A Different Drummer

"When the PLO opted after the Gulf War to follow the example of Egypt and Jordan, and work as closely as possible with the American government, it made its decision (as had the two Arab states before it) on the basis of vast ignorance and quite extraordinarily mistaken assumptions. The essence of its calculation was expressed to me, shortly after 1967, by a senior Egyptian diplomat: we must surrender, and promise not to struggle any further—we will accept Israel and the determining role of the United States in our future. There is no doubt that continuing to fight as the Arabs had historically done would indeed have led to further defeat and disaster. But neither then nor today was it the case that the only alternative was to throw ourselves onto the mercy of America—saying, in effect, we will no longer resist you, let us join you, but please treat us well. The pathetic hope was that if Arabs cried long enough, ‘We are not your enemies’, they would be welcomed as friends. They forgot the disparity of power that remained. From the viewpoint of the powerful, what difference does it make to your own strategy if an enfeebled adversary gives up and declares, ‘I have nothing further to fight for, take me as your ally, just try to understand me a bit better and perhaps you will then be fairer?’

....To submit supinely to American designs in the Middle East, as Arabs have done for almost a generation now, will bring neither peace and justice at home, nor equality abroad. Since the mid 1980s I have tried to impress on the PLO leadership, and every Palestinian or Arab I have met, that the quest for a protector in the White House is a complete chimera, since all recent presidents have been devoted to Zionist aims, and that the only way to change US policy is through a mass campaign on behalf of Palestinian human rights, out-flanking the Zionist establishment and going straight to the American people. Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally changed the balance of forces inside South Africa...

But it was soon clear that the PLO would never adopt this course anyway. There were several reasons for that. A strategy of this kind requires sustained and dedicated political work. It has to be based on democratic grass-roots organization. It can only spring from a movement, not a personal initiative by this or that leader. Last but not least, it demands genuine knowledge of US society, rather than superficial pieties or clichés. The reality is that there exists, inside America, a vast body of opinion which is often bewildered by the lurid rhetoric of Zionism and which would be capable of turning against it, were a mass campaign mobilized in the US itself for Palestinian human, civil and political rights. The tragedy is that the Arabs here have been too weak, too divided, too unorganized and ignorant to mount such a movement. But unless American Zionism is taken on in its homelands, all attempts to parley with the United States or Israel will lead to the same dismal and discrediting outcome."