Under the threat of significant "sanctions," Syria is "required" to surrender its political discourse and to halt any support for Palestinian liberation and resistance in Lebanon.
Colonized Iraq is "required" to "normalize relations" with Israel, extend an oil pipeline to the port of Haifa, fundamentally alter its written Arab history and educational curriculum, and extract itself from the popular Pan-Arab consensus for unity and liberation.
The responsibilities of Jordan and Egypt to the rest of the Arab World are effectively removed. Rather than belonging to and representing their Arab citizens, Jordan and Egypt are transformed into aid-dependent neo-colonial polities. Their task is to establish regional security in collaboration with Israel, and to open Arab gates to the advances of globalization - none of whose benefits accrue to the people.
The Arabian Peninsula has been transformed into a military base for U.S. troops. Transnational corporations and direct U.S. and European-related interests dominate the economies and national sovereignty of North and East African Arab states. Borders, forms of government, and national infrastructure are being reconfigured largely to meet the dictates of the U.S. administration and U.S. lending institutions.
The ultimate goal of Israel and the U.S. administration is to effectively de-Arabize the Arab World.
Simultaneously as the U.S. administration embarks on redrawing the political map of a region thousands of miles away, it imposes yet another war within. It positions Arabs and Muslims as conspirators and fifth columnists, gradually yanking away their constitutional rights through a multitude of regulations and laws under the guise of "Homeland Security." The foreign-domestic duality of the U.S. administration's quest for empire has no borders.
Mechanisms of Control
In order to gain acceptance for this project, the joint pact between Israel and the U.S. government employs not only clear colonialist tactics of military takeovers and brute force, but also less confrontational (although equally dangerous) and low intensity methods of normalizing defeatist notions. To that effect, the United States and Israel have succeeded in securing a long line of applicants for the job of propagating a defeatist mentality from within.
In an attempt to place the Arab people in perpetual servitude, those insisting on full independence and the legitimate and inalienable Palestinian national and individual rights are positioned as extremists deserving the wrath of "the international community." Alternatively, those who accept prescribed duties and partial semi-rights are hailed as brave heroes, heavily rewarded, and are incorporated as obedient functionaries into the system of dominance. The more drastic the departure from Arab and Palestinian national rights, the more appealing the reward, and the more generous is the praise.
Arab regimes have been fulfilling their dictated role for a long while. Historically and at present, prisons run by these regimes have been filled with activists, intellectuals, unionists, and young students who challenge the injustice of the status quo. But this dangerous course has also expanded and has taken hold on other levels. Increasingly, various voices and organizational entities have joined the pact, and are unabashedly implementing the U.S.-Israeli vision as they compete for favor from D.C. and Tel Aviv. They are executing prescribed duties while masking their real political intent through ambiguous "diplomatic" language. Many of these voices have gone so far as to leverage the apparatus and resources of existing organizations (or create their own) to market their narrow political agenda.
The Role of the New Functionaries
This course found its natural extension and ultimate purpose in Iraq, where the U.S. administration is engaged today in imposing obedient functionaries who for years have advanced the U.S. vision on various levels. But this is not limited to Iraq; the pact between Israel and the U.S. administration extends to all areas where potential strategic benefits lie - the consequences to Arab life and liberty be damned.
Examples of entities serving the U.S. administration's vision have sprung up everywhere, with significant financial backing, consistent political cover, and major media platforms. Almost uniformly, these entities attempt illogically to equate the violence of colonization on one hand, with the people's natural and legitimate resistance against colonial rule on the other. Some have begun using catch phrases such as "clashists, to rhyme with fascists," joining the chorus that demonizes resistance and relegates the anti-colonial movement to the margin.
The Palestinian right of return is a primary target of this tendency, simply because it is the core of all issues. Self-appointed "task force" leaders have begun to use cryptic diplomatic language about giving refugees "options" (i.e., "repatriation" to Western Europe, Canada, and the U.S.) in order to mask their intent of removing the right of return as a central Palestinian Arab demand - a demand that challenges Zionism on its face and strips it naked of its neo-liberal cover. To pave the way for implementing U.S.-Israeli "pragmatism," these Palestinian yes-men and yes-women are willing to abrogate the right of return with the morally reprehensible goal of preserving the "Jewish-only" demographic make up of Israel.
