MIDEAST CROSSROADS
Palestine's Deliverance
Can the Arabs build a normal political order?
The Palestinians are now truly at the crossroads: President Bush has held out to them the prospect of political deliverance--a break with their maximalist history, a chance to step back from the brink and to walk away from this terrible war of terror that they are destined to lose. For all the false consolations of this cult of "martyrdom" that has taken hold in their world, the Palestinians must know that the failure that has stalked their history is upon them yet again.
The commitment by President Bush that America will support the "creation of a Palestinian state" is a chance for the Palestinian national movement to return to the world--and the work--of nations.
National movements are about rescue, and for once the Palestinians are being given an opportunity to build a normal political order free of deadly legends, knowing of the things that can and cannot be had in this world of nations. No exemption is offered the Palestinians this time from the imperatives of decent governance. They can have Pax Americana on their side but they must first have decent rule. There is no Palestinian (or wider Arab) exceptionalism to the demands of transparency and accountability. It is not "written" or decreed--to use an Arabic expression--that the Palestinians live under the rule of the gun, and that their history begets a regime of plunder and autocracy.
For nearly a decade, under the Clinton presidency, and the unwritten rules of the peace of Oslo, the regime of Yasser Arafat was granted undue indulgence. The man winked at terror, aided and abetted and committed it, but he was Pax Americana's man, and he was seen as the best of a bad lot. It was either Arafat or the deluge, we were told.
But it was Arafat and the deluge. We couldn't have a democratic Palestine, the logic had it; we had better settle for a stable Palestine. The bargain did not work. Arafat was skilled at taking the furies and the failures of his regime, as well as the wrath of his people, and diverting it, away from himself, toward Israel and its American benefactor. He had young men and young women aplenty willing to commit terrible deeds: He would feed this cult of "martyrdom," the merciless suicide bombers, and now and then, under duress, issue tepid condemnations of terror that he himself had exalted and called forth.
Amidst the rubble and the wreckage he had unleashed on his own people and on Israel, Arafat had remained obscenely giddy and confident that he could ride out the storm, that Israel and powers beyond would have no other choice than to come to terms with him. But President Bush, leading a war on terror, made the only call he could: To find their way into the world, the Palestinians will have to put forth leaders made of different political material.
The "realists" will say that Palestinian political culture is what it is and can do no better than Arafat and the masked men of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But the bet must be made that Palestinian society--its professionals and merchants, and the deep wisdom that comes to ordinary men and women who have endured endless betrayals--can do better than the autocracy of the Maximum Leader in the Ramallah compound and the cynical, cruel bargain he has made with the perpetrators of terror. "You deserve democracy and the rule of law. You deserve an open society and a thriving economy," President Bush told the Palestinians. There must be decent men and women in the Palestinian world who can see in this new opening an alternative to rule by brigands.
Arafat made his wager and lost: he had bet that an America in the throes of an antiterror campaign in the Islamic world would have no choice but to conciliate him. He had fallen for and had peddled the old legend that a foreign power out to organize and lead a coalition in the world of Islam will have to grant the Palestinians all sorts of concessions. Indeed, Operation Enduring Freedom required a new kind of clarity, a distancing of America from the deeds and follies of Arafat and his lieutenants. For the Palestinians the choice couldn't be clearer: It is either a starring role on the broadcasts of al-Jazeera, or a patient political process that brings the Palestinian world back to the compromises and patience of political life.
A people who give themselves over to the fury of "the street" and the rage of suicide bombers are a people who have lost their way. Pollsters tell us that 60% of the Palestinian population approves of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians--civilians no less! A people in the throes of this kind of vengeance and radicalism needs leaders who can tell it sobering truths about what the balance of power, and the judgment of the contemporary order of nations, will permit. This kind of clarity has never been an Arafat trademark.
In recent days, a declaration, signed by dozens of Palestinian intellectuals and public figures, condemned suicide bombings against Israeli civilians and called upon their perpetrators and paymasters to stop driving young people toward these deeds. "We see that these bombings do not contribute toward achieving our national project that calls for freedom and independence. . . . There is a need to re-evaluate these acts considering that pushing the area towards an existential war between the two people living on the holy land will lead to destruction for the whole region. We do not find any logical, humane or political justification for this end result." The statement had the spirit and the prose of Sari Nusseibah, a Palestinian intellectual and philosopher of uncommon decency and courage. It is this sort of politics that American power should want to uphold.
A people's rescue can never be a foreigner's gift, it is true. Mr. Bush has no magic wand with which he can exorcise the demons of Palestinian political history; American diplomacy should not be called upon to offer some false specificity about the exact shape of things to come.
