Then get ready for a new intifada
When someone you care about is terminally ill, their death can be the cause of guilty satisfaction on your part. "At last", you think to yourself, "the suffering is over". I feel a little like that this week following the summit between Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon in Sharm-al-Sheikh. At the meeting in Egypt, the two leaders agreed to a ceasefire ending the four-year old intifada. The uprising, which has been in intensive care for more than half its life, has finally been put out of its misery. The war is over and the Palestinians have lost.
Of course you'll hear no talk of defeat and victory in most of the international media's coverage of this week's meeting. No, rather, this is a "window of opportunity" for peace. As ever with the conflict in the Holy Land, much of the media "analysis" involves the inane parroting of empty cliches which lunge from the absurdly optimistic to the downright fictitious. Terms like "the peace process", "tackling terror", "honest broker" and "back on track" spew forth from commentators and participants alike, to create a veritable rubbish dump of verbal garbage.
The fundamental rationale behind all this empty talk is the belief that the Palestinians, who are, lest we forget, the victims in this conflict, must prove themselves worthy of peace. The Israelis by contrast are ever noble, perenially searching for a "partner for peace" on the other side.
For those of us who don't share this pro-Israeli view of the conflict, now is the time, not for optimism about the future, but rather reflection on the past. Why did this uprising fail? For me this intifada was too violent from the outset.
Some of you may gawp at what I just wrote. How can an intifada be too violent? Isn't that like accusing water of being too wet? No,not at all. It's instructive to look back to the first (and far more successful) intifada which began in December 1987.
This uprising was much broader in scope than its successor. It included stone-throwing, strikes, boycotts and protests. In the early days of the first uprising, lethal violence by the Palestinians was a rarity. In the first twelve months of the original intifada, five Isarelis were killed by Palestinians, fewer than wrere killed the previous year, before the uprising began.
The decision to eschew violence which was likely to kill was a conscious decision of the grass-roots groups in the West Bank and Gaza. They understood that they could never compete with Isarel militarily but they realised that they could win the battle for hearts and minds around the world. So we saw the David and Goliath image of the young Palestinian throwing a rock at a Merkava tank.
For me this image reflects the reality of the conflict - the strong oppressing the weak. There are millions around the world who feel as I do, and the images from the West Bank and Gaza in the late 1980s have a lot to do with that.
Contrast the icon of the first uprising, the fearless Palestinian stone-thrower, with the symbol of the second intifada - the grinning suicide bomber on his way to paradise. The stone-thrower, to the best of my knowledge, never took a life. The suicide bomber by contrast took as many as he could.
As an instrument to terrorise, suicide bombing is very effective. The death it brings is so random and so horrible that it instills fear in everyone. But from a propaganda point of view, the decision to send young men to their deaths in this way was a colossal miscalculation.
The outrages in Haifa and Tel Aviv and Netanya, to be tactless, made great TV. Meanwhile the IDF went about killing many times more people in the occupied terrirtories in much less spectacular fashion. Hamas, for all their willing martyrs, couldn't tilt the military scales in the Palestinians' favour. Nothing had changed since the first intifada in that respect. But, thanks in large part to the suicide bombing, they couldn't win the propaganda battle either.
Those who may wish to help the Palestinian people, namely the European Union and our hand-chopping friends in the Arab League, have been hamstrung by the suicide bombs. No-one wants to appear to be "soft on terror", especially in the post 9-11 world.
The Palestinians' enemies - the Israeli and American governments - have seized on the horrific actions of Hamas and others to turn the conflict on its head. Now, instead of tackling the cause of the conflict - the occupation - the international meida tells us that all parties must tackle the symptom - terrorism. Or rather Palestinian "terrorism", since the Israelis have uniforms and hence they use "force".
From such a weak position, there is no hope for the Palestinians in this current round of negotiations. Don't get me wrong, if the "peace process" stays "on track" then life in the occupied territories will improve. International funds will help the Palestinian economy, I was going to say "get up off it's knees", but somehow the phrase "get up to its kness" seems more appropriate. The hudna, should it hold, will decrease the average Palestinian civilian's chance of having their life ended by an IDF bullet or missile (directed at "terrorists" of course).
Those of us who live in gentler and more prosperous circumstances should not diminsh the importance of even a small improvement in the lives of the Palestinian people. However, this does not change the fact that politically the situation will not improve for the Palestinian people now that the Israelis have deigned to sit down with their leader.
There is no way in the current circumstances that talks will lead to a lasting peace. It is impossible for the very simple reason that the Israeli government does not want to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve this goal. For Sharon "peace" does not mean ending the occupation but rather re-configuring it. He needs Palestinian agreement only to supervise those areas of the West Bank which, for security reasons, he would rather not control directly. For the Palestinian people such a "deal" is not peace, it's surrender.
If the point comes when Abbas makes clear that he can't and won't sell Bantustans to his people as "historic compromise", then Sharon can just as easily say "Fine then, go back to your war which wasn't working. See you in a couple of years when we have even more settlers in Judea and Samaria."
Should the talks break down in such a manner, expect the same commentators who are currently lauding Abbas as a "moderate" to lambast him in the most caustic terms for "throwing away the chance for peace".
I am not saying that Abbas should not enter into negotaitions in the current climate. There is nothing to be lost by turning up and going through the motions. By so doing he will allow his people to give peace a glance, to have a respite from war. In any case refusing to talk to the Israelis would only play into their hands.
But every Palestinian, whether at leadership or grass-roots level, should have no illusions that the current talks process has any chance of realising their national aspirations. Everyone should perpare for the post-talks atmosphere.
For me, this means readying for a third intifada, which learns the lessons of the first by avoiding the mistakes of the second. Palestinians must embrace the largely non-violent resistance of the original uprising if they are ever to enter the negotiaiting chamber with something to cover their modesty.