The trend of installing individuals who claim "centrist" positions, but who in reality speak the political language of the U.S. administration and Israel, is neither new nor limited to Palestine, Iraq, or the wider Arab World. Afghanistan is a dramatic example, where the U.S. government, to implement programs prescribed within its hegemonic model, handpicked the head of the state, formulated a government, and created a faade of democracy. All the while, the spin-doctors hailed the "return" of a "pluralistic and representative" government - never mind its arrival on a U.S. tank.
Rather than focusing on material realities and the gross power differentials that produce these realities, the self-styled "centrists" cloak their invitations - to war criminals, to proud Zionists, and to representatives of the U.S. police state's apparatus - in a liberal garb that supposedly and magnanimously reflects an "acceptance of all views."
For a Constitutional Citizenship Anchored in the Principles of Justice
In the United States, the people's membership in a constitutional society under the protection of laws and democratic representation is being purposely confused with a false allegiance to the designs of a hawkish U.S. administration. Increasingly, swearing one's political allegiance to the dominant empire is becoming a prerequisite to "good" citizenship. Rather than assume our natural role with various other communities and social forces in our joint struggle for a better and more just society, Arabs in the U.S. are being tricked and strong-armed by the many trumpeters of the administration to accept increasingly more subservient roles. The intentional obfuscation between legitimate constitutional belonging on the one hand, and roles of servitude to the current reigning ideology on the other, is being played out in full. In this context, the right to dissent (the anchor of any real participatory democracy) is vilified, while acts of blind obedience are hailed as appropriately within the orbit of civic duties and obligations.
With this call for a Pan-Arab Consensus Platform, we present an alternative vision. We envision a world that is anchored in justice and that is based on equity between peoples and nations. We seek a grassroots empowerment that protects everyone and marginalizes no one. We seek a consensus that does not leave anyone behind.
The Call to Join Us
In this context, we call on the Arab-American and Palestinian communities to resist all attempts to strip away our rights. We reject the strategic attempts to replace the unyielding demands of the Palestinian people in exile with a confused and opportunistic "state-building" model. We proclaim our resistance to political servitude and defeatist tendencies. We are certain that the collective Arab history of anti-colonialism, resistance, and struggle for liberation, will surmount this challenge.
We call on everyone to join together in formulating a Pan-Arab consensus on issues from Palestinian liberation and ending the colonial occupation of Iraq, to combating the war at home.
In formulating this consensus, we have taken notice of the shortcomings of previous projects for Pan-Arab unity, drawn from the successes of our collective experience, and projected a vision for a future based on the combined new realities of our people and the world.
In a time when regional and international alliances are emerging on the economic and political scene, Pan-Arab unity continues to be an existential imperative and a historic yearning that must become reality.
We initiate the discussion by proposing the following draft consensus platform:
1. We reject colonial occupations in all forms anywhere, including Iraq, the Golan Heights, all remaining portions of Southern Lebanon, and Palestine.
2. We hold that colonial rule is the anti-thesis of a participatory people's government, and hereby fully reject the notion that military conquest can in any way produce democracy.
3. We recognize that the Arab people, like all peoples, have the right and the duty to resist colonization, and to struggle for social and economic justice.
4. We consider Palestine to be indivisible from the rest of the Arab World's heritage and culture, despite the passage of time.
5. We insist that while ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is a right due to the Palestinian people, it is far from being a substitute for the goal of liberating the Arab people from Zionist settler-colonialism. Terminating the occupation is not an upper ceiling that either displaces or mitigates all of our other inalienable rights.
6. We reject any compromise on the individual and collective Palestinian right to return, and declare that no single person or entity has the authority to dispense or negotiate this fundamental national right.
7. We maintain that the Palestinian Arab people within the 1948 borders of Palestine are part and parcel of the totality of the Palestinian people, deserving along with all displaced refugees, national, civil, and human rights.
8. We reaffirm our rejection of Zionism as a form of racism, and emphasize our active refusal to normalize either with Zionists or with their institutions.
9. We uphold the individual and collective rights of all indigenous people in the Arab World regardless of background.
10. We regard the constitutional rights of Arab-Americans in the United States as inviolable, despite the unabashed agenda of the hawkish U.S. administration, and we reject any abrogation or minimization in part or in total of such rights. We seek to safeguard our position, as individuals and as members of a collective, to struggle within constitutional means along with all others for a just nation that is at peace with itself and the world.
