The EU Heads The Wrong Way
Thursday, December 13 2001 @ 02:13 PM GMT
By Ghassan Khatib, Palestine Report
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The recent European Union declaration has disappointed most Palestinians – officials and non-officials alike – and is producing further frustration and desperation, which usually leads to anger and violence.
The main problem of this declaration from a Palestinian perspective is not only that it is not balanced or that it neglects the Israeli violence and closure and so on, but rather because it does not tell the Palestinians how it is possible to end the Israeli military occupation or what Europe’s advice is as to what Palestinians might do to bring this occupation to an end.
Of course, the statement did criticize the occupation and settlement expansion and reiterated the well-known balanced European position. However, all these things remain verbal and theoretical while the aspects of the declaration that require Palestinian action, such as stopping the Palestinian uprising, had immediate practical dimensions. The Palestinian leadership, out of its complete weakness, is able to see only one option, which is simply to cave in under the external pressure now coming from everywhere, including Europe, but mainly from the United States.
The main problem that nobody seems willing to understand is that this Israeli recipe for “ending the violence” as a way out of this current crisis, i.e., applying pressure on Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and his Authority to arrest Intifada activists and “dismantle the terrorist networks” is not a recipe for success. The adoption of this recipe by the Americans and now the Europeans will not achieve the objectives of these parties and will only play into the hands of those who have always opposed the peace process in Israel and Palestine.
In Israel, pressure on the Palestinian Authority has one specific objective, which is to stop all kinds of Palestinian resistance. The achievement of this objective will only strengthen the political camp in Israel that has always opposed the peace process. In Palestine, too, this goal is undermining the peace camp, i.e. the Palestinian Authority and Fateh, and strengthening public support for and the credibility of those who oppose the peace process.
There is no doubt that when Israel was directly in charge of security in Palestinian population centers between 1967 and 1994, Israel was doing all of the things that it is now trying to have the Palestinian Authority do – carry out arbitrary arrests, dismantle militant organizations, prevent incitement, and so on. There were periods of time when Israel had some 15,000 Palestinian prisoners in its jails.
But that never succeeded in achieving the Israeli objective of stopping resistance to the Israeli occupation. On the contrary, it only increased the popularity of those factions that actively resisted, increased their credibility, gave them better recruitment (especially among young people) and ensured that they had incentives to continue what they were doing.
For all these reasons, any efforts, especially from Europe, that do not in practical terms help the Palestinians in their attempts to end the occupation or tell them what they might do to achieve that goal, while concentrating only on ending Palestinian resistance and making the Palestinian Authority’s job simply that of carrying out Israel’s security directions, will certainly backfire and produce the opposite results.
The kind of political efforts that might be effective in achieving the cause of peace in the Middle East and ending the violence should have three intertwined components.
First, efforts to stop Palestinian violence should be accompanied by equally strong efforts to stop Israeli violence and other inhumane measures taken against Palestinians.
Second, any efforts to stop or reduce violence will only be successful to the extent that they are accompanied by political efforts of the kind that bring back the hope to Palestinians that it is possible to achieve a political and peaceful end to the Israeli military occupation on the basis of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242.