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PALESTINE NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT – FATEH
COMMUNICATION TO THE SOCIALIST INTERNATIONAL
COUNCIL MEETING, MAPUTO, NOVEMBER 11TH, 2000
(Mozambique)
Dear comrades,
First of all I want to convey to our Mozambican hosts our gratitude for the warmth of their brotherly hospitality. Frelimo and the PLO have been, for many years, brothers-in-arms, fighting for the same cause against common enemies, and we feel today once again the depth and strength of this historical bond.
We must also tell you that the pleasure of being here among you, in this friendly and hospitable city, is mitigated by heavy feelings. Not only because a new chapter of blood and violence, of suffering and bitterness, in the century-old tragedy of our Palestinian people is now unfolding in our martyred country, but also because the last events have also liquidated most of the hopes that were aroused, more than seven years ago, by an agreement and a peace-process the whole world had come to call by the name of Oslo, where our Middle-East Committee convened last week.
The hope was that we could, without ever having to face war and destruction once again, turn a new page and put an end to the conflict that has torn our area and exacted a heavy toll of pain and mourning from all its peoples for decades. The hope was that we could, through the implementation of the various interim agreements signed between us and four successive Israeli governments, move from occupation to self-determination, and achieve peace and historic reconciliation between the Israeli and the Arab peoples, in concentric circles around the core issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
We knew, from the beginning, that there was an element of risk. That the agreements and the process as a whole were flawed by the gross imbalance of material power on the ground. We nonetheless took the risk, and betted on the success of rationality over violence, of justice over the rule of force, of right over might. The events of the last weeks have unfortunately made this faith and these hopes look pathetic, as death and the destruction of hope have once again become a daily reality in Palestine.
In the clashes of the last six weeks between the Israeli occupation forces and mostly disarmed Palestinian demonstrators, more than 180 Palestinians were killed, and more than eight thousand wounded, most of them maimed for ever, most of them shot in the head or in the chest. Occupation forces have used all sorts of weapons and ammunition, from the lethal rubber-coated bullets to the murderous “dum-dum” bullets, from heavy machine-guns to helicopter-propelled rockets and artillery shelling on urban areas. They have unleashed settler-terrorism, and fanatic settlers, who make no secret of their racist hatred against Arabs and of their will to exterminate Palestinians, armed and protected by the Israeli army, have gone on rampage, attacking, kidnapping, torturing and killing Palestinian civilians at random.The closure of the Palestinian territory, blockade and siege, has cost our renascent economy, and the international community which has invested considerable means in trying to develop it, an average 10 million US dollars a day. But the greatest victim of this barbaric onslaught, however, is the peace-process. For hope and a vision of peace had sustained Palestinians for seven years, in spite of all the delays, the crises, the massacres, (like that in Hebron in February 1994) the tragedies, (like the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin) the setbacks, (like the Netanyahu attempts at destroying the peace-process). In spite of the unkept promises and the unfulfilled commitments, our people kept hoping. And it is now the very idea of peace and coexistence which has been gravely crippled, and has started to lose any kind of credibility at the eyes of the people of our region.
This is no occasion to triumph and say: “We told you!” But you certainly recall that throughout these seven years, we haven’t stopped alerting you and all our friends throughout the world about the dangers and dysfunctioning of the process: the Israeli disrespect for signed agreements in general, and for time-tables in particular, the reluctance of our Israeli partners to prepare their public opinion to accept the essence of peace – its exchange for territory, and most of all the continuation, and even intensification of illegal settlement colonization on Palestinian land, a process which went parrallel with the growth of the political power of the settlers’ lobby in Israeli politics, the growth of the capacity of the settlers to blackmail Israeli leaders and take Israeli society hostage, until they reached the point where they could veto any progress towards peace.
This collapse into the abyss, however, occurred only a few weeks after the world had been convinced, with the Camp David negotiations of last July, that we were really on the verge of a historic accord, and that the much prayed-for end of the conflict was within immediate reach. Allow me, dear comrades, to sum up the fatal chain of events that led from the hopes of the summer to the somber drama of this fall.
