Ghada Karmi. Al-Hayat. 14/07/07. What does Fateh, having shed the Hamas embarrassment and obeyed western diktat, hope to gain from this incompatible situation? Is it credible that the US and its western partners will abandon Israel's cause after 60 years of unstinting support to satisfy Arab needs? Tony Blair's recent and futile appointment as Middle East peace envoy sheds light on the answer. Rather than face the basic contradictions fuelling the conflict, the Quartet preferred this pointless gesture that yet again substitutes process for substance, hoping thereby to convince the Arabs that something is being done, but in reality postponing the day of reckoning.
It's a pity, and especially for Palestinians, that no one learns from history. This truism is nowhere better illustrated than in today's struggles in the Palestinian territories between Fateh and Gaza. When Hamas released the BBC journalist, Alan Johnston, last week in Gaza, after months in captivity, Fateh in the West Bank reacted with sneers and derision. Unwilling to accord Hamas the credit for this success which had eluded everyone else after only three weeks in power, a senior Fateh official described it as 'a movie where the thieves in Gaza fall out and one of them claims to be honest and brave, and the other is the bad guy'. Even Western reaction, after eighteen months of boycott and sanctions against the Hamas government, was more enthusiastic. Though none of the Quartet powers was prepared to reward Hamas by ending the siege or changing policy towards it, several calls were made for greater engagement with Hamas. This had been repeatedly said amongst European diplomats in private, but now began to be made public
The unedifying and embarrassing spectacle of the two major Palestinian factions currently squabbling amongst themselves to the delight of their enemies is an echo of an earlier scenario, then as now, infinitely more damaging to the Palestinians than to their enemies. "The Arabs have been so misguided in the conduct of their case that I sometimes wonder whether Jewish agents are not at work inside the Arab camp", wrote Sir George Rendel, a Foreign Office official in 1938, following the mismanaged and failed Arab rebellion. In 1936, the Palestinians had risen in anger against the Jewish takeover of their land and the British authorities that supported and facilitated it. For two years the people fought valiantly, suffered enormously and were brutally punished by the British in ways reminiscent of the Israeli army's methods today. They ended up starving, their leaders killed or exiled, unsupported, economically ruined, and the fruits of their struggle vitiated by internal splits and rivalry.
All this went back to the conflict between two prominent Jerusalem families, the Husseinis and Nashashibis, who competed for power throughout the 1920s and 30s, divided over how to deal with the British who ruled over Palestine at that time. The Nashashibis were amenable to working with the British and believed in compromise and accommodation. On the other hand, the Husseinis, headed by Hajj Amin, were averse to dealing with a British government so blatantly enabling Zionism to take hold in Palestine. In today's terminology, we might call the former 'moderates' and the latter 'hardliners' or 'extremists'. Or, though the parallel is not really exact, the Nashashibis might stand for Fateh and the Husseinis for Hamas. The British assisted Hajj Amin to be elected as the Mufti of Jerusalem, although he was not the front runner in that competition, and appointed him head of the Supreme Muslim Council, in the hope that he would gain them the support of the Muslims population. But they also appointed one of his Nashashibi rivals, Ragheb, mayor of Jerusalem. In a classic divide-and-rule strategy, the British played one family off against the other and, it was said, sowed discord between them to divert their attention from the struggle against the Zionists. Today likewise, Israeli and Western hands are stirring the pot between Hamas and Fateh and for exactly the same reason.
The two families united in 1935 through the creation of the Arab Higher Committee, set up to lead the popular uprising against Brtish/Zioinst colonialism. But before long, they were back fighting each other. The Arab Higher Committee split, with each side threatening, intimidating, and even killing members of the other, just as Fateh and Hamas are now doing. My uncle Mahmoud, an anti-Husseini journalist, fell victim to Hajj Amin's men in 1939 who assassinated him in Beirut, and my father, Hasan, nearly met the same fate soon afterwards. In these tit-for-tat rivalries, the real protagonists were forgotten, and the main beneficiary was the Zionists. The British reacted against the Arabs by funding and arming the Jewish settlers, and increasing the number of Jewish police by more than 2000 men. It was even speculated later that without the Arab mishandling of the 1936 rebellion the Zionist cause might still have foundered. In the aftermath, the two Palestinian sides exchanged recriminations and accusations of treachery. Hajj Amin was alleged to be a British agent, and the Nashashibi clan were called collaborators.
Today's rift between Fateh and Hamas and their bitter mutual accusations of corruption and collaboration with foreign powers have equally distracted them from the elephant in the room, Israel and its US sponsor, Britain's modern equivalent. The anomaly of Fateh, shunning, even outlawing, its natural partner, Hamas, in the struggle against Israel, and turning for help instead to the western camp, the authors of Palestine's misfortunes, recalls another sad historical parallel. When, in 1915, Sherif Hussein of Mecca pledged Arab support for the war against the Ottomans in return for British help in the struggle to gain Arab independence, he too believed their promises to do so. But Britain broke its promise and its cruel betrayal of the Sherif Hussein then should have been an object lesson for Arabs never to repeat the error. Yet, the Fateh leadership today has discarded resistance against Israel in favour of peaceful 'compromise' with an enemy that has never compromised with them, hoping that the western powers and their regional proxies, who have failed so far to give the Palestinians their state, will now do so. The meeting held at Sharm-el-Sheikh at the end of June between Abbas and Olmet with Husni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan in attendance typically yielded nothing for the Palestinians.
Without confronting the contradiction at the heart of the equation, there can be no Israeli-Palestinian or regional peace. In a similar contradiction, the Balfour Declaration, Britain in 1917 simultaneously promised Palestine to its inhabitants and also to the Zionists, sowing the seeds of the conflict that is with us until this day. Likewise now, creating an independent Palestinian state against Israel's wishes, while simultaneously supporting Israel unreservedly, cannot work. Palestinian demands of an Israeli withdrawal from the 1967 territories, including East Jerusalem, the return of refugees and full state sovereignty are all rejected by Israel. The western powers, which could have pressured the Jewish state to accept Palestinian demands, cannot do so because they are fatally compromised by their devotion to its well-being and regional supremacy. To resolve the impasse, one of the sides of the equation must fall. On past evidence, it will not be Israel's. So what does Fateh, having shed the Hamas embarrassment and obeyed western diktat, hope to gain from this incompatible situation? Is it credible that the US and its western partners will abandon Israel's cause after 60 years of unstinting support to satisfy Arab needs?
Tony Blair's recent and futile appointment as Middle East peace envoy sheds light on the answer. Rather than face the basic contradictions fuelling the conflict, the Quartet preferred this pointless gesture that yet again substitutes process for substance, hoping thereby to convince the Arabs that something is being done, but in reality postponing the day of reckoning. Palestinians, who will pay the price for this prevarication, must expose the basic contradiction in the western position that perpetuates the conflict and dooms them to a sub-human existence. They must confront those who want to solve the problem with the inconvenient truth: that trying to meet Palestinian demands while indulging Israel are incompatible aims and will never yield results. Only by shedding their differences, uniting and regrouping to fight their real enemy, and not each other, will the Palestinians have finally learned the lessons of history.
Ghada Karmi is the author of, 'Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine'.
http://english.daralhayat.com/opinion/commentators/07-2007/Article-20070714-c51abe03-c0a8-10ed-0169-5e99bb438141/story.html
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