Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2002, pages 6-9

Four Views

 

Bush's Speech--What Next?

 

Bush Ignores Option Of Conditioning U.S. Aid on Acceptance of Existing Peace Plan

 

By Paul Findley

In his June 24 statement, President George W. Bush made history by taking the lead for peace in the Middle East, becoming the first U.S. president to make precise recommendations. There are serious flaws that will frustrate his hopes, however, the worst being his continuing tendency to treat the Israeli oppressors, not the Palestinians, as the victims.

Also, by demanding new Palestinian leadership, he risks repudiation when Palestinians vote in the upcoming election. Bush is hardly a hero among Palestinians, and this unpresidential expression of personal animus is apt to enhance Arafat's political strength, not diminish it.

By demanding an end to Palestinian violence--suicide bombings, for example--Bush plays into the hands of Israeli radicals who want nothing more than more time to expand settlements on Palestinian land. No Palestinian leader can stop all violence until Israeli occupation ends, and no Israeli leader--despite solemn promises to the contrary--has ever halted the construction of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

Instead, Bush should have stuck to the precise limits of his own presidential reach. He could have offered a carrot-and-stick combination behind recent Arab proposals. One is the peace plan of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, under which all Arab states are now pledged to make peace with Israel if it returns to the pre-June 1967 borders. The other is the improvement of the same proposal offered by the Palestinian National Authority, under which Palestinians would no longer demand the right of return to property in pre-1967 Israel that Israelis seized a half-century ago, and would yield to Israel the Wailing Wall, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, and two settlements near the old border to Israel. These are proposals that are already endorsed by the majority of Israelis.

Bush cannot order around foreign leaders, as he learned in his dealings with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, but he can put precise conditions on U.S. aid. For example, he can suspend all aid until Israel cooperates in one of the peace plans cited above and offer an expansion of aid to both Israelis and Palestinians when one of the plans is accepted. In a showdown with Congress over aid to Israel, Bush's father demonstrated the power of the presidency when he overcame Israel's U.S. lobby.

This approach is a "winner," as the late Jack Buck would say. The Bush plan means more delay, more violence, more despair.

Former Congressman Paul Findley (R-IL) is the author of They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby, Deliberate Deceptions: Facing the Facts about the U.S. Israeli Relationship, and Silent No More: Confronting America's False Images of Islam, all available from the AET Book Club.

 

The Palestinians Already Have a Democratic Constitution

 

By Wendy Pearlman

President Bush's recent speech calling for Palestinian reforms included several astute observations. The president was right to note that the "Palestinian Legislature has no authority and power is concentrated in the hands of an unaccountable few." Palestinian legislators, after all, are trapped in their homes under military curfew. Power over all aspects of life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is concentrated in the hands of the Israeli Cabinet and army, which are unaccountable to international law and the United Nations, no less to the three million Palestinian civilians who suffer under an unrelenting siege.

And the president was also right to remark that "today the Palestinian people lack effective courts of law and have no means to defend and vindicate their rights." The Israeli army, after all, has rounded up thousands of Palestinians without charge, trial, or access to legal counsel. They endure inhumane conditions and languish in Israeli prisons indefinitely.

Thus, Bush's analysis was incisive in many ways. But there was one key point on which he was misinformed. Twice in his speech the president told the Palestinians that they must draft a democratic constitution. Someone should have told the president that the Palestinians already have such a constitution. I know, because I translated it.

Yasser Arafat established a Palestinian Constitution Committee back in 1999, long before either George Bush or Ariel Sharon came to power and assumed the right to tell Palestinians how to choose their leaders and run their internal affairs. After months of comparative research, specialized workshops, and debates on various drafts, the Committee completed the first final draft in September 2000. Two friends and I, the three of us students of Arabic sharing an apartment in Cairo at the time, were offered the job of translating the draft. We eagerly accepted.

For days on end, we hovered around my laptop, encircled by legal dictionaries and guavas bought from the fruit market on the noisy street below. Feeling as if we, too, were participating in the development of Palestinian democracy, we were meticulous in considering the linguistic accuracy and legal implications of every word we translated. Furthermore, as modern 20-something women, we made the Palestinian constitution even more democratic than the American one by rendering the English translation gender-neutral. Not unlike male politicians and academics everywhere, however, the members of the Palestinian Constitution Committee eventually reinserted all the "he's" that we had taken such pains to circumvent.

