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History seems, somehow or other, to repeat itself itself in different ways and guises, at different times and with different people as the main protagonists.
Yasser Arafat was regarded as the number one Palestinian terrorist who spent his life struggling for Palestinian self-determination. He had failed. Not so two Jewish terrorists, Menachem Begin, leader of Irgun Zvai Leumi, and Jitzhak Shamir, one of the leaders of the Stern Gang, who both struggled for the creation of a Jewish state and who both eventually became prime ministers of the state of Israel.
After the 1967 War, the West Bank and Gaza came under strict Israeli military rule. What the Palestinians living in the occupied territories went through could be imagined by the grave concern expressed by General Assembly Resolution 2535 of December 10, 1969.
The resolution state: “that the denial of rights have been aggravated by the reported acts of collective punishment, arbitrary detention, curfews, destruction of houses and property, deportation and other repressive acts against the refugees and other inhabitants of the occupied territories”. It went on to “reaffirm the inalienable rights of the people of Palestine.”
The affirmative vote of this resolution confirmed what the Palestinian were being subjected to after only 2 years under Israeli occupation. Their situation worsened to a much greater extent as time went on. And the first intifada (1987) and, later, a second intifada (2000) were still in the distant future.
A year later, in 1970, Resolution 2627C of December 8, 1970 recognised “that the people of Palestine are entitled to equal rights and self-determination, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations”.
In this connection, it seems pertinent to add a short quotation from Alfred M. Lilienthal’s monumental work “The Zionist Connection II” (1982), p 684 which reads “ … there have been numerous reiterations of the “inalienable rights” of the Palestinians, of their right to political independence and self-determination in Palestine, of the legitimacy of their struggle for independence by all means available, including the use of armed force” (8). And the in immediately following sentence states: “In December 1977 the general Assembly voted $456,000 for publicising those “inalienable rights” of the Palestinians.
In his Note (8), p 876, this author indicated also the 9 resolutions on the “inalienable rights” of the Palestinians, with their respective dates as well as the sessions in which they were passed between 1969 and 1977.
It took decades for Arafat’s PLO, as the representative of the Palestinian people, to be recognised by Israel and the USA. For this Arafat had to (1) recognise Israel; (2) accept Resolution 242 (which mentioned refugees but omitted self-determination) and (3) renounce terrorism.
Like the dog in the circus act Arafat had to go through all three hoops with a public declaration he made in Geneva in 1988. It should here be recalled that Arafat tried to include “self-determination” in this declaration. But it was refused by the then US Secretary of State as “self-determination signified an independent Palestinian state”. Besides saying so, Schultz said “I would not in any way endorse a Palestinian state”. (George Schultz “Turmoil and Triumph” (1993) p1044).
It was in 1993 that Arafat, on his own, changed the covenant of the PLO. This was done as a result of the Oslo Accords with Israel of which the Palestinian National council had been kept in the dark.
Arafat was denigrated more then he deserved and must have been bitterly disappointed to see Israel, with the blessing of the United States, renege on every major agreement or understanding that it signed, such as Oslo I (1993), Oslo II (Taba Agreement) (1995) and Sharm el Sheik (1999), besides, of course, the mandatory Security council Resolutions 242 and 383.
But Arafat, to his credit, preferred failure at Camp David in 2000 to humiliation.
Having said all this, Arafat had often been widely and repeatedly criticised for his allegedly corrupt and utterly inefficient administration.
Mention now needs to be made of what some 400 observers regarded as an exemplar of democratic elections. These observers were purposely sent to monitor and report on the general elections that were held last January in the Palestine occupied territories. It also turned out, not unexpectedly perhaps, that some observers were sometimes obstructed to do their job by the Israeli army at various checkpoints.
It so happened that the Islamist Hamas won a landslide victory that surprised them and stunned Israel, the USA and the European Union.
The long dominant Fatah Party of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was humiliatingly defeated when Hamas won 76 seats out of parliament’s 132 with Fatah winning 43. The number of seats of each side also reflected the 57.6 percent of votes for Hamas and the humbling 32.6 percent for Fatah from a unsurprising turnout of 77 percent of the electorate.
It is well worth nothing here that many people were unable to vote because of the 10 feet high so-called security barrier or wall being built by Israel that surrounds in many places villages and even towns making them more like a prison.
In fact Israel has been condemned by the International Court of Justice for building this 10 feet high wall which, according to the Court, “Israel has repeatedly stated that the Barrier is a temporary measure (see report of the Secretary-General, para.29)”.
No sooner had the definite electoral results been known than the USA and the EU laid down a number of conditions, which Israel had also made, for acceptance by Hamas in return for financial assistance. Israel, in fact, had made it known that it would never recognise let alone negotiate with Hamas.
