MCC Palestine Update #38
“Better agonies of peace than pains of war.”
That was the message I read on billboards throughout the Gaza Strip this past week while visiting MCC projects in Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis. Posted at the entrance to Gaza City and all along the coast road between Gaza and Deir el-Balah, the billboards were funded by the Palestinian Authority as a show of its peaceful intentions. The billboards did not, however, escape graffiti's subversive scrawl. Islamists had written their slogan--"Islam huwa al-hal" [Islam is the solution]--on some; on others, someone skeptical about the Palestinian Authority's track-record of surrendering basic Palestinian rights in order to maintain the privileges of Palestinian elites, had written, "Better pain and freedom than surrender." Other billboards had escaped graffiti but not escaped the ravages of the wind blowing in from the sea, and were peeling away to reveal previous signs: "The Big Taste of America," promoting Viceroy cigarettes, thus competed with the peace message on one billboard.
In Deir el-Balah I stopped by a women's society with whom MCC has partnered to work with 13 families in establishing small agricultural projects: chicken farms, pigeon farms. People's determination, even amidst unemployment well over 60, even 70%, to bring in income for their families is inspiring.
I was fortunate to be able to make my visits to Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip; the day before, the north-south road had been shut down by the Israeli military, and the next day it was closed again. As I travelled past the north of the Gush Katif settlement bloc, I noticed the progress being made on the bridge which will connect the 3 or 4,000 settlers of the Gush with Israel. Millions upon millions of shekels are going into the construction of this bridge, along with the construction of a huge wall surrounding the Neve Dekalim settlement next to Khan Younis refugee camp.
At a time when the State of Israel is cutting back on a wide variety of social services to persons with disabilities and university students, plenty of money is found for the development of Israeli colonies in the occupied territories, even those deep in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
In the Qatatweh neighborhood of Khan Younis camp, I visited a kindergarten which a local women's society is developing into an afternoon club for children. That death is omnipresent in the camp is highlighted by the way in which graffiti pictures of slain Palestinians take up almost every inch of wall space. We hope that this club will provide a safe place for children to enjoy life and express themselves freely.
"No, this is forbidden, you can't take it out." That's what the soldier manning the baggage inspection machine at the Erez crossing point at the north of the Gaza Strip informed us as we sought to leave Gaza for our home in Jerusalem. The offensive article: a one- kilo bag of duqqa, a spice mixture for which Gaza is famous. Over the years we have often brought duqqa out of Gaza for one of our Palestinian colleagues in MCC who likes the spice. Now, we were informed, it was absolutely forbidden to take spices out of the Gaza Strip.
Countries all over the world, of course, limit what people can and can't bring in. What made this particular denial frustrating, however, was how it symbolized an entire system which denies freedom of movement to Palestinians, keeping people apart. Not being able to take a bag of spices from one part of a country to another pales in comparison to countless other stories: a mother in Gaza who can't see her children studying in the West Bank; a doctor in Jerusalem who can't visit his dying father in Gaza; millions of Muslims who can't pray at al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, even though it should only be a 90 minute drive.
The occupation has created a series of prisons confining Palestinians into increasingly smaller cages; this intolerable situation will not be sustainable forever.
--Alain Epp Weaver
Below are three pieces. The first is the text of an ad published in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, written by reserve officers in the Israeli military and declaring their refusal to serve in the occupied terrotires--may their number increase. The second, a commentary in the Los Angeles Times by a former CIA officer, succinctly notes the futility of trying to stop "terror" without addressing all forms of dispossession and violence in Palestine/Israel, particularly the occupation; unfortunately, it appears that the American administration is less concerned with causes than with symptoms. The final piece, written by Dr. Eyad al-Sarraj and published in al- Quds newspaper in Jerusalem, is a call to Palestinians to transform the current intifada into more of a mass, nonviolent movement than one focused on the ineffectual, counter-productive actions of armed militias.
1. The full text of Haaretz ad:
We, combat officers and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), raised on the values of Zionism, sacrifice, and giving to the Jewish people and the State of Israel, who have always served on the front line and were the first to fulfill every mission, regardless of how difficult, in order to defend and strengthen the State of Israel;
We, combat officers and soldiers, who serve the State of Israel for long weeks every year, despite the high personal price we pay, who have performed reserve duty throughout the territories and have been issued orders and instructions that have nothing to do with the security of our country, orders whose sole purpose was to perpetuate domination over the Palestinian people;
We, who have personally witnessed the terrible bloodshed on both sides of the conflict; Who have seen that the orders we were issued undermine all the values we were taught in this country; Who understand today that the price of occupation is the loss of humanity of the IDF, and corruption of Israeli society in general; Who know that the territories are not Israel, and that ultimately the settlements will be evacuated;
We hereby declare that we will not go on fighting a war for the peace of the settlements. We will not go on fighting beyond the green line for the purposes of domination, expulsion, starvation, and humiliation of an entire people.
We hereby declare that we shall continue to serve the Israel Defense Forces in any mission that serves the defense of the State of Israel. The mission of occupation and repression does not serve this goal and we refuse to participate in it. [A list of the name, rank, and unit of 53 IDF soldiers] This ad was funded by the participants themselves.
2. Bush Must See Past her Acts of Terror to the Root Causes
Graham E. Fuller
Los Angeles Times
The Israeli-Palestinian situation has moved into what can only be described as a stage of collective madness. And Washington is walking right down that same path, apparently unaware of or unconcerned about the abyss yawning ahead. Two basic schools of thought exist. One says: Unacceptable terrorism is running rampant in Israel and nothing can be done until the terror is brought under control or eliminated. The other view says: The core of the problem is 35 years of harsh and humiliating occupation. Ending the occupation is the sole means of beginning to attain peace.
The first view has triumphed; the second has been largely silenced. And things are deteriorating fast. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is committed to the first view. He believes he can crush Palestinian terrorism and is using extreme military power to do so. The Bush administration over the past month seemingly has accepted this rationale--a tragedy for Washington, Israel and the Palestinians because the terror isn't abating but increasing. Washington is treating only the symptoms of the massive Palestinian frustration: bitterness, impotence and rage.
Does Israel face a problem of terrorism? You bet. It is appalling that Israeli citizens are being blown up in discos, pizza parlors and public streets. Israelis justifiably are bitter and angry. But conditions in the West Bank and Gaza also have never been worse. Palestinians are reacting violently as the rat cage tightens. Tragically, the most unspeakable terrorism against Israelis will be applauded by virtually every Palestinian until their own desperation is alleviated and their sovereign state has been established.
In treating the symptoms and not the cause, President Bush is participating and contributing to the isolation, humiliation and destruction of Yasser Arafat. Sharon believes that Arafat's elimination is desirable, and most of the Israeli Cabinet is ready to assassinate him. Washington effectively acquiesces to the Sharon strategy. Few have sympathy for Arafat, who has made more than his fair share of stupid mistakes in his long political career to preserve the Palestinian cause.
The problem, however, is not Arafat but the Palestinian reality he reflects. The Palestinian Authority is corrupt and ineffective. If Israel is about to eliminate Arafat, fine, as long as Sharon and Bush are convinced that what succeeds him will be better, more malleable. To disabuse yourself of this view, read Khalil Shikaki's analysis of the next generation of Palestinian leadership in January's Foreign Affairs. That generation is more aggressive, more determined to move to armed struggle and more willing to cooperate with Hamas as an indispensable political and military ally. Hamas has never been stronger, thanks to current conditions.
Did Arafat or his lieutenants seek to import arms to bolster the armed struggle? Almost certainly; all national liberation movements do.
Is terrorism on the rise? Of course, because the Palestinians have no other vehicle of resistance. That does not justify it, but terrible political violence is emerging from the Israeli side as well, even if not technically terrorism. Bush's own war on terrorism is hostage to the situation. Lest these views appear one-sided, listen to Ami Ayalon, for four years the director of Shin Bet, the Israeli version of the FBI: "Israeli society, top to bottom, is sinking into confusion.... People mask this reality with swaggering slogans: 'We will vanquish terrorism!' There are today more Palestinian terrorists than a year ago and there will be even more tomorrow.... "In Israel, no one is in touch with reality.... Why is the problem not resolved? Reoccupying the Palestinian Authority lands, and killing Arafat, what would that change? Those who want victory want an unending war.... "Anyone who [equates] Arafat with [Osama] bin Laden understands neither Arafat nor Bin Laden....
We say the Palestinians behave like 'madmen,' but it is not madness but a bottomless despair.... "I favor unconditional withdrawal from the territories--preferably in the context of an agreement, but not necessarily." Should Bush listen to these powerful insights from Shin Bet? Or is he hostage to an agenda that looks only at the terror and not its cause?
*Graham E. Fuller is a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA.
3. "The end…and a new beginning!!"
Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj
Al-Quds, 28 January 2002
A dear friend drew my attention to what Dr. Jamal Abdel Jawad wrote in "Al-Ahram Files" on 11 January under the title of "The Limits of the Military Option in Palestine." The Palestinian struggle, as Dr. Abdel Jawad says, is going through a very sensitive and critical stage. I dare to add that the Palestinian issue as a whole is going through a very dangerous period but full of possibilities.
In this time we may witness to an end of a defeated old stream and the birth a new one belonging to the modern time, the age of science, awareness, freedom of expression, solidarity with justice-not blind solidarity-and being armed with the power of public opinion. The Palestinian issue is one of the most important in our times. It is the issue of a people who were robbed their rights and land, and have become refugees all over the world, looking for their livelihood and searching for identity. A grave injustice that should have enlisted world opinion in support of the issue had their been the leadership and the intellectual capacity to develop the means of the struggle and renewing them in accordance with the local, regional, and international developments, and in line with the human principles supporting justice. Zionists have tried, and succeeded in, portraying themselves a victim defending itself from Palestinian "terror" and Arab "aggression" that want to throw Jews in the sea. They achieved this at a time when the favorite Arab weapon was slogans and fiery talk about fighting to the death for the land. Arabs did not understand that the world took their shouting seriously, and Zionist propaganda used it as proof of Arab violence and barbarism against "poor" Israel.