For decades the Arab people and all those fighting for liberation have recognized that the Palestinian struggle cannot be reduced to a mini-state, that it is Arab in character, and that it represents a historic stand against colonial dominance in all of its manifestations. It is within the context of decolonization that we affirm the inextricable link between the liberation of Iraq and Palestine, and the international movement against war and hegemony.
The assault on our people and community is massive, and is employing the most dangerous of all tactics: destroying a people from within. We cannot but rise to the challenge, and prevent the fall of the Arab consensus.
Safeguarding our collective Pan-Arab consensus has become priority one, and we accept this responsibility.
To join the call for unity and consensus and to participate in formulating future steps, please write to: panarabplatform@yahoo.com
By alphabetical order:
Adel Samara; Ban Al-Wardi; Bassam Bahour; Dalia Sadiq; Eid Mustafa; Elias Rashmawi; Eyad Kishawi; Eyad Latif; Fadhil Al-Kazily; Fadia Rafeedie; Fadwa El Guindi; Free Arab Voice Editorial Board; Hanna Hanania; Hatem Bazian; Husam Abu-Sneineh; Hussain Agrama; Ibrahim Alloush; Ihab Darwish; Issam Rafeedie; Jamal Kanj; Jamal Saleh; Jess Ghannam; Johnny Batarseh; Khairi Abuljebain; Khaled Barakat; Lara Kiswani; Layla Kaiksow; Mahmud Ahmed; Marwan Abderrazzaq; Mary Harb; Masad Arbid; Mazin Yehya; Michael Shahin; Michel Shehadeh; Monadel Herzallah; Muna Coobti; Musa Al-Hindi; Nabil Migalli; Nader Abuljebain; Nadine Naber; Nasri Zakharia; Nidal Rafeedie; Nina Shoman; Omar Kamhieh; Omar Chaikhouni, Osama Abuljebain; Osama Doumani; Osama Qasem; Raja Bisharat; Rami Kishek; Ramiz Rafeedie; Randa Jamal; Reem Awad-Rashmawi; Rima Anebtawi; Ryan Elamine; Salman Abu Sitta; Samah Idriss; Samiha Saleh; Samira Sood; Senan Khairie; Susan Abdallah; Yousef Abudayyeh; Zahi Damuni; Zeina Zaatari
By George Bisharat
Reprinted from the Los Angeles Times
January 25, 2003
It is a tragic irony that, more than 55 years ago, one desperate people seeking sanctuary from murderous racism decimated another — and continue to oppress its scattered survivors to this day. In 1948, about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, their land and possessions taken by the new Jewish state of Israel. This included the Jerusalem home of my grandparents, Hanna and Mathilde Bisharat, which was expropriated through a process tantamount to state-sanctioned theft.
Today, many assume that to achieve Middle East peace, we Palestinians must surrender our right to return to our homes and homeland. Millions of Palestinians — with memories and photographs of our stolen properties, keys to our front doors, and an abiding sense of injustice — are expected to swallow our losses in order to facilitate a “two-state solution.”
But it’s not that simple. Although Israel has claimed that Palestinians willingly abandoned Palestine after being urged to leave in radio broadcasts by Arab leaders, a review of broadcast transcripts by Irish diplomat Erskine Childers in 1961 revealed that Palestinians were exhorted by Arab leaders to stay, not leave their homes. In fact, Yigal Allon, commander of Palmach, the elite Zionist troops, and later Israeli foreign minister, launched a whispering campaign to terrorize Palestinians into flight.
Nor were we simply unintended victims of a war launched by the Arab states against Israel. As far back as the late 19th century, leaders of Political Zionism (the movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine) advocated “transfer” of the Palestinians, by force if necessary. In 1948, Jews owned only 11% of the land allocated by the United Nations to the Jewish state — not enough for a viable economy. As David Ben-Gurion said in February 1948 before he became prime minister of Israel: “The war will give us the land. The concepts of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peace concepts only, and in war they lose their whole meaning.”
Zionist leaders knew that an Arab minority of 40% would challenge the Jewish demographic dominance they sought. Hence, nearly half of the Palestinian refugees ultimately expelled were forced out before the Arab states attacked Israel in May 1948. Israeli historian Benny Morris documented 24 massacres of Palestinian civilians, some claiming hundreds of unarmed men, women and children, during subsequent fighting. Thousands more Palestinians were, like the residents of Majdal (now Ashkelon) — a southern coastal city 15 miles north of the Gaza Strip — chased across the border into Gaza after the armistice of 1949.
