Too high expectations
By Danny Rubinstein

American, European and Israeli spokesmen lately have been creating great expectations of the new government that Mahmoud Abbas, Abu Mazen, is trying to put together for the Palestinian Authority. The prime minister-designate is supposed to rein in the terror, put some order in the PA governmental chaos, eradicate corruption, form a regime of law and order, and, of course, neutralize chairman Yasser Arafat, whom Israel regards as the father of all evil. After the PLC votes confidences in the Abu Mazen government, Washington will publish the road map, which is perceived as being sympathetic to the Palestinians, and which is regarded with suspicion by the Sharon government. Abu Mazen is promised visits to the White House and European capitals. The Israeli government has also promised to greet the new government with a series of steps meant to ease conditions in the territories.

The Palestinians are, of course, waiting for Abu Mazen, but their expectations are much lower, it seems. Judging, for example, by the poll published last week by the Jerusalem Media Institute, most Palestinians have very little hope from the new government, saying it won't significantly change the political reality and won't remove the daily suffering in the territories. Three years ago, the Palestinians also did not share America and Israel's high expectations from the Camp David summit. Many warned at the time that an outbreak of violence was coming. Israel interpreted that pessimism as an attempt to threaten violence to squeeze more concessions out of Ehud Barak's government. That Palestinian pessimism can now be read as a more accurate reading of reality.
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The men who are selling Palestine

David Hirst, the veteran correspondent for The Guardian, reported in 1996 on fears in Yasser Arafat's entourage that the Israelis would turn the Palestinian security forces against the Palestinian leader. According to Hirst, a Palestinian official said that the Israelis had so "penetrated" the security forces "that some of its leaders now depend on them at least as much as they do on Arafat. The time is coming when the Israelis decide that Arafat - who argues too much - has served his purpose." The official told Hirst that, "the Israelis are grooming Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas], one of the secret negotiators of the Oslo accord, to take Mr. Arafat's place, and that they will count on Muhammad Dahlan, head of Preventative Security in Gaza, to lead the putsch."

Seven years ago such fears and infighting could be dismissed as so much paranoia. And yet, as I write this, Arafat clings desperately to the rubble of his bombed-out headquarters, the Israelis having declared him "irrelevant," while the US- and Israeli-chosen Palestinian 'prime minister' Mahmoud Abbas is locked in a dispute with Arafat over the formation of a cabinet. The key sticking point is Abbas' insistence that Dahlan be placed in charge of security. Arafat's paranoia appears in this case to have been justified. Even the most level-headed observer is tempted to see in this a conspiracy.
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The war to annihilate Palestinian civil society

The IDF rules the current government, just as it ruled the previous one and the one before that. The prime ministers and ministers of defense, Barak, Sharon, Ben-Eliezer, Mofaz, and some of their reigning cheiftans, know no thought or feeling that is not militarized. The IDF, and the state it tows behind, are waging a war the sole goal of which is the utter subjugation of the Palestinian people living in the occupied territories. We should not forget this for a moment. The IDF is a criminal army. Immersion in the details of daily events -- including the shootings of children and elderly women -- diverts our gaze from the overall view, from the broad move being undertaken here, minute by minute, by well-disciplined soldiers.

The soldiers' role is to crumble the Palestinian population. Unthinkingingly, they are destroying not only the physical infrastructure of West Bank and Gaza Strip cities, not only homes and roads and fields and orchards, but also every trace of the human spirit. Over 50% of the Palestinians in the occupied territories are suffering from malnutrition. Overall health conditions verge on a catastrophe, and people in need of more than a bare minimum of health care fade silently away, uncounted among the casualties. At least 75 people have died in the last two years because the curfew, the road blocks and the ruined passes prevented them from receiving medical attention in time. Just yesterday we got word of two stillborn babies whose mothers could see the ambulances waiting from a distance, but couldn't reach them. The Palestinian educational system is limping along, functioning with extreme difficulty, and the universities hold classes in warehouses and private homes, in order to keep alive a small ember, so as not to burn out altogether. Family visits, travel from cities to villages, going to the beach -- all these are concepts long forgotten.
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