Dr. Abdel Jawad says that the first Palestinian Intifada succeeded in imprinting the picture of Palestinian victims in world opinion. Indeed that Intifada was the first time in history that the Palestinian people felt morally victorious over Israel, as some soldiers refused to serve in the Israeli army moved by feelings of guilt and consciousness. However, that Intifada reached its inevitable end when armed factions transformed it from the struggle of the oppressed for freedom into a resistance by military order. After it was abducted by the gun, the Intifada became a burden on the people, awareness was dimmed, and the world became alienated. The first intifada was a lesson for those paying attention; and we've had more than enough lessons pass us by.
The current Intifada was not to erupt had it not been for many objective reasons going back years. Palestinian performance was faltering in institution building as well as during the revolution. It depended on factions, arms, and turning a blind eye towards corruption, if not encouraging it to a degree that the "national project" became a business investment aiming to accumulate wealth and power for some at the expense of the people.
The causes behind the Intifada definitely include increasing conviction in the failure of the Oslo process, as well as the arrogance and stubbornness of the Israeli government. Sharon's visit to Al-Aqsa was the last straw! Sharon had a plan with specific objectives. The first objective, which was behind the visit to Al-Aqsa, was to attain power. In this he depended on a conclusion reached by Israeli experts, "provoke Arabs to become violent by killing a number of them. This transforms them into armed rebels shooting Jews. Feelings of fear and historic paranoia will face Jews to seek the 'powerful' father to protect them with brute force." This is how the Israelis chose to elect Sharon. Sharon's second objective was to go back on all agreements and take the Palestinian issue to the pre-Oslo days. This would not have been easy had he not known that by continuing to provoke Palestinians they would seek vengeance by killing Israeli civilians and shooting more bullets. Sharon succeeded in his second objective and received world support-when in the past the world hold him responsible for the Sabra and Chatilla massacre-who viewed him as someone defending Israel's right to exist and the security of its citizens, especially after the events of 11 September 2001. The Palestinian movement could not absorb the ramifications of these events. Some even were adamant as if saying that "we are also Taliban." So it was easy for Sharon to convince the world that Palestinians belong to the terrorist camp that the whole world is fighting. Thus, Palestinian bullets were a very important factor taken into consideration by the Israeli military establishment, a factor it utilized to portray Palestinians as terrorists.
This brings back to memory painful lessons such as the coalition by Haj Amin Husseini with Nazi Germany during the second world war, when the whole world was against it. Likewise, supporting Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait. It seems that Palestinians were insistent on being in the wrong camp. We can also learn from other experiences in seeking freedom. Ghandi was able to liberate India. Mandela liberated South Africa. Martin Luther King liberated the blacks in the US. They achieved freedom by resorting to the most powerful arm: not resorting to arms. Empires could not withstand their strategies that depended on the human principles of preserving life and rejecting killing. This doesn't not mean that armed resistance is illegitimate. What we're saying is that armed resistance alone devoid of clear thinking, vision, insight, morality, and democratic enrichment turns into an enemy against its advocates.
Look at the experiences of Algeria and Palestine. Since the first day of its establishment, others and I have written and asked the Palestinian Authority to respect democracy and the rule of law as well as adopt the principles of separation of power, pluralism, and accountability. But above all we stressed the need to collect illegal arms before they turn into armed militias threatening Palestinian national security.
Our demands and advice fell on deaf ears for reasons known only to the people in power during this dark period in Palestinian history. The indiscriminate use of Palestinian arms and the monopoly of arms in the hands of militias turned the majority of the people who are taking the brunt of the pain into marginal witnesses unable to express their pain or criticize as talking about the detrimental effect of arms is viewed as something against national security, national unity, and national interests.
Violence is feeding on the cultural background of the Palestinian and Arab society, which is ruled by a tribal mentality advocating revenge and blood as the only way to wash the disgrace and humiliation of the nation. There is an absence of Israeli readiness to submit to the truth, admit its guilt, and apologize for its crimes in order to pave the way for peace, the only guarantee of its security. In addition, there is a steady decline in the morale of the Palestinians as a result of repeated defeats and the increasing sense that the world is conspiring against them.
Therefore, the use of arms has become the means to die and be free of this world, and to take vengeance against the enemy and the whole world. It was the choice of the desperate. I have been a firm believer in that the best choice for the Palestinian people in their just struggle toward freedom and independence is that of peaceful resistance that holds to all our rights firmly. It doesn't sacrifice friends, but unites with them. It doesn't disregard world opinion, but is armed with it. It doesn't enforce opinions but reaches consensus through democratic dialogue. I do not see any possibility for decisive Arab intervention on behalf of the Palestinians.
Some Arab regimes have become middlemen renting out their countries. I do not expect international intervention enforcing justice upon Israel. Of course, I do not expect American intervention on to deter the aggressor and establish justice.
The only choice for the Palestinian people is to depend on themselves, develop their capabilities, renew their cadres, rise with their youth by holding on to national and human principles. They have to respect morality and the law. They have to organize themselves into a progressive movement deriving from its roots, its eyes on the future, connected to world cultures.
Such a movement would receive friends and supporters from the rest of the world. It would depend on knowledge as a means to renaissance. It would establish democracy as the system of government. It would hold on to the higher moral ground.
--Translated from the original Arabic, first published in Al-Quds, 27/1/2002
Tuesday, January 29
Thursday, January 17
MCC Palestine Update #37
MCC Palestine Update #37
During this past week Israeli troops entered the Evangelical School (Anglican) in Ramallah, forcing a cancellation of classes for a couple of days. Church personnel were prevented from entering, and the housemother and boarding students in the girls' boarding section were prevented from leaving. Israeli troops have since left the school premises and have set up camp outside the school gate. MCC has donated canned beef and other material aid to the school over the years.
Below you will find three pieces, each in its own way a cry for peace and sanity amidst a widening storm of violence. Gideon Levy's open letter to Shimon Peres is straightforward in its condemnation of the Sharon government's war crimes and the complicity of the nominal Israeli left in those actions. The piece by Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader who is certainly no pacifist, is worthwhile reading, as it captures what strikes us as the mainstream Palestinian sentiment: accepting a two-state solution with the borders of 1967 and a just resolution of the refugee problem; the final item, by Chicago-based activist Ali Abu Nimah, calls into question what Western reporters mean when they talk about "calm" in Israel and the occupied territories; Abu Nimah suggests that things are "calm" as long Israelis aren't being killed.
1. Tell the truth, Shimon
Gideon Levy
Haaretz
In the 24 years of our acquaintance, four of which I spent working as your aide, this is the third time I have written you an open letter. In 1989, when you were finance minister in the Shamir government and the first intifada was raging, I used these pages to write "A letter to a former boss." Then, I told you that "for the first time in your life, you have nothing left to lose - except the prospect of vanishing into thin air." This was after you kept silent in the face of the IDF's conduct in the intifada, in the face of the continuation of the occupation and Israel's stubborn refusal to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians. At the time, I believed that you thought differently from Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin (known then as the "bone-breaker"), but that you just weren't bold enough to speak up.
Eleven years later, in 2000, I wrote you another open letter. This was after Oslo and the Rabin assassination, and after you again had lost an election - this time, to the office of president. Then, I said: "Many Israelis see you as a different person now. For them, you represent the hope of something else." And now, as I write to you again, I have to say: You no longer represent hope for anything.
The government of which you are a senior member, the foreign minister, is no longer just a government of last resort in our history of governments of last resort; this government is a government of crime. And partnership in this crime is another matter. It is no longer possible to absolve you, to give you credit for Oslo, to understand that your heart aches over what is happening, and to know that you may even be bursting with rage over what is happening and refraining from speaking out, from shouting out, and most of all, from acting, only because of tactical considerations, which you understand better than anyone.
No, your silence and inaction can no longer be justified by any excuse: Shimon, you are a partner in crime. The fact that you might realize this in your heart and, from time to time, even utter some feeble words of condemnation, the fact that you are not prime minister and that America is giving carte blanche right now, the fact that most of the people think otherwise and that to quit and "chase after a Ha'aretz journalist," as you put it, would be pointless - All of these excuses make no difference. You continue to serve in a government with blood on its hands, whose outstretched hand is still busy killing and jailing and humiliating, and you are a partner to all of its deeds. Just as the Taliban foreign minister is a part of the Taliban regime, you are a part of the Sharon regime. Your responsibility does not fall far short of the prime minister's. It is equal to that of the defense minister and the chief of staff, whose actions you harshly criticize in private discussions. Always in private discussions only.
You say you heard about the assassination of Raed Karmi, after three weeks of Palestinian quiet, on the radio. From your perspective, that's enough to exempt you from responsibility for the deed and even from having to express criticism of it. While the IDF was reoccupying Tul Karm, you were with Bill Clinton. When asked about it, you mumbled something incoherent. Following the house demolitions in Rafah, you bit your lip and kept silent. One could assume that the blowing up of the radio station was not your cup of tea either. But you bear the terrible responsibility for all of these things, for all of these actions that cannot be defined as anything other than war crimes.
Ask your brother-in-law, Prof. Rafi Walden, the head of surgery at Sheba Medical Center, who sometimes travels to the territories as a volunteer with Physicians for Human Rights, and he'll tell you what you're a partner to. He'll tell you about the women in labor - not just one or two, not just the rare exception - who can't get to the hospital because of the cruelty of the IDF of which you were once so proud, and whose babies die right after they deliver them. He'll tell you about the cancer patients prevented from getting to Jordan for treatment. No, they cannot even go to Jordan - for "security reasons."
He'll tell you about the hospitals in Bethlehem that were shelled by the IDF. He'll tell you about the doctors and nurses who sleep in the hospital because they can't get home. He'll tell you about the dialysis patients forced to spend hours jostled about while traveling makeshift routes three times a week in a desperate attempt to reach the machines that their lives depend on. He'll tell you about the patients denied crucial medical treatment because of the closure and about the ambulances prevented from passing through checkpoints, even when they're carrying critically ill passengers. He'll tell you about the people who have died at the checkpoints and about those who died at home because they didn't dare to approach the checkpoints - which are now made up of menacing tanks in the middle of the road, or mounds of dirt and cement blocks that cannot be budged - even for someone on the brink of death.
You have imprisoned an entire people for over a year with a degree of cruelty unprecedented in the history of the Israeli occupation. Your government is trampling three million people, leaving them with no semblance of normal life. No going to the market, no going to work, no going to school, no visiting a sick uncle. Nothing. No going anywhere, and no coming back from anywhere. No day or night. Danger lurks everywhere, and everywhere there is another checkpoint, choking off life.
