Unity or Annihilation – The Real Choice For The Palestinians (Again)
Dr. Hajo G. Meyeris an Auschwitz survivor. His latest book is The End of Judaism; An Ethical Tradition Betrayed. In it Hajo expresses his dismay at what he sees as the “moral collapse of contemporary Israeli society and the worldwide Jewish community as a whole.” He compares Israel’s current policies with the early stages of the Nazi persecution of Germany’s Jews. He stresses that he is not seeking to draw a parallel between Israel’s current policies and the Nazis’ “endgame” – the slaughter of six million European Jews (and also the mass murder of perhaps as many as six million non-Jews). He is merely trying to point out, he says, “the slippery slope” that eventually led to this catastrophe, and the necessity of “forseeing the possible consequences” of a policy that oppresses and marginalizes the Palestinians in their own homeland.
As things are today, and unless they are pushed to do so by informed public opinion (by manifestations of real democracy in action), I think it is unrealistic to expect the governments of the major powers either to use the leverage they do have to call and hold the Zionist state to account for its past crimes, or to intervene to prevent the crimes it might very well commit in a foreseeable future.
It follows, or so it seems to me, that the Palestinians of the world must now become united and fully engaged in the political struggle not only to improve their prospects for some justice, but also to play their necessary part in stopping the possibility of a final round of Zionist ethnic cleansing (which some might call “transfer”) in Israel/Palestine.
The obstacle to Palestinian unity on the occupied West Bank and in the Gazaconcentration camp is not Hamas. There is no mystery about its real position. If tomorrow, for example, Israel said andmeantthat it was ready in good faith to negotiate a full and final peace on the basis of a genuine and viable two-state solution – one that would see Israel back to more or less its pre-1967 borders with Jerusalem (preferably as an open city) the capital of two states, Hamas’s leaders would say, “Let’s do the business”. And they would mean it because they would have no choice- because, as they know, a genuine and viable two-state solution is still what the vast majority of Palestinians in the conflict zone are prepared to settle for. (Though for how much longer this will remain the case is a very good question).
- The right of return for the refugees – those Palestinians and their descendants who were dispossed of their homes, their land and their rights in 1948/49 and again in 1967 – did not have to be the obstacle to peace Israel asserted it to be. When Arafat and his senior leadership colleagues came to grips with the need to make peace with Israel on the basis of a genuine and viable two-state solution, they accepted but could not then say in public that the right of return would have to be confined to the Palestinian mini-state– i.e. not to Israel inside more it less its pre-1967 borders. That would have meant, they knew, that probably not more than 100,000 refugees would be able to return to their homeland. The rest would have to be compensated… The information in this paragraph is essential for understanding, but the point being made here is academic because, as things are today, the idea of a two-state solution is dead, killed by Israel’s still on-going colonisation of the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem.
The obstacle to Palestinian unity on the West Bank and in the Gazaconcentration camp is not difficult to identity. It’s in the fact that under the leadership of “President” Abbas and his Fatah colleagues, the PNA has become an instrument of Israeli-and-American (and Western European) policy. The PNA is, in short, a collaborator (meaning quisling) regime. Israeli-and-American (and Western European) policy requires Hamas to be marginalised and destroyed. And the PNA, it seems, is content to go along with this policy. (Why did Hamas take on and defeat Fatah in Gaza? Fatah was planning, with American encouragement and Israeli assistance as required, to crush Hamas. It moved first with what the Israelis, if they had been initiating an attack, would have described as a pre-emptive strike).
It’s my guess that, at a point, Abbas will resign rather than seek to compel the Palestinians to accept crumbs from Zionism’s table; but whether he stays or goes will not change the fact that in the eyes of many if not most Palestinians everywhere, the PNA, like Fatah (and the regimes of the existing Arab Order), is impotent and discredited. That alone is a good enough reason for the PNA to be put out of its misery and for Palestinian policy making and implementation to be put into the hands of a reconstructed PNC.
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