Dispatches From Palestine

Graham Usher

Description

This is a controversial overview of the contemporary Middle East which charts the failure of the Oslo Agreement. It analyses the key processes that structure the Oslo process: economic, military, political and cultural.
Preface

1. Why Gaza says yes, mostly

2. What kind of nation ? The rise of Hamas in the occupied territories

3. An Israeli peace - an interview with Ilan Pappe

4. Palestine - the economic fist in the political glove

5. The meaning of return

Oslo two - Oslo's high tide

Preface

1. Bantustanisation or binationalism ? an interview with Azmi Bishara

2. The politics of internal security: the PA's new intelligence services

3. Outsider in - a profile of Palestinian Council candidate, Salah Tamari

4. The politics of atrocity

5. The Charter and the future of Palestinian politics

6. Closures, cantons and the Palestinian Covenant

7. The Palestinians in Israel

8. Shimon Peres - fourth time loser

Post-Oslo - decline and fall

Preface

1. Pictures of war

2. Madness in Ramallah

3. Hezballah, Syria and the Lebanese elections

4. "All killers" - Luxor, the Gamaa and Egypt's prisons

5. Fatah, Hamas and the crisis of Oslo - interviews with Marwan Barghouti and Ibrahim Ghoshah

6. Making peace - an interview with Yossi Beilin

7. Believers in blue jeans - an interview with Aryeh Deri

8. The fire the next time - Palestinians in Lebanon

9. The meaning of Shiekh Yassin

10. Impossible contradictions - Israel at 50

11. A Palestinian refugee at 51

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Political Science
• Peace
• Palestine

