[News] Fisk: There Will Be No Middle East Peace Without Justice

[News at freedomarchives.org]

There Will Be No Middle East Peace Without Justice; At No Point
Yesterday Did Anyone Mention Occupation

By Robert Fisk
The Independent, 9 February 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=609177

So, the Palestinians will end their occupation of Israel. No more
will Palestinian tanks smash their way into Haifa and Tel Aviv. No
more will Palestinian F-18s bomb Israeli population centres. No
more will Palestinian Apache helicopters carry out "targeted
killings" - ie: murders - of Israeli military leaders.

The Palestinians have promised to end all "acts of violence"
against Israelis while Israel has promised to end all "military
activity" against Palestinians. So that's it, then. Peace in our
time.

A Martian - even a well-educated Martian - would have gathered
that this was the message, supposing he dropped in on the fantasy
world of Sharm el-Sheikh yesterday. The Palestinians had been
committing "violence", the Israelis carrying out "innocent"
operations. Palestinian "violence" or "terror and violence" - the
latter a more popular phrase since it carried the stigma of 11
September 2001 - was now at an end. Mahmoud Abbas - who told a
close Lebanese friend this year that he wore a suit and tie so
that he would look "different" to Yasser Arafat - went along with
all this. Just which people were occupying the homes of which
other people remained a mystery.

Silver-haired and wisdom-burdened, Mahmoud Abbas looked the part.
We had to forget that it was this same Abbas who wrote the Oslo
Accords, who in 1,000 pages failed to use - even once - the word
"occupation", and who talked not of Israeli "withdrawal" from
Palestinian territory, but of "redeployment".

At no point yesterday did anyone mention occupation. Like sex,
"occupation" had to be censored out of the historical narrative.
As usual - as in Oslo - the real issues were put back to a later
date. Refugees, the "right of return", East Jerusalem as a
Palestinian capital: let's deal with them later.

Never before have we been in such need of the caustic voice of the
late Edward Said. Settlements - Jewish colonies for Jews, and Jews
only, on Arab land - were not, of course, discussed yesterday. Nor
was East Jerusalem. Nor was the "right of return" of 1948
refugees. These are the "unrealistic dreams" that were referred to
by the Israelis yesterday.

All this will be discussed "later" - as they were supposed to be
in Abbas's hopeless Oslo agreement. As long as you can postpone
the real causes of war, that's OK. "An end to violence," that has
cost 4,000 deaths - it was all said yesterday, minus the
all-important equation that two-thirds of these were Palestinian
lives. Peace, peace, peace. It was like terrorism, terrorism,
terrorism. It was the sort of stuff you could buy off a
supermarket shelf. If only.

At the end of the day the issues were these. Will the Israelis
close down their massive settlements in the West Bank, including
those which surround Jerusalem? No mention of this yesterday. Will
they end the expansion of Jewish settlements - for Jews, and Jews
only, across the Palestinian West Bank? No mention of this
yesterday. Will they allow the Palestinians to have a capital in
Arab East Jerusalem? No mention of this yesterday. Will the
Palestinians truly end their "intifada" - including their
murderous suicide bombings - as a result of these non-existent
promises?

Like the Iraqi elections - which were also held under foreign
occupation - the Israeli-Palestinian talks were historic because
they were "historic". US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice,
"warned" Palestinians that they must "control violence" but there
was, as usual, no request to "control" the violence of the Israeli
army.

Because the sine qua non of the equation was that the Palestinians
were guilty. That the Palestinians were the "violent" party -
hence the admonition that the Palestinians must end "violence"
while the Israelis would merely end "operations". The
Palestinians, it seems, are generically violent. The Israelis
generically law-abiding; the latter carry out "operations".
Mahmoud Abbas went along with this nonsense.

It was all too clear in the reporting of yesterday's events. What
was on offer, said CNN, was "an end to all violence" - as if
occupation and illegal colonisation was not a form of violence.
The American Associated Press news agency talked gutlessly about
"towns that, for now, continue to be under Israeli security
control" - in other words, under Israeli occupation, although they
would not tell their readers this.

So Mahmoud Abbas is going to be the Hamid Karzai of Palestine, his
tie the equivalent of Karzai's green gown, "our" new man in
Palestine, the "tsunami" that has washed away the contamination of
Yasser Arafat, whose grave Condoleezza Rice managed to avoid. But
the tank-traps remain: East Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and the
"right of return" of 1948 Palestinians to the homes they lost.

If we are going to clap our hands like the Sharm El-Sheikh
"peacemakers" yesterday, we'd better realise that unless we are
going to resolve these great issues of injustice now, this new act
of "peacemaking" will prove to be as bloody as Oslo. Ask Mahmoud
Abbas. He was the author of that first fatal agreement.

The Freedom Archives
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