By Rami Khoury
The apparent breakthrough agreement between Israel and the PLO on an initial self-governing Palestinian authority in Jericho and Gaza has generated much excitement, but also scepticism and opposition in both Israeli and Arab quarters. What did we expect after nearly a century of Zionist-Arab nationalist warfare: children's choirs and free felafel sandwiches? The initial scepticism is a sign of more to come, including violence by extremists in both Israel and the Arab world. The fact remains, though, that great historical forces that were unleashed in recent years are starting to change the face of the Middle East.
The Jericho-Gaza option, if it materialises, will be an extraordinary historic occasion: the first sign that the political and territorial gains of 20th century expansionist Zionism are being reversed. Sure, the arguments of the opponents of this move are based on reality: Jericho-Gaza is small stuff, self-government is not full sovereignty, the future of Jerusalem is unclear, Israel retains its occupational mode and so on and so forth.
All of this is real, but this method of all-or-nothing political action and historical analysis is no longer valid, for it has brought the Palestinians and the Arabs only failure and suffering in the past. The point of Jericho-Gaza is to vanquish the past, to engage the enemy with new weapons of political maturity and historical patience, and to usher in a better future based on realism, pragmatism and hope.
Israel is gradually but persistently coming to terms with three things that it always said it would refuse to accept: the Palestinian national reality of a people with collective and individual rights, the legitimate representational role of the PLO, and that Israel's borders have to revert to something approximating its pre-1967 frontiers.
Jericho-Gaza is a dramatic symbol of these processes that have been forced on Israel, but, sadly, Jericho-Gaza is also being analysed by many as a sign of the weakness of the PLO and President Arafat, due to the PLO's financial and decision-making pressures. I would suggest this is a badly mistaken analysis that reflects the widespread Arab disease of intellectual dependence on Western media and diplomacy, and of psychological confusion generated by cumulative defeats at the hands of Zionism/Israel.
The reality is that this is a moment of mini-triumph for the PLO and for reasonable Palestinians and other Arabs who have insisted on the validity of patient diplomacy.
It was inevitable that Zionism would have to accommodate itself to the Palestinian and Arab/Islamic reality, and Israel could not forever live as a military occupier or predator in this region. Israel finally recognised the Palestinian/Arab reality when the Palestinian intifada and the anti-Israeli resistance in south Lebanon revealed a new generation of Arabs willing to struggle and to pay a price for their rights, while at the same time the PLO and the Arab states decided to engage in responsible, patient diplomacy through the peace talks, rather than cling to emotional slogans or make unrealistic, all-or-nothing demands.
Jericho-Gaza is the first tangible sign that this approach will bring results, if one is patient and clever enough to develop a strategy that aims for small gains that can be built upon cumulatively to achieve our long-term national rights and goals.
Jericho-Gaza is a small first step, the start of a very long process that might lead to Palestinian self-determination and sovereignty in several decades. But its symbolism is powerful. It represents the initial step in the geographical roll-back and political containment of Zionism, an early 20th century mass movement which, like communism, socialism, fascism, Nazism and others, is being forced to come to terms with its fraying historical relevance.
Israel is a fortress state dependent on foreign support and, occupying Arab lands in perpetuity, is a neo-Crusader model of imperialistic and predatory racism that promises the Jewish people only perpetual suffering and, perhaps, long-term annihilation. The future of Jews in Palestine and the Arab world is likely to be very much like their past, as one of several minorities living in peace and productivity in a region to which they are deeply tied with ancient bonds.
Those who fear that Jericho-Gaza is all we will get represent the battered Arab psyche of defeat and fear. Instead of mindlessly and immaturely uttering stupidities about how the Israelis will give us autonomy in Jericho and Gaza and then give us nothing in the future, Palestinians and Arabs who are sceptical of the moves under way today should take some time to reflect on their own defeated psychological state, while appreciating the broader historical forces at work in the region today.
Israel wants us to react with scepticism and negativism. It wants us to see ourselves as weak, defeated people whose fate lies in the hands of officials in Israel and Washington. Many — perhaps most — Arabs play along with this scenario. They doubt the peace talks will succeed. They think Arafat and the PLO are on the ropes and therefore must accept anything offered to them, no matter how humiliating. They think the Israelis are supermen who do what they want in this area, or that the Americans are super planners who have already mapped out the future of the Middle East.
This is perhaps a natural way to think for an Arab people defeated and dazed by history's injustices, but it is a way that we should no longer tolerate in our midst, for it is a sign of the past, at a moment when we should focus on building the future.
The future I envision will see Palestinian institutions slowly taking charge of the fate of the Palestinian people, wherever they may live; simultaneously, Israelis and Palestinians may recognise that if they accord one another equal rights and recognition they can work together for a better future for both people, while Palestinian-Jordanian confederal ties may mark the start of a new process of regional integration that must eventually spread to the entire Levant, including Israel/Palestine/Jordan, Syria/Lebanon, and Iraq as the three likely primary units of the future in this area.
This future will only happen if the Arabs and the Israelis are sensible enough to maintain their focus on diplomacy as the key to detente, disengagement and coexistence.
For the Arabs, and Palestinians in particular, to heap abuse on the PLO now for its alleged financial problems, its autocratic president, its institutional weaknesses or its diplomatic vulnerabilities strikes me as not only very odd and unfortunate, but also very sad and even slightly sinister. Why, at a possible moment of historic triumph for a Palestinian people, who have suffered so grievously for so long, do so many Palestinians and other Arabs find it appropriate to malign the leadership that achieved this progress?
Those who fear the future find it easy to condemn or to question present decisions that will usher in the future. Of course, the PLO is riddled with problems, corruption, inefficiency and many of the other attributes that define the modern Arab political order and every single other Arab government and political power structure. So what's new? Who ever said the PLO and Arafat and Co were angels? Who ever said they were anything more than a symbol of the Palestinian struggle for national rights and, by extension, of the broader pan-Arab struggle for dignity and rational national order?
The sudden focus on the weaknesses of Arafat and the PLO is outrageous and slightly demented, in my view, at the moment when we have engaged the Western powers in political action, cornered the Israelis and started to reverse the excesses of Zionism. We are in the early stages of these processes, but we are in them, and moving ahead.
When the PLO and Arafat are long gone, the issues of Palestinian/Arab national dignity will continue to challenge us. That is where our focus should be, and Jericho-Gaza suggests that we have a rare chance today to reap some small but real gains to start reversing our grievous experience of this century. Those Arabs who are so confused and scared by signs of small victories would do their nation a service by taming their psychological weaknesses and political deficiencies, and instead trying harder to appreciate that the future does not have to be as bad as the past — unless they wish it to be. Have we been so badly shaken by defeat that we can no longer recognise progress and perhaps even victory when we stand before their unfamiliar arms?
[Rami Khoury is a Palestinian-Jordanian author based in Amman.]