Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi is a leading Palestinian grassroots activist. He is a co-founder, with Edward Said and Haider Adbel-Shafi, of the Palestinian National Initiative for which he serves as general secretary. He was runner-up in the most recent Palestinian presidential elections.
JON ELMER: Can you comment on the images we saw this summer in the media of Jewish settlers being carried crying from their homes in Gaza?
MUSTAFA BARGHOUTHI: I guess any thief will feel sorrow if you take away what he or she has stolen, but I think a lot of it is exaggerated and meaningless. The property did not belong to the settlers and they know that. They were residing in occupied territory on stolen land. On the other hand, they are right to say they were betrayed. Their government has betrayed them, from Shimon Peres to Ariel Sharon. These governments, especially Sharon’s, were the ones that encouraged them to settle on stolen land in Gaza. It was Sharon who used to be called “the Bulldozer” because he was responsible for creating so many settlements on occupied land. I hope that with all the sadness felt by these families they will be better able to understand the feelings of the five million Palestinian refugees, those who were displaced from their land in 1948 and their descendents. At least the settlers are going back to a place they can call their homeland, while the Palestinian refugees are accorded no such right.
How should the international community interpret the “disengagement” from Gaza?
The dismantling of settlements in Gaza is an historical development. For the first time since 1897, the Zionist movement is retreating, it is dismantling settlements built on Palestinian land. This is a very important precedent, but this is not a withdrawal and it is not yet peace. It is only a redeployment of the Israeli military. Gaza will remain under the control of the Israeli army—its passages and borders, its land, air, and sea.
To make this pullout a true step towards peace, Palestinians must have freedom of movement, the freedom to import and export goods, control of air and sea, and free passage between the West Bank and Gaza. Israel must give up Gaza completely and stop interfering in the daily life and affairs of Palestinians.
So if we want this to become a positive development, three things must happen: (1) Palestinians must have total sovereignty and control of Gaza; (2) Palestinians must have free passage between the West Bank and Gaza; and (3) the process of removing the rest of the 450,000 settlers from the West Bank and Jerusalem must start immediately
The risk is that Sharon will freeze the peace process. He will turn Gaza into a big prison, hoping that Palestinians will start fighting internally. Sharon will then tell the world that Palestinians do not have the right to self-rule. Meanwhile, Israel will continue to build settlements and the Wall in the West Bank, transforming the country into clusters of cantons and Bantustans. This could mean a third Intifada. So the most important thing is to not allow the peace process to die.
To this end, we are proposing to the Palestinian Authority three important steps. First, that democratic elections take place on time and without delay—legislative council elections in January, municipal elections in September. This is the only way to keep all political groups satisfied. Each of them will understand that they have the right to compete, but in the ballot box, not by guns in the streets. The second step is to call for an international peace conference—Madrid II, if you will—because the final status issues must be opened and international law must be applied. The third step is to take the International Court of Justice’s ruling regarding the Wall to the United Nations.
Who should take credit for this unprecedented move by Israel? Many people are talking about Hamas and the armed resistance in Gaza, others are saying Sharon made the decision in order to secure the West Bank and receive the go-ahead from the U.S.
Most of the credit should go to the Palestinian people who have survived 38 years of occupation, oppression, and poverty in Gaza, walled in a prison-like reality. These are the people who sacrificed.
The factional competition between Fatah and Hamas is disrespectful to the Palestinian people who have been in struggle long before Hamas was established and while Fatah was concerned with Lebanon and elsewhere. I deeply dislike the factional competition and I think it should play out in democratic elections.
Also, one should not exaggerate the achievement. We should concentrate not on celebration, but on finalizing the ultimate goal. Especially knowing that Sharon is not a changed man, but simply a good strategist. He understood that the Intifadas—particularly the second—changed international opinion and fomented support for the Palestinian people, obliging him to act.
Sharon is maneuvering in order to avoid a real solution to the conflict. For him the “Gaza disengagement” is an instrument. He pays a small price: the removal of several thousand Gaza settlers in exchange for keeping the biggest part of the occupation, the 450,000 settlers in the West Bank.
As Sharon has made clear, he wants to use this to freeze the peace process. He has declared that he will not discuss Jerusalem, construction of the Wall will continue, and settlements in the West Bank will be expanded and annexed to Israel. We must not let him succeed in this, which is why I told President Mahmoud Abbas to call for an international peace conference to address final status negotiations.
Can you talk about the impact and significance of the popular movement against the Wall? It doesn’t get much attention in Western media.
It is the most important popular struggle now in Palestine. The Wall is a symbol of all the most important issues. If you struggle for the freedom of Jerusalem, you have to remove the Wall. If you struggle for removal of settlements, you have to remove the Wall. If you struggle for security of Palestinians, if you want economic prosperity and opportunity, you have to remove the Wall.
It has crystallized the Palestinian struggle. It is non-violent, it is organized almost exclusively by Palestinian civil society—not the Palestinian Authority—and it has strong alliances with hundreds of thousands of people across the world. It has a great chance of success if we put all our possible resources in that direction.
I have always said that the settlers are the greatest obstacle to peace. Even the U.S. Administration agrees, so why don’t we remove this obstacle to peace?
Essentially what you are saying is that the two-state solution should remain on the table—that a Palestinian national homeland alongside a Jewish national homeland is the solution?
Of course, this is the only way. But when we say a state, we do not mean bantustans, cantons, or apartheid. I don’t know why when it comes to Palestinians suddenly there are all these new formulas for what a state should be. A state means a sovereign, independent entity—with a capital, its own institutions, control of the lives if its citizens and its borders, just like Greece controls its borders with Turkey or Germany with France.
We have suffered so much and we’ve struggled so hard to achieve our national dream: a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, without exception. The majority of Palestinians will accept this compromise, which will provide them with only 22 percent of historic Palestine and less than half of what was assigned to Palestinians in the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947, the plan which provided Israel with the only international basis for its legitimacy.
If the Israelis, or anyone else in the world, think that the Palestinians will be satisfied with the bantustan-system where Gaza and the West Bak are controlled by a security officer who is a subcontractor for Israeli occupation—while Israel keeps 50 percent of the Territories and controls our lives—they are mistaken. We will never accept that.
Jon Elmer is a Canadian freelance photojournalist currently on assignment with the NewStandard in Palestine.