An entire nation already partly outstretched its hand in peace, no less than we have - you know this well - It has had its fill of suffering, from the Nakba in 1948, through the 1967 occupation and the siege of 2002, and it wants exactly the same things that Israelis want for themselves - a little quiet, a little security and a drop of national pride. To a man, this entire people now wakes up each morning to a gaping abyss of despair, unemployment and deprivation - now with tanks parked at the end of the street, too.
You were always forgiven for all this - but no longer. Someone who is a partner in a government that deliberately sabotages every Palestinian effort to achieve quiet, that utterly humiliates their leaders, for whom vengeance is the sole motivating force, which cynically exploits the world's post-September 11 blindness and obtuseness to do as it pleases - can no longer be forgiven. True, you do not agree with everything this government wants to do, but what does that matter? You're inside - you're an accessory, as in any other crime. I sometimes see you answering a reporter's question about your government's latest despicable deed. The look on your face (and I'm pretty familiar with your expressions after all these years) suggests unease, even disgust. And then you give one of your evasive, hint-laden and not quite direct answers. You mumble something and try to extricate yourself by means of some awkward wordplay. Like what happened this week when you were standing next to Clinton and were asked about the occupation of Tul Karm and you said nothing - nothing - and just waited for the question to pass, to be left alone so you could go back to talking about peace and vision.
When asked about the assassinations, the demolitions, the humiliation of Arafat and his scandalous confinement, the destruction of the Dahaniya airport or the festival of the munitions display in Eilat, you furrow your brow and give half an answer. But that's not enough anymore.
Now is the time for a straight, honest and truthful answer - or nothing. Now is the time to say that the occupation of Tul Karm was a foolish move, that the assassination of Raed Karmi was intended to renew the violence and that the destruction of the houses in Rafah was a war crime - or to be Ariel Sharon. This is not the time for subtlety, for hidden meanings, for veiled criticism in private - because, here on the outside, a terrible disaster is underway, and a great ill wind is blowing and laying waste to everything.
Shall I give you an example? A few days ago, you were quoted as saying (privately, again) that it was hard for you to criticize the government's actions when the United States wasn't doing so. What kind of pathetic excuse is that? What does the fact that there is a predatory administration in the U.S. that has no counterbalancing power in the world, that does as it pleases and lets Israel do as it pleases, have to do with your principled positions? What does that have to do with the good of Israel? What does that have to do with basic values of justice and morality?
Perhaps you might take just one day of vacation, which you so rarely do, and visit the occupied territories. Have you ever actually seen the Qalandiyah checkpoint, even once? Have you seen what happens there? Do you think that you can do your job without seeing the Qalandiyah checkpoint? Do you understand that you are responsible for what goes on there? Do you understand that any foreign minister of a state that puts up these checkpoints bears responsibility for their existence?
Then you could go to the village of Yamoun and meet Heira Abu Hassan and Amiya Zakin, who lost their babies three weeks ago when IDF soldiers wouldn't let their cars through the checkpoint, while they were in labor and bleeding. Listen to their terrible stories. And what will you tell them? That you're sorry? That it shouldn't have happened? That it's part of the war on terror? That it's shocking? That maybe it's Shaul Mofaz's fault and not yours? The IDF spokesman hasn't even expressed regret about these two instances, not to mention any criminal investigation. He only confirmed that one occurred and said he "didn't know" about the other.
And equally important, what will you say about our soldiers who behave this way? That it's because of national security? That the Palestinians are to blame? Or Arafat? The truth, Shimon, is that you bear responsibility for the deaths of those two babies. Because you were silent. Because you sat in this government.
These are terrible times. But worse is yet to come. The cycle of violence and hatred has far from reached its peak. All the injustices and evil perpetrated against the Palestinians will eventually blow up in our faces. A people that is abused this way for years will explode one day in a terrible fury, even worse than what we see now. And meanwhile we have the soldiers going into the radio station, laying explosives and blowing the place to kingdom come - without stopping to ask why.
These soldiers are the bearers of bad tidings, not only for their victims, but for their dispatchers as well. Soldiers that destroy dozens of homes belonging to refugees, with all their meager possessions inside, without a moment's hesitation - and certainly no refusal to carry out such blatantly illegal orders, are not good soldiers, even for their country. Pilots who bomb targets in the heart of populated cities, tank operators who point their guns at women trying to get to the hospital to give birth in the middle of the night and Border Police officers who abuse women and youngsters are not a good portent of things to come. They all attest to the loosening of restraint that derives from a total loss of direction.
Yes, this year we have lost our way. You have joined forces with a prime minister who is Israel's most veteran warmonger, and no one can say for sure what your intentions are. And with a brainwashed public that speaks with frightening uniformity, you have it easy. Ever since another member of your party, Ehud Barak, intentionally shattered the peace camp, you've been able to do practically as you pleased. The IDF no longer investigates any war crime and the legal system approves every injustice that comes wrapped in the mantle of security. The whole world is busy struggling against terror, the press hides its face and the public doesn't want to hear, doesn't want to see and doesn't want to know. It only wants revenge. And under cover of this darkness and with the backing of a person of your stature, the occupation has become a machine of crime and evil.
Naturally, you'll say: What can I do? I wasn't elected prime minister. And I wasn't elected chairman of the Labor Party. I'm not even the defense minister. You're right: In this government you cannot do anything and you are not doing anything. Which is exactly why you never should have become a member of it. You'll say: I have influence - I rein things in, I'm a moderating force, I'm trying. Nonsense. It couldn't be much worse than it is now, so where exactly have you exerted your influence and what are you preventing from happening? Did you ever imagine that you would be sitting in a government that would reoccupy parts of Area A completely unhindered?
Just think what would have happened had you got up and loudly resigned from this government and told the world what is (perhaps) in your heart. The Nobel Prize laureate versus the crimes of the Sharon government. Imagine if you had gone to Ramallah, to Yasser Arafat who is under siege there, and taken to the street together, faced the Israeli tanks and called for their removal and for a cease-fire. True, the sky wouldn't have fallen - the occupation wouldn't have ended and the closure of Jenin would not have been lifted, but real cracks would have been opened in the moral, political and international basis of this currently immune government. Imagine if you would have said: Yes, the house demolitions are a war crime. Yes, a state that has lists of assassination targets is not a state of law. Yes, installing a checkpoint that causes people to die is an act of terror. No, the Palestinians are not the only ones to blame for this orgy of blood. Yes, we have a chief of staff who is a danger to democracy. Yes, we have a defense minister and Labor Party chairman who is the government's contractor for assassinations and house demolitions.
Yes, we have a prime minister who only wants to occupy, to avenge, to kill, to expel, to demolish and to uproot and he has no other plan in mind.
That's what you think, isn't it? If it is, then say so, for God's sake.
And if not, then your place really is with this government and we who once believed in you made a dreadful mistake. And please don't say that you're being made a punching bag once again. You're not. Ever since Oslo, you were the embodiment of our hopes. And these have been disappointed.
Time is short, Shimon. Not just for you, but for all of us. We are standing on the verge of the abyss. If you wait until Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, Ephraim Sneh, Ra'anan Cohen, Dalia Itzik and their like come up with another sneaky resigning-from-the-government-for-election-purposes deal, you might just find yourself kicked into oblivion by them. You know that they've been itching to be rid of you for some time now. And even if you do make a stand now, it may just be too late. Everyone may already be too disappointed in you and there may be no way to rebuild the ruin brought about by Sharon.
But the only way for you to add one more meaningful accomplishment to your rich biography is not just to get up now and resign from this government, which you may be compelled to do at some point anyway, but to do it while speaking out loud and clear, and telling Israelis all that you think about everything that is happening, especially about the evil we are perpetrating with our own hands. Once more in your life, try to build something new - not an atomic reactor or an aircraft industry, of which we already have more than enough. Now, against all the odds, try to build a radical Israeli peace camp, to make something out of nothing. Is it too farfetched to believe that you still see things differently than the rest of your colleagues in the government? Tell the truth, Shimon.
