|
Yesterday, I was asked
by an Italian journalist why the Alternative
Information Center
(AIC) is not participating in the Florence
conference entitled “Peace NGO Conference.” I gave her two answers: first,
because the AIC was not invited, which is not surprising, and second, because
even if we would have been invited, we would have declined the invitation. There
are two major reasons to oppose, or better—to ignore, the Florence initiative. The first one is related
to its platform, the second reason to its very nature.
Sell Out
According to the
organizers, the Palestinian-Israeli peace they are promoting should be based on,
among other things, the Geneva Initiative and the “Ayalon-Nusseibeh agreement.”
In both cases, we are dealing with substantial departures from the PLO platform
for peace, which represents the Palestinian consensus, or at least the position
of the huge majority of the Palestinian people. One has only to remember the
angry Palestinian popular reaction to Sari Nusseibeh’s “compromises” to his
friend Ayalon, or the decision of most of the Palestinian actors of the Geneva Initiative
to back off when they discovered, upon their return from Geneva, the lack of any support for their initiative. What
mandate or what popular support allows Nusseibeh or Yasser Abed Rabbo to add
compromises to the substantial ones already made by the official
representatives of the Palestinian people? And to whom? To Israeli politicians
who are not the government and will not, in the foreseeable future, be more
than a fifth wheel in a right-wing government?
Only the elected
representatives of the Palestinian people are empowered to make, at the table
of negotiations, the compromises that they believe necessary in order to
achieve freedom and independence. Not individual personalities who are not
accountable to their people, and under permanent pressures of their Israeli and
international friends. One may ask: “why do you care, if they represent only
themselves?” The answer to that question was given, in the real world,
throughout the Oslo process: in the eyes of the Israeli negotiators, the
“individual compromises” were supposed to be the Palestinian starting point of
the negotiations and when Yasser Arafat and Saeb Erekat came with the official
PLO positions, and not Abed Rabbo or Nusseibeh’s “improved” ones, they were
immediately considered as extremists who don’t really want to make compromises—kind
of saboteurs of the peace process. The case of the Right of Return of the
refugees, a fundamental demand in the PLO platform, is an enlightening example:
according to many witnesses who were at the Camp David summit, the Israeli
negotiators were really surprised and angry when Yasser Arafat raised “again”
the issue of the refugees; they thought that the issue has been dropped by the
Palestinians… because people like Nusseibeh had promised so! And indeed, in the
Ayalon-Nusseibeh document (written after the fiasco of Camp
David), the Right of Return is explicitly abolished.
A conference based on a
sell-out initiated by people who do not own what they are selling (at a very cheap
price) is definitely not an event which justifies spending time and money. Moreover,
it focuses the attention and the energies of many decent people away from what
should be, today, their priorities.
Promoting Peace or Fighting
Occupation
The Florence conference is part of a long series
of internationally sponsored initiatives to bring Palestinians and Israelis to
meet and speak peace. Why is it extremely negative and dangerous? Because it is
a typical example of escapism, when the reality is replaced by fantasies, and
our real tasks by fake ones.
Israeli-Palestinian
peace is not on the agenda, but rather occupation, colonization, repression
and, concerning the northern front, a planned war, maybe as soon as the coming
summer.
The struggle against
occupation and colonization should be our central concern and the core of our
strategies, not fantasizing imaginary peace plans, disconnected from any real
peace process. Fighting against the real risk of a military aggression against Lebanon or Syria,
raising awareness against the dangers of a major crisis with Iran—these are
our duties in June 2007, not spending energies in writing peace scenarios.
Initiating peace
conferences like the one being hold in Florence is not only out of focus, but
also distracting attention from the real world and the burning duties which
should be on our agenda: the settlements’ drive, the Wall, political prisoners,
including many elected leaders of the Palestinian population, the dramatic
situation of the refugees in Nahar el-Bared and Ein el-Hilweh, the attack on
the Palestinian citizens of Israel, civil liberties etc.
On these issues,
however, there is no agreement between the Palestinians and most of the
Israelis who have been invited to the NGO Peace Conference. But isn't it
obvious that these are the real concerns of the Palestinian people, and not the
various paragraphs of the Ayalon-Nusseibeh document?
What to do now in order
to change reality, improve the relation of forces and then to make possible,
ultimately, the renewal of a peace atmosphere—that is the real sequence, and
not the other way round. The real international peace movement, the one which mobilizes
against wars and occupation, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Lebanon and in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories, offers an alternative way to the one suggested in
Florence: to coordinate a global campaign aimed to put pressure on Israel to
end its politics of occupation and colonization, and to sanction its systematic
violations of international law and United Nations resolutions.
Following the
recommendations of the International Court of Justice, to call the international
community to boycott the occupation, sanction Israel and divest, as long as the
Palestinian people will not be allowed to be free in their own sovereign state.
This is our alternative to the diversion of the so-call NGO peace conference.
|
