What we must do

In his third instalment on Israel's historic options, Azmi Bishara argues that Arab democratisation and development are at the heart of resisting Israel's strategic choice of permanent war against the Arab nation

Al-Ahram Weekly

"......It is useful, here, to consider why Yasser Arafat turned down such an offer at Camp David. His rejection has less to do with his commitment to "fixed principles" than it does with his grasp of how that solution would play in Palestinian and Arab opinion: it would have no legitimacy. Arafat had linked his personal and political career to negotiations.....

If the Palestinian people agreed on a solution, that would be sufficient to settle any questions about its legitimacy at the regional level. The problem with the proposal at hand is that it is being pushed by means of an outside alliance with one Palestinian faction against another Palestinian faction, one of which that swept the last legislative elections. Meanwhile, to Palestinians in the Diaspora, a solution that by definition excludes the refugees is automatically out of the question. The solution, thus, has no basis of legitimacy among the Palestinian people. But to aggravate the problem, it has become a cause of fierce infighting, with the result that part of the solution's ripening process is to bombard and starve a part of the Palestinian people until they buckle before the inevitable. This is not a sign of legitimacy.......

.....Neither the settlement nor the process that led to it is legitimate in the public eye. Also, the brutality that Israel has unleashed to drive the Palestinian people away from resistance into bowing to Israeli conditions has fed popular rancour and fuelled the tendency to hurl accusations of treachery at Arab parties lending themselves to the settlement process......

The Arab region has encountered a very similar situation in the past. It took the form of the crusader state that, too, lived in permanent conflict with its environment. I will not enumerate the similarities, because that is not the point here. Suffice it to say that, in spite of the obviously different historical contexts, the crusader state contracted numerous pacts and alliances with Arab rulers against other Arab rulers, and it is not difficult to identify contemporary parallels......
Indeed, we could bring up any number of such similarities, but at every turn we'd find someone who would counter -- correctly -- that the current international order is completely different from that which prevailed in the days of the crusader knights and Arab princedoms. To be sure, the permanence and stability of the modern Arab and Jewish state is of a radically different quality.......

More significantly, we can counter that it is also obvious that the Arabs today are not the Arabs of the past. The Arabs today have a totally different mindset in terms of national and pan-Arab consciousness, common interests and concerns, as well as an understanding of colonialism and the cause of national expression. Therefore, we are not so naïve to draw analogies. But we do have a paradigm: an alien state in the region implanted by colonialist military expeditions, establishing itself in opposition to its environment and dependent for its continuity on its fortifications and knights and on the exploitation of the animosities extant between the political entities around it.......

There is very little hope on the horizon that Israel will come around to either the one-state or the two-state solution, which means that the Palestinians and the Arabs can anticipate a situation that is not conducive to the fulfilment of their rights. But this does not mean that they should renounce their rights. Rather, they should reject all unfair solutions and, at the same time, develop a fixed democratic alternative to present to both Jews and Arabs within a framework of safeguarding for future welfare of the Arab region as a whole.

This is the course of the pursuit of life and development while sustaining the means of subsistence in Palestine and resistance against the de facto realities Israel is creating on the ground. Resistance can accomplish important partial gains while forestalling the normalisation of a colonialist condition. However, the major challenge to Israel is at the regional level and resides in the cumulative progress the Arabs can achieve towards building their capacities to withstand Israel, through the modernisation of their states and societies, through the performance of such essential tasks as building their deterrent powers, economic development and democratisation. The struggle is a long one, but it must be conducted, and at a proper pace. Time is not in favour of Israel; it is in favour of whoever uses it astutely. That is one of the most important lessons of the past 60 years."