Trite slogan won't solve the crisis

PAT JOHNSON

"End the occupation now!" is a chant that has been heard a million times on Canadian streets. Throughout the past 40 years, but especially since the wholesale resumption of Palestinian violence in 2000, "end the occupation now" has been the core demand of the pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist movement.

So intrinsic to the debate is this mantra that otherwise intelligent Canadian observers have resorted to it as the crutch upon which an entire simplistic worldview of the Middle East conflict hangs. The problem with the "end the occupation now" (EON) movement is that it not only oversimplifies the realities of the conflict, it completely negates any and all claims from the Israeli side. The myriad compromises, complexities and sensitivities that require attention in order for there to be a lasting peace are obliterated under the chant.

This slogan is assumed by many well-meaning and progressive, if ignorant, Canadians to be a position of basic social justice. In fact, it is the opposite. It is a fundamentally dishonest and unfair proposition. Ending the occupation has been the priority of successive Israeli governments, from the 1967 offer rejected by the Arab League at Khartoum to the successive offers at Camp David, Oslo and Taba that would have led to a disengagement of Israel from the West Bank and Gaza. Eventually, after years of chanting "end the occupation now," Canadian activists, among others, are aghast that Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is preparing to do just that. Since they cannot possibly be on the same side of an issue as the old warmonger Sharon, their thinking seems to go, some have now revised their position to insist that they didn't mean "now" literally. After decades of sloganeering, these activists seem unwilling to give up their chant, even though Sharon has started to implement a plan that does precisely what they have demanded.

The disengagement plan – a brave and revolutionary step toward peace where no other steps have worked – has been attacked by the most extreme elements of the anti-Israel movement, on the assumption that disengagement is not the end goal. There is a suspicion that Sharon has other, hidden plans that do not reflect the mutual best interests of the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Part of this is based on the logical assumption that a leopard doesn't change its spots. Sharon is well known to have been the most powerful voice for Israeli settler communities in the

Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Some reasonably conclude that Sharon's current policy – seemingly a direct reversal of his past policies – is a subterfuge similar to Stephen Harper's about-face on Kyoto.

Part of the intellectual dishonesty presented by the EON movement is that Israel has been prepared to do just that since 1967. The sole reason that Israel has not been able to end the occupation is that the various "partners" with which it has had to negotiate have refused to provide the miniscule, largely symbolic, demands that the country has asked for: recognition of its right to exist and an end to six decades of hostility. Having refused to negotiate or grant even the slightest legitimacy to any Israeli request – including peace – pro-Palestinian critics then demand that Israel hand over whatever the Palestinians demand – unilaterally and with no expectation of any commensurate benefit or the offer of possible peaceful coexistence.

Arguably more egregious than the injustice of demanding that Israel give all and receive nothing is the willingness of Canadian and other pro-Palestinian activists to wilfully suspend disbelief about the underlying intent of the slogan "end the occupation now." Despite the inequity inherent in this chant, many of those who repeat it ignore an important aspect of its subtext. When well-intentioned Canadians use the phrase, they refer to the occupation of 1967 – the postwar situation in which Israel found itself in possession of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When the slogan is shouted on Arab streets and by some of the extremists in our own midst, it means the "occupation" of 1948. It is a clever slogan because it can mean whatever one wants it to mean. For decent Canadian activists, it can mean creating a Palestinian sovereign state. To others, it can mean nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish one.

The peace process – any peace process, really – is premised on two contending rights. In this case, Israel was expected to accommodate the creation of an independent Palestinian state and the Palestinians, and their Arab allies, were expected to provide a reasonable expectation of peace. EON says Israel should accommodate the former and forget about the latter.

The ascent of Mahmoud Abbas has led to the first real hope that a democratic state might emerge among the Palestinians. For most of the years that Canadians have enthusiastically chanted "end the occupation now," such an act – a universal, immediate withdrawal – would have resulted in, at best, a lawless kleptocracy or, at worst, genocidal chaos in the West Bank and Gaza. As despicable as Israeli occupation might be, and as much as Palestinians and their allies downplay the fact, the vacuum that would have been created at almost any period after 2000 by an Israeli withdrawal would have resulted in a series of events that would have had almost certainly cataclysmic consequences for ordinary Palestinians.

One could argue, as many did in the case of post-colonial Africa, that people must be free to make their own mistakes. But the Palestinian people, under the authoritarianism of Arafat, would have been arguably less free to make their own mistakes than they have been under Israeli occupation.

There is also a strong element of naïve hope and a fear of digging too deeply into the complexities of this conflict. Canadians, whose relatively peaceful history imbues us with a smug why-can't-we-all-just-get-along attitude, do not want to look deeper into this conflict. We would hate to imagine that this conflict could have even more dire consequences; that the current curriculum of murder across much of the Arab world has created a global powder keg of which Israel may be the primary – but far from the final – target.

Nobody wants to imagine that this could devolve into a final showdown between fundamentalist Islamist armageddon theology and Western concepts of democracy, pluralism and fun-fun-fun. We would hate to think that this might be a battle not simply for the national rights of a small, oppressed people, but a proxy war between religious fundamentalism and democratic pluralism. Who needs to go there? Its easier just to chant "end the occupation now" and believe that simple phrase will solve a massively complex and nuanced problem.

Pat Johnson is a B.C. journalist and commentator.

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