LV,
This interview appeared in Haaretz, and I found it interesting. Dr Jawad's is the first rational voice I have heard come out of Bir Zeit. I don't agree with all his conclusions, but it's definitely a rational voice. What do you think?
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Once again, Israel is operating according to a `concept'
Dr. Salah Abdel Jawad, a political science professor from Bir Zeit says that Ehud Barak hoped to push the Palestinians into all-out conflict.
By Amira Hass
For many Palestinians it is not the Palestinian news services, but the Israeli and foreign ones that provide their main source of news. Israeli society, says Dr. Salah Abdel Jawad, a political science professor from Bir Zeit University, is a lot more exposed to the Palestinian public than Israelis are exposed to Palestinian society.
Palestinians watch Israeli TV and listen to Israel radio. They read the half dozen Israeli newspaper articles books about current events that are translated into Arabic and passed around.
But over the past few months Jawad, like many Palestinians, has been shocked by what he's seen up close in the Israeli media. The media, he says, which was long considered professional and pluralistic, have suddenly started singing one tune. They give the Israeli public false information about Palestinian society in general and more specifically about the conflict and the crisis. Brainwashing, in short.
"But the Palestinians are also responsible and to blame," he says. "We've never known how to get out message across in the proper way. Our media is very mediocre, both as a means to transmit information and as a propaganda tool. They open the Palestinian TV news in Hebrew with photos of a boy pulling down an Israeli flag. It may be at the IDF outpost in Netzarim but nonetheless, if you want to reach the Israeli public, that's not the image with which to open the Hebrew-language broadcasts."
He wrote a similar critique back in October 2000 in El Ayam and by now it's become an acceptable self-criticism heard in many Palestinian circles.
Jawad zaps through the various channels provided by a particularly generous satellite dish. Besieged townships, cut off roads, dirt blockades, and uncrossable trenches have isolated Palestinians, making satellite TV popular throughout Palestinian society, which is locked up at home.
The conversation with him goes back and forth between critiques of Palestinian society and Israeli society, so that sometimes it's difficult to tell them apart. That two-barreled criticism is the daily bread of those who believe that at the end of the process, the Palestinian struggle will inevitably lead the parties back to the negotiating table and turn the occupier into a neighbor - "in two states, or in a binational state or with full annexation of the territories with full civil rights." It's a view voiced not just by intellectuals. It's heard in vegetable stores, at demonstrations, and in everyday conversation - it's a view held not by the few but by the many.
The connection between information, knowledge, frankness, understanding and change is the thread that weaves together the conversation about the current Intifada with Jawad. Within Palestinian society he's known for dealing with the issues of the struggle's tactics and how to improve them.
At a public debate in Ramallah in front of hundreds of people in November 2000 he said "people gather knowledge through experience, and internalize that knowledge without the need for more experiences. But unfortunately, that isn't always the case with the Palestinian national movement. We all know about the difficult behavior of the PLO in Jordan and Lebanon ... in both cases, the Jordanian and Lebanese governments used PLO behavior as an excuse to eliminate the `annoying' presence of the Palestinians. Nonetheless, despite that accumulated Palestinian experience, we see the same mistakes repeating themselves in the current Intifada."
Hamas repeats the PLO's mistakes
His critique appeared in a pioneering article he wrote in the second week of the current Intifada. Referring to the militarization of the struggle, he warned that Palestinian shooting, in any case was ineffective, but it would give Israel the excuse to hit back at the Palestinians with excessive force. Then - and many times since - he has said "We must not give the Israelis the opportunity to create a national consensus against us."
Sticking to the morality of the struggle, which means the duty not to strike at civilians - on both sides - is not only a human value unto itself, he says, but is true for its efficacy. The internal debate among Israelis about the nature of relations with the Palestinians is important for the struggle against the occupation. In general, he adds, militarism has negative influences on an entire society that becomes addicted to it.
"We Palestinians," he said at the Ramallah debate, "don't document our accumulated knowledge." Thus, in the struggle for independence, new groups repeat the mistakes of the past the way the Hamas repeated the mistakes of the PLO (in the armed struggle at the beginning of the first Intifada).
A second problem, he added, is that nothing is done with the accumulated knowledge. The appearance of masked men at demonstrations in the first Intifada, gave the Israelis the opportunity to send soldiers camouflaged as masked men into Palestinian society and to make arrests or kill wanted men.
Nonetheless, "we repeat the same mistake at funerals and demonstrations today, when armed masked men fire into the air. There's no use to that shooting, and the masks - particularly ugly ones - only increase the possibility that camouflaged soldiers will show up, and it distracts the world's attention from the main issue to a marginal, non-representative one, strengthening their view of the Palestinians as a `terrorist nation.'"
"Then there's also the problem of knowledge and frankness," he said at the debate. "When Mahmoud al Amousi (a Fatah man killed in Bitouniya) and two other Palestinians were martyred, we were told the Israelis shot them at a checkpoint. But that wasn't the truth. The truth is that two days earlier those three had shot at an Israeli bus from an ambush. And then two days later they wanted to do it again,. But this time, the Israelis were lying in ambush for them and they got killed. It's very important that information reach the people because that's the only way to prevent other youngsters from making the same mistake."
