Yet enough has been said about economic, social, and political deprivations for Palestinians during the past four years (all of them attributable to the Oslo peace process) without sufficient attention paid to the human factor, surely the most important. For in the age of globalized capital and the triumph if not the actual but of the theoretical market model, most analysts tend to reproduce one of the ideological correlatives of this triumph which, I believe, is the conviction that there is no alternative to it. If you think that only the IMF, the World Bank and market economics, which favour the wealthiest transnationals and countries, count in the world today, and that more equitable distribution and social justice are sentimentalized aspects of socialism's defeat, then you will also be condemned to think that there is no alternative but to compete in the market. Individual will and energy recede in importance, while the sheer power of market economics seems to dominate every individual everywhere. So it has been with Oslo, which has been a triumph for the powerful, in which Israel and the United States have convinced Palestinians and others that what has taken place since 1993 is not only the best, but the single remaining solution to our extremely grave problems. So the attitude today is "let us get Oslo back on track, since anything else is unthinkable."
At such a juncture it becomes evident that Oslo's greatest expense for the Palestinians has been the loss of faith in what I called above the human factor. We need to remind ourselves that political struggles are always contests of will, in which one side attempts to persuade the other side to give up, to lose the will to resist and fight on. This is not a military but a political and moral matter. I therefore think that the task for Palestinian intellectuals today is the reactivation of the will and, just as important, to revive belief in the possibility that what human beings do can make a difference. The tragedy of suicide missions is that they stem from hopelessness; they cannot be part of a programme for national revival since what they promote is negation for its own sake. The problem with the present impasse is not that Madeleine Albright and the US are unwilling to pressure Israel enough but the leadership is caught up mainly in the effort to survive, not in the effort to mobilize as many Palestinians as possible to resist what Israel, in its arrogance and blind heedlessness, is trying to do to us as a people. This attempt at survival is understandable but insufficient as the core Palestinian strategy since the good of the many, the good of the nation, is of far more significance than the well-being of a few. So what then are the imperatives?
Some of them are obvious and scarcely need insistence here. SUMUD is crucial, as is the building of civil institutions by and for Palestinians, quite independently of what the Palestinian Authority may or may not have in mind. For we have a tendency to think only in literal terms, not sufficiently in symbolic or moral ones. The greatest victory of Zionism has been a sustained one for a whole century: to persuade Jews and others that "a return" to an empty land is the proper, indeed the only solution for the afflictions of genocide and anti-Semitism. What has been totally lost in this project of course is the exorbitant price paid by Palestinians who, as invisible, silent, or mainly irrational and violent "lesser" beings have all along been considered sacrificeable to the grand Zionist fulfillment. After spending many years living, studying and being active in the struggle for Palestinian rights I am more convinced than ever that we have totally neglected the effort-- the human effort -- required to demonstrate to the world the immorality of what was done to us: this, I now think, is the essential task facing us as a people now.
Unless we mobilise ourselves and our friends and, above all, our voices so that the Zionist project can systematically be shown for what it is and was, we can never expect any change in our status as an inferior and dominated people. Even as Arafat and his men try to unsuccessfully deal with Israel's actions they seem to have forgotten that no voice (voices) speaks for the suffering of the Palestinians, no effort is made to record systematically the wrong we suffer, no energy is expended on trying to organize our various expatriate communities so that they can undertake the task of dramatising and finally defeating the legitimacy of the plan to take the whole of Palestine, every significant inch of our land, every aspect of our past as a people, every possibility of self-determination in the future. For at bottom our struggle with Zionism must be won first on the moral level, and then can be fought in negotiations from a position of moral strength, given that militarily and economically we will always be weaker than Israel and its supporters.
The importance of this was first borne out for me when I visited South Africa in May of 1991. Mandela had already been released, exile leaders of the ANC had been repatriated, and the stage was set for the huge political transformation that was to ensue with democratic elections four years later and the victory of the "one person one vote" programme of the ANC. When I was there I visited the ANC's headquarters in downtown Johannesburg; a few scant weeks before the organization was considered terrorist, and no legitimacy at all attached to it. I was stunned by the complete reversal. Speaking to Walter Sisulu, who had been exiled for almost 30 years and was second only to Mandela in authority and prestige, I asked him how the transformation had been possible. What exactly did the ANC do to turn defeat into victory? "You must remember," he said, "that during the eighties we were beaten in South Africa; the organization was wrecked by the police, our bases in neighbouring countries were routinely attacked by the South African army, our leaders were in jail or in exile or killed. We then realized that our only hope was to concentrate on the international area, and there to delegitimize apartheid.
We organized in every major Western city; we initiated committees, we prodded the media, we held meetings and demonstrations, not once or twice but thousands of times. We organized university campuses, and churches, and labour unions, and business people, and professional groups." He paused for a moment and then said something that I shall never forget as long as I live. "Every victory that we registered in London, Glasgow, or Iowa City, or Toulouse, or Berlin, or Stockholm gave the people at home a sense of hope, and renewed their determination not to give up the struggle.
In time we morally isolated the South African regime and its policy of apartheid so that even though militarily we could not do much to hurt them, in the end they came to us, asking for negotiations. We never changed or retreated from our basic programme, our central demand: one person, one vote." Let me add one footnote to this. On the basis of my South African experience I organized a seminar in London for every leading Palestinian activist-intellectual that I knew, including a few who have since become ministers in Arafat's government. I invited the ANC ambassador in England, whom I had met in Mandela's office and was on the same plane with me out of Johannesburg, to address one of our sessions, and he gladly accepted. The idea was to impress on everyone, a mere matter of weeks before Madrid, that we should all tirelessly focus on the same facts about what had happened to us as a people, and should not get deflected in discussions about policy and grand negotiating tactics with the Israelis and the US and so lose sight of the political-moral goal of isolating the Israeli occupation and delegitimising it all over, as the result of a carefully organized mass movement in Europe, North America, the Arab world, and elsewhere.