When the five years of the Interim period came to an end, in May 1999, we agreed to postpone the proclamation of our sovereignty on our territory, as we were legally entitled to, in order to give peace in general, and Ehud Barak in particular, a chance. And we consider that his victory in the May 1999 elections, where he obtained from the Israeli voters a clear mandate for peace, was also the result of our contribution. We went to Sharm El Sheikh and signed a Memorandum setting a new calendar. On September 13th, 1999, exactly six years after the signing of the Declaration of Principles known as the Oslo accord, we committed ourselves to conclude a permanent-status agreement within a year. At that time, as you certainly remember, the Israeli Prime minister was quite optimistic, telling critics such an agreement could even be achieved within six months. After nine months of stagnation in the final-status talks, on the background of the Israeli refusal to implement the unfulfilled clauses of the interim agreements, and while the Israeli negotiators kept on rejecting the basic legal terms of reference of the peace-process, the US President let himself be convinced that a summit at Camp David, held without any prior agreement, would operate the miracle.
It did just the opposite. While the PLO, once again, decided to postpone the materialization of statehood and sovereignty to allow for negotiations to go on, the Israeli side insisted that it would not abide by the resolutions of the UN or international legality, and demanded a Palestinian agreement to the Israeli annexion of Palestinian territory, in total contradiction with the spirit and letter of UNSC Resolution 242, which stipulates without any ambiguity the “inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war”, as a pre-condition to withdrawal from the rest. Let us say bluntly that the limited scope of this annexation can in no way be described as “generous”. Restitution of stolen property is not generosity, and the proposal to “share” part of it with the victim represents a continuation of criminal intent. But, above all, and while conceptual progress was under way on many other aspects of the conflict, the Israeli Prime minister, in Camp David, raised the unprecedented claim to Israeli sovereignty, not only on occupied Arab East-Jerusalem, but specifically on the Haram-El-Sharif, one of the three holiest shrines of Islam. Put in a “take-it-or-leave-it” package deal, this claim doomed the negotiations to collapse. President Arafat made it very clear to President Clinton on the spot. The Old City of Jerusalem belongs to all Arabs, to all Moslems and to all Christians. No Palestinian leader can abandon its custody. He also warned that the Israeli claim bore the germs of a religious war, and of the regional extension of the conflict. In spite of American, Arab and European efforts to bridge the gap, the Israeli government maintained this illegal, unreasonable and provocative demand, and talks were suspended without any guarantee or timetable for resumption.
We understand that the Israeli Prime minister, at that juncture, was facing a concrete political problem: he had gotten into a crisis with the components of his coalition, and since he has always refused to rely on the Arab parties inside the Knesseth, which could have guaranteed him a parliamentary majority, he started to court the right-wing opposition, and Likud leader Ariel Sharon in particular, in order to form a national unity government, avoid anticipated elections, and remain in power, in total betrayal of those who put him there with a mandate for peace.
This is how, on September 28th, Ariel Sharon, accompanied by hundreds of Israeli soldiers, litterally invaded the Haram El Sharif in a provocative “private visit”, in spite of the unambiguous warnings issued by Palestinian officials, both at the political and at the security level. This provocation, advertized in advance, and which has been universally condemned, aroused the predictable anger and protest among the Palestinians. It was also predictable that the following day, Friday 29th, Great Prayer Day, protest marches would take place. The reaction of the Israeli occupation forces was totally, and fatally, unappropriate, disproportionate and excessive. Eight demonstrators, mostly teenagers, were killed, nearly fifty wounded. This was a recipe for more. Protest took to the streets in all the cities and villages of Palestine, and the Israeli army, which suffered practically no casualties from stone-throwing demonstrators, reacted everywhere with the same deadly disproportion.
One cannot avoid, at that point, to mention that the Israeli security forces reacted with the same brutality to peaceful demonstrations held by the Arab citizens of Israel. Police brutality and racist mob-violence inside Israel killed 13 persons and wounded hundreds, bringing to the surface appalling hatred and genocidal discourse, in a spectacular and pitiful regression.
