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<dd><h1><b>Reducing the Palestinians </b></h1>
<dd><font size=3>The Palestinian people cannot be legislated out of
existence, writes Joseph Massad<a href="#1">*</a></b> <br>
<br>
<dd>One of the most important changes that the Oslo process brought about
was the de facto transformation, indeed the ultimate corruption, of the
Palestine Liberation Organisation, from a liberation movement
representing the entire Palestinian people, into a vassal regime called
the Palestinian Authority (PA), representing only one third of the
Palestinian people. What is quite insidious in this process is how the
PA, conscious of this transformation, continues to speak of the
"Palestinian people", which had been reduced through the Oslo
Accords to those West Bank and Gaza Palestinians it now represents.
Diaspora Palestinians are simply referred to, in accordance with US and
Israeli parlance, as "refugees", and Israeli Palestinians are
referred to by Israeli diktat as "Israeli Arabs". In doing so,
not only has the scope of the Palestinian leadership and its
representative status of the whole Palestinian people (achieved in
international fora in 1974 after a strenuous struggle) been substantially
reduced, but the Palestinian people themselves were diminished
demographically by the PA's appropriation of the designation
"Palestinian people" to refer to a mere third of Palestinians.
<br><br>
<dd>This has had an immensely deleterious effect on those Palestinians
who have been excluded from the designation "the Palestinian
people", as, according to the Geneva Document, all their grievances
are null and void after Mr Abed Rabbo signed the agreement on behalf of
the PLO</i> (not the PA), claiming to represent the entire Palestinian
people. <br><br>
<dd>The Geneva Document is explicit on this issue: "No further
claims related to events prior to this Agreement may be raised by either
Party." This demographic diminution of the Palestinian people was
carried out with an important twist: while the PA will no longer fight
for the rights of diaspora Palestinians and Israeli Palestinians, it can,
in reclaiming its former status as the PLO temporarily, compromise and
surrender all their rights to gain some rights for the portion of the
Palestinians it now claims is</i> "the Palestinian people".
Thus, in order to obtain a measure of independence from Israeli
occupation for West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, the PA recognises
Israel's right to be a Jewish racist state -- that has the right to
discriminate against Israeli Palestinians -- and surrenders the
internationally recognised rights of diaspora Palestinians to return and
compensation. This has been the logic of Oslo, and it also governs the
Geneva Document. It is thus essential to point out that the Geneva
Document was signed by Palestinians who were not even elected by West
Bank and Gaza Palestinians, much less the entire Palestinian people,
whose rights they surrendered. <br><br>
<dd>There is a parallel process that unfolded on the Israeli side. While
Israel has no legitimacy and is not recognised by any international body
as a "representative" of the Jewish people worldwide but rather
as the state of the Israeli people, who are citizens of it, the PLO and
the PA, contrary to world opinion -- including that of the United Nations
and the United States -- have recognised Israel's jurisdiction over world
Jewry. Thus, it is not the Israeli people's rights that are recognised in
the Geneva Document; rather it is those of the "Jewish people"
tout court</i>. In the Geneva Document, the signatories affirm that
"this agreement marks the recognition of the right of the Jewish
people to statehood." While the internationally recognised status of
the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people has been reduced
by one third since Oslo and more recently by the Geneva Accords, the
representative status of the Israeli government has been expanded
threefold when the PA and its "unofficial" representatives
recognised Israel's claims on world Jewry as legitimate. Thus, what this
"peace" formula has made possible is the reduction of the
Palestinian people and the multiplication of Israeli Jews. This has been
done despite the fact that the majority of Jews living outside Israel are
not Israeli citizens nor have any bodies representing them endowing the
Israeli State with representative powers on their behalf. <br><br>
<dd>In this vein, the Geneva Document speaks of how, "[r]ecognising
that after years of living in mutual fear and insecurity, both peoples
need to enter an era of peace, security and stability, entailing all
necessary actions by the parties to guarantee the realisation of this
era." The two "peoples" spoken of are not Israeli Jews and
the Palestinian people, rather they are world Jewry and West Bank and
Gaza Palestinians! Does this mean that the Palestinian people in its
entirety has not actually been fighting a colonial settler movement on
its land but instead it is West Bank and Gaza Palestinians who have been
fighting the Jewish people worldwide? Is this not what Zionism always
claimed in order to justify its colonial policies and portray itself as a
victim of anti-Semitism? <br><br>
<dd>When have the Palestinian people chosen world Jewry as their enemy?
