DFLP leader Nayef Hawatmeh, at a roundtable discussion with the Weekly, explains why a united Palestinian national leadership and a common national programme are both urgent and incontrovertible conditions for realising Palestinian national goals and lasting peace and coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis "We had spent more than 50 years of our struggle issuing grandiose slogans saying we want Palestine from the sea to the river. Things had to change. Slogans such as a unified Palestinian democratic state had to be abandoned. Talk about a bi-national state or a multi-ethnic state all proved incongruous with a realistic, if just and comprehensive settlement" "The disintegration of Iraq and the effort to rebuild it according to US dictates are intended to disable Iraq's potential as a leading Arab country for quite some time to come. This, in turn, is expected to impact negatively on the Arab-Israeli conflict" Nayef Hawatmeh is an iconic figure in modern Arab political history. In the 1950s and '60s he was leading member of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), which enjoyed tremendous political and ideological influence not only among the Palestinian people, but throughout the Arabian Peninsula. A branch of ANM in southern Yemen led a successful revolution against the British occupation of what was then Aden, creating the erstwhile Democratic Republic of Yemen. In the mid-1960s, Hawatmeh led the ANM's transition to the left, establishing a new political trend within the pan-Arab movement, which dared to critique the Nasserist experience in Egypt from the left. The humiliating defeat of the Arab armies at Israel's hands in the June 1967 "six-day war", unleashed the Palestinian revolution, at the same time dramatically underlining, and developing the leftist critique of traditional Arab nationalism, represented by Nasserism and Ba'thism. Hawatmeh's pioneering role did not stop there. As leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, he was the first Palestinian leader to propose a two-state solution to the conflict with Israel. He did so in a series of articles, published in the DFLP organ, Al-Hurrya, in 1972. Following the 1973 October War, Hawatmeh's initially audacious proposal came to be adopted by most PLO factions. Although he has always supported the armed struggle against Israel, Hawatmeh is opposed to attacks against civilian targets. He has also been critical of the Palestinian Authority and the policies of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Meeting with Al-Ahram Weekly at this critical juncture in the history of the Palestinian struggle and the Arab world in general, Hawatmeh discussed the hurdles on the roadmap, the failure of Oslo and his ideas for a Palestinian national plan. Below are extracts of Hawatemah's comments: TAINTED ROADMAP: The basic flaw in the roadmap is that while it strongly emphasises Palestinian obligations towards its executing its terms, it fails to stress Israel's commitment to do the same. This is exactly what Sharon's government is trying to do through the 14 amendments he insisted on making to the roadmap. The US administration has actually approved 12 of these 14 amendments. Furthermore, Israel presented, and Bush approved the 13th amendment at the Aqaba Summit last month. According to the amended roadmap, the Palestinians would have to implement everything that is related to the security of Israel first before Israel would comply with its own commitments. Even worse, Bush avoided making any reference to the Palestinian right of return at the Aqaba Summit. The original text of the roadmap was drastically changed from a document based on balanced and simultaneous commitments to one based on Palestinian compliances with set conditions. The original text clearly stipulated that the roadmap should be implemented without any negotiations or amendments. The roadmap is bound to lead us to a labyrinth similar to the one that developed after Oslo. Yet, despite such drastic shortcomings in the amended roadmap, the Palestinian Authority agreed to its terms regardless of all the reservations expressed by Palestinian opposition groups. For his part, Sharon has already started criticising the performance of the Palestinians by declaring that the announced truce (between armed Palestinian resistance groups and Israel) is not sufficient. Sharon has further called for a crackdown on resistance groups and the confiscation of their weapons. He has threatened to halt Israel's implementation of Phase I of the roadmap, which calls for a total cease-fire and withdrawal of Israeli forces from the areas it re-occupied after 28 September 2000, if the PA fails to comply with his demands. The roadmap further stipulates that Israel dismantle all settlement outposts that have been erected since March 2001. Although the number of outposts has reached 105 since Sharon came to power, the Israeli government has merely dismantled eight outposts. Of those, seven were empty and one was inhabited by less than 10 families. In the meantime, the council of settlements has since built nearly 20 more outposts even though this is in stark violation of the roadmap. In addition, what the Israelis offered in what is dubbed the "Gaza-Bethlehem First" deal is not by any means a full withdrawal. In Gaza, it is merely a withdrawal to the areas re-occupied after 28 September 2000. In Bethlehem, on the other hand, it is a withdrawal from the town only but not from the villages and the refugee camps that fall within its domain. In other words, the Israelis withdraw from the town but they continued to encircle it and prevent access to it. This is part of an old Israeli project that was suggested by the previous coalition government of the Likud and Labour parties. It is clear that what Sharon is doing is altering the roadmap into one based on security rather than political considerations. He wants to impose a periodical assessment of the Palestinian performance, to be carried out by an American monitoring group. According to the original roadmap, the assessment process was supposed to be performed by a team assigned by the Quartet Committee (US, Russia, the EU and the UN), but this was one of the 13 amendments Sharon succeeded in getting the US administration to make to the document. JERUSALEM VIA BAGHDAD: There is no doubt that the Palestinian struggle for independence is currently at a crossroads that may either lead to progress or else be dealt a severe blow. The US-British invasion and occupation of Iraq clearly makes the second option more likely. The disintegration of Iraq and the effort to rebuild it according to US dictates are intended to disable Iraq's potential as a leading Arab country for quite some time to come. This, in turn, is expected to impact negatively on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Following its