Israel's own self-obstructions to knowledge take place in a different way, at other, deep and strategic levels. Jawad is convinced that Israeli intelligence has precise knowledge about the Palestinians - "otherwise how can we explain their ability to assassinate various activists."
But when he hears Israeli intelligence's versions about what's going on he says "it is like 1973, when Israeli intelligence had a formulated concept and despite all the information it refused to change that concept.
He continued: "In 1973 the concept was that the Arabs were afraid - and it fell apart. It wasn't a failure of lack of information. Like now, when they are trapped with wrong concepts about the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people. There were dozens of years of demonization of the Palestinians, and it didn't change much after Oslo. They haven't given up the perspective of the conqueror over the conquered, they still have the perspective of the colonizer. That's why they are wrong all the time at the strategic level."
Israeli intelligence is not only wrong - it's misleading, he says. "The Israeli public is the victim of the media, which eagerly responded to the call and practically without any argument at all reported the government's version, hiding from the public those activities and intentions of the Barak government that harmed the chance for peace."
Therefore, a majority of Israelis believed the claims of Barak's generosity at Camp David. "The Palestinian side hasn't published its version of what happened there because, I believe, it couldn't admit at that stage and in public just how much we were ready to concede."
"Barak's policies didn't exactly coincide with those of the Labor Party," he adds. "That's one of the problems in Israeli politics. There's not always a unity of intentions. It's known, after all, that Barak opposed the Oslo agreements. He was the first prime minister who managed to avoid implementing any of the agreements Israel signed. I believe that Barak wanted the Palestinians to be recalcitrant at Camp David, so he could torpedo the process. When he raised the Israeli demands about Haram el Shareef (the Temple Mount) he knew Arafat couldn't accept it, and certainly not within the context of a package of other Palestinian concessions."
The target - destroy the PA
Barak, he believes, hoped to push the Palestinians into an overall conflict, "but the Palestinians didn't help him. They weren't totally trapped by all out war that would have allowed Israel to make unlimited use of its military power. Palestinian tactics are low profile tactics, which makes it difficult for the Israelis to achieve their goal." That goal, especially for the Sharon government, he believes, "is the destruction of the Palestinian Authority and the entire Oslo process ... since they don't want to pay the price of peace, which is evacuation of the settlements."
Israeli ignorance about Palestinian life before the Intifada also characterizes the problem. For years, he says, Israel ignored the small details of the occupation, which add up to a suffocating, insufferable life.
"Most Israelis - Zionists or not - are humane," he says. "If they knew and understood the reality, they wouldn't accept what's going on. No Israeli has seen the entire picture, not even the soldier at the checkpoint. The land that was expropriated, the water we don't have and the settlements do have, the passes we need to travel, the passes we don't get, the ban on travel to Jerusalem. And that's what it's like day in and day out, year in and year out. The Israelis aren't aware of the utter totality of the occupation. Our daily life is worse than that of the French - not the Jews, of course - under the Nazis. It's difficult to accept, but it's true. And it goes on forever.
"The Israelis have a tendency to believe they are always the ones who are being hurt. Despite their power, the long years of occupation, they feel that every chapter in their lives is another chapter in the history of the persecution of the Jews. When they say this they are perfectly serious. It's not manipulation. And I believe that if they knew more, at least they would understand why we do what we do. Maybe they won't accept it," he quickly adds, "but at least they'll understand."
More detailed knowledge will change something among the Israelis, he says, and maybe influence others. "After all, most Israelis aren't in daily contact with the occupation. They live their lives separately and know that they do from the media."
And that media, he says, on a day when 10 Palestinian civilians were killed by IDF gunfire, barely mentioned it. "It's a media that gives the wrong impression of Israeli restraint.
"And the Israeli public has no idea what's happening on the ground. They don't understand how much the population is suffering, or the IDF's system of repression. At the end of the day, it's a sword of Damocles over the government, since a majority of Israelis aren't satisfied, feeling that the army isn't doing enough, the government isn't decisive or aggressive, isn't operating according to the mandate the public gave it."
That ignorance, says the political scientist, leads to a breakdown in confidence in the government and that shows up afterward in the elections.
He believes that Israeli intelligence and the Israeli public, fed incorrect information, is scornful of Palestinian ability to withstand the suffering, and its ability to stand up to the current system of oppression. The Israeli occupation authorities, he says, may have learned from the mistakes of other colonialist regimes, but, he adds, "it's only technical. They've adopted more sophisticated methods for control, which have a cumulative destructive influence on the fabric of Palestinian society, but is less felt in the world because it's all done `drop by drop' while at the same time the Palestinians have developed an amazing ability to remain steadfast."
When the F-16s bombed Ramallah, Jawad stopped being afraid. "I felt as if in any case there was nothing we could do against the planes. And then I understood for the first time how an entire nation reaches the point where death stops being a threat and becomes easier, acceptable. It's amazing how until the Intifada the Israelis managed to create among us a feeling of impotence and total surrender - until they pushed us to a point saturated with fear, an explosion.
"And then, in only a few weeks, we managed to unite the entire society around the Intifada and to reach the strategic decision to continue it: In any case we've lost so much, so let's continue the struggle and be patient, bear the burden." |
