Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2008, pages 64-65

Waging Peace

Conference Reflects Growing Emergency, Divisions in Palestinian Strategy

	Professor Bashir Abu-Manneh (Staff photo M. Horton).

ON NOV. 2—THE 90th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration—the Palestine Center held its annual conference in Washington, DC. The theme of this year’s conference was Politicide, an idea advanced by Baruch Kimmerling in his book of the same name (available from the AET Book Club).

Barnard College professor and keynote speaker Bashir Abu-Manneh described an increasingly “atomized” Palestinian population reeling from Israeli assaults, international sanctions and internal strife.

Arguing that there has been a “catastrophic failure of [Palestinian] leadership and the absence of a liberation strategy,” Professor Abu-Manneh said the leadership not only never built the “capacity and leverage to liberate Palestine,” but never believed in its ability to win.

While “Israel’s goal has been a constant  Jewish sovereignty in Palestine,” he said, it “cannot incorporate [Palestinians], nor can it expel them all in one go.” Currently saddled with an “undesired demographic burden” whose solution, he said, has been “delayed for tactical, not for fundamental reasons,” Israel is “closer than ever” to achieving its goals, he warned.

Abu-Manneh concluded his remarks by proposing a “new Palestinian grassroots struggle...focusing on defeating the [1967] occupation.”

The conference’s first panel, entitled “Mechanics of Politicide: Palestinians Since 1967,” featured Jewish-Israeli researchers Adi Ophir of Tel Aviv University, and Tal Arbel from Harvard University. Ophir described Israel’s use of separation and submission as conflicting yet complementary strategies to maintain control. Ophir argued that “Palestinian guerrilla tactics” did not cause these measures, but “supplied it with a seemingly independent rationale.”

Researchers Tal Arbel (l) and Adi Ophir discuss Israel’s occupation and the mechanics of politicide (Staff photo M. Horton).

Assessing the prospects for a peace agreement, Ophir explained that ”Israelis see ending the occupation as the end of submission, but only along the separation lines Israel has created...Any attempt for Palestinians to set up their own lines of separation [is deemed] an offense.” There are only two possible solutions, Ophir argued: “ethnic cleansing and humanitarian catastrophe, or a just solution.” He concluded by expressing the hope that the occupation comes to “the correct end, and not that of the extreme right.”

Arbel described the Israeli occupation as a machine-like system managing the movement of Palestinians, with an increasingly complicated checkpoint system made up of “terminals,” “passages” and “gates.” As a result, she noted, “mobility status” has become a “social currency” for Palestinians living in 64 separate West Bank enclaves created by this system, “not including those in the seam between the wall and the Green Line.”

The second panel featured George Mason University professor Nadim Rouhana and Randolf-Macon College professor Michael Fischbach discussing the situation of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and that of refugees, respectively. Rouhana argued for inclusion in any solution of all three elements of the Palestinian community: “the one under occupation, the one in exile, and the one under quasi-citizenship.”

Rouhana responded to Abu-Manneh’s proposal by stating that merely ending the occupation is not enough. Noting that the single most important challenge to Israel “is the Palestinian segment inside Israel,” he argued that “the idea of a Jewish state...has to become the focus of the Palestinian national movement.”

The 1948 depopulation of Palestine was “not simply traumatic,” Fischbach pointed out, “but for the Palestinians themselves [it] is central to who they are as a people today.” Any solution that does not address the refugee problem “is not going to work,” he insisted.

In a third panel, Harvey Mudd College professor Suheir Daoud described the Oslo accord as “the first brilliant Israeli step to make politicide by Palestinian against Palestinians.” Professor Daoud took issue with the conference theme, noting that the term “politicide” was first used by her Hebrew University professor Yehosefat Harakabi to describe the PLO’s actions against Israel. She urged the creation of “a new organization outside the PLO...that takes and embraces all the Palestinian organizations that were left out.”

Asked to respond to comments made by other speakers, Abu-Manneh expressed his “fear that we have a new generation getting swept up in the idea [of a one-state solution], which will mean nothing on the ground for 40 years.” He called a one-state solution “a complete fantasy at this point,” and “a product of despair,” saying it “assumes that Jews and Palestinians want to live together...that the conflict of Palestine should find a solution in the historic territory of Pales­tine... [and] that the West will one day support the end of Zionism in Palestine.”

Responding directly to Rouhana, Abu-manneh described it as “completely narcissistic to think that Palestinians in Israel are at the cutting edge of the struggle against Zionism,” and proposed that the basis of any campaign should be resisting the 1967 occupation for “practical” and “realistic” reasons.

For more information about the conference visit the Palestine Center’s Web site: <www.thejerusalemfund.org>.