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849640213
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Dispatches from
Palestine
The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process
Graham Usher
Pluto P Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIAFirst published 1999 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling,
VA 20166–2012, USA
Chapters 1–4 and 6 © Race & Class; Chapters 7 and 16 © Journal of
Palestine Studies; Chapters 8, 13 and 19 © Al-Ahram Weekly; Chapters 9
and 21 © News from Within; Chapters 10, 14, 15 and 17 © Middle East
International; Chapter 11 © Middle East Report; Chapters 12 and 23 © Red
Pepper; Chapter 22 © Independent on Sunday (South Africa)
This collection copyright © Graham Usher 1999
Maps © Foundation for Middle East Peace 1999
Reproduced by kind permission
The right of Graham Usher to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1342 6 hbk
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Usher, Graham, 1958–
Dispatches from Palestine : the rise and fall of the Oslo peace
process / Graham Usher.
p. cm.
ISBN 0–7453–1342–6 (hc.)
1. Arab–Israeli conflict—1993—Peace. 2. Palestinian Arabs—
Politics and government. I. Title.
DS119.76.U83 1999
956.05'3—DC21 99–19670
CIP
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Production Services, Chadlington, OX7 3LN
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton
Printed in the EC by T.J. International, PadstowContents
List of Interviewees vii
Introduction 1
Part 1 Oslo One – Gaza/Jericho First
September 1993 to September 1995
Preface 9
1 Why Gaza Says Yes, Mostly 12
2 What Kind of Nation? The Rise of Hamas in the
Occupied Territories 18
3 An Israeli Peace: an Interview with Ilan Pappe 34
4 Palestine: the Economic Fist in the Political Glove 42
5 Jabalyia and the Meaning of Return 49
Part 2 Olso Two – Oslo’s High Tide
September 1995 to May 1996
Preface 55
6 Bantustanisation or Binationalism? An Interview
with Azmi Bishara 59
7 The Politics of Internal Security: the PA’s New
Intelligence Services 67
8 Outsider In: a Profile of Palestinian Council Candidate
Salah Tamari 80
9 The Politics of Atrocity 83
10 The Charter and the Future of Palestinian Politics 88
11 Closures, Cantons and the Palestinian Covenant 94
12 The Palestinians in Israel 103
13 Shimon Peres – a Fourth-Time Loser? 107vi Dispatches from Palestine
Part 3 Post–Oslo – Decline and Fall
May 1996 to December 1998
Preface 113
14 Pictures of War 117
15 Madness in Ramallah 120
16 Hizbollah, Syria and the Lebanese Elections 122
17 ‘All Killers’: Luxor, the Gama’a and Egypt’s Prisons 130
18 Fatah, Hamas and the Crisis of Oslo: Interviews with
Marwan Barghouti and Ibrahim Ghoshah 136
19 Making Peace: an Interview with Yossi Beilin 145
20 Believers in Blue Jeans: an Interview with
Rabbi Aryeh Deri 151
21 The Fire the Next Time? Palestinians in Lebanon 162
22 The Meaning of Sheikh Yassin 166
23 Impossible Contradictions – Israel at 50 169
24 A Palestinian Refugee at 51 172
References 176
Index 191
Maps
1 Palestinian Autonomous Area – Gaza strip 1994 10
2 Areas of National Priority – 1997 56
3 West Bank – 1998 114List of Interviewees
Marwan Barghouti is the General Secretary of the Fatah
movement in the West Bank, the premier nationalist faction within
the PLO. President of Birzeit University Student Council between
1985 and 1987, Barghouti was expelled from the occupied territories
in 1987 for membership of Fatah, then an outlawed organisation. He
returned to the West Bank in April 1994 and was elected a
Palestinian Council member for Ramallah in January 1996.
Yossi Beilin is a Member of Knesset and a leading figure in Israel’s
Labour Party. As Israel’s deputy Foreign Minister, Beilin initiated the
Oslo ‘secret channel’ that led eventually to the PLO-Israeli
Declaration of Principles in September 1993. Losing to Ehud Barak
for leadership of the Labour Party in June 1997, Beilin has since
become the leading advocate in Israel for a unilateral Israeli
withdrawal from South Lebanon.
Azmi Bishara is a Palestinian Member of Knesset and leader of the
National Democratic Assembly in Israel. A former philosophy
lecturer at Birzeit University, Bishara has been active in struggles
against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and for the
political and national rights of the Arab minority in Israel. He is a
member of Mutawin – the Palestinian Institute for the study of
democracy and author of numerous political and philosophical
studies.
Rabbi Aryeh Deri is a Member of Knesset and the General
Secretary of Israel’s Sephardi List for Tradition or Shas movement. He
served as Interior Minister for the governments of Yitzak Shamir and
Yitzak Rabin. Currently on charge for corruption (and so prevented
from holding any cabinet position), Deri was nevertheless seen as an
enormously influential figure in Israel’s last government of
Binyamin Netanyahu.
viiviii Dispatches from Palestine
Ibrahim Ghoshah is the official spokesman of the Palestinian
Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas. Currently based in Amman,
he has been active in Hamas and its forerunner, the Muslim
Brotherhood, since the late 1950s. Ghoshah was a member of the
Hamas delegation to the ‘reconciliation’ talks with the PLO in Cairo
in October 1995.
Ilan Pappe is one of Israel’s ‘new historians’ whose work has
challenged received accounts of Israeli history. A lecturer in Middle
Eastern history at Haifa University, Pappe is the author of The
Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict (I.B. Taurus, 1994) and several
other studies on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is a founder of the
Institute of Peace Research in Israel and a member of the Israeli
Communist Party.Introduction
My first encounter with Palestine was in the summer of 1985 when
I spent two months teaching English to Palestinian refugees in the
Gaza Strip. On my second day I was given a tour of Jabalyia refugee
camp. Picking my way through the warren of sand tracks and
breezeblock shelters, I met Achmed Abdallah. In a gesture I soon learned
to be customary, he invited me to stay that night in his home. In the
neat little ‘study’ he has chiselled out of his shelter, he relayed to me
the story of his life.
Thirteen years later I revisited Achmed as a journalist. I listened
again to his story, and published it wherever I could as my
contribution to remembering the 50th anniversary of the Palestinian
al-Nakba – the catastrophe that, in 1948, delivered the state of Israel
for ‘the whole Jewish people’ and exile to the bulk of the Palestinian
people, including those who now reside in Jabalyia.
As I transcribed the tape, I was struck by how little Achmed’s
reading of his life had changed, despite the momentous events that
had passed under the bridge of the intervening years. But I also
reflected on my motives for retrieving Achmed’s story rather than
one of the similar histories I had heard in camps in Gaza, the West
Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The answer I think was an
illdefined need to return to the original source to place a symmetry on
a people and a cause that, for the last 16 years, have become my own.
The currents that swept me to such an identification had none of
the usual tributaries. I am not Jewish. I have none of the ties of
family, service or travel that bind so many Europeans to the Arab
world. Until very recently, I was woefully ignorant of Arab
civilisation in general and Palestinian nationalism in particular. Nor – as a
committed non-believer – was I enticed by the spectacle of Palestine
and Jerusalem as the cradle of the world’s three great monotheistic
religions. What drew me to Palestine was rather the meaning of an
experience and an event.
The first was born of being a teacher in the East End of London in
the 1980s. Many of those I taught were the offspring of immigrants
who had come in the 1950s and 1960s from the Indian
subcontinent and the Caribbean to rebuild Britian’s shattered post-war
12 Dispatches from Palestine
economy. Others were the later arrivals of refugees, asylum-seekers
and migrants who had washed up in Britain in flight from the
turmoil of their own societies. In classrooms, church halls and living
rooms, they narrated their stories with much the same mix of
emotion and detachment as Achmed did his, and revealed to me the
organic links between the institutional and popular racism they
experienced ‘here’ and the regimes of political oppression and
national dislocation they had fled from ‘there’.
Many would speak of Palestine. Indeed, of all the issues we
discussed, it was Palestine that most exposed the gulf separating
their view of the world from ‘ours’. For most Europeans, the demand
that Palestinians sacrifice all or most of their pre-1948 patrimony by
accepting the state of Israel was but a negligible part of the
atonement for the incomparable crime done to the Jewish people by
the Nazis and their allies. It troubled very few of us that the
penitence was to be paid by a people who had played no role in the
genocide.
But, for the refugees in my classroom, Palestine was the emblem
of their own dispossession. For them, the PLO’s quest for a
homeland chimed with their own aspirations of liberation,
independence and return. As for Israel, that was merely proof of the
enduring fact of colonialism in what was supposedly a post-colonial
world. Palestine thus became for me not simply one cause among
others, but the prism that threw into relief the context, bitterness
and violence of all those other causes espoused by my Kurdish,
Iranian, Sri Lankan and Chilean students. It lent light to their
experience and shade to my experience of them.
The event was Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Like most
interested observers, I was initially stunned by the sheer scale of the
carnage – a toll of 18,000 Palestinian and Lebanese dead in less than
five months of hostilities, according to Lebanese statistics. But I was
also out