Qatar, and explained to the assembled Palestinian parliamentarians the differences betweenZionism and Zionist dissidence. It was a noteworthy intervention, since most Palestinians had no real notionin those days that Israel was made up not only of fundamentalist Zionists who were anathema to every Arab, butof various kinds of peaceniks and activists as well. In retrospect, Abu Mazen's speech launched the PLO'scampaign of meetings, most of them secret, between Palestinians and Israelis who had long dialogues in Europeabout peace and some considerable effect in their respective societies on shaping the constituencies that madeOslo possible.

Nevertheless, no one doubted that Arafat had authorised Abu Mazen's speech and the subsequent campaign,which cost brave men like Issam Sartawi and Said Hammami their lives. And while the Palestinian participantsemerged from the centre of Palestinian politics (i.e. Fatah), the Israelis were a small marginalised group ofreviled peace supporters whose courage was commendable for that very reason. During the PLO's Beirut yearsbetween 1971 and 1982, Abu Mazen was stationed in Damascus, but joined the exiled Arafat and his staff inTunis for the next decade or so. I saw him there several times and was struck by his well-organised office,his quiet bureaucratic manner, and his evident interest in Europe and the United States as arenas wherePalestinians could do useful work promoting peace with Israelis. After the Madrid conference in 1991, he wassaid to have brought together PLO employees and independent intellectuals in Europe and turned them into teamsto prepare negotiating files on subjects such as water, refugees, demography, and boundaries in advance ofwhat were to become the secret Oslo meetings of 1992 and 1993, although to the best of my knowledge, none ofthe files was used, none of the Palestinian experts was directly involved in the talks, and none of theresults of this research influenced the final documents that emerged.

In Oslo, the Israelis fielded an array of experts supported by maps, documents, statistics and at least 17prior drafts of what the Palestinians would end up signing, while the Palestinians unfortunately restrictedtheir negotiators to three completely different PLO men, not one of whom knew English or had a background ininternational (or any other kind of) negotiation. Arafat's idea seems to have been that he was fielding a teammainly to keep himself in the process, especially after his exit from Beirut and his disastrous decision toside with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. If he had other objectives in mind, then he didn't prepare for themeffectively, as has always been his style. In Abu Mazen's memoire and in other anecdotal accounts of the Oslodiscussions, Arafat's subordinate is credited as the "architect" of the accords, though he neverleft Tunis; Abu Mazen goes so far as to say that it took him a year after the Washington ceremonies (where heappeared alongside Arafat, Rabin, Peres, and Clinton) to convince Arafat that he hadn't gotten a state fromOslo. Yet, most accounts of the peace talks stress the fact that Arafat was pulling all the strings just thesame. No wonder then that the Oslo negotiations made the over-all situation of the Palestinians a good dealworse. The American team led by Dennis Ross, a former Israeli-lobby employee -- a job to which he has nowreturned -- routinely supported the Israeli position which, after a full decade of negotiation, consisted inhanding back 18 per cent of the occupied territories to the Palestinians on highly unfavourable terms, withthe IDF left in charge of security, borders, and water. Naturally enough, the number of settlements more thandoubled.

Since the PLO's return to the occupied territories in 1994, Abu Mazen has remained a second-rank figure,known universally for his "flexibility" with Israel, his subservience to Arafat, and his total lackof any organised political base, although he is one of Fatah's original founders and a long-standing memberand secretary-general of its Central Committee. So far as I know, he has never been elected to anything, andcertainly not to the Palestinian Legislative Council. The PLO and the Palestine Authority under Arafat areanything but transparent. Little is known about the way decisions have been made, or how money gets spent,where it is, and who besides Arafat has any say in the matter. Everyone agrees, however, that Arafat, afiendish micro-manager and control freak, remains the central figure in every significant way. That is why AbuMazen's elevation to the status of reforming prime minister, which so pleases the Americans and Israelis, isthought of by most Palestinians as, well, a kind of joke, the old man's way of holding on to power byinventing a new gimmick so to speak. Abu Mazen is thought of generally as colourless, moderately corrupt, andwithout any clear ideas of his own, except that he wants to please the white man.

Like Arafat, Abu Mazen has never lived anywhere except the Gulf, Syria and Lebanon, Tunisia, and nowoccupied Palestine; he knows no languages other than Arabic, and isn't much of an orator or public presence.By contrast, Mohamed Dahlan, the new security chief from Gaza -- the other much- heralded figure in whom theIsraelis and Americans place great hope -- is younger, cleverer, and quite ruthless. During the eight yearsthat he ran one of Arafat's 14 or 15 security organisations, Gaza was known as Dahlanistan. He resigned lastyear, only to be re-recruited for the job of "unified security chief" by the Europeans, theAmericans and the Israelis, even though of course he too has always been one of Arafat's men. Now he isexpected to crack down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad; one of the reiterated Israeli demands behind which lies thehope that there will be something resembling a Palestinian civil war, a gleam in the eyes of the Israelimilitary.

In any event, it seems clear to me that, no matter how assiduously and flexibly Abu Mazen"performs", he is going to be limited by three factors. One of course is Arafat himself, who stillcontrols Fatah, which, in theory, is also Abu Mazen's power base. Another is Sharon (who will presumably havethe US behind him all the way). In a list of 14 "remarks" about the roadmap published in Ha'aretzon 27 May, Sharon signalled the very narrow limits on anything that might be construed as flexibility onIsrael's part.