Vulnerable nations are prone to exalt their specific differences and to identify themselves with heroic legends, divine legitimacy and transcendent privileges over the rest of mankind. A legitimate feeling of exaltation, when based on a symbolic act deep-rooted in history or culture, could easily turn into abnormal doctrines and transpolitical strategies. In the Middle East, a chain of events has built up a series of ideologies of that kind. So long as they affect the political culture within the domestic arena, they only breach universal principles and democratic standards, and degenerate into a source of aggression and violence when other nations fall victim to such aberrations.

The Israeli representative to the Peace Process Steering Group, then Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, advocated such an ideology when he openly stated, during a meeting in Montebello, Canada, in February 1994, that “the Israeli government was not ready to endorse the principle of equal status for the peoples of the region.” He repeated the same pledge at two successive meetings in Cairo in January 1995 and in Montreux, Switzerland, in May 1995. Within the peace process, this stand prevented the adoption of the Steering Group Guidelines and proceeded also to block the Arms Control and Regional Security (ACRS) Working Group Statement of Principles. The doctrine is not confined to the negotiating table alone. Indeed the Israeli government has enforced it through a number of acts and practices in the field such as:

• denial of political rights, and discriminatory practices against the Palestinians;
  
  
• use of fait accompli within the territory of neighboring states;
  
  
• annexation of territories and confiscation of aquifers;
  
  
• claiming privileges regarding the nature and quality of armaments;
  
  
• claiming non-equal status with regard to international conventions and treaties.
  

• respect the equal rights of peoples and their right to self-determination…;
  
  
• respect the territorial integrity and unity of each of the other partners”.-Published 18/9/2003©bitterlemons-international.org
  
  Abderraouf Ounaies is former Tunisian ambassador to Moscow and Delhi, and currently professor of international relations at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, University of Tunis.

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  The Arab Communist experience: between Marx and the Soviets
  by Rifaat al Said

  In 1972, I published a book entitled "Reflections on Nasserism," in which I told of a report that had been published in Pravda, and broadcast on Radio Moscow. We listened to that report, called "Joys on the Banks of the Nile," as we sat in the Wahat Egyptian jail. The report was meant to glorify Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose devils beat us harshly that very night.
  
  My book was received very negatively by Arab communists. Comrade Khalid Bakdash, secretary general of the Syrian Communist Party at the time, told me that it was not appropriate to attack Soviet journalists because they were Lenin’s sons. In fact, Arab communists had a rough time with Marxism in two areas. First, they demonstrated an over-reliance on the texts and the most educated among them ornamented their discourse with quotations of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin or even Joseph Stalin in his glory days. But the text here was meant for its own sake, not to illustrate reality. In fact, realities had to be twisted in order to adapt to the text. (And here I recall the fundamentalism of the Islamists that I criticize emphatically; there is also a fundamentalist Marxism.)
  
  The other area of difficulty is sanctification of the Soviet model as the only correct one. This model spans both the ideological vision and practical application, and has resulted in a feeling of subordination. Arab communists, like many others in the world, have become like children grasping at the edge of their mother’s dress, walking with her wherever she goes.
  
  The Arab communist leaders enjoyed that, as they were not required to be creative, or to think, nor to do research and study. They merely received and reiterated. They were skilled imitators. So when Stalin, for instance, rose to the throne of the party general secretary, they reiterated that this was done in accordance with the theory of deputation, whereby the people deputize the working class (the most revolutionary of classes) on their behalf, the working class in its turn deputizes the party (its revolutionary vanguard) on its behalf, then the party deputizes the party conference on its behalf, and so on up to the position of the general secretary who gathered in his hands the two triangles of authority composed of "the Party, Government and the Supreme Soviet Council" and "ideology, implementation and legislation."
  
  Therefore, he himself was considered the revolution. Anyone who dared differ with him, or criticize him even in a whisper, would be labeled part of the counterrevolution. When crucial ideology became a lifeless mold, to explain was reserved for the Kremlin’s "pope" alone. Marx said that "all the authority belongs to the masses," but the deputation put all authority in the hands of the general secretary, and thus the general secretaries of the Arab communist parties gathered all authority in their hands and were dwarf tsars before the great tsar.
  
  Much of what Marx said was never applied. Hundreds and even thousands of specific directives in Marxist ideology disappeared before the bureaucracy and brutality of the Soviet application. Arab Marxists, like others, did not notice any defect, nor did they doubt or feel contradiction. The Stalinist era only made Arab Marxist leaders strive for more authority. As a result, the Marxist ideology, which was intended to be vibrant, was petrified. "Marxism is renewed with every new scientific discovery," said Friedrich Engels, but no one was allowed to think or to be creative, because criticism was not to be practiced.
  

