Tag: Comment Is Free

A recipe for resentment

Ahmad Samih Khalidi | The Guardian

26 May 2009

The Obama administration is gearing up for its impending and ­possibly decisive moves ­towards relaunching the Middle East peace process, with a series of consultations with Arab leaders, including the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, later this week. After ­meeting with Barack Obama in ­Washington last week, the Israeli prime ­minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, pressed his demand that the Palestinians should recognise Israel as a Jewish state, ­posing it as the sine qua non for any ­future agreement. This demand seems to be gaining some traction in the US and in western capitals.

But Washington and the international community should be very wary of progressing any further down this path; for behind what may appear an innocuous demand to accept Israel for what it deems itself to be lies an ideologically motivated attempt to force the Palestinians into an unprecedented repudiation of their history. Palestinians’ recognition of Israel as a Jewish state implies the acknowledgment that the lands they lost in 1948 are a Jewish birthright. This runs contrary to the heart of the Palestinians’ historical narrative and their sense of identity and belonging.

It invalidates the history of the ­Palestinians’ century-old struggle and in effect demands that they should become Zionists; for the essence of Zionism lies in the belief that these lands are (and always were) the homeland of the Jewish people, and that the history of Jewish dispossession was rightfully rectified by the emergence of Israel in 1948.

Despite their current split, the ­majority of Palestinians – including Hamas – have accepted the political ­reality of Israel. The Palestine Liberation Organisation has gone further in acknowledging Israel’s right to live in peace within secure borders. The PLO has also accepted that the loss of 77% of the Palestinians’ historic homeland within Israel’s pre-1967 borders cannot be reversed by force. Even Hamas has indicated that it can accept long-term peaceful coexistence with Israel if it withdraws from the territories that it occupied in 1967.

Accepting the notion of Palestinian-Israeli coexistence and an end to ­violence is one thing. Acknowledging ­Israel’s historic and moral claim to what were once Palestinian Arab lands is another thing altogether.

But there is more to this Israeli demand. The underlying purpose is to preempt the Palestinians who were driven into exile in 1948 from ­continuing to claim the “right of return” to their lost lands and ­properties. But the Palestinian desire to “return” is not about undoing Israel’s Jewish character. It is lodged in the sense of a broader ­historical injustice that is in need of acknowledgement, ­restitution and compensation.

The Palestinian leadership is aware that Israel cannot be compelled to take back any refugees against its will, and that any resolution of the refugee problem will have to be negotiated and agreed by mutual consent.

The fact is that the demand to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state is meant less to block the prospects of being swamped by Arabs – as Israeli propagandists claim – and more as a ­covert attempt to wrest Palestinian absolution for Israel’s “original sin” in taking over their homeland.

There is another vital matter relating to Israel’s Arab citizens – currently about 20% of its population. Acknowledging Israel as a Jewish state would undermine their status and jeopardise their very presence, especially in light of the rise of ultra-right parties that are already seeking to deny the country’s Arab ­citizens their most basic civic rights.

The Palestinian leadership has made it clear that it will not accede to Israel’s demand. But even in the unlikely event that it eventually succumbs to Israeli pressure and misguided western arm-twisting, this would remain an insincere and disingenuous concession. It would weaken and subvert the existing ­Palestinian order and create new and dangerous splits within it.

Far from being a prerequisite for peace and coexistence, this is an unnecessary and dangerous diversion – and a recipe for deep future resentment, revanchism and renewed conflict.

Israel must think again about whether there is any real utility – besides dis­ruption and delay – in pressing this issue. The west must steer well clear of adopting this ideologically loaded ­formula, or seek to impose it on an already weakened and divided Pales­tinian polity, or to add to the burdens of the already tenuous and very uncertain prospects for peace.

Ahmad Samih Khalidi is a senior associate member of St Antony’s College, Oxford and a former Palestinian negotiator.

1967: Abandoned and rejected

By Ahmad Shaheen | Guardian: Comment Is Free

I was born in a tent and I’m living in a tent, but I hope I won’t die in a tent.