2. Want Security? End the Occupation
Marwan Barghouti
Washington Post, January 16, 2002
RAMALLAH -- Israel's assassination of Fatah activist Raed Karmi on Monday was predictable. Despite Israel's having killed more than 18 Palestinians since President Yasser Arafat's call for a cease-fire on Dec. 18, there have been no Israeli civilian casualties during that time. That, according to world governments and the international press, constituted a "lull in the violence." But a lull in the violence is exactly what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cannot afford. He was elected in a time of crisis and knows that his rule is sustainable only in a time of crisis. For his own political survival, he will do whatever it takes, and look for any excuse, to stoke the flames of unrest and avoid a return to peace negotiations. _
Hence, more than 600 Palestinians, already refugees, were recently made refugees yet again as Sharon's bulldozers razed their homes in Gaza. A day later Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem were destroyed. And then, just to ensure that Palestinians are sufficiently provoked and the cycle of violence starts again, Israel assassinates Karmi._ Sharon justifies such barbaric and illegal measures in the name of "security." But as someone often considered a candidate for Israeli assassination myself, I can assure the Israeli people that neither my assassination nor any of the other 82 assassinations during the past 15 months will bring them any closer to the security they seek and deserve. _
The only way for Israelis to have security is, quite simply, to end the 35- year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Israelis must abandon the myth that it is possible to have peace and occupation at the same time, that peaceful coexistence is possible between slave and master. The lack of Israeli security is born of the lack of Palestinian freedom. Israel will have security only after the end of occupation, not before._
Once Israel and the rest of the world understand this fundamental truth, the way forward becomes clear: End the occupation, allow the Palestinians to live in freedom and let the independent and equal neighbors of Israel and Palestine negotiate a peaceful future with close economic and cultural ties._
Let us not forget, we Palestinians have recognized Israel on 78 percent of historic Palestine. It is Israel that refuses to acknowledge Palestine's right to exist on the remaining 22 percent of land occupied in 1967. And yet it is the Palestinians who are accused of not compromising and of missing opportunities. Frankly, we are tired of always taking the blame for Israeli intransigence when all we are seeking is the implementation of international law. _
And we have no faith in the United States, the provider of billions of dollars in annual aid to fund Israel's expansion of illegal colonies, the "fighter of terrorism" that supplies Israel with the F-16s and helicopter gunships used against a defenseless civilian population, the "defender of freedom and the oppressed" that coddles Sharon even as he faces war crimes charges for his responsibility in the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees. The role of the world's only superpower has been reduced to that of a mere spectator with nothing to offer other than a tired refrain of "Stop the violence" while doing nothing to address the root causes of that violence: denial of Palestinian
freedom._
Watch as the hapless Gen. Anthony Zinni focuses his efforts on "violence" while Jewish settlers violate international law and even American policy by moving into a new illegal colony in occupied East Jerusalem. We Palestinians are not impressed._
Over the past 15 months, Israel has killed more than 900 Palestinian civilians, 25 percent of them under the age of 18. And still the United States has the audacity to veto a U.N. plan for an international protection force to stop the onslaught._
So we will protect ourselves. If Israel reserves the right to bomb us with F- 16s and helicopter gunships, it should not be surprised when Palestinians seek defensive weapons to bring those aircraft down. And while I, and the Fatah movement to which I belong, strongly oppose attacks and the targeting of civilians inside Israel, our future neighbor, I reserve the right to protect myself, to resist the Israeli occupation of my country and to fight for my freedom. If Palestinians are expected to negotiate under occupation, then Israel must be expected to negotiate as we resist that occupation._
I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated -- the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else. _
This principle may well lead to my assassination. So let my position be clear in order that my death not be lightly dismissed by the world as just one more statistic in Israel's "war on terrorism." For six years I languished as a political prisoner in an Israeli jail, where I was tortured, where I hung blindfolded as an Israeli beat my genitals with a stick. But since 1994, when I believed Israel was serious about ending its occupation, I have been a tireless advocate of a peace based on fairness and equality. I led delegations of Palestinians in meetings with Israeli parliamentarians to promote mutual understanding and cooperation. I still seek peaceful coexistence between the equal and independent countries of Israel and Palestine based on full withdrawal from Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 and a just resolution to the plight of Palestinian refugees pursuant to
U.N. resolutions. I do not seek to destroy Israel but only to end its occupation of my country._
The writer is general secretary of Fatah on the West Bank and was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council._
3. A non-existent “lull,” “quiet,” or “calm”: the blatant semantic clues of journalists admitting they fail to consider Israeli violence against Palestinians noteworthy
Ali Abunimah (Edited by Nigel Parry)
National Public Radio (NPR), 10 January 2002
Consistently over the past week, many members of the media have been repeating as a mantra that there has over the past three weeks been a "relative calm" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. has been one of the worst offenders. Correspondent Linda Gradstein defined this for us when she told Morning Edition host Bob Edwards on January 3 that: “you know, there's been actually three weeks of relative quiet. Only one Israeli has been killed in those three weeks, as opposed to 44 Israelis who were killed when Zinni was here last time in November and early December."
The facts -- a shameful pattern of devaluation of Palestinian life
In fact, since December 13, at least 28 Palestinians, most of them unarmed civilians and 11 of them children, have been killed by the Israeli occupation. Eighteen of them died since Yasir Arafat made his call for an end to all Israeli and Palestinian violence on December 16 as Israel's raids, demolitions and siege have continued unabated.
The following list of Palestinians killed between 13 December 2001 and 6 January 2002 includes only those killed by the Israeli occupation. In addition to this there were dozens of men, women and children maimed and injured by the occupation forces, dozens more houses demolished, as millions of civilians continued to exist under an unrelenting military siege. Six Palestinians were killed on Dec 20-21 by Palestinian police during riots and clashes, and have not been included in the list.
The fact that NPR and other media organizations consistently and deliberately ignore these dozens of Palestinians brutally killed by Israel demonstrates in the clearest possible terms that only Israeli lives are valued and only the concerns and security of Israel are taken seriously.
A cold, hard look at the list below forces any reasonable commentator to conclude that the relentless Israeli violence has not stopped taking Palestinian lives and limbs for a single day.
This is not a new coverage trend, but rather has been a persistent pattern, both with respect to Israel's violence against Palestinians and during Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon. Although
this has been brought to the attention of NPR and other media organisations on countless occasions over a period of years, this problem has only been getting worse.
The only question really worth asking now: is NPR going to do something about this or will it choose instead to allow its correspondent to continue to indulge in such an outrageous level of bias and misrepresentation? The problem is not simply with Linda Gradstein. It seems to be endemic to NPR's approach to the region generally since studio hosts have also routinely emphasized the concerns and experiences of Israeli civilians over those of any Arabs.
The result of this in specific instances and over time is to convey to NPR's listeners a deeply misleading picture of the situation in the region.
Palestinians killed by Israeli occupation forces between 13 December 2001 and 6 January 2002
December 13th:
Rami Khamis Al-Zorob, 13, killed by a live bullet to the head while playing near his home as Israeli forces fired at civilian houses. Rafah, Gaza;
Ahmed Khamis Al-Masri, 19, killed by bullet to the heart as Israeli occupation forces fired at a group of young men. Khan Yunis refugee camp, Gaza.
December 14th
Israeli occupation forces invade the West Bank village of Salfit, killing six Palestinian members of the security forces. They are
Mohammed Mohammed Aashour, 19, wounded by wo bullets in the chest and his right arm. He was run down by an Israeli army vehicle after being shot;
Assad Atayeh, 22, from Salfit, hit by several bullets in the chest. He was run down by an Israeli army vehicle after being shot;
Khalid Abu Yaqub, 27, from Kufol Haris hit by a bullet in the head;
Samih Jawad Abdel-Latif al-Danaf, 20, from Salfit, hit by a bullet in the chest and in the abdomen;
Diah Nadi Ibdah, 19, from Salfit, an employee of the Palestinian presidential guard (Force 17), hit by a bullet in the head;
Raziq Shabaan Haruzallah, 25, from Salfit hit by a bullet in the neck.
December 15th:
A Palestinian man was killed during an Israeli military incursion into the Palestinian town of Rafah, Gaza.
December 16th
Yasir Arafat makes speech calling for end to all Israeli and Palestinian violence.
Yasir Al-Kasbeh, 12, killed by rubber-coated steel bullet, Qalandia refugee camp, West Bank.
December 17th
Muhammad Huneidek, 12, killed by bullet to the chest fired from Israeli checkpoint near Neve Dekalim settlement, Gaza Strip.
Munjed Salman, 22, Palestinian police officer. Killed when Israeli forces opened fire with heavy machine guns on a police patrol. Nablus, West Bank.
Yaqoub Adkediq, 28, shot dead as he fled from Israeli death squad that raided his home at 3 am. Hebron, West Bank.
December 20th:
Dib Sarawi, 37, killed when hit in the head by fire as Israeli forces raided Nablus. Mr. Sarawi's wife and 12-year old daughter were injured.
December 24th:
Jamil Abu Atwan, 22, killed in exchange of fire with Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
December 26th:
Walid Saadi, 53, killed by Israeli helicopter gunships attacking Jenin, West Bank.
December 28th:
Mahmoud Al-Boraieh, 22, from Jabaliya refugee camp, shot dead by an Israeli patrol who claimed he was "preparing an attack." Gaza City.
December 29th:
Nujud Ghonam (female), 26, died of a brain hemorrage after being knocked unconscious with a rifle butt by an Israeli soldier during a raid of her home. Al Khadr village near Bethlehem, West Bank.
December 30th
Three Palestinian boys are killed by Israeli forces near the settlement of Elei Sinai in the Gaza Strip. Israel first claims the boys are "militants" who had "bombs strapped to their bodies." All these false claims are later withdrawn. The boys are:
Mohammed Ahmed Lubbad, 17;
Mohammed Abdel-Rahman El-Madhoun, 15;
Ahmed Mohammed Banat, 15.
Israeli occupation forces kill three Palestinians they say were trying to enter Israel east of Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip. They were:
Ismail Ahmed Abu El-Qumsan, 31;
Mohammed Mahmoud Salah, 19;
Ali As'ad Muhanna, 21.
January 4th:
A Palestinian man is killed as Israeli forces raid Nablus.
January 6th:
Five Palestinian children made homeless after their family fled their home in Khan Yunis refugee camp due to constant shelling by Israeli forces die when their refugee tent is set on fire accidentally by a candle. The children are
Nafez Huneideq, 3;
Turkia Huneideq, 5;
Fadi Huneideq, 6;
Sufian Huneideq, 7;
Hussein Huneideq, 9.
During this past week Israeli troops entered the Evangelical School (Anglican) in Ramallah, forcing a cancellation of classes for a couple of days. Church personnel were prevented from entering, and the housemother and boarding students in the girls' boarding section were prevented from leaving. Israeli troops have since left the school premises and have set up camp outside the school gate. MCC has donated canned beef and other material aid to the school over the years.
Below you will find three pieces, each in its own way a cry for peace and sanity amidst a widening storm of violence. Gideon Levy's open letter to Shimon Peres is straightforward in its condemnation of the Sharon government's war crimes and the complicity of the nominal Israeli left in those actions. The piece by Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader who is certainly no pacifist, is worthwhile reading, as it captures what strikes us as the mainstream Palestinian sentiment: accepting a two-state solution with the borders of 1967 and a just resolution of the refugee problem; the final item, by Chicago-based activist Ali Abu Nimah, calls into question what Western reporters mean when they talk about "calm" in Israel and the occupied territories; Abu Nimah suggests that things are "calm" as long Israelis aren't being killed.
1. Tell the truth, Shimon
Gideon Levy
Haaretz
In the 24 years of our acquaintance, four of which I spent working as your aide, this is the third time I have written you an open letter. In 1989, when you were finance minister in the Shamir government and the first intifada was raging, I used these pages to write "A letter to a former boss." Then, I told you that "for the first time in your life, you have nothing left to lose - except the prospect of vanishing into thin air." This was after you kept silent in the face of the IDF's conduct in the intifada, in the face of the continuation of the occupation and Israel's stubborn refusal to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians. At the time, I believed that you thought differently from Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin (known then as the "bone-breaker"), but that you just weren't bold enough to speak up.
Eleven years later, in 2000, I wrote you another open letter. This was after Oslo and the Rabin assassination, and after you again had lost an election - this time, to the office of president. Then, I said: "Many Israelis see you as a different person now. For them, you represent the hope of something else." And now, as I write to you again, I have to say: You no longer represent hope for anything.
