Ten years since Arafat’s death: Lost hope as the illusion of temporary occupation fades

[Jefferson23]

Palestinian society is completing its split into geographic units cut off from one another. Meanwhile, economic gaps widen among the regions, cities, villages, refugee camps and extended families.

By Amira Hass | Nov. 8, 2014 |

On Wednesday evening, as young Palestinians were sparring with the Israel Police in East Jerusalem neighborhoods, a documentary about the life of Yasser Arafat was being shown at the Mahmoud Darwish Museum in Ramallah. The museum’s Galilee Hall was filled with members of the PLO and Fatah — high-ranking and lower-ranking, well-known and not so well-known, old and young. There were more men than women. They applauded when, on-screen, Arafat declared the establishment of a Palestinian state on November 15, 1988.

The people in attendance, like the rest of the residents of the Palestinian Authority’s de facto capital, followed Wednesday’s events in East Jerusalem, “the capital of the Palestinian state,” 10 to 15 kilometers away. They “followed” the demonstrations and clashes as opposed to “participated” or “expanded” them to other areas of the occupied West Bank.

This is because the identifying feature of Palestinian society today is the split into local units, where dramatic incidents that take place in some units — war in Gaza, mass arrests in Hebron, conflicts with the Palestinian police in Jenin — don’t affect the rest. The mental distance between one geographic unit and the next is several times greater than the physical distance — not only when it comes to Gaza and Jerusalem, where Israel’s policy of closure and movement restrictions cut people off physically from the West Bank, or in the villages behind the separation barriers such as Bart'aa, Nabi Samwil and Nuaman.

The common objective reality — a foreign rule that the Palestinians experience as a colonialist system working to displace and dispossess them — is broken down into separate components with ostensibly different experiences for each.

The choice of the anniversary of Arafat’s death to discuss the changes in Palestinian society contains the assumption that the presence or absence of the late PLO chairman had an effect on these changes. There is no doubt that Arafat, in going to Oslo or signing the agreement for gradual progress toward a goal never explicitly defined with the occupying state, had a hand in creating the geographic fragmentation that so profoundly affected the societal fragmentation (the West Bank’s temporary division into areas A, B and C, which became permanent).

http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.625283