Dr. Ghada Karmi, Prof. Lev Grinberg Analyze Post-Oslo Mideast

By Jane Adas

On Nov. 21, New York University’s Kevorkian Center sponsored a discussion on Israel and Palestine with Dr. Ghada Karmi, a physician and an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, and Prof. Lev Grinberg, director of the Humphrey Institute for Social Research at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.

Dr. Karmi’s beautifully written memoir, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, has recently been published by Verso Press. She was nine years old when, in 1949, her family was forced to leave Jerusalem. They went first to Damascus, then to London. The Karmis, a Muslim family, moved to Golders Green, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in north London. Thus Karmi’s experiences growing up were those of European Jews. Her parents were traumatized by having been uprooted and losing everything. Her mother tried to preserve the family’s Palestinian identity and never attempted to learn English.

Karmi, however, yearned to assimilate, to be “a dark-skinned English girl.” Events in the Middle East, however—Israel’s 1956 invasion of Egypt and, above all, the 1967 war—kept intruding. When asked why she wrote her memoir, Karmi said that 30 years of activism, trying to educate people with facts and numbers, hasn’t worked. She realized that she, like most Palestinians, has a story to tell that may help people understand why Palestinians care so passionately about their homeland.

The present is an especially grave moment in the wider region, Karmi noted. Palestinians fear that war in Iraq will lead to an intensification of Israel’s war against the Palestinians. Israelis are openly and without shame debating “transfer” of the Palestinian population—a euphemism for expulsion and a concept supported by nearly 50 percent of the Israeli public. Karmi described it as a continuation of the Zionist project begun before 1948 of colonizing land confiscated from Palestinians.

As a United Nations report issued on Nov. 19 indicated, the situation in the occupied territories is dire. Seventy percent of Palestinians live below the poverty line and a fifth of all children are malnourished. The U.N. report concluded that the situation is entirely man-made, a result of Israel’s brutal siege. But, Karmi said, the last two years have been only an intensification of policies in effect since 1967. All aspects of civil society have been smashed, she noted—education, health services, food distribution and social life. Palestinians cannot even bury their dead properly, and there seems to be no end in sight.

It is suicidal folly for Israel to go on like this, Karmi said, because it will only lead to more resistance. Officials in Washington don’t seem willing to do anything, she added, whether because of domestic pressure or preoccupation with Iraq. Concerned people in Europe and Great Britain therefore have concluded that they must work on the level of civil society. In particular, boycott and divestment are gaining momentum in Europe, with the goal of isolating Israel and sending the message that, unless it changes its policies, Israel has no place among civilized nations. The most positive thing to do now, Karmi concluded, is to connect the various movements.

Professor Grinberg offered “an analytical framework to understand what has happened.” Neither Israelis nor Palestinians constitute a single community, he said. Each side is subject to internal power struggles and neither has been willing to rein in its extremists. During the Oslo process, the Palestinian goal was to end the occupation and the Israeli to achieve security. But, Grinberg said, Oslo was a political struggle won by its opponents; Palestine is still occupied and Israel has no security.

This happened, he said, because Israel is so powerful that it has no need to dismantle the occupation and Palestinians are too weak to resist the terms Israel tries to impose. The situation for Palestinians became much worse from 1993 to 2000. Israel’s military oppression of Palestinians expanded under the peace process, Grinberg noted, and, at the economic level, the Paris agreements institutionalized Palestinian dependence on Israel for everything. Israel never stopped settlement building, and the Palestinian negotiators, mainly from Tunis, never demanded that they do so. The Israeli government added as many settlers in the seven years of the peace process as it had in the 25 years prior to it.

Even after Rabin’s assassination, most Israelis paid more attention to a “post-conflict agenda” than to the conflict itself. They discussed internal tensions—secular versus religious Jews, Ashkenazi versus Mizrahi—and left the Oslo negotiations to Barak. Barak went to Camp David, Grinberg said, with the support of only 25 percent of the Knesset, knowing everything was already lost, in order to create the myth of the generous offer.

At that time, however, according to Grinberg, the military entered the vacuum left by the political parties and began making decisions about how to handle Palestinians. Concerned that Palestinians would conclude that Israel’s hasty withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000 proved that the only way to get Israel out was through force, Israeli military leaders determined not to make political concessions. Well before the second intifada, the military began preparations that would show that Palestinians would achieve no political gains from violence.

Two steps are needed to bring an end to the crisis, Grinberg stated: first, end the occupation, remove the settlements and the military posts protecting them, and introduce U.N. peacekeeping forces; second, move toward reconciliation with discussions about borders, refugees, and Palestinians living within Israel—none of which can be discussed while the occupation is in force. But, he added, it can’t happen without international pressure. Grinberg does not expect a solution to come from the United States where the discussion is “shallow and right-wing.”

Attorney Diana Buttu on Life in Palestine

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian attorney now living in Ramallah and serving as a legal adviser to the Palestinian Authority’s negotiations support unit, concluded a 10-day tour sponsored by Global Exchange with a Nov. 11 talk in Fairfield, New Jersey hosted by that state’s chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).

Buttu began by saying that Palestinian resistance has been reduced to breathing, to staying alive, to finding food and water. Meanwhile, she said, the world insists that the Palestinian Authority institute reforms and have elections before international law and the Geneva Conventions can be applicable.

For 54 years, Buttu continued, Palestinians have not experienced an Israel concerned with peace and reconciliation, but rather an Israel that wants to rid itself of Palestinians and keep the land. Palestinians supported the Oslo process because they assumed it would lead to self-determination on the entire 22 percent of Palestine left them by Israel’s territorial expansion of 1948. They even accepted the division of their land into Areas A, B and C, and the proliferation of checkpoints that severely limit their freedom of movement, because they assumed it would all end after five years, in May 1999.

However, Buttu said, Oslo turned out to be only a continuation of the process of getting rid of the people while keeping the land. Oslo was a green light for colony construction—of which Barak did the most. The seven years of Oslo saw a 63 percent increase in Israeli settlement housing units, even though 40 percent of them remain empty. Under Sharon, 44 new colonies have been established.

Moreover, Buttu argued, the PLO became a security subcontractor for Israel. Nobody questioned whether Israel’s security needs were legitimate, she pointed out, or why the oppressed should provide security for the oppressor. Buttu likened the situation to the victim of a rapist being asked to ensure that the rapist doesn’t get hurt in the process.

Throughout the “peace process,” she said, people in the U.S. and Canada—even those sympathetic to Palestine—ignored or were uninformed about what was happening on the ground. “Occupation,” “international law,” and “justice” were terms absent from the Oslo discourse. Consequently, after the failure of Camp David, Palestinians were accused of turning down Barak’s so-called generous offer and of being “psychologically unprepared for peace.” But no one asked whether Barak had the right to be “generous” with occupied territory, she noted. At that point, Buttu said, unable to stand having the idea of Palestine being transmitted to the West through the Israel lobby, she packed her bags and went to Palestine.

Camp David offered Palestinians a “state” divided into four cantons, each surrounded and controlled by Israel. Because the 10 percent of the West Bank Israel would have retained under the plan includes access to the aquifers, Palestine would not have control over water resources. Nor would it have control over its air space, which has implications for satellite television and mobile phones. And the “generous offer” would have legitimized the illegal colonies and added them to Israel.

Today, Buttu told her audience, each town and village in occupied Palestine is surrounded by checkpoints, barbed wire and electric fences. Israel is in the process of building a wall, paid for by U.S. tax dollars, to separate the West Bank from Israel. At 25 feet, it is twice as high as the Berlin Wall, and when completed will be three times as long. Nor should one envision a mere wall, Buttu said, but a series of trenches, walls, and electric fencing that ranges in width from 35 to 105 meters. It is being built within, not on, the Green Line, and is really another land grab. So far Israel has seized 1,000 acres of the best agricultural land in the Qalqilya area and slated 80 homes for demolition because they are “too close to the wall.” Buttu described the wall as a monstrosity that is designed to kill off Palestine.

Buttu suggested that Americans lobby Congress on specific issues, such as protesting the $10 million the U.S. gives Israel every day, which in effect funds the occupation. Another issue is to demand implementation of the Arms Export Control Act, which makes it illegal to use U.S.-made arms against a civilian population. Because the humanitarian crisis is now desperate, Buttu urged her audience to support organizations, such as the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, that are getting food and medicine to the people.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in the New York metropolitan area.