The government of which you are a senior member, the foreign minister, is no longer just a government of last resort in our history of governments of last resort; this government is a government of crime. And partnership in this crime is another matter. It is no longer possible to absolve you, to give you credit for Oslo, to understand that your heart aches over what is happening, and to know that you may even be bursting with rage over what is happening and refraining from speaking out, from shouting out, and most of all, from acting, only because of tactical considerations, which you understand better than anyone.
No, your silence and inaction can no longer be justified by any excuse: Shimon, you are a partner in crime. The fact that you might realize this in your heart and, from time to time, even utter some feeble words of condemnation, the fact that you are not prime minister and that America is giving carte blanche right now, the fact that most of the people think otherwise and that to quit and "chase after a Ha'aretz journalist," as you put it, would be pointless - All of these excuses make no difference. You continue to serve in a government with blood on its hands, whose outstretched hand is still busy killing and jailing and humiliating, and you are a partner to all of its deeds. Just as the Taliban foreign minister is a part of the Taliban regime, you are a part of the Sharon regime. Your responsibility does not fall far short of the prime minister's. It is equal to that of the defense minister and the chief of staff, whose actions you harshly criticize in private discussions. Always in private discussions only.
You say you heard about the assassination of Raed Karmi, after three weeks of Palestinian quiet, on the radio. From your perspective, that's enough to exempt you from responsibility for the deed and even from having to express criticism of it. While the IDF was reoccupying Tul Karm, you were with Bill Clinton. When asked about it, you mumbled something incoherent. Following the house demolitions in Rafah, you bit your lip and kept silent. One could assume that the blowing up of the radio station was not your cup of tea either. But you bear the terrible responsibility for all of these things, for all of these actions that cannot be defined as anything other than war crimes.
Ask your brother-in-law, Prof. Rafi Walden, the head of surgery at Sheba Medical Center, who sometimes travels to the territories as a volunteer with Physicians for Human Rights, and he'll tell you what you're a partner to. He'll tell you about the women in labor - not just one or two, not just the rare exception - who can't get to the hospital because of the cruelty of the IDF of which you were once so proud, and whose babies die right after they deliver them. He'll tell you about the cancer patients prevented from getting to Jordan for treatment. No, they cannot even go to Jordan - for "security reasons."
He'll tell you about the hospitals in Bethlehem that were shelled by the IDF. He'll tell you about the doctors and nurses who sleep in the hospital because they can't get home. He'll tell you about the dialysis patients forced to spend hours jostled about while traveling makeshift routes three times a week in a desperate attempt to reach the machines that their lives depend on. He'll tell you about the patients denied crucial medical treatment because of the closure and about the ambulances prevented from passing through checkpoints, even when they're carrying critically ill passengers. He'll tell you about the people who have died at the checkpoints and about those who died at home because they didn't dare to approach the checkpoints - which are now made up of menacing tanks in the middle of the road, or mounds of dirt and cement blocks that cannot be budged - even for someone on the brink of death.
You have imprisoned an entire people for over a year with a degree of cruelty unprecedented in the history of the Israeli occupation. Your government is trampling three million people, leaving them with no semblance of normal life. No going to the market, no going to work, no going to school, no visiting a sick uncle. Nothing. No going anywhere, and no coming back from anywhere. No day or night. Danger lurks everywhere, and everywhere there is another checkpoint, choking off life.
An entire nation already partly outstretched its hand in peace, no less than we have - you know this well - It has had its fill of suffering, from the Nakba in 1948, through the 1967 occupation and the siege of 2002, and it wants exactly the same things that Israelis want for themselves - a little quiet, a little security and a drop of national pride. To a man, this entire people now wakes up each morning to a gaping abyss of despair, unemployment and deprivation - now with tanks parked at the end of the street, too.
You were always forgiven for all this - but no longer. Someone who is a partner in a government that deliberately sabotages every Palestinian effort to achieve quiet, that utterly humiliates their leaders, for whom vengeance is the sole motivating force, which cynically exploits the world's post-September 11 blindness and obtuseness to do as it pleases - can no longer be forgiven. True, you do not agree with everything this government wants to do, but what does that matter? You're inside - you're an accessory, as in any other crime. I sometimes see you answering a reporter's question about your government's latest despicable deed. The look on your face (and I'm pretty familiar with your expressions after all these years) suggests unease, even disgust. And then you give one of your evasive, hint-laden and not quite direct answers. You mumble something and try to extricate yourself by means of some awkward wordplay. Like what happened this week when you were standing next to Clinton and were asked about the occupation of Tul Karm and you said nothing - nothing - and just waited for the question to pass, to be left alone so you could go back to talking about peace and vision.
When asked about the assassinations, the demolitions, the humiliation of Arafat and his scandalous confinement, the destruction of the Dahaniya airport or the festival of the munitions display in Eilat, you furrow your brow and give half an answer. But that's not enough anymore.
Now is the time for a straight, honest and truthful answer - or nothing. Now is the time to say that the occupation of Tul Karm was a foolish move, that the assassination of Raed Karmi was intended to renew the violence and that the destruction of the houses in Rafah was a war crime - or to be Ariel Sharon. This is not the time for subtlety, for hidden meanings, for veiled criticism in private - because, here on the outside, a terrible disaster is underway, and a great ill wind is blowing and laying waste to everything.
Shall I give you an example? A few days ago, you were quoted as saying (privately, again) that it was hard for you to criticize the government's actions when the United States wasn't doing so. What kind of pathetic excuse is that? What does the fact that there is a predatory administration in the U.S. that has no counterbalancing power in the world, that does as it pleases and lets Israel do as it pleases, have to do with your principled positions? What does that have to do with the good of Israel? What does that have to do with basic values of justice and morality?
Perhaps you might take just one day of vacation, which you so rarely do, and visit the occupied territories. Have you ever actually seen the Qalandiyah checkpoint, even once? Have you seen what happens there? Do you think that you can do your job without seeing the Qalandiyah checkpoint? Do you understand that you are responsible for what goes on there? Do you understand that any foreign minister of a state that puts up these checkpoints bears responsibility for their existence?
Then you could go to the village of Yamoun and meet Heira Abu Hassan and Amiya Zakin, who lost their babies three weeks ago when IDF soldiers wouldn't let their cars through the checkpoint, while they were in labor and bleeding. Listen to their terrible stories. And what will you tell them? That you're sorry? That it shouldn't have happened? That it's part of the war on terror? That it's shocking? That maybe it's Shaul Mofaz's fault and not yours? The IDF spokesman hasn't even expressed regret about these two instances, not to mention any criminal investigation. He only confirmed that one occurred and said he "didn't know" about the other.
And equally important, what will you say about our soldiers who behave this way? That it's because of national security? That the Palestinians are to blame? Or Arafat? The truth, Shimon, is that you bear responsibility for the deaths of those two babies. Because you were silent. Because you sat in this government.
These are terrible times. But worse is yet to come. The cycle of violence and hatred has far from reached its peak. All the injustices and evil perpetrated against the Palestinians will eventually blow up in our faces. A people that is abused this way for years will explode one day in a terrible fury, even worse than what we see now. And meanwhile we have the soldiers going into the radio station, laying explosives and blowing the place to kingdom come - without stopping to ask why.
These soldiers are the bearers of bad tidings, not only for their victims, but for their dispatchers as well. Soldiers that destroy dozens of homes belonging to refugees, with all their meager possessions inside, without a moment's hesitation - and certainly no refusal to carry out such blatantly illegal orders, are not good soldiers, even for their country. Pilots who bomb targets in the heart of populated cities, tank operators who point their guns at women trying to get to the hospital to give birth in the middle of the night and Border Police officers who abuse women and youngsters are not a good portent of things to come. They all attest to the loosening of restraint that derives from a total loss of direction.
Yes, this year we have lost our way. You have joined forces with a prime minister who is Israel's most veteran warmonger, and no one can say for sure what your intentions are. And with a brainwashed public that speaks with frightening uniformity, you have it easy. Ever since another member of your party, Ehud Barak, intentionally shattered the peace camp, you've been able to do practically as you pleased. The IDF no longer investigates any war crime and the legal system approves every injustice that comes wrapped in the mantle of security. The whole world is busy struggling against terror, the press hides its face and the public doesn't want to hear, doesn't want to see and doesn't want to know. It only wants revenge. And under cover of this darkness and with the backing of a person of your stature, the occupation has become a machine of crime and evil.
Naturally, you'll say: What can I do? I wasn't elected prime minister. And I wasn't elected chairman of the Labor Party. I'm not even the defense minister. You're right: In this government you cannot do anything and you are not doing anything. Which is exactly why you never should have become a member of it. You'll say: I have influence - I rein things in, I'm a moderating force, I'm trying. Nonsense. It couldn't be much worse than it is now, so where exactly have you exerted your influence and what are you preventing from happening? Did you ever imagine that you would be sitting in a government that would reoccupy parts of Area A completely unhindered?
Just think what would have happened had you got up and loudly resigned from this government and told the world what is (perhaps) in your heart. The Nobel Prize laureate versus the crimes of the Sharon government. Imagine if you had gone to Ramallah, to Yasser Arafat who is under siege there, and taken to the street together, faced the Israeli tanks and called for their removal and for a cease-fire. True, the sky wouldn't have fallen - the occupation wouldn't have ended and the closure of Jenin would not have been lifted, but real cracks would have been opened in the moral, political and international basis of this currently immune government. Imagine if you would have said: Yes, the house demolitions are a war crime. Yes, a state that has lists of assassination targets is not a state of law. Yes, installing a checkpoint that causes people to die is an act of terror. No, the Palestinians are not the only ones to blame for this orgy of blood. Yes, we have a chief of staff who is a danger to democracy. Yes, we have a defense minister and Labor Party chairman who is the government's contractor for assassinations and house demolitions.
Yes, we have a prime minister who only wants to occupy, to avenge, to kill, to expel, to demolish and to uproot and he has no other plan in mind.
That's what you think, isn't it? If it is, then say so, for God's sake.
And if not, then your place really is with this government and we who once believed in you made a dreadful mistake. And please don't say that you're being made a punching bag once again. You're not. Ever since Oslo, you were the embodiment of our hopes. And these have been disappointed.