Was it not Zionism and Israel who would always insist that it is the
"Jewish people" who are claiming the right to colonise
Palestine and its people while the PLO always rejected Israel's claim to
speak for all Jews? Have not the PLO, the Palestinian intelligentsia, and
Palestinian revolutionary groups always asserted their enmity to Zionism
and not to the Jewish people? Only by accepting Zionism's claims that
Israel is the representative of the Jewish people, does the Palestinian
anti-colonial struggle become identified by Yasser Abed Rabbo as a war
with the "Jewish people". Unlike Abed Rabbo, most Palestinians
have always understood the anti-Semitic nature of Israel, its persistent
attempts to claim anti- Semitically that all Jews have the
"same" opinion of Zionism, that they all support it, that it
represents them all, and that any attack or criticism of it is
anti-Semitic since it, Israel, is</i> the Jewish people. <br><br>
<dd>Such anti-Semitic claims that flatten world Jewry as some cohesive
group with an international agenda à la Protocols of the Elders of
Zion</i> would produce much uproar if their authors were not Zionism and
the State of Israel. Indeed the claim advanced by Israel and its
apologists that criticism of Israel is "anti-Semitic" is the
most anti-Semitic claim of all, rendering all Jews around the world
represented by this one state and claiming that they all approve of its
atrocities and crimes against humanity. That the PA and Mr Abed Rabbo
have accepted this "logic of peace," as they call it in their
Document, speaks of the success that Israel has had in imparting its
version of anti-Semitism to the corrupt Palestinian leadership.
<br><br>
<dd>As for the two-thirds of the Palestinian people being eliminated by
the Oslo process, Israeli Palestinians, on their part, understand well
the logic of Oslo and have been fighting Israeli state racism
independently of the PLO and the PA and without compromising the rights
of the rest of the Palestinian people. Diaspora Palestinians, mostly
bereft of leadership, continue to struggle for the application of their
internationally recognised rights to return and be compensated, also
without compromising the rights of other Palestinians. Only the corrupt
leadership of the West Bank and Gaza wants to speak for all Palestinians
in order to do away with most of them and derive benefits, if any, for a
few. This does not mean that West Bank and Gaza Palestinians cannot seek
agreements with the Israeli occupation to obtain independence; it means
that they cannot do so by compromising the rights of diaspora and Israeli
Palestinians for whom they cannot speak. They may compromise their own
rights if they so choose, such as accepting limits on the future
sovereignty of their mini-state to be, for example, but not the right of
return nor the rights of Israeli Palestinians to fight Israeli
state-racism. Indeed, most West Bank and Gaza Palestinians have rejected
the Geneva Document on this basis, whether in demonstrations or public
statements and in recent opinion polls, further proving that the PA
leadership that claims to represent them does not represent them at all.
<br><br>
<dd>What is central to this politics of representation is that neither
world Jewry nor diaspora Palestinians and Israeli Palestinians ever
elected Israel or the PA as representatives. These two, however, continue
to fight for so-called "rights" for world Jewry, or surrender
the rights of the Palestinian people, respectively. This process is one
wherein the Israeli state wants to unify world Jewry under its flag
against all international norms, while the PA wants to eliminate
two-thirds of the Palestinian people from its internationally- recognized
mandate by surrendering their rights and keeping a third of the
Palestinians as "the</i> Palestinian people". <br><br>
<dd>Zionism's historic denial of the Palestinian people has finally been
adopted by the Palestinian Authority and its coterie of functionaries,
ministers, security officers, and, yes, members of the Legislative
Council (half of whom have already served as ministers of the corrupt
Palestinian Authority and the other half, with few exceptions, aspires to
serve in the future). Golda Meir asserted in 1969 that "it was not
as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself
as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their
country away from them. They did not exist." The Palestinian people
have been fighting Zionism's denial of their existence from Herzl to Meir
and beyond. However, the Palestinian Authority and its
"unofficial" envoy Yasser Abed Rabbo (whose name incidentally
means "Yasser worshipper of his Lord" and who is otherwise
nicknamed in popular Palestinian circles as "Yasser Abed
Yasser" or "Yasser worshipper of Yasser"), have fully
endorsed the Zionist view by excluding two thirds of the Palestinians
from the designation "the Palestinian People". Following this
formula, all Palestinians Israel expelled and all those who remained
living within Israel under the Israeli racialist system of
democracy-only-for-Jews are, in line with Golda Meir's racist lie, not
considered Palestinian at all. <br><br>
<dd>The fact that a corrupt and dictatorial Palestinian leadership is
aiming to eliminate two-thirds of the Palestinian people is symptomatic
of the continued Zionist aggression that the Oslo process culminating in
Geneva has legitimised. No one should have been fooled, least of all
Nelson Mandela, by the songs for "peace" announcing the triumph
of the last unrepentant settler colony in the world. Abed Rabbo and his
colleagues may have accepted the Zionist victory but the Palestinian
people are not going anywhere. They are resisting and will continue to
resist all attempts to liquidate their national existence and their lives
in the name of "peaceful" solutions. Mr Abed Rabbo and his PA
colleagues can do what they want, whether with Ariel Sharon or with Yossi
Beilin. The Palestinian people, however, cannot be legislated in and out
of existence by the strike of a pen. <br><br>
<dd><a name="1"></a>* The writer is assistant professor of Modern Arab
Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, New
York.</i><a name="1"></a> <br>
<br>
</dl><div align="center">© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights
reserved<br><br>
</div>
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<dd>Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 25 - 31 December 2003 (Issue No. 670)<br>
<dd>Located at:
<a href="http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/670/op42.htm">http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/670/op42.htm</a>
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