  
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  Perhaps because Egyptian Marxism began in Egypt in 1894, a quarter of a century before the Bolshevik revolution, as well as for numerous other reasons, Egyptian Marxists did not fully adapt to the Soviet version.
  
  The Egyptian Socialist Party was established in 1921 as the first socialist party in the Arab world and Africa. The founders of the party decided two things: to include the entire socialist spectrum, and therefore form a leadership of four (Mahmoud Husni al Arabi, a Marxist, Ali al Anani, a leftist, Muhammed Abdalla Anan, a social democrat, and Salamah Musa, a Fabian), as well as to exclude from the leadership any foreigners. Egypt at the time was crowded with foreign communities (Greeks, Italians, Armenians, French, etc), all of which enjoyed foreign concessions that put them in a higher class than Egyptians. As such, Egypt was particularly sensitive to foreign hegemony and concession.
  
  But this Egyptian vanguard was shocked when they requested to join the Soviet Comintern, as they were subsequently asked to call themselves the Communist Party. They protested that the Egyptian constitution prohibited the establishment of communist parties, and made a brilliant suggestion--that they call themselves the "Egyptian Socialist Party--The Egyptian Branch of Comintern." The Soviets refused this offer, and formed a committee to look into the Egyptian application. Among the impossible conditions set by that committee were that the party should call itself the Egyptian Communist Party and accept all 21 conditions laid down by the Comintern, and that the party should include in its ranks any communist living in Egypt, which meant opening party doors to a foreign majority.
  
  The Egyptian party was thus forced to submit to these conditions, and came under the penalty of the law. Egyptian authorities subsequently issued a decision to disband the party of 2,000 members, dissolve the associated Workers’ General Federation, and confiscate its offices and funds. All central committee members were arrested.
  
  At the Sixth Comintern Conference held in 1928, the Egyptian communists revolted against the Stalinist idea that the national bourgeois (in the second-degree colonies like Egypt) had thrown the flag of freedom in the mud, and should therefore be fought by a newly established revolutionary bloc of workers and peasants. The Egyptians refused to attack the Egyptian Wafd Party, as it was waging a fiery battle against the constitution and against the British occupation. The Egyptians again suggested a compromise where they would not ally with the Wafd Party, but acknowledge the inevitability of joint actions--but did Stalin ever accept a compromise? Seven years later, the Soviet Encyclopedia published a list of communist parties worldwide that did not mention the Egyptian Communist Party, thus deposing the party from Soviet-subordinate good children’s heaven.
  
  When the July Revolution broke out in Egypt, the Soviets considered it a coup d’etat loyal to the Americans, and of course, world communists reiterated that view. But the Egyptian communist organization, the Democratic Movement for National Liberation, was partner to the revolution, with two members in its command council. Thus, the July Revolution became a nationalist revolution. In 1955, the Soviets offered their blessings to Abdel Naser while the majority of the communists suffered brutal torture in his jails. Due to this history of divergent visions, the collapse of the Soviet Union did not have a similarly bloody impact on Egyptian Marxism.-Published 18/9/03©bitterlemons-international.org
  
  Dr. Rifaat al Said is president of the National Progressive Party and a member of the Shura Council (the upper house of Parliament) in Egypt.

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  What happened to Palestinian nationalism?
  by Salim Tamari

  Every decade or so since the 1948 War it seems that the Palestinian national movement goes through periods of historical re-thinking. Almost all of those episodes are focused on inherent tensions and dynamics between the remnants of Palestinian society that remained on the land (in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza) and those forces that led the movement in the dispersed communities in the Arab host countries (primarily in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon). But today the challenge comes also from an ideological source: an Islamic vision of salvation that is not tied to the territorial principle.
  
  We can point out three critical junctions in the growth of secular Palestinian nationalism in the period preceding the Oslo accords: the merger of the Palestinian movement into mainstream Arab nationalism during the late fifties and sixties (the Ba’th Party, the Greater Syria Movement, and Nasserism); the rise of the armed struggle movement after 1967 as inspired by Maoism and Guevarism; and the decline of the doctrine of liberation through notions of guerrilla struggle and people’s war after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (1982) and the dispersal of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its militias. Throughout this period the Islamic movement (mainly the Muslim Brothers) was busy with moral rearmament, and distancing itself from effective politics.
  