Time is short, Shimon. Not just for you, but for all of us. We are standing on the verge of the abyss. If you wait until Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, Ephraim Sneh, Ra'anan Cohen, Dalia Itzik and their like come up with another sneaky resigning-from-the-government-for-election-purposes deal, you might just find yourself kicked into oblivion by them. You know that they've been itching to be rid of you for some time now. And even if you do make a stand now, it may just be too late. Everyone may already be too disappointed in you and there may be no way to rebuild the ruin brought about by Sharon.
But the only way for you to add one more meaningful accomplishment to your rich biography is not just to get up now and resign from this government, which you may be compelled to do at some point anyway, but to do it while speaking out loud and clear, and telling Israelis all that you think about everything that is happening, especially about the evil we are perpetrating with our own hands. Once more in your life, try to build something new - not an atomic reactor or an aircraft industry, of which we already have more than enough. Now, against all the odds, try to build a radical Israeli peace camp, to make something out of nothing. Is it too farfetched to believe that you still see things differently than the rest of your colleagues in the government? Tell the truth, Shimon.
2. Want Security? End the Occupation
Marwan Barghouti
Washington Post, January 16, 2002
RAMALLAH -- Israel's assassination of Fatah activist Raed Karmi on Monday was predictable. Despite Israel's having killed more than 18 Palestinians since President Yasser Arafat's call for a cease-fire on Dec. 18, there have been no Israeli civilian casualties during that time. That, according to world governments and the international press, constituted a "lull in the violence." But a lull in the violence is exactly what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cannot afford. He was elected in a time of crisis and knows that his rule is sustainable only in a time of crisis. For his own political survival, he will do whatever it takes, and look for any excuse, to stoke the flames of unrest and avoid a return to peace negotiations. _
Hence, more than 600 Palestinians, already refugees, were recently made refugees yet again as Sharon's bulldozers razed their homes in Gaza. A day later Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem were destroyed. And then, just to ensure that Palestinians are sufficiently provoked and the cycle of violence starts again, Israel assassinates Karmi._ Sharon justifies such barbaric and illegal measures in the name of "security." But as someone often considered a candidate for Israeli assassination myself, I can assure the Israeli people that neither my assassination nor any of the other 82 assassinations during the past 15 months will bring them any closer to the security they seek and deserve. _
The only way for Israelis to have security is, quite simply, to end the 35- year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Israelis must abandon the myth that it is possible to have peace and occupation at the same time, that peaceful coexistence is possible between slave and master. The lack of Israeli security is born of the lack of Palestinian freedom. Israel will have security only after the end of occupation, not before._
Once Israel and the rest of the world understand this fundamental truth, the way forward becomes clear: End the occupation, allow the Palestinians to live in freedom and let the independent and equal neighbors of Israel and Palestine negotiate a peaceful future with close economic and cultural ties._
Let us not forget, we Palestinians have recognized Israel on 78 percent of historic Palestine. It is Israel that refuses to acknowledge Palestine's right to exist on the remaining 22 percent of land occupied in 1967. And yet it is the Palestinians who are accused of not compromising and of missing opportunities. Frankly, we are tired of always taking the blame for Israeli intransigence when all we are seeking is the implementation of international law. _
And we have no faith in the United States, the provider of billions of dollars in annual aid to fund Israel's expansion of illegal colonies, the "fighter of terrorism" that supplies Israel with the F-16s and helicopter gunships used against a defenseless civilian population, the "defender of freedom and the oppressed" that coddles Sharon even as he faces war crimes charges for his responsibility in the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees. The role of the world's only superpower has been reduced to that of a mere spectator with nothing to offer other than a tired refrain of "Stop the violence" while doing nothing to address the root causes of that violence: denial of Palestinian
freedom._
Watch as the hapless Gen. Anthony Zinni focuses his efforts on "violence" while Jewish settlers violate international law and even American policy by moving into a new illegal colony in occupied East Jerusalem. We Palestinians are not impressed._
Over the past 15 months, Israel has killed more than 900 Palestinian civilians, 25 percent of them under the age of 18. And still the United States has the audacity to veto a U.N. plan for an international protection force to stop the onslaught._
So we will protect ourselves. If Israel reserves the right to bomb us with F- 16s and helicopter gunships, it should not be surprised when Palestinians seek defensive weapons to bring those aircraft down. And while I, and the Fatah movement to which I belong, strongly oppose attacks and the targeting of civilians inside Israel, our future neighbor, I reserve the right to protect myself, to resist the Israeli occupation of my country and to fight for my freedom. If Palestinians are expected to negotiate under occupation, then Israel must be expected to negotiate as we resist that occupation._
I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated -- the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else. _
This principle may well lead to my assassination. So let my position be clear in order that my death not be lightly dismissed by the world as just one more statistic in Israel's "war on terrorism." For six years I languished as a political prisoner in an Israeli jail, where I was tortured, where I hung blindfolded as an Israeli beat my genitals with a stick. But since 1994, when I believed Israel was serious about ending its occupation, I have been a tireless advocate of a peace based on fairness and equality. I led delegations of Palestinians in meetings with Israeli parliamentarians to promote mutual understanding and cooperation. I still seek peaceful coexistence between the equal and independent countries of Israel and Palestine based on full withdrawal from Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 and a just resolution to the plight of Palestinian refugees pursuant to
U.N. resolutions. I do not seek to destroy Israel but only to end its occupation of my country._
The writer is general secretary of Fatah on the West Bank and was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council._
3. A non-existent “lull,” “quiet,” or “calm”: the blatant semantic clues of journalists admitting they fail to consider Israeli violence against Palestinians noteworthy
Ali Abunimah (Edited by Nigel Parry)
National Public Radio (NPR), 10 January 2002
Consistently over the past week, many members of the media have been repeating as a mantra that there has over the past three weeks been a "relative calm" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. has been one of the worst offenders. Correspondent Linda Gradstein defined this for us when she told Morning Edition host Bob Edwards on January 3 that: “you know, there's been actually three weeks of relative quiet. Only one Israeli has been killed in those three weeks, as opposed to 44 Israelis who were killed when Zinni was here last time in November and early December."
The facts -- a shameful pattern of devaluation of Palestinian life
In fact, since December 13, at least 28 Palestinians, most of them unarmed civilians and 11 of them children, have been killed by the Israeli occupation. Eighteen of them died since Yasir Arafat made his call for an end to all Israeli and Palestinian violence on December 16 as Israel's raids, demolitions and siege have continued unabated.
The following list of Palestinians killed between 13 December 2001 and 6 January 2002 includes only those killed by the Israeli occupation. In addition to this there were dozens of men, women and children maimed and injured by the occupation forces, dozens more houses demolished, as millions of civilians continued to exist under an unrelenting military siege. Six Palestinians were killed on Dec 20-21 by Palestinian police during riots and clashes, and have not been included in the list.
The fact that NPR and other media organizations consistently and deliberately ignore these dozens of Palestinians brutally killed by Israel demonstrates in the clearest possible terms that only Israeli lives are valued and only the concerns and security of Israel are taken seriously.
A cold, hard look at the list below forces any reasonable commentator to conclude that the relentless Israeli violence has not stopped taking Palestinian lives and limbs for a single day.
This is not a new coverage trend, but rather has been a persistent pattern, both with respect to Israel's violence against Palestinians and during Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon. Although
this has been brought to the attention of NPR and other media organisations on countless occasions over a period of years, this problem has only been getting worse.
The only question really worth asking now: is NPR going to do something about this or will it choose instead to allow its correspondent to continue to indulge in such an outrageous level of bias and misrepresentation? The problem is not simply with Linda Gradstein. It seems to be endemic to NPR's approach to the region generally since studio hosts have also routinely emphasized the concerns and experiences of Israeli civilians over those of any Arabs.
The result of this in specific instances and over time is to convey to NPR's listeners a deeply misleading picture of the situation in the region.
Palestinians killed by Israeli occupation forces between 13 December 2001 and 6 January 2002
December 13th:
Rami Khamis Al-Zorob, 13, killed by a live bullet to the head while playing near his home as Israeli forces fired at civilian houses. Rafah, Gaza;
Ahmed Khamis Al-Masri, 19, killed by bullet to the heart as Israeli occupation forces fired at a group of young men. Khan Yunis refugee camp, Gaza.
December 14th
Israeli occupation forces invade the West Bank village of Salfit, killing six Palestinian members of the security forces. They are
Mohammed Mohammed Aashour, 19, wounded by wo bullets in the chest and his right arm. He was run down by an Israeli army vehicle after being shot;
Assad Atayeh, 22, from Salfit, hit by several bullets in the chest. He was run down by an Israeli army vehicle after being shot;
Khalid Abu Yaqub, 27, from Kufol Haris hit by a bullet in the head;
Samih Jawad Abdel-Latif al-Danaf, 20, from Salfit, hit by a bullet in the chest and in the abdomen;
Diah Nadi Ibdah, 19, from Salfit, an employee of the Palestinian presidential guard (Force 17), hit by a bullet in the head;
Raziq Shabaan Haruzallah, 25, from Salfit hit by a bullet in the neck.
December 15th:
A Palestinian man was killed during an Israeli military incursion into the Palestinian town of Rafah, Gaza.
December 16th
Yasir Arafat makes speech calling for end to all Israeli and Palestinian violence.
Yasir Al-Kasbeh, 12, killed by rubber-coated steel bullet, Qalandia refugee camp, West Bank.
December 17th
Muhammad Huneidek, 12, killed by bullet to the chest fired from Israeli checkpoint near Neve Dekalim settlement, Gaza Strip.
Munjed Salman, 22, Palestinian police officer. Killed when Israeli forces opened fire with heavy machine guns on a police patrol. Nablus, West Bank.
Yaqoub Adkediq, 28, shot dead as he fled from Israeli death squad that raided his home at 3 am. Hebron, West Bank.
December 20th:
Dib Sarawi, 37, killed when hit in the head by fire as Israeli forces raided Nablus. Mr. Sarawi's wife and 12-year old daughter were injured.
December 24th:
Jamil Abu Atwan, 22, killed in exchange of fire with Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
December 26th:
Walid Saadi, 53, killed by Israeli helicopter gunships attacking Jenin, West Bank.
December 28th:
Mahmoud Al-Boraieh, 22, from Jabaliya refugee camp, shot dead by an Israeli patrol who claimed he was "preparing an attack." Gaza City.