So I've reviewed every "for," "of," and "to" of the Draft Palestinian Constitution, and I can say that it's not too bad, as far as democratic constitutions go. It provides for free and regular elections, specifies the separate powers and duties of the three branches of government, outlines qualifications for public officials, and details the civil and political rights of all citizens. It addresses the democratic aspirations of Palestinian refugees both within and outside of the Palestinian territories, and it pledges religious tolerance.

Granted, the constitution is far from perfect. A number of legal loopholes allow the Executive Branch the same wide discretion that it enjoys throughout the developing world. Palestinian human rights groups have been vocal in denouncing this issue, and have produced a host of seminars, articles, and legal studies suggesting changes to improve future drafts. More than grounds for invalidating the current working draft of the constitution, however, these debates are positive testimony that democratic dialogue and popular participation in the process of state-building already is a vibrant part of Palestinian civil society.

Anyway, my co-translators and I spent many long days absorbed in the legal minutiae of the Palestinian state-to-be, tuning out the rest of the world in order to meet our Sept. 30, 2000 deadline. It was only after we had submitted our translation, therefore, that we looked at the newspaper and discovered that Palestine was up in flames. Two days earlier, Ariel Sharon had visited the al-Aqsa mosque. Clashes ensued the next day between Palestinian protesters and Israeli police. According to Palestinian Red Crescent figures, some 60 Palestinians were killed and 2,500 injured during the week following Sharon's visit.

The al-Aqsa intifada had begun. Within a month, another 125 Palestinians were killed. The 126th to die was the intifada's first suicide bomber. The rest is history.

The three of us spent much of the first month of the intifada in our Cairo apartment watching the news from Palestine. Listening to the reports about the bombing of neighborhoods, demolition of homes, and countless funerals, we would exclaim, "How can this happen? The Palestinians have a Constitution!"

We knew then what our president still does not seem to understand. A Palestinian constitution means little as long as the Israeli occupation continues. Palestinian reforms will not end the conflict, because Palestinian politics is not the source of the conflict. The engine driving the violence is the Israeli occupation. The violence will never end until Israel takes its soldiers and settlers and leaves the West Bank and Gaza, once and for all.

President Bush's call for democracy in Palestine, therefore, is not wrong as much as it is beside the point. It does not matter how the Palestinians choose their leaders when Israel retains the power to besiege, exile, arrest or assassinate them at whim. It does not matter what free-market institutions the Palestinians develop as long as Israel can impose closures and curfews that bring all commerce, not to mention all daily life, to a screeching halt.

Israel is wreaking havoc in Palestinian towns and refugee camps with impunity, and the White House's solution is to audit the PNA? Perhaps the president got the Enron and Middle East files mixed up, because his speech sounded more like a prescription for reforming American finance than it did a plan to settle the Palestinians' 50-year struggle to live with freedom and dignity on their own land.

The Palestinians already have a constitution; they don't need another one. What they need is to be treated like a people.

Wendy Pearlman is earning a Ph.D. in Government at Harvard University. She has lived in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and is currently preparing a book of interviews with Palestinians about their experiences during the second intifada. She has published op-eds in The Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer,Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Jordan Times.

 

After Bush's Hope-Killing Speech, Palestine Should Sign the Treaty of Rome

 

By John V. Whitbeck

Late June was a brutal time for all who still hope for peace and justice in the Middle East--and not simply with respect to the violence, death and destruction on the ground.

On June 24, President George W. Bush delivered a hope-destroying speech on his "vision" for Middle East peace which combined overwhelming pro-Israeli bias with breathtaking logical absurdity and incoherence. (Writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland called it a "fantastic speech" in the sense that it "consisted, from beginning to end, of fantasy.") This speech, which the world had been counting on to restore hope, virtually guarantees deepening despair and an acceleration of the already appalling violence, death and destruction. It is now clear that any progress toward peace must await regime change in the United States as well as in Israel.

Two days after Bush's speech, a Belgian court dismissed the complaint against Ariel Sharon for crimes against humanity arising out of his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacres on the purely procedural (and, no doubt, politically pressured) grounds that Belgium's "universal jurisdiction" with respect to crimes against humanity only extends to persons physically present in Belgium.

What can seekers of peace and justice now do--if not to improve the situation, at least to limit its deterioration? International law and the moral conscience of mankind have always been the Palestinians' only assets. These assets may be currently overwhelmed by the dominant principle of the new imperial order, "Might Makes Right," but there is now an opportunity to build on them which can and should be taken.