occupation, Iraq has not been able to play any role in the increasingly tense Turkey-Iraq-Iran triangle. The US administration is well aware of this, and that might explain why it chose Iraq as the starting point for intensifying its hegemony over the region. We need to remember that US Secretary of State Collin Powell at some point told the Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee that Iraq is the key to re-arranging the Middle East according to US strategic interests. But the price for doing so is going to be very high and all the Arab states, particularly those who are involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, will pay. The attitude of the regime in Iraq was stark ever since Iraq launched its war against its Iranian neighbours, with the full financial backing of the Gulf states and with US sponsorship. It was evident then that the Iraqi regime was moving against all regional liberation and progressive movements. The DFLP tried to contain the growing threat of a US invasion on Iraq by sending an envoy to the Iraqi regime in Baghdad. Our envoy advised the Iraqi leader to work towards preventing the eminent US threat that was clearly bound to rock the whole region. The DFLP envoy advised the Iraqi president to work on improving his ties with the Gulf countries, including Kuwait. Had he done so, Saddam Hussein could have made it difficult for the US to use Arab soil as a launchpad for its war against his country. The DFLP's initiative also urged the Iraqi president to take immediate steps towards ending single-party rule and democratising the political system. We urged him to amend the constitution forthwith, introducing a multi-party parliamentary democracy. But all was to no avail. The war took place and our predictions were proven right. One day after the fall of Baghdad, the Americans told the Israelis that repercussions would follow the war. They said that after Iraq, Arab regimes would fall one after the other and a new Middle East order would be established according to US interests. At the top of these interests was, of course, imposing full control over regional oil and imposing a permanent settlement of the Palestinian Israeli conflict. From the American point of view, this could best be achieved by establishing Arab blocs that would work toward safeguarding these interests. It was amidst this atmosphere that the roadmap was worked out. We all know that the failure to implement the Oslo agreement led the Palestinian track to a deadlock and therefore to the eruption of the Intifada. The Intifada came as an alternative to the stalemate in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and as a result of years of oppression that was first initiated by Camp David, then Oslo, and then Camp David II. COMMON PLAN FOR A UNITED LEADERSHIP: The Intifada erupted in the aftermath of the failure of the Camp David II talks in the summer of 2000. It developed in the midst of rather absurd international realities. For one thing, US President George W Bush saw himself as a new prophet inspired by God to invade Iraq, and then claimed seeing another vision of two states: Palestine and Israel. The Palestinians unquestionably want to get rid of the occupation which, in our case, has developed into a colonial, expansionist project bent on expropriating our land and replacing our people with another people. Unfortunately, this Israeli project drew its legitimisation from the Torah by claiming that God had promised Abraham and his son Isaac the land extending from the Nile River to the Euphrates. Palestine was merely the first phase of this project and people thought that this would be it. But the 1956 War on Egypt followed, even though Egypt has in no way been problematic to Israel. It was clear that obstructing the development of Egypt's economy was the Israeli aim. A few years later, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War took place and led to the occupation of more Arab land. The rest of Palestine became occupied, the Golan Heights in Syria became occupied, and expansionist dreams in Sinai were lingering. The only way Palestinians can resist the current attempts to usurp their national and political rights is through the formulation of a Palestinian national programme. We have to go beyond the declaration of a truce. We have to have our own unified plan, one which combines at least the minimal level of our common grounds. These common grounds were actually worked out among all Palestinian factions represented in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation back in 1974. At the time, the DFLP proposed a more clearly defined programme, dispensing with empty rhetoric and focussing instead on addressing specific goals, outlining the different phases of the struggle and determining a plan of action. We had spent more than 50 years of our struggle issuing grandiose slogans saying we want Palestine from the sea to the river. Things had to change. Slogans such as a unified Palestinian democratic state had to be abandoned. Talk about a bi-national state or a multi-ethnic state all proved incongruous with a realistic, if just and comprehensive settlement. In 1973, the DFLP called for a more realistic political agenda in the Palestinian struggle for liberation -- an agenda based on action, a comprehensive political settlement as well as international resolutions that would lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. This agenda would also reaffirm the right of return for Palestinian refugees. These are our rights and we have to obtain them through establishing and affirming our common grounds with the different factions and their varying ideological, factional, and political backgrounds. We all have to recognise the fact that we are a national liberation movement struggling for independence. This is why the DFLP refuses to use terms like the "Palestinian Authority" or "the opposition", because such terms imply that we are an independent state when we are not -- not yet. Thirty years on, our common grounds are strikingly familiar and elusively simple. All factions could agree to such principles as regaining the land occupied in 1967, making East Jerusalem the capital of the Palestinian state, dismantling the settlements and solving the plight of thousands of refugees in a regional framework for peace. If these things are settled, then our political programme would be formulated and we would have a unified Palestinian leadership that would include representatives from various political factions, including the current Palestinian Authority. This is the only way to turn the roadmap into something more positive than a tunnel that leads to a deadend. Participants from DFLP: Fahd Soliman and Khaled Atta; Al-Ahram Weekly: Hani Shukrallah, Omayma Abdel-Latif, Sherine Bahaa, Muna Hamzeh, Amira Howeidy, Gamal Nkrumah, Hala Saqr, Amina Elbendary