December 29th:
Nujud Ghonam (female), 26, died of a brain hemorrage after being knocked unconscious with a rifle butt by an Israeli soldier during a raid of her home. Al Khadr village near Bethlehem, West Bank.
December 30th
Three Palestinian boys are killed by Israeli forces near the settlement of Elei Sinai in the Gaza Strip. Israel first claims the boys are "militants" who had "bombs strapped to their bodies." All these false claims are later withdrawn. The boys are:
Mohammed Ahmed Lubbad, 17;
Mohammed Abdel-Rahman El-Madhoun, 15;
Ahmed Mohammed Banat, 15.
Israeli occupation forces kill three Palestinians they say were trying to enter Israel east of Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip. They were:
Ismail Ahmed Abu El-Qumsan, 31;
Mohammed Mahmoud Salah, 19;
Ali As'ad Muhanna, 21.
January 4th:
A Palestinian man is killed as Israeli forces raid Nablus.
January 6th:
Five Palestinian children made homeless after their family fled their home in Khan Yunis refugee camp due to constant shelling by Israeli forces die when their refugee tent is set on fire accidentally by a candle. The children are
Nafez Huneideq, 3;
Turkia Huneideq, 5;
Fadi Huneideq, 6;
Sufian Huneideq, 7;
Hussein Huneideq, 9.
Sunday, January 13
MCC Palestine Update #36
MCC Palestine Update #36
13 January 2002
This past week eight Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip joined colleagues from Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt in Amman, Jordan for a regional meeting of conflict resolution practitioners sponsored by MCC. Those attending the meeting were graduates of the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at Eastern Mennonite University and are active in peace building in their respective countries and communities. At this meeting, participants shared knowledge and experiences with one another. MCC stands ready to support these committed peace builders as they consider what work they can do together regionally.
The Center for Agricultural Services, an MCC partner in the Hebron district, distributed over 3000 tree seedlings to more than 30 farmers in villages around Hebron. Targeted farmers were those living in close proximity to illegal Israeli colonies.
Below are three pieces. The first is a brief update on Israel's destruction of more than 50 homes in Rafah in the Gaza Strip, an act of collective punishment against a civilian population in retaliation for the killing of four Israeli soldiers by Hamas operatives on Wednesday. Former Israeli Knesset member Shulamit Aloni was straightforward when she called the Israeli Army action a war crime.
The second piece, by Israeli peace activist Neta Golan, movingly details her encounter with an Israeli soldier who had killed one of her friends in the West Bank village of Hares.
Finally, an interview from Le Monde with Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Shin Bet (Israel's internal security service which was responsible over the years for the torture of thousands of Palestinians); Ayalon's remarks are candid surprisingly insightful.
1. Urgent Update: Israeli Army Attacks Residential Neighbourhoods, Demolishing 73 Homes
The Palestine Monitor, 11 January 2002
Yesterday’s Israeli attack on, and destruction of, the Palestinian Civilian airport in Gaza has been widely reported. However, the army’s complete destruction of 53 homes, and partial destruction of 20 more, leaving 120 families homeless, is barely mentioned.
The destruction of these houses took place under the cover of tank and gunfire on Wednesday and Thursday nights while the inhabitants were sleeping; families, including hundreds of children, have now to seek temporary shelter in tents and school buildings -- in the middle of a severe winter.
At the same time the main road between Rafah and Khan Younis has been completely cut in two, with access denied to all traffic. This move makes the collection and transportation of refuse and sewage from the city of Khan Younis an impossibility. Furthermore the centralized sewage network was attacked and destroyed by the Israeli army at the same time as the attacks on Rafah. These two events leave the 110,000 residents of Khan Younis facing severe epidemiological and environmental problems.
Additionally, the destruction of the road means that the total population has been completely isolated from the only hospital in the area – the European Hospital, constructed by the European Union. Moreover, an ambulance attempting to transport a patient to the hospital was fired upon.
Since the Palestinian December 16th ceasefire the Israeli army has made over 20 attacks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and has killed 23 Palestinians.
For more information please contact The Palestine Monitor +972 2 2985372 and see www.palestinemonitor.org
2. By Neta Golan
I had spent the day with the villagers of Deir Istiya in which we planted trees on land coveted by the settlement of Yakir. I was on my way home. Two soldiers recognized me and asked in Hebrew:" Neta how are you?" To them I was a novelty. "You know who I'm talking to?" One of them told a friend that phoned his cell phone "Neta from Peace Now" ( I am not from Peace Now but that's as far left as they could fathom).
We talked. At one point one of the soldiers told me: "when I see a terrorist laying on the ground in his own blood it gives me an appetite". He hesitated before continuing. He wanted to reveal to me something he was proud of. "There was a time when someone in Hares village picked up a huge bolder to throw at me. Do you know what I did?" He asked.
I knew. - "You killed him."
- "That's right" he smiled self-satisfied.
I know the two children and the young father who where murdered in Hares in the last fifteen months by Israeli soldiers so I asked him when it happened, On what day? By his answered I realized the soldier in front of me was the murderer of my friend Muhammad Daud.
- " Let me tell you who you killed" I said.
- "I don't care."
"I know you don't but I want you to know who you killed. His name was Muhammad Dud he was fifteen years old he was retarded and I loved him very much..." I told him every thing I could think of about Muhammad and about his family. He didn't want to hear it.
"I know where he was standing" I said "I saw his blood on the ground. There is know way he could have thrown a stone at you from so far away, let alone a boulder."
- "You weren't there." He was screaming now.
- "OK. You were there. So you tell me. How far do you think he could have thrown that "boulder"? three meters? Ten meters? Lets just imagine that it was humanly possible to throw it a hundred meters you where over three hundred meters away.
- " You weren't there. "
- "That's right I wasn't there. You were there. So you tell me how far away where you when you murdered him?
He kept trying to stop me but I wouldn't stop. It was all I could do. And the fact he didn't want to hear it was the only indication that maybe somewhere deep inside there is a piece of humanity still intact in this boy.
After they walked away I was lucky to have friends with me who held me as I wept. Meeting his killer reopened the wound of losing my friend, a wound that never healed. I realized that if any man was evil the soldier I just spoke to was, and yet he was a boy, an ignorant and stupid boy that never should have been given any power. That never should have step foot in any village. that never should have had a gun.
Young Soldiers, many of them like Muhammad's Killer control every Aspect of the lives of millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Ignorant youth like these have the power of life and death over Palestinian elders and children alike.
This cannot continue.
To stop this injustice we need help.
Help us.
In solidarity,
Neta Golan
3. An unconditional withdrawal from the Territories is urgently needed: Interview with Ami Ayalon
Le Monde, 22 December 2001
[Ami Ayalon, 55, headed Israeli interior security (known as Shin Beth), from February 1996 until May 2000, under Prime Ministers Netanyahu and Barak. in this interview with Le Monde from December 22. Ayalon urges that Israel unconditionally withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He says that there is no way for Israel to vanquish terrorism through military strength. The piece was translated from the French by Annette Herskovits.]
[Small, lean, dressed in jeans and an open shirt, Ayalon speaks
Alain Cypel (Le Monde): How do you see the state of political debate in Israel?
Ami Ayalon: Israeli society, top to bottom, is sinking into confusion.There are no reference points. People mask this reality with swaggering slogans: “We will vanquish terrorism!”. At a colloquium, the army chief of staff declares: “We are winning”; he evokes the “superiority of Tsahal” --the Israeli army -- and his “feeling that the nation is finding its strength.”
Then he adds “there are today more Palestinian terrorists than a year ago” and says there will be even more tomorrow! If we are winning, how come terrorists are multiplying?
In Israel, no one is in touch with reality. This is a consequence of a misperception of the peace process. “We have been generous and they refused!” is ridiculous, and everything that follows from this misperception is skewed. Moreover, our obsession with the Palestinians makes us forget to ask questions about ourselves. What do we want to be? Where are we going? No leader addresses these questions. Thus the confusion and general anxiety.
AC: The majority of leaders though are convinced that time works in favor of Israel.
AA: Since September 11, our leaders have been euphoric. With no more international pressures on Israel, they think, the way is open. This obscures the consequences of our holding onto the Palestinian Territories.
This is not only a moral matter. Our founders saw a state that provided a homeland for Jews and was a democracy. From both points of view, time plays against us! Demographically, it works in favor of the Palestinians. And politically in favor of Hamas and the settlers. But to fight against Hamas, we must evacuate the settlers, whose proximity to the Palestinians reinforces hatred.
Among the Palestinians, the weight of the Islamists is increasing, and also that of intellectuals who used to favor a two-state solution, but who now say: “Since the Israelis will never evacuate the settlements, well, then, there will be a binational state.”
This is something I absolutely oppose. It would not be a Jewish state any more. And if it remained a Jewish state while dominating the Arab population, it would not be a democracy.
AC: Do you exclude the possibility of an Israeli victory, despite the power differential?
AA: We have had our “victory”! In 1967, we occupied all the Palestinian lands. Once “terrorism is vanquished,” what shall we do? This is absurd. The Palestinians want self-rule. Whoever wants to “vanquish” them, then offer them bread and circuses, understands nothing. The Israeli army is stronger than ever, our secret services are excellent; then why is the problem not resolved? Reoccupying the Palestinian Authority lands, andkilling Arafat, what would that change? Those who want victory want an unending war.
AC: Yet, since September 11, many think that Israel can change the regional situation in its favor.
AA: An illusion! September 11 has changed many paradigms in the U.S., but nothing basic in the Middle East. Whatever Arafat’s errors, the Palestinian people will continue to exist. As long as the Palestinian question is not resolved, the region will not know stability.Only a Palestinian state will preserve the Jewish and democratic character of Israel.
We do need international political and financial help to resolve that problem and that of the refugees, because as long as the refugee problem persists, even if a Palestinian state exists, it will poison our relationship.
AC: But the Israelis are traumatized by the Palestinian demand for the return of refugees.
AA: Let us stop worrying about what our adversaries say and ask what we, ourselves, want. We do not want the return of the refugees. But we can refuse only if Israel acknowledges unambiguously its role in the suffering of the Palestinians and its obligation to help solve the problem. Israel must accept the principle of the right of return and the PLO must commit itself to not question the Jewish identity of our state.
AC: What do you think of the view put forth by the head of Mossad of Israel in the front line of the “third world war” against terrorism?
