By Edward Said Bill Clinton's two-day visit to Gaza, Bethlehem and Israel was intended to save the peace process and to make him look more noble to his impeachers. It's too early to tell about the second mission, though I must say that his speech to the Palestinians for the first time expressed a humane sympathy for what they have endured; the first was a dismal failure, despite the media-hype (more misleading than usual) and the super-ignorant gushing by media commentators. As soon as Clinton arrived, Benjamin Netanyahu announced that there would be no further Israeli army troop redeployment as stipulated by the Wye River Plantation Accords of last October. Since in any event Israel was to redeploy from a minuscule amount of land (five per cent from Israeli-controlled Area C to jointly-controlled area B, which is under Israeli security anyway), the snub was just that, designed to humiliate both the Palestinians and Clinton. The "unrest" reported in the Occupied Territories for the past several weeks was provoked both by Israeli cynicism in releasing only about 100 car thieves and common criminals (the agreement having been that 750 political prisoners would be freed), and by Palestinian anger at Arafat's limitless appetite for concessions and a careless, not to say heedless, negotiating style. (Several members of his team in the past weeks have threatened to resign for that reason). Far from peace being assured, therefore, the combination of Netanyahu's arrogance, Clinton's vulnerability, and Arafat's by now non-existent support wasn't alleviated by the picturesque, hokey ceremonies patched together by the Americans and Palestinians, bagpipes, flower maidens, Mrs Arafat and all. What puzzles me is how many times Arafat can bring himself and some of his people to go through the motions of repealing the notorious Charter just to satisfy Israeli demands. There was of course no real PNC meeting, since in effect that body lost its legitimacy and independence when Arafat returned to Gaza in l994. He brought a bunch of people together in l996 to change the Charter, but this time only made a perfunctory effort to round up officials, businessmen, and some hangers-on for the great occasion. I was invited (by mistake) to attend when a fax from the Arafat-run Palestinian Commercial Services Company came to my office asking me to present myself at Amman Airport at a given time, then to link up with a special charter flight to Gaza, to attend the meeting, then to come back by charter the same evening. I had resigned my membership in 1991. So much for the idea of a legitimate quorum and roll call. At the same time, I was also invited to a meeting of the opposition led by George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh in Damascus; through the ever-efficient rumour mills (one of the few things that still work in Palestinian politics), it was widely reported that I was in attendance. The low comedy of the Gaza proceedings -- which elicited a rapturously ill-informed piece by the Times's new Israel correspondent Deborah Sontag about how much nicer and more democratic life is for Palestinians than for other Arabs -- was belied by what was going on outside. In the first place, the expropriation of Arab land through Israeli colonisation continues at a furious pace as old settlements grow and new ones expand rapidly. About 40 per cent of Gaza is held by settlers and the Strip itself is surrounded on three sides by an Israeli electronic fence (side four is the Israeli-patrolled sea). Clinton seems not to have noticed how his security was assured. According to the authoritative Washington-based Report on Israeli Settlement, "diplomacy fails to address Israel's transformation of the Occupied Territories"; thus Israel's settlement policy all through the peace process "is well on its way toward achieving an objective pursued by a succession of Israeli leaders during the last three decades: to obstruct the creation of an independent, truly sovereign Palestinian political entity west of the Jordan River. Israel's objective, on the face of it, is the antithesis of popular notions about the goal of the negotiations begun at Oslo in l993." (September/October 1988). Each time one of the much touted summits occurs, the Palestinians fail at curtailing Israeli settlement drives; Wye was no exception, as Lamis Andoni shows in Middle East International (11 December l998), since there the negotiators failed to grasp that "Israel only agreed not to carry out the expansion of settlements until all current construction had been completed, which means that 'contiguous areas' [accepted by the Palestinians] could end up including hundreds and hundreds of acres." A chilling account of how one such settlement, Efrat, near Bethlehem, is expanding and choking off every Arab village in its vicinity is found in Ha'aretz (27 November); I filmed there last February, but villages like Wad Rahal and Khadr have since lost most of their land. Second, the economics of peace have driven Palestinians into poverty, as Sara Roy shows in an impressive new study just published by the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies, "The Palestinian Economy and the Oslo Process: Decline and Fragmentation". At all levels of society, productivity is down, markets have shrunk, there is greater dependency on Israel. Unemployment is now at an all-time high yet Arafat's Authority, with its 14 or so security services, its bloated bureaucracy, its thousands of informers and enforcers is the largest, and the least productive, employer. Each ministry now employs hundreds of managers and directors who do absolutely nothing except draw down handsome salaries. The World Bank figure for Arafat's labour force is 120,000 people, which, multiplied by the number of dependents, accounts for almost half the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza directly in thrall to Arafat. But discontent rages anyway. Thousands of refugees demonstrated in Syria and Lebanon. Four Palestinians were wounded by Israeli forces when the latter made a group of Palestinian labourers crawl on the ground. And the Palestinian rock-throwing and Israeli shooting with "rubber bullets" continue. Still, Netanyahu rants on about incitement when a Palestinian holds up a sign demanding free access to holy sites in Jerusalem, which is off limits to West Bank and Gaza Palestinians (as described by Ha'aretz, 14 December). The main burden of the Wye Accord, therefore, was neither to give Palestinians more freedom, nor to allow the US and Israel to "help" Palestinian independence, but quite the contrary: with the Authority's help, to increase the restrictions and conditions under which Palestinians live so that they remain docile and taken care of in the best colonial manner. A perfect symbolic example of this is the promulgation on 19 November of a presidential decree by Arafat entitled "to strengthen national unity and forbid incitement". Obviously the result of Netanyahu's remorseless obsession with Israeli security (and Arafat's reciprocal neglect of Palestinian security), the decree states that its legal references and precedents derive, among others, from "the Palestinian penal code number 74 for 1936 and its amendments". For the uninitiated, this code is nothing less than the Emergency Defence Regulations issued by the British Mandatory Authority as a way of punishing Palestinian resistance; it was then adopted by the Israelis after 1948 for the same purpose. And now Mr Arafat uses it to threaten his own people. For what? To interdict incitement to violence, insults, racism. The decree also forbids "illegal organisations" as well as "undermining the quality of life, agitating the masses to bring about change by illegal methods of force, incitement to civil strife, incitement to violate agreements made between the PLO and Arab and foreign countries". Implementing this remarkable new law will be a committee made up equally of Palestinians, Israelis and (the number varies according to reports) one or more Americans who might, or might not be members of the CIA. Their mandate is nothing less than every utterance -- written, spoken, printed or broadcast -- made by Palestinians and, as a West Bank friend explained it to me, his voice alternately sad and cheerful, school text books, newspapers, and magazines. This bizarre document has yet to be noted by the US, Arab, or European media, who are falling all over each other in prophesying the advent of Palestinian statehood. Never mind of course the total absence of territorial contiguity for areas of Palestinian self-rule. Never mind that Arafat has refused to ratify either the constitution or the basic law proposed by his Legislative Council. Never mind, that thanks to US and Israeli pressure, Palestinian life is governed by state security courts which forbid the presence of witnesses, defence lawyers, or audience. Never mind that the large sums of money pledged by European and American donors are still controlled by Arafat, who answers and is accountable to no one, despite widespread evidence of massive corruption. But that Israel and the US should require Palestinians to submit fawningly to a law against incitement -- with a Stalinist-type committee to decide unilaterally what is or is not incitement: this is scarcely a forward step in the search for peace or Palestinian self-determination.
