Pressing Arafat to carry out reform is not necessarily in Sharon's favour, writes David Hirst There must be Palestinian reforms. That is the great new prescription for Middle East peace making, supposedly to come back to life -- after almost expiring under the hammer-blows of Palestinian Intifada and Israeli repression -- in the form of an international conference. Rarely has there been such a show of unanimity. Everybody wants them, Israelis and Americans, Palestinians and Arabs. For who, in principle, could object to the desirable things that reforms would bring: democracy, due process, accountability, efficiency, an end to corruption? Surely not the Israelis, who call themselves "the only democracy in the Middle East" and contend that only when their adversaries become democratic too will true peace break out; or the Americans, who deem it their business to spread these blessings to all peoples. Unfortunately, it is an outward unanimity only. The ironic truth is that, in the vast disparity of what all these parties actually mean by reforms, it is the Palestinians (their public, political organisations, and some, at least, within the Palestinian Authority which would be the target of them) who most sincerely seek them in any true, progressive, universally recognised sense of the word; while for the Israelis, and in varying degrees Americans and Arab regimes, they are just a means and a cover for altogether less exalted ends. Never mind that this whole, sudden enshrinement of reforms as the indispensable pre-requisite for further peace-making came first from their most detested enemy, General Sharon himself, and that it was quickly endorsed by Israel's friend and backer, the US, the Palestinians had no inhibitions about joining the general clamour, for the very good reason that demands for reform have been an almost continuous theme of their internal politics since, in the 1960s, Yasser Arafat and his Fatah guerrilla took control of the national struggle. What was important before the Oslo Agreement of 1993 became even more so after it. With his "return" to a West Bank and Gaza still under full Israeli military control, renunciation of armed struggle, dependence on US-sponsored diplomacy, commitment to Israel's security above the Palestinians' own, Arafat had to conjure up any possible resource to offset a balance of power weighted overwhelmingly in Israel's favour. The chief architect of Oslo, Abu Mazen, said at the outset that it would "lead either to the Palestine state or to the liquidation of the Palestine cause." Everything hinged on whether, through good governance, Arafat made proper use of the talent, education and good will of the people who inhabited this state-in-the-making. In other words, reform became not merely desirable for its own sake, it was the indispensable tool for the successful pursuit of the liberation struggle. Unfortunately, no sooner had the guerrilla chieftain, who, in exile, had continuously trumpeted the contrast between his "Palestinian democracy" and Arab despotisms, acquired a polity of his own than he set about emulating them. That had long been clear, but it became overwhelmingly, intolerably so, in his people's eyes, with General Sharon's pacification campaign in the West Bank, during which the resistance and heroism of an unofficial few only dramatised the long- accumulated flaws of officialdom. "The all but universal belief," said Palestinian commentator Mouin Rabbani, "that the absence of structural transformation is intimately related to Israel's political and military victories unleashed the torrent of Palestinian demands for change." Obviously, change that would strengthen his adversary's ability to confront him is not what Sharon wants. Ideally, in fact, he would destroy Arafat and his Authority altogether, on the ostensible ground that Israel, as he puts it, cannot deal with a "corrupt terror regime which is rotten and dictatorial," but on the real one that he has always abhorred any legitimate, representative institution that embodies Palestinian national identity and eventual statehood on territory he and the Israeli right deem to be an inalienable, exclusive part of Greater Israel. He has not managed that. But the reforms which -- as the next best thing -- Sharon has in mind are the precise opposite of what the Palestinians have in theirs: they would not empower the Palestinian people through a democratically installed regime, they would subject them to one that, of necessity, would be more tyrannical and unrepresentative than before. In effect, far from advancing the peace process, he would take it back to the point it was at least a generation ago, when neither Israel nor the US so much as contemplated the idea of a Palestine state on Palestine territory, or recognized the Palestinians' right to a leadership of their own choosing. His notion of a peace plan, so far as it is known, repudiates all the progress made via the 1991 Madrid conference, Oslo, and subsequent accords and negotiations. It would consecrate all existing "Zionist facts on the ground" under yet another 'interim' agreement of indefinite duration during which Israel would be free to create ever more new ones. Sharon's notion of a Palestinian leadership is one that acquiesces in these conditions; if neither Arafat or anyone else comes forward to do so, Israel will promote a leadership of its own choosing, just as it did the so-called Village Leagues -- apparently the model for what Sharon has in mind today -- when, in the 1970s, he was in charge of settlement policy in the territories. Since an international conference -- originally Sharon's idea too -- is to furnish the framework in which, with the Palestine Authority duly reformed, the peace-making resumes, he also arrogates to himself the right to decide who will attend it. Thus no Syria or Lebanon will be there, not at least until they carry out a whole series of "reforms" -- such as the disbandment of Hizbullah -- as drastic as those required of the Palestinians. Like the Israelis, the Americans showed little objection to Arafat's corruption and oppression when, with at least a semblance of a peace process still in being, he was exploiting them to do what they both wanted of him: fighting the "terror" which they are now accusing him of tolerating, or sponsoring outright. They do not want to get rid of Arafat -- their deference to Israel has not gone that far, or at least not yet. They want to keep him as a national figurehead, in nominal charge of an Authority whose security services and finances have been "reformed" in accordance with their own specifications. They seek the assistance to this end of pro-American Arab regimes for which the outbreak of real Palestinian democracy would be at least as disturbing, if for different reasons, as for the Americans and the Israelis. These rival concepts of reform are impossible to reconcile, though Arafat, the focus of them, is trying, as is his contortionist's wont, to do so in his person. It makes for as fiendish a predicament as he has ever faced, and could be his final undoing. The more ground he cedes to his own people the more that will prove to the Israelis that, if they really expect yet greater pliancy from their adversaries, Arafat the corrupt dictator would have been far better able to supply it than an Arafat confronted by Hamas deputies in a properly elected parliament. The more he accommodates the Israelis, the more he will persuade his own people that violence, in defiance of himself as well as Israel, is the only solution. But whatever does eventually come of Palestinian reforms, they won't, on their own, advance the peace process. For that there would have to be far-reaching Israeli reforms too, not about democracy, but about the means of achieving what, since Israel came into being, has, or should have, been its overriding national purpose: winning the acceptance of the Palestinians whose conquest or displacement are the root cause of all its woes. But there is little chance of that. As the Likud party's latest repudiation of the very idea of a Palestinian state showed, a repudiation that almost cast Sharon in the astonishing role of a "centrist," Israel's democracy now translates into the very opposite -- an ever greater extremism -- of what, in theory, it expects democracy to do for the Palestinians. Related stories: Standard operating procedures No magic wand Destroying Arafat's leadership Defining reforms 30 May - 5 June 2002 Reform, not bickering 23 -29 May 2002 Sharon's reforms 23 -29 May 2002 Time for change 23 -29 May 2002 See INVASION 2 - 8 May 2002