It is true that in the first phase of this massacre, isolated members of our security forces have sporadically returned fire in self-defense. It is also true that some elements in the avant-garde of our own movement, Fateh, have also sporadically fired back, without causing any casualty on the other side. We are committed to contain these individual initiatives, because we do not want to provide pretexts and alibis to the Israeli attempts to portray this popular protest movement as an aggressive, violent one, and because we know that the escalation of the confrontation is also an ideological, cultural and psychological one, which will complicate even more the task of the future peace-makers. It is also true that excesses have been perpetrated by Palestinian civilians in a few instances, such as the attacks on places of Jewish worship after they were evacuated, in Nablus and in Jericho. The PNA unequivocally condemned these acts, and both sites were immediately restored. We also condemned the brutal killing of two Israeli soldiers detained in a Ramallah police-station by an angry mob. Fifteen Palestinian policemen were injured while trying to protect the prisoners, whose presence in the center of the besieged and encircled city has still not been convincingly accounted for. But we cannot, and will not accept any description of the situation that would imply symmetry, and inspire some neutral call on “both parties” to refrain from violence. The violence exerted by the Israeli army and armed settlers, the shooting and shelling, the terror and the siege are phenomenae which cannot be compared, neither in quantity nor in quality, with the basically disarmed Palestinian popular uprising. This is why we insist on an international commission of inquiry. Complacency vis-à-vis the Israeli belief in the use and abuse of force has shown its counter-productive character, and we will not lend a hand to it. Israel’s undisputed military superiority cannot continue to ensure it immunity, impunity, and legal privilege.
We must tell you that the negotiations that went on for several weeks, on the background of this crisis, between the Israeli Prime minister and the right wing, wherein the latter demanded from Ehud Barak a clear departure from negotiations, an explicit abandon of the peace-process and a clear rejection of all the agreements signed by Israel as a condition to its ralliment; the readiness of the Israeli prime minister to grant the enemies of peace a veto right on the political process; the preposterous statement that the PLO is not a partner for negotiations, as though one could choose one’s partner; the permanent incitement against the Palestinian leadership, and against President Arafat in particular, as well as the totally irresponsible threats to impose a “unilateral separation” upon Palestinian self-rule areas; all those are gravely worrying signs of the continuing escalation.
This is why, pending the just and lasting peace which we can only achieve through good-faith negotiations, on the basis of international legality, we demand international protection for our people, and we ask our brother-parties in this great socialist international family to support this demand.
Paralyzed by the preparation of yesterday’s elections, caught in the overbidding race for the “Jewish vote”, the US administration has, ever since the morrow of the Camp David fiasco, forfeited its role as a “honest broker”. Can it regain it now that elections are over ? President Arafat is today in Washington, exploring this possibility. We, for our part, went to Sharm-El-Sheikh once again in the midst of those horrendous events, at the request of the US President, and upon the invitation of the Egyptian President. We were comforted by the presence, there, of both the Secretary-General of the UN and the High Commissioner of the European Union, and we are convinced that this enlargement of the sponsorship of negotiations is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of success. Europe in general, and the European Union in particular, can play a decisive role in putting this political process back on track, and the Socialist International is the moral center of gravity of Europe. This gives you accrued responsibility. We welcome your call for a special Presidium meeting, which indeed expresses your continued commitment to peace in our area. But the decisive issue is that of the substance, of the content.
At no time before has the alternative – Peace or War – been so acutely put on the agenda of our region as a whole. We are still totally committed to the idea of peace, and our movement, through its active leadership of the street, has maintained the wave of popular protest articulated to our peace and negotiation strategy. The Israeli government, under the leadership of a SI Vice-President, is trying to impose its will by force. But it is waging a unilateral war on our people, because our forces do not reciprocate fire, and do not fight back. Likewise, the last Cairo Arab Summit has also clearly asserted that it considered peace as a strategic option, and that it rejected war. It also expressed unqualified support to the Intifada, the popular upheaval in the Palestinian occupied territory. We refuse the amalgam between this basically peaceful movement and violence. We also refuse the calls to put an end to it. It is the street which has stepped in in the vacuum left open by the crisis of the peace-process, and not a movement we have deliberately ignited. Therefore we cannot call it off. The Israeli government is the only one who can stop it, not by committing more war crimes, but by withdrawing to its borders. Let us not ignore that the tension these events have caused throughout the Arab and Islamic world threatens stability everywhere, undermines Euro-Mediterranean efforts, and even whips up old racist and confessionalist demons in the North. Together we must work in earnest to defuse these mines, and to restore dialogue. This is a matter of principle, but it is also a matter of common sense, and of common interests. Let our stand today be at the height and level of this responsibility and those expectations.
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