Hamas Paves the Way for a New Intifada : To Palestinians still under Israel’s thumb, Arafat sold out, and now they’re worse off.

“What about the bomb on the bus in Tel Aviv?” I asked Edward Said, a few hours after the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas had taken credit for the explosion Wednesday that killed at least 22 people. Said is the best-known Palestinian in the United States. A professor at Columbia University, between 1977 and 1991 he was a member of the Palestinian National Council. He broke with Yasser Arafat over the negotiations leading to the Oslo agreement, and has been a harsh critic of the “peace process” ever since.

“It’s a catastrophe. It’s criminal and also stupid. But on the West Bank the bombing has no doubt got a lot of support. They say, ‘at least the Muslim people are fighting.’

“These are the same fundamentalists, more or less, who (last Friday) stabbed the Egyptian writer (Naguib) Mahfouz. To make a devil’s pact with reactionary religious sentiment is a tremendous mistake.”

Aside from terrorism, Said remarked, Hamas has absolutely no sane strategy of resistance. “Take the settlements and continued expropriation of land--prime cause of contention between us and the Israelis on the West Bank. Just the other day, they took another 3,000 acres. Most of the labor on these settlements and new roads, taking our land away, consists of Palestinians working for the Israelis.

“Now, you’d think that the principal responsibility of a national authority or of any coherent resistance would be in some way to mobilize the people against participating in the destruction of their own future. But they’ve never done that.

“Again, take Jerusalem, a core problem. It’s now expanded to some 25% of the whole West Bank. There are dozens of Palestinians whose land has been taken away, but who cling on in little shacks and simply refuse to move out. They could become the focus of a mass struggle--strikes and so on--to stop the bulldozers, some of which are driven by Palestinians. The Israelis have made no secret of their plans for Jerusalem. They publish them all the time. But there has never been a Palestinian response.

“In the meantime we’ve become at best a Bantustan and at worst an Israeli protectorate.

“The peace process has made it possible for the Israelis to hold on to Gaza and the West Bank through indirect rule, without any of the burden. They’ve made no concession on any other point. Even the meager provisions of Oslo they haven’t stuck to.

“There was a timetable, but the Israelis say no dates are sacred. They were supposed to provide free passage between Gaza and Jericho--60 miles--and they haven’t. They were supposed to withdraw and they haven’t withdrawn. They were supposed to turn over authorities on the West Bank in 37 areas and they’ve only given up five. And above all, they haven’t paid any reparations.

“In the meantime, Arafat has become a parody of a Latin American dictator. The only thing he cares about are these elections he’s pushing for, where he will become president for life. Arafat’s now known as the military commander of Gaza, the old Israeli title. He’s become an Israeli enforcer.”

In Said’s view, the Israelis realized that after Arafat’s disastrous strategy in the Gulf War, his concern was personal survival. His one card to play was to give Israel everything it wanted and jump into its lap. So he did that and the Israelis quite brilliantly capitalized on it. They gave him symbolic authority, unloaded the onerous part of the West Bank and especially Gaza and held on to everything else.

“Obviously people feel relieved to walk on the streets of Gaza and not see Israeli soldiers. It’s nice to go to the beach and to see Arafat as your own leader. You can’t minimize that. But the realities are that when the Israelis press the button, he jumps. He’s autonomous, not independent, and he rules by gangs, thugs.

Said doesn’t think that the peace agreement will last. “Arafat himself is quite ill and also likely to be shot. Oslo is a failure because they’re just not giving Arafat the necessary money.”

And if the Oslo agreement really falls apart, what do the Palestinians have to do?

“There has to be resistance at the grass-roots level. Revive the popular committees of the intifada, with these two demands: no Palestinian labor on the settlements of any sort; no compliance with the Palestinian National Authority, which is simply a Vichy government, a stooge.

“We have to restate the fundamental objective; self-determination for the West Bank, Gaza and the Palestinian people. You can’t keep changing your objective. That’s why I left them in 1991. To go from self-determination to limited self-rule, what kind of nonsense is that?”