Having surpassed the required 60 ratifications in April, the Treaty of Rome establishing the International Criminal Court came into force on July 1. The court will have jurisdiction over those committing war crimes (notably including settlement activity) and crimes against humanity after July 1. There are, of course, various exceptions and exclusions, many insisted upon by the United States as a condition to its signing the treaty. (In the end, the United States and Israel were among the seven states, out of 127 participating in the Rome Conference not to sign the treaty at the conclusion of the conference--perhaps, at least in part, due to their failure to obtain an exclusion for settlement activity.)

One exclusion successfully negotiated by the United States is highly relevant to the Middle East. For the court to have jurisdiction, either the alleged criminal must come from a ratifying state or the alleged crime must be committed in a ratifying state. Since Israel is most unlikely ever to ratify the treaty and since Palestine is not (at least yet) a ratifying state, this carefully crafted legal loophole means that Israelis can continue to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territories with no fear that their crimes might lead to their being brought to justice in The Hague.

However, what is to prevent the State of Palestine, which was proclaimed in 1988 and has been recognized diplomatically by more than 120 other sovereign states, from signing and ratifying the treaty and presenting its instrument of ratification to the United Nations, where, although Palestine has not applied for full member state status, it enjoys permanent observer status with most of the rights of a member state?

While the United States can veto full United Nations membership for Palestine, it cannot veto a state's accession to an international treaty to which the United States is not itself a party. It might try to twist Secretary-General Kofi Annan's arm to fend off Palestine's instrument of ratification, but on what basis?

President Bush could scarcely have been more vigorous or insistent that the Palestinian leadership must "do more" to fight "terrorism." If Palestine were a ratifying state of the Treaty of Rome, then any Palestinian, at any level, committing a "terrorist" act which constitutes a war crime or a crime against humanity could be brought to justice before the International Criminal Court, which would not be the case in the absence of Palestinian ratification.

How could the United States oppose this? More precisely, how could it explain its opposition? Because making Palestinians subject to international criminal law would, indirectly, make Israelis committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territories also subject to international criminal law? Because the United States prefers targeted assassinations and extrajudicial executions to the rule of law?

Not incidentally, Palestinian accession to the Treaty of Rome would entail official United Nations recognition of Palestine as a "state," existing today, with nothing "provisional" about it. At least as importantly, every Israeli politician, every Israeli soldier and every Israeli settler would then know that "business as usual" would put them at some risk (however modest) of indictment, of arrest in other countries and of being tried before the International Criminal Court. This knowledge could have some restraining effect on the behavior of some of them.

This recourse to international law would not overrule the principle that "Might Makes Right." However, it could moderate and reduce somewhat the intensity of the violence, death and destruction which both Palestinians and Israelis will have to suffer while waiting for the Palestinian leadership (any Palestinian leadership) to have true partners for peace in the Israeli and American leaderships. It could be a long wait. Moderating the brutality, saving lives and strengthening the rule of law against the law of the jungle are well worth the effort.

John V. Whitbeck is an international lawyer who writes frequently on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 

The One Way Forward

 

By Ahmed Bouzid

Not that we have had a "good week" since the second intifada started back in September 2000, but the last week of June was a particularly bad and ugly week for those who struggle for justice and peace in the Middle East: President George W. Bush gave a speech that could just as well have been written by a Likud speechwriter; Congressman Earl Hilliard of Alabama was defeated by AIPAC money; Ariel Sharon's Belgium trials were thrown out over a technicality; and CNN spectacularly buckled under mighty pro-Israeli pressures.

And so we must ask: what should the lesson be for us Arabs, Muslims, and those who support the Palestinians' quest for independence? What should we learn from the setbacks of that nasty week?

When Ariel Sharon began his military re-invasion of the West Bank back in March, his intent was to destroy fully the nascent Palestinian state's infrastructure and to set the stage for a full reoccupation of the West Bank. And, while he did manage to do that to a certain extent, he was reigned back and had to pace his murderous assault. Why? Because ordinary Arab citizens around the world mobilized en masse and gave Europe and the U.S. a bad scare. It was not Arab governments who kept Sharon in check, not any threat to stop the flow of oil (there was none issued, except for Saddam Hussain's half-hearted gesture), not any threat to halt cooperation in "the war against terrorism," but the threat of a popular revolt that could spiral out of control.

