A Place For Our Dream...

by Mustafa Barghouti
July 30, 2003

As the wrangling over the roadmap continues and the Palestinian people are subjected to unprecedented new forms of horror, we may find it helpful to put the details of that horror to one side for a moment, and sketch a general overview of our situation. The Oslo process produced a truce that lasted for seven years. But it was, with a few exceptions, a one- sided truce -- one which the Palestinians mostly observed, while the Israelis continued their attacks on our interests and lands, thus wrecking the prospects of peace. This assault was carried out on three levels.

Firstly, since the assassination of Rabin, Israel has been governed by the right. True, there was Barak in the interval between Netanyahu and Sharon; but once in power, Barak pursued policies which were totally in line with right-wing interests. In particular, he undermined the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority (PA) by spreading the myth that it was the PA that had rejected the "generous" political offer he had made them, because it was determined to destroy Israel. This myth fed the momentum of the Zionist right-wing as it sought to block the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

Secondly, under Oslo, the building of settlements continued unabated. Since the signing of the accords, over 100 new settlements have been created, and the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories has doubled. This was not spontaneous, 'organic' expansion. It was the result of a deliberate and programmed attempt to change the status quo to an extent unprecedented during the previous 27 years of occupation. Indeed, the only period during which the pace of settlement building significantly slowed was that which immediately preceded the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, following the outbreak of the 1987 Intifada.

The post-93 expansion of settlements was an elaborate process. Not only were the settlements themselves often on a large scale, but they needed an intricate network of roads to link them to each other and to Israel. The aim was not to create houses for an expanding Israeli population, but to change the economic and political geography of the occupied territories. Through its settlement activities, Israel has sought to transform the West Bank into ethnically Israeli territory, in which Palestinian villages and towns are nothing more than isolated outposts. Between 1967 and 1993, Israel had tried to alter particular facts on the ground, mostly in Jerusalem. During the Oslo truce, they sought to transform the geographical character of the occupied territories as a whole, in order to claim these lands for themselves. Yet even this is nothing new, for this is exactly what Israel had already done in the Galilee, the Negev, and Jaffa, where it succeeded in changing the demographics. The territories, however, presented Israel with a more complex problem, because the Palestinians there had stayed on their land.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=3974

Thanks for the link.

:thumbsup:

Glad I took the time to read it before turning in.

Thanks

POWER TO THE INITIATIVE

A stress on the Human Factors Involved. I certainly couldn't say it any better so I will move over and let a Palestinian Scholar expound upon the Affirmations required to instill Dignity and Confidence in the People and Keep the DREAM alive.

SNIP

Some of them are obvious and scarcely need insistence here. SUMUD is crucial, as is the building of civil institutions by and for Palestinians, quite independently of what the Palestinian Authority may or may not have in mind. For we have a tendency to think only in literal terms, not sufficiently in symbolic or moral ones. The greatest victory of Zionism has been a sustained one for a whole century: to persuade Jews and others that "a return" to an empty land is the proper, indeed the only solution for the afflictions of genocide and anti-Semitism. What has been totally lost in this project of course is the exorbitant price paid by Palestinians who, as invisible, silent, or mainly irrational and violent "lesser" beings have all along been considered sacrificeable to the grand Zionist fulfilment. After spending many years living, studying and being active in the struggle for Palestinian rights I am more convinced than ever that we have totally neglected the effort -- the human effort -- required to demonstrate to the world the immorality of what was done to us: this, I now think, is the essential task facing us as a people now.

Unless we mobilise ourselves and our friends and, above all, our voices so that the Zionist project can systematically be shown for what it is and was, we can never expect any change in our status as an inferior and dominated people. Even as Arafat and his men try to unsuccessfully deal with Israel's actions they seem to have forgotten that no voice (voices) speaks for the suffering of the Palestinians, no effort is made to record systematically the wrong we suffer, no energy is expended on trying to organize our various expatriate communities so that they can undertake the task of dramatising and finally defeating the legitimacy of the plan to take the whole of Palestine, every significant inch of our land, every aspect of our past as a people, every possibility of self-determination in the future. For at bottom our struggle with Zionism must be won first on the moral level, and then can be fought in negotiations from a position of moral strength, given that militarily and economically we will always be weaker than Israel and its supporters.

The importance of this was first borne out for me when I visited South Africa in May of 1991. Mandela had already been released, exile leaders of the ANC had been repatriated, and the stage was set for the huge political transformation that was to ensue with democratic elections four years later and the victory of the "one person one vote" programme of the ANC. When I was there I visited the ANC's headquarters in downtown Johannesburg; a few scant weeks before the organization was considered terrorist, and no legitimacy at all attached to it. I was stunned by the complete reversal. Speaking to Walter Sisulu, who had been exiled for almost 30 years and was second only to Mandela in authority and prestige, I asked him how the transformation had been possible. What exactly did the ANC do to turn defeat into victory? "You must remember," he said, "that during the eighties we were beaten in South Africa; the organization was wrecked by the police, our bases in neighbouring countries were routinely attacked by the South African army, our leaders were in jail or in exile or killed. We then realized that our only hope was to concentrate on the international area, and there to delegitimize apartheid. We organized in every major Western city; we initiated committees, we prodded the media, we held meetings and demonstrations, not once or twice but thousands of times. We organized university campuses, and churches, and labour unions, and business people, and professional groups." He paused for a moment and then said something that I shall never forget as long as I live. "Every victory that we registered in London, Glasgow, or Iowa City, or Toulouse, or Berlin, or Stockholm gave the people at home a sense of hope, and renewed their determination not to give up the struggle. In time we morally isolated the South African regime and its policy of apartheid so that even though militarily we could not do much to hurt them, in the end they came to us, asking for negotiations. We never changed or retreated from our basic programme, our central demand: one person, one vote."

more...

http://leb.net/~bcome/palestine/strategies.html