Palestine had to be “cleansed” of its native population to establish Israel as a Jewish state. Ironically, those who today protest that the return of the refugees would destroy Israel unwittingly confirm this viewpoint, for the refugees are simply the Palestinians and their offspring who would have become Israeli citizens had they not been exiled.
Israel’s denial of responsibility for the refugees and rejection of their repatriation (intransigence that was condemned early on by a U.S. official as “morally reprehensible”) is nearly as offensive as the original expulsion itself. Israel welcomed immigrant Jews from all over the world but shot Palestinians who tried to return to recover movable property, harvest the fruit of their orchards or reclaim their homes. Oxford professor Avi Shlaim concluded in his book “The Iron Wall” that “between 2,700 and 5,000 [Palestinian] infiltrators were killed in the period 1949-56, the great majority of them unarmed.”
Nothing the Palestinians had done merited this treatment, something the international community has consistently recognized. A 1948 U.N. resolution recognizing the Palestinian right of return has been annually — and almost unanimously — reaffirmed ever since. The Palestinian right of return is also supported by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
The two-state solution envisioned today would probably ameliorate the conditions of the one-third of the Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There, Palestinians face incessant military attacks that have demolished homes and orchards and killed an average of nearly 70 Palestinians per month over the last three years. A smothering matrix of closures, curfews and checkpoints restricts movement and has caused unemployment to soar to more than 70% and threaten Palestinian children with malnutrition. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers, shock troops in the grinding 36-year campaign to seize and colonize yet more Palestinian land, speed through the West Bank and Gaza Strip on “Jewish only” roads. The oppressive features of Israeli military occupation were entrenched long before Palestinians resorted in the mid-1990s to the desperate — yet still indefensible — tactic of suicide bombings to slow the colonizing juggernaut.
But this two-state solution would not address the concerns of 1.2 million Palestinians living in Israel as second-class citizens. Palestinian citizens there possess formal political rights — that much Israel can afford after expelling most Palestinians in 1948. But these Palestinians have restricted access to land (most real property in Israel is owned by the state or the Jewish National Fund and is leased to Jews only). They are also forced to carry identity cards that brand them as non-Jews, and they cannot serve in the armed forces (the key to many benefits in Israeli society). Palestinian towns and villages are starved of resources, with many lacking connections to the country’s electrical or water systems. Government policies, from immigration to family planning, are designed to counter the “demographic threat” Israelis fear in the higher birthrate of Palestinian citizens. Israeli law enshrines the principle that Israel is the “state of the Jewish people,” and it lacks firm guarantees of the legal equality of all citizens.
Nor would the two-state solution fairly redress the rights of diaspora Palestinians — permitting us only return to a new, already overcrowded and underfunded “statelet” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
There is no bar to implementing the Palestinians’ right of return. If there is room in Israel for a million Russian immigrants (including many non-Jews), there is room for those Palestinians who would elect return over other legal options. The sole obstacle is Israel’s desire to maintain a “demographic balance” favorable to Jews.
Why is it self-evident that our international legal rights should give way to cement dominance of Jews over Palestinians in Israel? Why is this assumption unquestioned — especially in the U.S., which fought a civil war for the ideal of equal rights under the law? How do claims that are 2,000 years old trump our rights when we have modern deeds in hand? Why should Palestinians pay for a European holocaust? Why do U.S. officials — including our two Democratic senators in this multicultural state — unconditionally support Israel with billions in tax dollars while ignoring glaring contradictions between Jewish exclusivism and truly democratic values? Would Americans tolerate any group placing its religious symbol on the national flag, appropriating the state for some citizens rather than all and pursuing policies systematically giving privileges to its members over others?
Palestinians are prepared to sacrifice for a just and therefore lasting peace, but not to simply formalize our dispossession and exile or our institutionalized subordination in Israel.
Isn’t it time to explore a way for Jews to co-inhabit Israel/Palestine without excluding, dominating and oppressing Palestinians? The past cannot be undone — but the future can be. We, Israelis and Palestinians together, should be seeking to form a society founded on tolerance and mutual respect for each other’s humanity, a country that would truly be the “light unto nations” that Israel always aspired to be. When title to our home is restored — and the rights of its current occupants have been fully respected — I hope one day to stand in front of it with my family and welcome neighbors and visitors of all faiths and backgrounds, as my grandparents did before 1948.