Why Arafat can no longer read from the thief's script?

 

The "peace" offers to Palestinians were written in Tel Aviv and Washington, and are fit only for burial

Arafat - A Local Cop on The Beat

By Scott Burchill

 

 ALTHOUGH the United Nations recognized the PLO as the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in 1974, it wasn't until the 1987 uprisings known as the intifada that Israel began to consider Yasser Arafat and the PLO as acceptable interlocutors in a regional settlement.

 

 Ironically, from the early days of the intifada, if not before, the PLO had begun to lose its popular support in the occupied territories. Absent from Palestine for many years, Arafat and the PLO leaders were no longer in touch with the sentiments of those who had lived under 20 years of occupation.

 

 So just as Arafat was being rehabilitated in Tel Aviv and Washington from a terrorist to a negotiating partner, in occupied Palestine he was losing his status as a nationalist hero, becoming instead a colluder and soon a corrupt collaborator. The key to understanding what is currently going on in the Middle East can be found in these divergent views of Arafat.

 

 Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, has a role in mind for Arafat, which he continues to call the Oslo "peace process". The PLO chairman is to be the local cop on the beat, the guy to whom the task of keeping his less moderate nationals in line would be subcontracted. With US backing, the challenge was to get Arafat to sign an agreement which would confine the Palestinian population to a small number of scattered and isolated enclaves on the West Bank and Gaza Strip - the model perfected by apartheid governments in South Africa.

 

 To satisfy nationalist aspirations, these enclaves could be called a "state" with a Palestinian capital permitted in the village of Abus Dis on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and renamed "Al-Quds". Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, which violate UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), would remain. The discontiguous tracts of land that will comprise the "state of Palestine" would be completely surrounded by territory to be annexed to Israel, which would remain in control of borders, roads, water resources and the movement of the population between them.

 

 In effect, Palestinians will not be "granted" a sovereign state but merely civil authority over a percentage of their land occupied since 1967. If the Palestinian Authority is any guide, the government which will assert this authority won't be very civil, and more likely brutal, corrupt and nepotistic, but ultimately compliant to Israel's wishes. For Tel Aviv, this arrangement is significantly preferable to direct Israeli rule.

 

 In return for the status and privileges of a presidential office, Barak demanded two things of Arafat: that he formally terminate all Palestinian claims against Israel and that he sell the deal to his people. Ultimately Arafat couldn't do either, and used the pretext of holy sites in Jerusalem as his escape clause.

 

 Arafat's refusal to sign off at Camp David and his failure to quell the current uprising have predictably led to complaints about Palestinian ingratitude for the unprecedented and generous concessions on offer. Convinced of their biblically endorsed right to possession of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), Israelis believe that under this offer they are actually handing over their property.

 

 The indigenous people see things very differently. Seven years after what they regarded as an Israeli-Arafat agreement (Oslo), they remain under military occupation. Self-rule continues to be a humiliating disaster and independence promises to bear no relation to the self- determination they have been promised since 1948. The implementation of UN resolutions which are supposedly the legal basis of their property rights and the return of refugees expelled in 1948 (700,000) and 1967 (430,000), have been consistently vetoed by Israel's patron in the Security Council.

 

 Their aging leaders have betrayed them for the perks of high office. Today Palestinians increasingly insist that the question of Palestine is much more than what rules Arafat and the PLO leadership will agree to abide by. They resent being told how much of their land Israel is "generously" prepared to return to them. Oslo demands their capitulation. Camp David was like sitting down with the thief and the police to be told by both how much of your stolen property they think you should get back.

 

 Palestinians reject the idea that they have a moral obligation to sacrifice their land to compensate for the crimes committed by Europeans against Jews. They compare their circumstances with those enjoyed by Israeli citizens and know who the real victims are. They demand more than phoney promises and raised, but unrealised, expectations.

 

 For Arafat, outflanked by popular hostility to the terms of a "surrender" he almost signed at Camp David, there is no way back from the ceasefire summit at Sharm el-Sheikh. The misnamed "peace process" must be buried. He can no longer read the script written for him in Tel Aviv and Washington.