There was some resistance to listening to the ANC representative talk about his experiences: "South Africa is a different case," said a distinguished young Palestinian political scientist who thought we should be addressing Oxford or Harvard experts behind close doors, not wasting our time trying to create a grass roots movement of support for Palestinian human rights. I remember saying that we should always make it a point to be as concrete as possible -- to talk about daily life under Israeli occupation, to talk about the humiliation of check points, of how our houses were blown up, and how our trees were uprooted -- and not to talk to audiences as if we were negotiating theoretical issues. All in all I and my co-organizers of the seminar felt that we had made some progress. But the moment Madrid gave us the opportunity to appear in public we all started to speak like James Baker, forgetting that our status had more weight as representatives of a moral cause than as members of a diplomatic delegation. And of course the goal changed, so much so that in the Oslo negotiations and in the period after them we forgot not just our values but our own history.
I am convinced that we have no recourse now but to return to the discourse of the oppressed and use what Netanyahu is now doing to us as an initiative to put his policies in direct contact with the history of Zionist policies towards the Palestinians. After all he speaks from a straight line of descent from what every major Zionist theoretician has declared: that Jews have a superior right to Palestine despite the presence and existence of Palestinians. We must not only contest what is now being done to us, but also take our moral presence directly into the Israeli and Western, and even Arab, consciousness. Zionism's original sin was to have dispossessed us, and what the Likud now does is what Labour had done before it, to continue the original dispossession under the guise of "peace" and "security." But this confrontation cannot be undertaken by individuals acting alone: it must be a job of organizing and then implementing such a plan by the world-wide community of Palestinians. Arafat and his coterie have never understood this. They have always supposed that if they could get of the president or secretary of state, even of various prominent Jewish leaders in the United States, these influential people could be persuaded to do "something" for the Palestinians.
I have always refused the premise that what we demand as a people ought to be conceded to us charitably, or in bits and pieces as a reward for our good behaviour. This is to diminish ourselves and what we stand for, since our position as a dispossessed people is morally unassailable. So it is therefore evident that each Palestinian community must organize itself so as to intervene in the public discussion now taking place on a world-wide scale about the conflict between us and those Israelis who support Netanyahu. But even that supposed majority of Israelis who say in polls that they are for peace have to be recalled to our reality, which is that of a people whose land was taken so that Israel could be built.
I am not at all saying that we should advocate the destruction of Israel, nor the dispossession of Israelis. Our movement gains its moral stature by its humane dimensions, its sincere willingness for coexistence, its firm belief in respecting the rights of others. What I am talking about is a new peace initiative designed over a long period of time to bring parity between us and the Israelis, who so far overpower us now as to make the moral dimension our only field of struggle. We must show Israel and its supporters that only a full acknowledgement by them of what was done to us can bring peace and reconciliation. To do this, therefore, we must have a policy of concrete detail, not one of broad abstract statements that are not fully engaged in the struggle for opinion. It would be good, for example, to remind readers of journalistic articles that various sites in Israel were once Arab from which their original inhabitants were expelled. Thus in a recent profile of Anatol Scharansky by David Remnick in THE NEW YORKER magazine, Remnick mentions casually that the Soviet activist now resides in Qatamon, "an old quarter in West Jerusalem," without saying to his readers that it was an Arab quarter emptied of its inhabitants by force in the early months of 1948.
Similarly when Albright cites her appreciation of "Palestinian suffering" we should be challenging her to do the arithmetic in public: how many Palestinians need to suffer and for how long and in what way for Israel's security anxieties to be allayed? Or yet again, in a recent issue of the NEW YORK TIMES Sunday magazine which contained a profile of Jibril Rajoub by Jonathan Goldberg, who admits to have served in the Israeli army, we should be publicly challenging the appropriateness of an ex-Israeli soldier to write fairly of a Palestinian activist. The examples can be multiplied infinitely, but all of them rest on one assumption: that, as a people, we carry a full scale moral argument that has never been fully heard or taken into account. What we ask for is acknowledgement, not destruction, equality, not subordination. I think also that we must always be very clear in our understanding of Jewish suffering and in making it apparent that what binds us together is a common history of persecution, which must be shown not be the exclusive possession of the Jewish people.
Only by raising our voices in concert and registering moral victories can we then further encourage and empower our compatriots in Palestine or in the various refugee camps in the Arab world. We should be voices of courage and honesty both of them credibly connected to an ongoing effort to gain self-determination for the Palestinian people. I know that sceptics will say that words are not as effective as deeds, and that only the experience of facing Israeli settlers on the land is what counts. But that, I think, is sadly to miss the moral dimension that must be expounded on wherever there are people to listen and unjust power to engage them directly. The greatest victories of Zionism were not simply that they had better armies than we did, but that they had organized opinion to accept and even support the idea that settling Palestine with incoming Jews was a morally positive idea.
We must now undertake the same laborious task, first of delegitimising Israel's military and colonial policy in Gaza and the West Bank, then of giving our quest for self-determination the authority it still lacks. We should be prepared to ask academics and professionals to boycott visits to Israel unless they make an effort to visit and support Palestinian universities and institutes; we should also be mounting a campaign to ensure that tourists to Israel who think of it only as an "interesting place" should begin to see it as a land where two peoples must live together peacefully and equally but now do not. In other words, what we now have before us is a commitment that far exceeds anything that Oslo either foresaw or promised, and if we do not take up the challenge I fear that we will be the very compromised and much impoverished permanent losers.