AA: Anyone who equals Arafat with Bin Laden understand neither Arafat nor Bin Laden. The latter is the guru of a very harmful sect, but one that is very marginal to Islam; it aims to bring chaos and cares nothing about the international community. But Arafat dreams of being accepted by the international community -- since 1993, he has constantly made reference to it, demanding the application of the UN resolutions, while we, Israelis, refuse! If Bin Laden is killed, his sect may disappear with him. If we kill Arafat, the Palestinian people will continue to want its independence.
AC: Do you fear that the Palestinian Territories may become a quagmire?
AA: We say the Palestinians behave like “madmen,” but it is not madness but a bottomless despair. As long as there was a peace process -- the prospect of an end to the occupation -- Arafat could maneuver, incite or repress violence to better negotiate. When there is no more peace process, the more terrorists one kills the more strength their camp gains.
Yasser Arafat neither prepared nor triggered the Intifada. The explosion was spontaneous, against Israel, as all hope for the end of occupation disappeared, and against the Palestinian authority, its corruption, its impotence. Arafat could not repress it. The peace process is what allowed Arafat to be seen as the head of a national liberation movement rather than a collaborator of Israel. Without it, he can fight neither against the Islamists nor against his own base. The Palestinians would end up hanging him in the public square.
AC: From Oslo to Camp David, did Israel miss a rare opportunity for peace?
AA: Yes. It is not all the Israelis’ fault. The Palestinians, the international community, bear some responsibility, but we missed an extraordinary opportunity: the international situation was incredibly favorable after the fall of communism, the Gulf war, the emergence of globalization, all these phenomena led Israel to reexamine its own assumptions. Now, we are regressing.
AC: Do you favor a “unilateral separation” from the Palestinians?
AA: I do not like the word separation, it reminds me of South Africa. I favor unconditional withdrawal from the Territories -- preferably in the context of an agreement, but not necessarily: what needs to be done, urgently, is to withdraw from the Territories. And a true withdrawal, which gives the Palestinians territorial continuity in a Transjordan linked to Gaza, open to Egypt and Jordan. If they proclaim their own state, Israel should be the first to recognize it and to propose state to state negotiations, without conditions, on the basis of the Clinton proposals, to resolve all pending problems.
13 January 2002
This past week eight Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip joined colleagues from Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt in Amman, Jordan for a regional meeting of conflict resolution practitioners sponsored by MCC. Those attending the meeting were graduates of the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at Eastern Mennonite University and are active in peace building in their respective countries and communities. At this meeting, participants shared knowledge and experiences with one another. MCC stands ready to support these committed peace builders as they consider what work they can do together regionally.
The Center for Agricultural Services, an MCC partner in the Hebron district, distributed over 3000 tree seedlings to more than 30 farmers in villages around Hebron. Targeted farmers were those living in close proximity to illegal Israeli colonies.
Below are three pieces. The first is a brief update on Israel's destruction of more than 50 homes in Rafah in the Gaza Strip, an act of collective punishment against a civilian population in retaliation for the killing of four Israeli soldiers by Hamas operatives on Wednesday. Former Israeli Knesset member Shulamit Aloni was straightforward when she called the Israeli Army action a war crime.
The second piece, by Israeli peace activist Neta Golan, movingly details her encounter with an Israeli soldier who had killed one of her friends in the West Bank village of Hares.
Finally, an interview from Le Monde with Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Shin Bet (Israel's internal security service which was responsible over the years for the torture of thousands of Palestinians); Ayalon's remarks are candid surprisingly insightful.
1. Urgent Update: Israeli Army Attacks Residential Neighbourhoods, Demolishing 73 Homes
The Palestine Monitor, 11 January 2002
Yesterday’s Israeli attack on, and destruction of, the Palestinian Civilian airport in Gaza has been widely reported. However, the army’s complete destruction of 53 homes, and partial destruction of 20 more, leaving 120 families homeless, is barely mentioned.
The destruction of these houses took place under the cover of tank and gunfire on Wednesday and Thursday nights while the inhabitants were sleeping; families, including hundreds of children, have now to seek temporary shelter in tents and school buildings -- in the middle of a severe winter.
At the same time the main road between Rafah and Khan Younis has been completely cut in two, with access denied to all traffic. This move makes the collection and transportation of refuse and sewage from the city of Khan Younis an impossibility. Furthermore the centralized sewage network was attacked and destroyed by the Israeli army at the same time as the attacks on Rafah. These two events leave the 110,000 residents of Khan Younis facing severe epidemiological and environmental problems.
Additionally, the destruction of the road means that the total population has been completely isolated from the only hospital in the area – the European Hospital, constructed by the European Union. Moreover, an ambulance attempting to transport a patient to the hospital was fired upon.
Since the Palestinian December 16th ceasefire the Israeli army has made over 20 attacks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and has killed 23 Palestinians.
For more information please contact The Palestine Monitor +972 2 2985372 and see www.palestinemonitor.org
2. By Neta Golan
I had spent the day with the villagers of Deir Istiya in which we planted trees on land coveted by the settlement of Yakir. I was on my way home. Two soldiers recognized me and asked in Hebrew:" Neta how are you?" To them I was a novelty. "You know who I'm talking to?" One of them told a friend that phoned his cell phone "Neta from Peace Now" ( I am not from Peace Now but that's as far left as they could fathom).
We talked. At one point one of the soldiers told me: "when I see a terrorist laying on the ground in his own blood it gives me an appetite". He hesitated before continuing. He wanted to reveal to me something he was proud of. "There was a time when someone in Hares village picked up a huge bolder to throw at me. Do you know what I did?" He asked.
I knew. - "You killed him."
- "That's right" he smiled self-satisfied.
I know the two children and the young father who where murdered in Hares in the last fifteen months by Israeli soldiers so I asked him when it happened, On what day? By his answered I realized the soldier in front of me was the murderer of my friend Muhammad Daud.
- " Let me tell you who you killed" I said.
- "I don't care."
"I know you don't but I want you to know who you killed. His name was Muhammad Dud he was fifteen years old he was retarded and I loved him very much..." I told him every thing I could think of about Muhammad and about his family. He didn't want to hear it.
"I know where he was standing" I said "I saw his blood on the ground. There is know way he could have thrown a stone at you from so far away, let alone a boulder."
- "You weren't there." He was screaming now.
- "OK. You were there. So you tell me. How far do you think he could have thrown that "boulder"? three meters? Ten meters? Lets just imagine that it was humanly possible to throw it a hundred meters you where over three hundred meters away.
- " You weren't there. "
- "That's right I wasn't there. You were there. So you tell me how far away where you when you murdered him?
He kept trying to stop me but I wouldn't stop. It was all I could do. And the fact he didn't want to hear it was the only indication that maybe somewhere deep inside there is a piece of humanity still intact in this boy.
After they walked away I was lucky to have friends with me who held me as I wept. Meeting his killer reopened the wound of losing my friend, a wound that never healed. I realized that if any man was evil the soldier I just spoke to was, and yet he was a boy, an ignorant and stupid boy that never should have been given any power. That never should have step foot in any village. that never should have had a gun.
Young Soldiers, many of them like Muhammad's Killer control every Aspect of the lives of millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Ignorant youth like these have the power of life and death over Palestinian elders and children alike.
This cannot continue.
To stop this injustice we need help.
Help us.
In solidarity,
Neta Golan
3. An unconditional withdrawal from the Territories is urgently needed: Interview with Ami Ayalon
Le Monde, 22 December 2001
[Ami Ayalon, 55, headed Israeli interior security (known as Shin Beth), from February 1996 until May 2000, under Prime Ministers Netanyahu and Barak. in this interview with Le Monde from December 22. Ayalon urges that Israel unconditionally withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He says that there is no way for Israel to vanquish terrorism through military strength. The piece was translated from the French by Annette Herskovits.]
[Small, lean, dressed in jeans and an open shirt, Ayalon speaks
Alain Cypel (Le Monde): How do you see the state of political debate in Israel?
Ami Ayalon: Israeli society, top to bottom, is sinking into confusion.There are no reference points. People mask this reality with swaggering slogans: “We will vanquish terrorism!”. At a colloquium, the army chief of staff declares: “We are winning”; he evokes the “superiority of Tsahal” --the Israeli army -- and his “feeling that the nation is finding its strength.”
Then he adds “there are today more Palestinian terrorists than a year ago” and says there will be even more tomorrow! If we are winning, how come terrorists are multiplying?
In Israel, no one is in touch with reality. This is a consequence of a misperception of the peace process. “We have been generous and they refused!” is ridiculous, and everything that follows from this misperception is skewed. Moreover, our obsession with the Palestinians makes us forget to ask questions about ourselves. What do we want to be? Where are we going? No leader addresses these questions. Thus the confusion and general anxiety.
AC: The majority of leaders though are convinced that time works in favor of Israel.
AA: Since September 11, our leaders have been euphoric. With no more international pressures on Israel, they think, the way is open. This obscures the consequences of our holding onto the Palestinian Territories.
This is not only a moral matter. Our founders saw a state that provided a homeland for Jews and was a democracy. From both points of view, time plays against us! Demographically, it works in favor of the Palestinians. And politically in favor of Hamas and the settlers. But to fight against Hamas, we must evacuate the settlers, whose proximity to the Palestinians reinforces hatred.
Among the Palestinians, the weight of the Islamists is increasing, and also that of intellectuals who used to favor a two-state solution, but who now say: “Since the Israelis will never evacuate the settlements, well, then, there will be a binational state.”
This is something I absolutely oppose. It would not be a Jewish state any more. And if it remained a Jewish state while dominating the Arab population, it would not be a democracy.
AC: Do you exclude the possibility of an Israeli victory, despite the power differential?
AA: We have had our “victory”! In 1967, we occupied all the Palestinian lands. Once “terrorism is vanquished,” what shall we do? This is absurd. The Palestinians want self-rule. Whoever wants to “vanquish” them, then offer them bread and circuses, understands nothing. The Israeli army is stronger than ever, our secret services are excellent; then why is the problem not resolved? Reoccupying the Palestinian Authority lands, andkilling Arafat, what would that change? Those who want victory want an unending war.
AC: Yet, since September 11, many think that Israel can change the regional situation in its favor.
AA: An illusion! September 11 has changed many paradigms in the U.S., but nothing basic in the Middle East. