Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2002, page 14

Special Report

 

Azmi Bishara Predicts Palestinian State in The Near Future

 

By Pat McDonnell Twair

“Statehood is about to happen. That’s why we must have nerves of steel, or conditions will be set for us and they will be final.”

This extraordinary statement was made by Israeli parliamentarian Azmi Bishara in Anaheim, California Sept. 20—even as Israeli tanks and bulldozers once more were dismantling Yasser Arafat’s presidential headquarters in Ramallah.

Bishara, one of 13 Palestinians serving in the 120-member Knesset, is the first Israeli MK to face criminal charges for his political views. Because he publicly speaks out against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and arranged trips for elderly Arab Israelis to visit their refugee relatives in Syria, Bishara has been charged with sedition. If found guilty, he could be stripped of the parliamentary seat he has held since 1996 and sentenced to prison.

Bishara, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Berlin’s Humboldt University, thinks this is unlikely, as a battery of attorneys prepare for the trial that has captured international attention. As many as 15 jurists from France, Sweden, Denmark and Italy have sat in on three preliminary hearings, which, Bishara said, have been the longest in Israeli history.

“The last hearing took 10 hours for the prosecution to answer our allegations against the indictment,” stated the outspoken intellectual. “An Israeli judge admitted we have a formidable defense.”

There are no Israeli attorneys on his defense team, Bishara said, describing his legal representatives as “young, enthusiastic Arab lawyers. I don’t want to hide behind Israeli attorneys who may believe in my right of dissent, but don’t agree that resistance against occupation is just,” he explained. “I want lawyers who think like me.”

As the Israeli right wing gains momentum in Israel, Bishara said, attempts are being made to draft laws that discriminate against the dissenting minority. These attempts include revoking the citizenship of Arabs who speak out against occupation.

“If the right wing succeeds in disqualifying the Arab political parties, we will appeal,” stated Bishara, who heads the Balad party. “This is dangerous—it’s establishing red lines to intimidate us from taking political positions.

“I sit just 20 meters away from Sharon in the Knesset,” he said, a smile crossing his face. “It drives him and his cronies crazy that I am more democratic than they are.”

Sharon’s election was due in part to the decision of Israel’s Arab citizens to boycott the February 2001 elections. It is a decision Bishara defends. “We knew that, even if all the Palestinian citizens had voted for [incumbent Prime Minister Ehud] Barak, it wouldn’t have bridged the gap favoring Sharon,” he explained. “So we decided to take a stand and show our displeasure with Barak, who said if he was elected, he’d name Sharon as his defense minister.

“We want all the people to go to the polls in the next [January ‘03] election,” Bishara said. “Traditionally, about 75 percent of the Arab electorate votes. We want it to be more, to surpass the 80 to 85 percent of Jews who vote.”

As for the strong possibility that hardliner Binyamin Netanyahu may become Israel’s next prime minister, it’s not the politician who is in office, Bishara argued, but the policies carried out that counts.

“Israel hasn’t reached the conclusion that it must pay a price for peace,” he noted. “The Israeli public is tired of this conflict, but it’s not ready for political alternatives.”

Regarding the Zionist claim that Israel is a democracy because Arab citizens do sit in the Knesset, the Nazareth-born Bishara, who can trace his family roots in the Galilee back 400 years, observed that “in the beginning, Israel could tolerate a small Palestinian minority. However, it fails the test for a democracy,” he maintained, “when it treats its Arab citizens as enemies of the state if they express solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. In October 2000, Israeli soldiers shot 13 Arab citizens demonstrating for their cousins across the Green Line. They would never shoot at Jews.

“A Supreme Court judge defined Israel as a democracy that is essentially Jewish in character,” he noted. “I would call it a conditional democracy that doesn’t separate religion from the state. One’s ethnic affiliation is part of the Jewish identity. Jewishness is more important than citizenship in Israel.

“An Arab can’t be an Israeli,” Bishara continued, “because he’s a Christian or Muslim. In the U.S., you can be a [Muslim] Arab and an American, a [Christian] Irishman and an American, an Italian and an American—because there is separation between religion and the state.”

Bishara does not rule out the possibility that, eventually, Arab citizens of Israel might enjoy the same rights as Jews. “Theoretically, I believe a civil society is possible,” he said. “This is the worst time right now. It is difficult to struggle for rights in a society mobilized for war, a frightened, closed society that is reproducing ghetto conditions.

“Maybe Israel feels it’s okay to treat its Palestinian citizens as second- or third-class,” he theorized, “because its primary supporter, the U.S., has discriminated against its indigenous Indian population.”

To Israel’s claim that there is no military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Bishara responded, “If there is no occupation, then why aren’t the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza citizens of Israel? No one is even suggesting citizenship. The Palestinians are thrown into the same pot as the Kurds, Chechens and Kashmiris. The latter are oppressed minorities who do have citizenship and are struggling for separatism.”

According to the former professor of philosophy at Birzeit University, the biggest obstacle facing the Palestinians is Washington’s wholehearted approval of Ariel Sharon’s brutal repression of the occupied population.

“This is the first time in Israeli/U.S. history that the U.S. is 100 percent behind the Likud,” he emphasized. “The U.S. has lost its pragmatic touch when its secretary of defense refers to the West Bank and Gaza as Judea and Samaria and talks about the ‘so-called’ occupation.”

Asked about the possibility that Sharon will attempt mass expulsions of the Palestinians if the U.S. invades Iraq, Bishara replied, “Sure, there are some Israelis who dream about the transfer option, who would like to see an Israel devoid of Arabs. But this isn’t possible. Transfer would bring on a massacre of inestimable proportions. The experience of 1948 ingrained in Palestinians a never-again attitude about becoming refugees. The majority would resist to the death.

“The notion of putting people into trucks and dumping them across the border is over,” Bishara stated. “The new version of transfer is to maintain a Jewish majority and to reduce the land held by Palestinians.

“This is the last existing colonial issue in the world,” he pointed out. “The Europeans see this for what it is: a colonial problem. Other colonial powers built railroads, education systems and other forms of infrastructure. All the Israelis have done is to destroy, devastate our agricultural lands, dig up our roads, close our schools. We built our own hospitals and universities, and they try to tear them down.

“I believe that if these policies continue, the Palestinians should disband the Palestinian Authority and demand that Israel supply food, water, education and health care for three million Palestinians,” he added. “Israel can’t control Ramallah and expect us to run the schools.”

Despite the bleakness of the current situation, Bishara said he is not without hope. “I see the light at the very end of the tunnel,” he stated. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be living in Nazareth. It would be easier to live anywhere else in the world. I believe the Palestinian colonial issue will be solved. We can’t sit in our pajamas and cry over our plight. This is the last national liberation movement in the world. The Israelis are tired, a lot is at stake here. We’re struggling under conditions of forming a Palestinian state and that statehood is about to happen.”

Pat McDonnell Twair is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles.

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