The opposition facing Hamas is reminiscent of that of the socialists Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity Party in Chile in 1970 but much more of that of Jorg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party in Austria in 1999, both democratically elected. In the first case the strongest opposition came from the USA; in the second from the EU. In Hamas’s case strong opposition comes equally from Israel, the USA and EU.
These conditions are (1) recognition of Israel; (2) a commitment to the principles of non-violence; (3) a change of their charter; (4) to disarm, and (5) acceptance of previous agreements and obligations.
It is to be recalled that Israel has been adamant about the disarming of Hamas but it is loth to control the thousands of settlers who are on the loose with guns.
The Israeli interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert urged foreign leaders not to support a Palestinian government which includes Hamas. He also added: “Israel will have no contact with the Palestinians until Hamas recognise Israel’s right to exist and accept every agreement signed by the leaders of Palestine and Israel” (my emphasis). Note here that Mr Olmert does not mention the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. Or that Israel has ignored or better reneged on all the agreements he referred to.
Astonishingly, Mr Abbas and the Egyptian Prime Minister did not take long to echo Mr Olmert. The first had said, “the new government must recognise past peace deals with Israel”; and the second was quoted as saying to “Newsweek” that Hamas should “work within the framework of the Oslo agreement of 1993, the peace plan known as the road map and a two-state solution”.
It is certainly true that the Oslo agreement has long been regarded as ‘ridiculous’ and the road map as ‘laughable’ and a ‘joke’, but it is also incredible that Mr. Abbas and the Egyptian Prime Minister have forgotten altogether: (a) that the then Israeli Prime Minister Binjamin Netanjahu had declared on September 5, 1997 that Israel no longer considers the Oslo Accords binding; (b) that he, also, in an address to the US Congress – to standing ovation in 1997, repeated his three no’s: no to a Palestinian state, no to comprise over East Jerusalem, no to a return of the Golan Heights to Syria. (Incidentally, a fourth no should have been a no to halting settlements which have become instruments to prevent the establishment of a sovereign state); (c) Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister in February 2001 and in the following December, his Security Minister Uzi Landau told a reporter: “What is certain is we will never accept the existence of a Palestinian state”. (Guardian Weekly, ‘Le Monde’ section, December 20, 2001)
Although the Hamas Islamist group has been regarded as a terrorist organisation, its great electoral victory does not mean that those who voted terrorists all Palestinians because all of them are against the brutal, oppressive, dehumanising and utterly humiliating Israeli occupation.
When talking about terrorism one needs to keep in mind:
(1) the horrendous killing of innocent civilians by suicide bombings
(2) in May 1978 General Mordechai (Motta) Gur, then Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, had stated that official Israeli military newspaper Al-Hamishmar, May 10, 1978, published an interview with Gur in which he boasted that “After the massacre at Avivim he had four villages in the Sout Lebanon bombed without authorisation”. To the question, “Without making distinctions between civilians and noncivilians?”, he replied “What distinction?” and to another question, “Then you claim that the population ought to be punished?”, he replied, “Of course, and I have never had any doubt about that”. (cited in E.W. Said ‘The Question of Palestine’ pp 224 and xi)
(3) bulldozers and their various acts of demolitions, tanks and artillery firing into civilian areas, helicopter gunships launching missiles, Israeli jets bombing villages, towns and cities, assassination squads, expropriation of vast lands curfews, closures, etc etc.
(4) in December 1987, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning terrorism and urging “effective and resolute measures for the speedy elimination of international terrorism”. The resolution passed by 153 votes to 2, the two being the USA and Israel.
In a recent news report Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s choice for Prime Minister has declared “We want to avoid any sharp debate especially while the (Isreaeli) occupation refused to recognise Palestinian rights and refuses to recognise the agreements signed with the (Palestinian) Authority “ (my emphases).
Before concluding it is worthwhile to include here the opinion expressed publicly by an authoritative Israeli:
“In March 2002, Michael Ben-Yair, the Israeli Attorney General between 1993 and 1996, wrote in the Israeli newspaper ‘Ha’ aretz’:
“The intifada is the Palestinian people’s war of national liberation. We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers
“from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities … we established an apartheid regime”. (Quote from the ‘Observer’, 31 March 2002, cited in Greg Philo and Mike Berger “Bad News from Israel” (2004) p157).
The following concluding paragraph is being reproduced because of its validity in the context of this article and acknowledgement is due to the forgotten source:
‘Israel wants security and peace. The Palestinians want justice and freedom but they cannot have freedom with justice. And justice, true justice can only be achieved with the implementation of Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973)’. And the United States, be it recalled wanted Arafat to accept these unconditionally.
J. Cachia
Paola
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