I’m a middle-aged journalist and a human rights advocate. My children are grown up and college educated – three of them married with children. I’m far from them though, living with my partner in a desert refugee camp on the Iraqi-Syrian border. Through friends I managed to get word to my brother to phone me on a borrowed mobile, from a shop in our refugee camp in Gaza last week. I was describing my situation and he told me “you born in a tent and you will die in one”. I don’t know if his prediction will come true. So far I’ve been in Tanaf refugee camp for eight months and have still not received asylum from any state. Hundreds of Palestinian refugees are currently in the same situation, along Iraq’s western borders, living in tents.

I fled Baghdad eight months ago. Palestinian life there had become unbearable and incredibly dangerous. After the arrival of Anglo-American troops, we refugees were stripped of all rights, denied the renewal of refugee travel documents that had been customarily issued to us since the days of the monarchy.

Paperless and unable to leave, we were targeted by the death squads as an unprotected minority, and then a collective execution fatwa was issued against our entire community, some 40,000 strong who have been in Iraq since 1948.

Many of my friends were killed in perverse and cruel ways. My neighbour, Abu Adel, was murdered while trying to pick up the body of his son from the morgue. Others were killed by militia having their heads drilled with electric tools. I had previously tried to leave Iraq, spending 14 months at the Ruwaished camp on the Jordanian border, only to be refused entry.

Upon my return to Baghdad, I found that things had got far worse. One afternoon, the interior ministry’s Saqer force arrested me at a café, along with my 76-year-old neighbour, for the crime of sipping tea while being a Palestinian. Taken to an American-run interrogation centre, we saw young men blindfolded and tied, while others were hanging from the ceiling. Fortunately, the debacle ended after the ranking American officer took pity on my elderly friend and ordered our release. We were thereafter thrown in the street while curfew was on, lucky not to have been shot. This incident, along with a phone call ordering me to evacuate my house, convinced me of the need to leave at whatever cost. Nowadays, a tent shields me from the strong dust-storms of the Khamseen wind, while my house in Baghdad has been converted into a local militia office.

My first displacement occurred in the aftermath of what we call the setback, the naksah, of 1967. I was a 15-year-old teenager when the Israeli occupying forces entered Gaza, their megaphones blasting the order for all males between the ages of 15 and 60 to congregate in designated local schools. A vast campaign of random arrests began, and my family feared I would face the fate of other neighborhood youth and told me to escape. Through the desert and across the river, I fled the occupation to Jordan, separated from my family for ever; up until this day never allowed to return. I joined the ranks of the 400,000 displaced (naziheen), almost half of whom had already been refugees since 1948.

Here I am; six displacements later and four decades into my life. I am not that old, but I feel really tired. Stressed out by the last war, I now have diabetes along with high blood pressure. Everyone around me has been through hard times though, and we all share in the daily struggle for survival. The camp is overcrowded, intolerably hot in the morning and incredibly cold during winter nights, extremely flammable (only last month there was a terrible fire that destroyed some of the camp), and lacks most medical and social services. Nevertheless, a UN water truck arrives every other day and rations are distributed monthly (although they are not ideal for diabetics, consisting mainly of flour and sugar). Palestinian refugee volunteers from Syria also come to support us, and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society currently provides me with insulin.

Somehow, incredibly, we are still alive, but we are frozen in time, isolated and abandoned by the governments of the world. I am not a refugee by choice and I will hold forever to the right of return to my home. Nevertheless, until I am able to exercise that right, I want to live in safety and dignity somewhere, anywhere, away from the wretchedness of this desert and the carnage of Iraq. Yes, I was born in a tent but I certainly hope I don’t die in one.

Ahmad Shaheen (Abu Fadi) is a Palestinian refugee from the village of Al-Qubayba near Al Ramleh. In 1948 his family was forced out to Gaza. Since 1967, he has been displaced six times. Before moving to the Tanaf refugee camp on the on the Iraqi-Syrian border, he was a Baghdad based journalist and human rights activist.