  The main lessons of these achievements (and defeats) were epitomized in the Palestine National Congress meeting in Algiers (November 1988), when Yasser Arafat announced the Declaration of Independence and the Peace Initiative. The gist of that declaration was that Palestinian nationalism was now reconciled to two states in historic Palestine (Israel and Palestine) on the basis of the 1947 partition plan. The border of the two states would be the June 1967 borders in line with international legitimacy and consensus, underwritten by Security Council Resolution 242.
  
  Obviously, this new development at the time was protracted and had been in the works for 18 years of debate, polemics, and occasionally, armed conflict within the various factions of the PLO. It started hesitantly with the early 1970s launching by the Democratic Front of the notion of independent Palestinian territory "that can be liberated from the enemy" (again a Guevarist formulation). The subsequent adoption by a majority vote in the tenth PNC in Amman (1974) of the same idea amounted to the first step towards independent statehood (as opposed to the total liberation of Palestine). The result was that the PLO was now split into two currents: the pro-state trends (Fateh’s majority, the DFLP, and the communists), and the "rejectionists" led by the Popular Front, and the opposition tendency in Fateh led by Abu Musa and the pro-Syrian Palestinian Ba’thists.
  
  The great turning point in this reformulation of nationalist ideology was the return of the PLO to Palestine after 1994. The main consequence of this return was that the historic apposition between a localized political culture that paid symbolic allegiance to "its" leadership in Tunis (and before that in Beirut and Amman), and that of the PLO, came to a historic end. The returning leaders of diasporean nationalism now forged a new institutional edifice (the Palestinian Authority) with local urban elites and the internal wings of Fateh that effectively marginalized the PLO in all but name, and with it sidelined the role of Palestinian diaspora communities in affecting the course of Palestinian politics.
  
  It was the state-in-the-making, and its various components, that became the instrument of this new transformation: the enhanced presidency, the parliament, the security apparatus and the bureaucracy. While the elections of 1996 legitimized the new regime in the eyes of the world and the local constituencies, it was the public sector bureaucracy which allowed Arafat and the returning leadership to underwrite an effective (but not so efficient) system of clientalism and patronage. It was also the institutional lynchpin that created a new political apparatus uniting the returnees (external leadership) with local elites and movements. But the main weakness of this process was an endemic inability of the new/old leadership to create effective and accountable institutions of governance.
  
  This whole symbiotic process between the two wings of Palestinian nationalism, and the inevitable decline of the diaspora came to a sudden reversal with the collapse of the Camp David talks. The inability of the state-in-the-making to bring about territorial consolidation of its population base (i.e. sovereignty), and the rise of the Israeli right, which was keen at preventing any Palestinian state (barring a quisling segmented regime) from having contiguity, dealt an effective blow to the whole idea of a two-state solution.
  
  Palestinian nationalism is being re-defined today as a result of these twin developments: the failure of the project for independence (two-state solution) mainly due to intransigent and superior Israeli settlement policies under conditions of an overwhelmingly uneven power relationship; and secondly, the rise of Islamist movements positing themselves as an alternative paradigm of national deliverance.
  
  Of the former it must be said that Palestinian civil society failed to present an effective challenge to the system of patronage and segmental power that was inherited from the years of the PLO in exile. But the main blow was dealt by an Israeli system that seems to be unable and unwilling to tolerate another state between the river and the sea. (Israel today adopts the mirror image of those stands of territorial maximalism adopted by the Palestinians and Arabs during the fifties and sixties vis-à-vis Israel.) The rise of Islamic movements was predicated on this weakness. Hamas and their allies have presented themselves, paradoxically, as both an alternative worldly and millenarian system of adherence--worldly, through a seemingly accountable network of social services for the poor (something that the patronage-based institutions of the PA were unable to deliver). The Islamists have also promised a paradigm of otherworldly salvation, through the cult of martyrdom. But this combination has built-in limitations on its ability to set itself as the alternative to the PLO, since it feeds on the inability of secular Palestinian nationalism to create a state, rather than its own (Islamist) ability to create a workable system of governance. These limitations are most obvious in the country where they reached their highest success: Iran.
  
  We are witnessing an impasse today: the major blow to the project of self-determination in Palestine has not led to a revitalization of extra-territorial Palestinian nationalism, as in the sixties and seventies, nor has the set-back of the two-state solution given rise to a movement to adopt binationalism. The most likely short-term possibility is the current Israeli version of apartheid rule and cantonization. At no time was there a more pressing need for intellectual coherence and political leadership to give the Palestinians a new direction, in a time when the old formulas (Arab nationalism, steadfastness, and people’s war) ring hollow.-Published 18/9/03©bitterlemons-international.org
  
  
  Salim Tamari is director of the Institute for Jerusalem Studies. Until recently, he co-directed the Mediterranean Studies Unit at Birzeit University, Palestine.

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