Back to square one

Tempted by the trappings of statehood, Palestinian leaders forgot they had yet to build a state

By Azmi Bishara
Al-Ahram Weekly

"......The PLO was founded as a movement for refugees striving to liberate their land, not as a movement to fight the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It was founded in East Jerusalem at a time when that city was under Arab sovereignty and when the creation of a Palestinian entity meant the creation of a liberation organisation embodying the political aspirations and national identity of the Palestinian people. There was never any question of the creation of a state on only a portion of the land; indeed, in order to receive the Jordanian monarch's approval to hold the PLO constitutional assembly in Jerusalem the founders had to assure him this was not the intent......

There is a big difference between a real state and a hypothetical one, even if the latter's representatives can sit around a table imagining themselves equal to the former's representatives, even if Palestinian and Israeli kids can play in the same youth orchestra, conceived of by some European philanthropist as a way to illustrate the possibilities of mutual co-existence and brotherly love, as opposed to the same kids pelting each other with stones, even if Palestinian writers can engage in fruitful debate with their Israeli "counterparts" as an alternative to the "mutual exchange of violence", and even if Palestinians can "liberate" international peace prizes as the symbolic alternative to true liberation. There is a big difference. Unfortunately, today we are witnessing the consequences of the obfuscation of this difference.....

The result was that Israel was rewarded with a liberation movement that had abandoned its original calling, structures and alliances while the Palestinians were still without a state. The second result was that the 1967 boundaries were transformed from the eventual lines of a peace agreement, as was the case with Syria and Egypt, to the ultimate hope in eventual negotiations over a lasting solution to the Palestinian cause. The third is that the Palestinian people became one of "two sides", and now have to prove themselves worthy in order for the occupying power to negotiate with them. It seems even Islamist resistance movements such as Hamas are being lured into the game of proving themselves in an attempt to win the acceptance of the international community, an almost impossible task for any Islamist movement.

These may be the rules of the game of nations but they are not the rules by which national liberation movements should play. For the moment Hamas is hesitating at the threshold. If it steps across it will go down the same slippery path as the liberation movements that preceded it.

The PLO lost the structure, vision, alliances and rights of a liberation movement before it even became a state. Because it wanted the prerogatives of state so prematurely it had to accept the obligations of a state prematurely. This entailed not only calling off the resistance, as nations do once they achieve independence, but also fighting the resistance, now termed "terrorism"......

It was the Palestinian refugees that created the Palestinian national liberation movement. It was from beneath that umbrella that there emerged the anti- occupation resistance movements, on the one hand, and, on the other, the drive to create a Palestinian state as an end in itself.

Who among us has not met that loathsome specimen that is forever trying to shed his connections with the people who gave him the initial leg up on the ladder to success? Such people's sense of self- importance is so great that they suppress all memory of those to whom debts of gratitude are owed. Such inflated egos quickly reveal a propensity for other evil......

When refugees become too much of bother for the Palestinian state enterprise something is terribly askew. A state without the right to return is not just a perversion, it is a burden on the cause of Palestinian refugees, of Jerusalem and of the struggle against Zionism."