The New Palestinian Revolt

Chris Hedges

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2001

Summary:  Last autumn's fresh outbreak of violence between Palestinians and Israelis has shaken an assumption that has reigned since the 1993 Oslo peace accords: that negotiations and interim agreements can lay the roadwork for a lasting peace. Now Oslo's delegitimization has swayed public opinion in Israel and the occupied territories away from compromise and toward more radical solutions.

Chris Hedges is a reporter for The New York Times. He was Middle East Bureau Chief for The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, based in Jerusalem and Cairo, from 1988 to 1995.

The economic squeeze is taking its biggest toll on Arafat. The first intifada swept away the cautious and passive Palestinian leadership that had accommodated, or at least not challenged, the Israeli authorities after 1967. Arafat's Fatah took control. Now, under threat from the new wave of violence, Arafat is working hard to make sure that this revolt does not replace him with Hamas activists. Hamas has nonetheless become venerated as the vanguard in the struggle against the Jewish state.

Arafat's stature began to slip after he signed the 1993 Oslo accords, which were wrenchingly painful for the Palestinians. By signing, Arafat recognized the legitimacy of Israel, formally ending Palestinian claims to Israeli land that had been home to many of his people for generations. He gave up nearly 30 percent of the territory that the original 1948 U.N. partition plan had defined as Palestinian, leaving his bifurcated state with little more than 20 percent of what was once the British Mandate of Palestine.

Many Palestinians believe that by signing the Oslo accords, Arafat deprived them of a capital in Jerusalem, a return of refugees, and an end to the expansion of the Jewish settlements. Indeed, over the past decade of peace negotiations, the number of Israeli settlers has nearly doubled. The 1993 accords stipulated a partial Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, after which a five-year transitional period of negotiations toward a final-status agreement should begin. Palestinians were angered when Oslo-mandated deadlines for the Israeli withdrawal passed unfulfilled; the Israelis said that Arafat was not living up to the terms of the agreement. Thus, it began to appear to most Palestinians that Israel would withhold even the promised 20 percent. Indeed, Israel still occupies more than 80 percent of Gaza and the West Bank.

This despair, coupled with declining incomes, created a more radical, militant population. Compromise obviously did not work. After signing Oslo, Arafat was excoriated in the Arab press in ways that might have stunned even his right-wing critics in Israel. He had become the Arab world's Marshal Philippe Petain, the leader of France's collaborationist Vichy government during World War II. As time went by and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud government let the peace process stagnate, Arafat's stock continued to plummet. As Hamas carried out suicide bombings in Israel and Hezbollah attacked Israeli forces in southern Lebanon -- eventually forcing Israel to withdraw -- it seemed that Arafat's secular Fatah movement was fading into the twilight. His decision to jail Hamas activists did not improve his popularity.

Palestinian men, filled with rage and economic despair, grew impatient with Fatah's conciliation, as well as its nepotism and corruption, and embraced the harsher methods and rhetoric of the Islamists. After all, they argued, such tactics worked for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

When Barak came to power in June 1998, a lot of time -- perhaps too much -- had been lost. The suicide bombings and lengthy closures had seen Israeli companies replace Palestinian workers with Filipinos, Chinese, and Romanians. The real per capita GDP for the West Bank and Gaza declined 36 percent between 1992 and 1996, due to falling incomes and the explosive population growth. In the 1980s, unemployment averaged just 5 percent; that figure is now well above 40 percent and is still climbing. Israel's per capita income is $17,000, whereas the Palestinians' is less than $2,000.

In hindsight, it appears that Barak underestimated the mounting Palestinian frustration. He squandered valuable time in fruitlessly wooing Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad and in waiting nearly a year before making overtures to Arafat. Meanwhile, the prime minister reached out to the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza.

It was a beleaguered Arafat who arrived at Camp David in July 2000. He had cut a deal with the Israelis in Oslo that had not, in his eyes, been fulfilled. He had been stranded, he felt, by the heir of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. And at Camp David, he was faced with an all-or-nothing Israeli peace proposal that would have left the Palestinians with a mutated statelet in five chunks, all subject to Israeli fiat. In pushing for a final-status agreement, Barak and President Clinton had ignored Arab, European, and Palestinian warnings that such a move could destroy the peace process.

Arafat saw himself as vulnerable on the issues of Jerusalem, the refugees' right of return, and the disposition of occupied land. So he walked away. If he wanted to remain the Palestinians' leader, it was his only choice. The mood in the territories had reached a feverish pitch, and Arafat correctly read the political landscape when others did not. He was cheered at home and throughout the Arab world for his decision.

The spiral toward a lengthy war of attrition is dangerous not only for Israel but also for the United States. The Islamic world -- almost 20 percent of the world's population -- will have little problem breeding militant cells to harass and attack American interests if they are perceived as too pro-Israeli.