Three years after Oslo
The confrontation
Salah Jaber
In May, 55% of Israelis voted against Shimon Peres, the Zionist
Labour leader identified with the
"peace process." Four months later,
Palestinian anger boiled over in the muwajaha (confrontation) of 25-27 September.
You don't have to look far for the causes of this revolt. Insults, deception, repression, blockade and pauperisation were piling up on the Palestinians long before Likud leader Benyamin Netanyahu became Prime Minister. Yasser Arafat's capitulation, disguised as a "soldiers' peace" had built up false hopes. His Palestinian Authority" added new forms of repression. The situation for ordinary Palestinians was increasingly insupportable.
Michel Warshawsky and Walid Salem wrote the following articles just before the muwajaha. They explain, with surprising clarity, the dynamic which led to this explosion of Palestinian anger:
Israel's conservative government did not "kill" or "reverse" the peace process. As Michel Warshawsky argues, "Netanyahu did not cause the death of the peace process: he is the expression of its death." Palestinian patience was already strained under the previous Labour administration. By pushing patience beyond its limit, Netanyahu is directly responsible for the particularly violent character of the confrontation. He may even have provoked the Palestinian reaction. He knew that the "tunnel" crisis was sure to light the fuse.
The Zionist right is not motivated by short term fanaticism. This is a machiavellian manoeuvre. Netanyahu's minimalist interpretation of the Washington accords obliged him to cut short the illusions and bluff which the previous government had built up. Likud exposed what, for the Zionists, were Palestinian shortcomings in the application of the accords. Yasser Arafat, Netanyahu argued, was unable to control his own troops, never mind the Palestinian masses. The Zionist right had always doubted the reliability of Arafat's control, despite the waves of repression the Palestinian leader organised at the request of Israeli leaders Rabin and Peres. The Israeli right began to ask itself what was the point of entrusting police control of the Palestinians to a puppet Authority, which, regardless of its real and symbolic prerogatives, was unable of filling the mission which Israel entrusted it with.
Netanyahu can now claim to have foreseen the danger, rather than have provoked it. And Arafat has his back to the wall, even more than he did under the previous Israeli government. Either the Palestinian leader accepts new restrictions, and accepts to be no more than a prison warder for his people, or he seizes the Palestinian people's formidable capacity for revolt, and widespread indignation around the world, in order to fight for a solution which goes beyond the fool's bargain he accepted in Oslo and Washington.
Palestine is a land of miracles. But such a transformation of Arafat is highly unlikely. His immediate response to the September confrontations was true to form. He turned to the reactionary forces of the Arab world, including even King Hussein of Jordan, in the hope that they would rescue him.
Given the crisis of the Palestinian left (see p.7-8), the danger is that, once again, it will be the Islamic fundamentalists who capitalise on the new, more combative spirit of the Palestinian masses. *
November 1996 #282 3