Azmi Bishara* ponders the splintering of the Palestinian cause Developments in the West Bank and Gaza have thrown the current Palestinian tragedy into sharp relief. This tragedy resides not so much in the political divides or the state of the Palestinian leadership as it does in the deep undercurrents that shape what makes the news, or the clichés reported in the media. Political analysts may not be aware of these undercurrents or, if they are, they may not feel able to discuss them openly. Thus is made the fodder of furtive gossip. Diagnoses that do make it in to print or on to the air waves are swept up and else submerged in the flood of information and analyses which rarely discriminate between the wheat and the chaff. All is a question of opinion, vested interests and hidden agendas. This, in turn, becomes part and parcel of the production of a political mood that works to depoliticise society at a point in the national struggle when it most needs society's direct and dynamic political involvement. The battle of Camp David is not over for the Palestinians or the Arabs, even if it is over in Israel, which has rejected both the Barak formula at Camp David, and Oslo. (For the sake of clarity and precision, these are two different approaches.) Among the Palestinians, in keeping with the Arab tradition of agreeing then falling into disarray, their general opposition to Camp David quickly ran aground on the shoals of which parties would or would not have a say in the decision-making process. Since the beginning of the Intifada the factional leaderships who disagreed about the Camp David accord busied themselves setting traps for one another, regardless of whether their agendas coincided with the fixed Israeli and US agenda or the less resolute agendas of particular Arab powers. And this even as Israel and the US escalated their campaign against the Palestinian people. The banner of reform has frequently been appropriated by Palestinian forces that have not only been complicit in corruption but were themselves a product of corruption. Political discourse avoids even the most straightforward questions. Now, given that your income as an official is such and such and that you are against corruption, how did you amass such enormous wealth? It is not a question you hear. We might also ask how it is that the heads of security agencies are directly involved in politics, and have even become media celebrities, airing their opinions even on the fate of the leader who appointed them or delegated them to work with visiting foreign delegations not because of the force of their personalities but because of the positions they occupy. Is this a form of corruption? The fight against corruption has been appropriated and manipulated in a way that seems designed to make the people give up on corruption and the fight against corruption, which itself is corrupted by having been transformed into a battleground for power and influence. Certainly, the idea of fighting corruption enjoys wide popular support. However, the uncorrupt and the non-beneficiaries of corruption, whether in the PA or outside of it, have relinquished the banner of reform to the corrupt for fear of the political consequences of taking a stand against corruption within the PA. There is a catastrophic confusion between armed resistance forces and the dozens of groups that have begun to form militias to pursue private agendas on the factional level, or on an informal family or street level. Whether in the form of clan-based protection gangs or neighbourhood vigilantes, the organisers of these militias are inspired by the principle that as long as their members are sacrificing themselves for the national cause they have the right to the "payoffs" or "commissions" that others used to exact. They take for granted that as long as someone is benefiting from the coerced redistribution of wealth in society, then it should be those who lay their lives on the line for the struggle, or so goes their thinking. Such logic is laden with faultlines. Rather than curbing corruption it fosters it; indeed, it is a form of corruption, a popular extension of corruption. However, on the whole, it should be stressed that the majority of resistance groups, even the most loosely organised, are not yet involved in corruption, though the lack of a clear organisational structure makes it easy for others to misappropriate their names and use them in power struggles within the PA. The various alliances between former or current members of the PA and the militias further complicate the situation. I do not believe that a full survey into this phenomenon is necessary. As attractive as it may be to those fond of novels of the detective or espionage type, I have no heart for producing a literary portrait of the absurdity of Palestinian conditions under siege. Nevertheless, there are certain observations with political import that must be made. The first pertains to the illusory question as to whether the Palestinians should have accepted Barak's and Clinton's proposals at Camp David II. Although my answer would be a categorical no, the question is, in fact, invalid. Apart from the fact that the options are no longer even available, Barak and Clinton were far from being in full concordance. In addition, whether or not the Palestinians had accepted Barak's ideas, it does not require a great stretch of the imagination to picture how these ideas would have been received in Israel. One has only to look at the opposition to Sharon's original disengagement plan to realise how vehement the opposition to Barak's already controversial plan would have been. Taxing ourselves with this question presents a second problem, which is that it courts those who would have us think our dilemma boils down to a matter of method. The rejectionist method that turned down the proposals in Camp David is still alive and thriving, they will tell us, and its proponents have steered us from one disaster to the next and forced us to forego one opportunity after the other. Sadly, the crux of the problem is not the method but the total lack of method. Proof of this can be seen in the fact that the very forces that vociferously or surreptitiously urged us not to pass up the "golden opportunity" of the "generous offer" of Camp David succeeded marvelously in working side by side with the rejectionists in the same PA, at least before the international clamp down on it and on its president. Moreover, following the outbreak of the Intifada some of those who had approved Clinton's and Barak's ideas turned the full force of their media personalities towards supporting the Intifada and to the task of playing to the gallery. Few were taken in by the "beliefs" and "truths" they now professed. No, there is no method. What there is is the incessant blending of a determination to get the biggest part of the wretched and paltry PA cake and the rush to reach a political settlement even at the expense of fundamental issues and sometimes at the expense of secondary issues that even Israel could be persuaded to accept. Meanwhile, the thinking of those elements of the PA opposed to the rush to yield to Israeli conditions or historically bound to a different role and mindset does not make for a sturdier approach. The Caliph Muawiya's maxim, "If there is so much as a hair between you and your adversary do not let it break," no longer applies to the PA's relationship with Israel and the US. This is because according to Israel and the US the PA, as it was produced by Oslo, ceased to perform the function for which it was intended by refusing to serve as a phase for eliminating -- not solving -- the issues Oslo had defined as final status. Eventually Bush and Sharon agreed that they needed to create another Palestinian political entity tailor-made to their specifications or to encourage the emergence of a Palestinian leadership that would be more pliant on final status issues in any new bartering process. The PA is no longer a liberation movement and it has not become a state. It neither performs its former role, nor has it acquired a new role that has national or democratic legitimacy. It is in crisis, a crisis of identity, with all the attendant moral difficulties, and a crisis of a lack of strategy now that Oslo has been put to rest. At least Oslo was a strategy, even if we did not approve it. As for the current "wait and see" approach, this is not a strategy, regardless of how suspense is heightened by such trends as divergent as the unofficial attempts to placate Israel and the US, which reached its zenith with the Geneva accord (remember the Geneva accord? What did it achieve except internal Palestinian splits?), and the rush of ad hoc militias to compete with Hamas. In the absence of a carefully studied unified strategy for resistance we get gambits to outdo Hamas even during periods of ceasefire, and in the absence of a strategy for reaching a political settlement we get a negotiating gambit that was so bent on mollifying the Zionist left that it made the ICJ ruling seem like a pronouncement of the Palestinian rejectionist front. These phenomena are indicative of a profound sense of loss and lack of direction, and the uncontrolled violence and the haphazard negotiating initiatives are but two sides of the same coin. As I have said before, the only way out of this predicament is through a political formula that produces a uniform strategy for politics and resistance. This in turn requires a unified political framework that operates alongside the PA as an institution for managing the affairs of Palestinian society and meeting the requirements of its survival. Although Palestinian security forces will not be able to, and should not, end the phenomenon of militias in one go, the climate created by a uniform strategy and unified political framework will gradually weaken and marginalise this phenomenon. At the same time it is important to draw a clear distinction between the commitment the PA should have to the security of the people and attempts to exploit people's natural desire for security in order to incorporate Israeli security into the picture, thereby tacitly outlawing resistance against Israel. Under a uniform strategy for resistance, based on a careful assessment of the ingredients of success or failure, and on a consensus over what does and does not constitute a justifiable act of resistance, the notion of resistance is not inconsistent with the obligation to safeguard the domestic security of a society under occupation. Now is the time to make concrete proposals in this direction, in which connection it is also time to return to the question of corruption, on which so many people are currently trading in their dealings with a dispossessed people and impoverished society that has a natural inclination to believe that every official and institution is corrupt. Corruption in Palestine, as in other political entities, features a blend of abuse of political and economic position for personal gain, the bartering of public services in exchange for political allegiances and assorted forms of nepotism, favouritism and other deliberate obfuscations between the public and private spheres. However, it is also important to mention the corruption emanating from the donor nations and their functionaries who also link the taps of funding with expressions of political allegiance and who are quite willing to turn a blind eye to corruption if a person or party seems appropriately keen on a political settlement. The corruption that exists before the creation of the Palestinian state is far more dangerous than the corruption that exists in established states if only because of the frustration it causes at a time when the people need every source of hope. Even if the elimination of corruption does not produce an immediate improvement in the circumstances of the average citizen at least he will willingly bear his strains out of the belief that he is contributing, even if only in a small way, to the greater cause. However, when people are asked to remain steadfast in enduring hardship while all around them officials and their relatives and their associates are pursuing a different agenda, they will question the very meaning of this liberation from occupation. This is truly a moral crisis. Israel is in the process of imposing unilateral solutions and the Palestinians are being told to get used to the borders these are imposing. The first shots have already been fired in this battle. There is a close connection, which any sociologist would pick up immediately, between the closure of Gaza and the ongoing Israeli siege, and the rise of internecine violence and the fights to stake out areas of control. Such are the dynamics of the ghetto, the concentration camp and other such places where people are forcefully crammed and confined in small patches of territory. The same will apply to the West Bank where, on the model of the sealed off Gaza Strip, Israel plans to create several "West Bank strips", sealed off from Israel and from each other by the wall, the checkpoints and ring roads. Events in Gaza, against the backdrop of Israel's continued policy of repression, assassinations and construction of the wall, are tangible evidence that the Palestinians have not given the problem of ghetto or internment camp violence, which sociologists take for granted, sufficient thought. The need to accord it special study and to formulate policies to offset it cannot be overstated. This is not a superfluous matter; it is a question of survival, just as is the question of a uniform strategy and a unified national leadership when it comes to resistance and negotiation. But will these words have any impact? How often have we made such appeals? It is frustrating to know that things will happen that cannot be prevented, to be left wondering whether our worst expectations will arrive. And this, maybe, is what Larson would have felt had he not been given advanced knowledge of what would happen, though his "prediction" was based on totally different premises. * The writer is a leading Palestinian political activist and member of the Knesset.
