Driven Back to a Place We Would Rather Not Be

Here is what you have to understand: Palestinians want a democratic, professional, institutionalized government. They probably want a leader who is not Arafat, and who is not influenced by Arafat. But such a leader must take us someplace and give us something new. For Palestinians want their freedom before everything else. A leader independent of Arafat who simply gives away the store to the Israelis is unacceptable.

Arafat will not go away until public opinion shifts away from him. But there now seems to be only one way that can happen. The end of the era of Arafat will come with the end of the occupation. That's what Arafat stands for; if the occupation goes away, so does he. There will be no more need for him -- even he would agree. If the U.S. government were to force the Israelis to leave and give us our own state, I think all parties would be very pleasantly surprised by the outcome of the first Palestinian election. But instead, the United States ignores the whole situation. And the Israelis madly go after Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, not seeing the insult to the Palestinian people.

So, as a Palestinian citizen, I find myself in an impossible situation. I have to cheer for rulers I'm not convinced of only because the alternative -- the continued occupation -- is completely unacceptable.
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  thanks to American Samizdat

Sharon's Intentions: Destroy the Moderates and Then Continue Occupation
The Israeli-Palestinian Tango Mortale.

And what has Sharon been doing ever since he was elected? He is still misleading the Israeli public (and the US) in the pattern perfected in Lebanon. He is working to dismantle the secular Palestinian Authority and neutralize the secular civic bodies supporting Arafat, primarily Fatah activists. His war on Hamas is nothing but a war against Fatah and the pragmatic groups who in 1993 dared to enter a negotiation process with Israeli pragmatists to reach a historic compromise. The campaign against Arafat and the pragmatic forces entails encouraging Hamas and turning it into the dominant body among the Palestinians. I wish to emphasize here: This is not an inadvertent mistake by Sharon; it is the conception, over which we shall weep for generations to come.

Sharon envisages only an all-out war against the Palestinians and their total submission. The moderate position of secular Palestinian circles thus creates a problem for him, because it exposes his extremist positions. That is why he must cunningly eliminate them politically and reject a cease fire (Hudna).

According to Abu Mazen, the Hudna was designed to counter Sharon's war strategy, his argument being that the Palestinians must stop terror and unilaterally embrace the Hudna in order to show the whole world that the real refusenik of peace is Ariel Sharon. That is why Abu Mazen's regime had to be eliminated, but not in a direct manner. Sharon accomplished this first by refraining from the release of prisoners and dismantling settlements and blockades. When that did not help, he began to serially liquidate Hamas activists and leaders. This was all done in order to topple Abu Mazen's government, supposedly through Arafat's fault.
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One state for two people

Ten years ago, Israelis and Palestinians agreed to recognize each other's national rights and separate peacefully. But Oslo failed utterly to accomplish what it set out to do: bring an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in return for peace.

Instead, it divided the Palestinian territories into 202 separate cantons, diminishing the inhabitants' access to employment, health and education and reducing their gross domestic product by more than a quarter. The number of Israeli settlers doubled in the 10 years, and a complex network of bypass roads rendered the occupation irreversible.

How did such a dramatic turn of events come about?
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  thanks to Aron's Israel Peace Weblog

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An Israeli Paratrooper Investigates Illegal Settlements

This is a three part series that is a must read...

Ariel Sharon and the Geometry of Occupation:
strategic points, flexible lines, tense surfaces, political volumes

Israel’s ‘barrier’, ‘wall’, or ‘separation fence’ across the West Bank is the latest architectural expression of a twenty-year old political strategy. In a mind-opening three-part series that extends his renowned “The Politics of Verticality” into a new dimension, Eyal Weizman offers a penetrating analysis of how ideas about power, security and planning intersect with politics to shape the spaces in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict develops.

Part one: Border versus frontier
The post-1967 transformation of the occupied territories is the story of how Israeli military and civilian planning became the executive arm of geopolitical strategy. The Suez Canal battles of the Yom Kippur war in 1973 were a national trauma that returned the ‘frontier’ to the Israeli public imagination. The figure of Ariel Sharon is central to this process.
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Part two: Architecture as war by other means
How does Ariel Sharon imagine territory and practice space? The settlements, the ‘battle for the hilltops’, and now the security fence embody his long-term territorial ambition: to combine control of the West Bank with physical separation of its populations.
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Part three: Temporary permanence
The ‘barrier’ exemplifies the dystopian logic of Israeli occupation of the West Bank, where a fragmented, borderless, always-provisional territory refuses accommodation with security ambitions that seek definitiveness. There is no spatial-technical design solution to the conflict: it can only be political.
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Terrorism and Oslo

But that, too, is only part of the truth. Some 60 Israelis were killed during the first five months of the intifada, or 12 per month, while Ehud Barak was Israel's prime minister. In the 31 months since March 7, 2001, when Ariel Sharon took over, the death rate has exploded to nearly 25 per month, or about 770 deaths in all.

Three per month under the Oslo accords. Twenty-five per month under the Sharon plan. Those are the numbers.

To be sure, we would not dream of suggesting that Israel's prime minister is guilty of the deaths of those 770 victims of terrorism. The victims of terrorism were killed by terrorists. To suggest otherwise would be to pervert history. Sharon is no more guilty of the deaths of the Israelis killed on his watch than Yitzhak Rabin was guilty of the deaths of the Israelis killed when he was prime minister, or Yitzhak Shamir when he was prime minister before that.

It's become fashionable among conservatives in Washington and Jerusalem to blame the spectacular failures of their governance on near-forgotten episodes in history. Republicans have lately begun blaming the economic disaster of the Bush administration on the policies of Jimmy Carter, who was president between 1977 and 1981. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's finance minister, recently announced that the troubles of the Israeli economy are the fault of Berl Katznelson, a Labor Party theoretician who died in 1944. And everyone likes to blame the spiraling violence that now plagues Israel on the diplomatic initiative undertaken in the fall of 1993.

But the numbers don't add up.
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#24 U.S. Aid to Israel Fuels Repressive Occupation in Palestine   thanks to Aron's Israel Peace Weblog

A long and excellent background piece. A must read...

FROM BARAK TO THE ROAD MAP

One of the main flaws of the Oslo accords was the assumption that the Palestinian Authority would be a subcontractor regime, working to maintain Israel’s security, while all other issues would be subject to endless rounds of negotiations with every concession depending on Israeli generosity. This approach proved futile. In addition, the collapse of the Oslo process showed that the long period of ‘trust building’ caused mainly mutual distrust and offered plenty of opportunities for internal projectionist forces to sabotage any agreements. A minimal requirement of a realistic peace plan is to give the Palestinians some possibility of achieving one of their major aims: a sovereign state over 22 per cent of historic Palestine. An explicit statement of this goal could create a greater symmetry among the parties and provide incentives for settling all the additional issues such as Jerusalem, refugees, the division of water resources and so on. Finally, the Road Map includes two contradictory demands on the Palestinians, as preconditions for a settlement: on the one hand, they are to establish an authoritarian regime to fight dissident terror organizations; on the other they are to democratize their polity. Again, the understanding of the causality at stake needs to be reversed, if this is not to be simply a hypocritical pretext for avoiding any agreement—for a settlement itself, with popular backing, might be the best means to accelerate the democratization of all the parties involved. Without, at the very least, such adaptations as these, the Road Map merely points the way to the continued politicide of the Palestinian people under the umbrella of a Pax Americana.
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  thanks to Altercation