We need to keep that lesson well in mind in these difficult times, when we ask ourselves: what on earth can be done to get us out of this absurd situation? Justice is on our side, the vast majority of the world is on our side, so why do the Israelis continue to score points while we keep on falling behind? What can we do beside lamenting our fate, to make the headway we should be making?

Looking back closer to ourselves here in the U.S., the answer is simple: pro-Israel Jews and their supporters are constantly on the move, are constantly mobilized, are highly motivated and organized, and wage their battle to promote what they believe in EVERY SINGLE DAY.

When Earl Hilliard was picked as the political season's victim of the year by AIPAC, pro-Israel supporters did not whine, wince, and wring hands: they sent checks, spread the word, and kept at it until he was defeated. They mobilized their well-oiled machine and got things done.

In sharp contrast, what did Arab and Muslim Americans do to support Hilliard? I had a chat with an AP reporter from Alabama last week, a few days before the run-off, and he complained that, aside from our little couple of pages that we at Palestine Media Watch had put up (see <http://www.votehilliard.org>), he could not find anything else on the Internet by way of open support and organization for Congressman Hilliard from Arab Americans. To be sure, there was some behind-the-scene support from Arab-American organizations, but nowhere nearly as much noise and publicity as the campaign should have been given by our side. Worse, Hilliard's opponent, Artur Davis, was showered with money from pro-Israel supporters, while Hilliard received relatively much less from Arab Americans.

Sure, one may argue that we are not as affluent as the pro-Israel forces--but then again, what does it take to raise a million dollars (and a million dollars would have made a huge difference)? One thousand $1,000 checks? Ten thousand $100 checks? We Arabs and Muslims count more than 6 million; we can't together come up with a million dollars to make the point that WE CAN stop the mighty AIPAC machine--that AIPAC and their supporters are not GOD, that they can be stopped? Imagine if Hilliard had been saved by Arab/Muslim money and support? Imagine how much more encouraged those congressmen who do want to stand for what is right and good without risking political suicide would be? No, instead we sat on our hands and watched as Hilliard, an incumbent, was felled, and replaced by someone who now wholly owes his election to the pro-Israel lobby. And so now the hysterical Congress is sure to get even more hysterical about not daring to criticize Israel.

But let's turn to what we can do from here on.

Last week Ted Turner dared to suggest that Israel is also engaged in terrorism (by the way, 40 percent of the American people do agree with him on that). Predictably, a maelstrom followed, and CNN not only was forced to rebuff and rebuke Turner, but immediately launched a five-part series on Israeli victims, and a Web site listing every single Israeli victim of suicide bombings.

What are we going to do about this?

Are we going to ONCE AGAIN sit on our hands, maybe at best protest for a few days, and then move on with our busy lives, or are we going to get obsessed with the cause and push as hard as we can--EACH ONE OF US--until we get what we want: a five-part series from CNN and a Web site listing each and every single child, woman, and elderly Palestinian victim killed by Israel?

The Palestinian issue, and the issue of the Middle East in general, are not mere foreign policy side issues that have little effect on our workaday lives here in the U.S. On the contrary, they affect us IMMENSELY--and they will continue to affect us as long as the Middle East conflict is not solved, once and for all. As long as the AIPAC lobby has the influence it has on U.S. policy toward the Middle East, we Arabs and Muslims will suffer the consequences (as will Americans in general, in fact--in terms of a reckless and unwise foreign policy, and in terms of an erosion of basic civil rights and due process): we will hear absurd things like Attorney General John Ashcroft's comment on Islam being a religion of suicide bombers, we will be characterized as a people who produce terrorists, we will be viewed as coming from a culture of weakness, divisiveness, impotence--we will be viewed the way AIPAC wants us to be viewed, the better to make sure that the Palestinians' plight is never fully humanized.

And that is why--in addition to our obligation to stand and defend justice and freedom for our Palestinian sisters and brothers--we MUST become obsessed with the cause, why we need to fight EVERY SINGLE DAY, why we must organize, constantly, why we must be creative, be energetic, why we must try, and fail, and fail again, and try and try again, to get coalitions going, get people motivated, speak out, write, call, fax, distribute, volunteer, day in and day out. Our struggle is not just for an ideal: it is a crucial struggle for our own well-being and the well-being of the society we live in here and now and for the future.

Things can only get better--but only if we will ourselves to act.

Ahmed Bouzid is president of Palestine Media Watch, <http:www.pmwatch.org>.

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