But a beginning is made; henceforth, the politics of the lowest common denominator, the politics of giving a pass to Palestinian (and Arab) dictators in the name of stability, in the name of a fatalistic belief that reform is a hopeless undertaking in Arab lands, that the choice in these lands is between terrible leaders and more malignant oppositionists, may begin to yield. The Palestinian and Arab worlds may disappoint us: There may be a Gordian knot of radicalism that no foreign sword can cut through. But the attempt must be made, and in full daylight. We can't give in to Palestinian victimology, grant it a waiver from decency and practicality, write off its cruel deeds as the inevitable product of a particularly disillusioning history.
History grants no people, no national movement, an exemption from having to pay for choices made or evaded. There is no deliverance for the Palestinians to be found in inter-Arab politics. The Palestinians are shrewd enough to know this, but they often play history's choices as though the cavalry and the treasures of Araby are on the way. It has been a peculiarity of Arab life, ever since the birth of the modern state system in the Arab world, to promise the Palestinians the sky, and then stiff them when it truly mattered.
Denied a sovereign political world of their own, the Palestinians came to believe that they could share in the sovereignties of other Arab states, that the armies of Egypt and Syria and Iraq, and the oil wealth of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, and the territories of Lebanon, were theirs for the asking. Few Arabs bothered to tell them otherwise, and the legend took hold of an Arab world forever in the grip of a Palestinian obsession. The "Palestinian cause" was there, an affliction and a supreme alibi of Arab politics, and the rival monarchs and dictators picked it up at will, offering dreams of vengeance against Israel, and wars of restoration.
Starting with little, the Zionists had built a formidable political enterprise. But there had still lingered in the Palestinian and wider Arab imagination a view, depicted by the Moroccan historian Abdullah Laroui, that "on a certain day, everything would be obliterated and instantaneously reconstructed and the new inhabitants would leave, as if by magic, the land they had despoiled; in this way will justice be dispensed to the victims, on that day when the presence of God shall again make itself felt."
You couldn't assimilate the men and women of Jaffa and Haifa in neighboring Arab lands; restoration and return were on the horizon. A formidable, new Egyptian or Iraqi army was set to redeem their rights, a great charismatic figure, a Nasser or a Saddam, was always about to make them whole and put the Zionists to flight. The Arab states cut their own deals with the world, a brave and forthcoming Sadat told the Palestinians that Egypt would fight no further on their behalf. But the realism would not sink in.
There was that other weapon, oil, and perhaps it could be deployed on behalf of the Palestinians. But that, too, was delusion. In the tension between pipeline and Palestine--to quote an expression from the diplomacy of the 1940s--the oil states, the House of Saud and the smaller dynastic realms, had their own worlds to maintain. There would be favors granted the Palestinians who made their way into Arab courts, there would be "representations" on behalf of the Palestinians by the oil states, but the rulers' imperative, and the needs of growing populations in the Gulf, came first as they had to.
No state in the Arabian Peninsula or the Gulf would put its American connection at risk on behalf of the Palestinians. This truth has held ever since oil and the struggle for Palestine intersected in that volatile region. It was so for Ibn Saud, the founder of the Saudi state; it remains so to his inheritors today.
"Oil is not a weapon. Oil is not a tank. You cannot fire oil," an astute Saudi diplomat recently said in Crawford, Texas, when the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, its de facto ruler, Prince Abdullah, came calling on President Bush. In truth, the Saudi realm has its own burdens--a population growing younger and poorer by the day. No responsible ruler would grant Arafat and the shabab (young men) of Gaza and Hamas a veto over national policies.
For all the fury of the satellite channels of the Arab world, for all those drums and false rumors of war, there is no pan-Arab rescue for the Palestinians. Small treasure may come from the dictator in Baghdad, demonstrations may erupt in Cairo, and sly, cruel religious preachers in distant Arab and Muslim realms may bless the bombers, but the Palestinian dilemma will persist. Its cure remains anchored in the political world west of the Jordan River, in the shape of a realistic accommodation with Israel.
Ever since that searing war of 1948-49, Palestinians have lived with the moral burden of the flight and panic that overcame them. But histories can be remade and transcended. The point had been made: Palestinians have fought and have bloodied the Zionists. Another history now beckons them. In the first flush of things, it will be said that the Palestinians will not bend to outside pressure, and that no great power can dictate a people's history. But the Palestinians are calling for outside intervention in their affairs, a tilting of the material and military imbalance between them and Israel. And when the dust settles, there must come a reckoning with the stark choice that is now put before the Palestinians: the past again, or a new, sober history.
Mr. Ajami teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" (Vintage, 1999).
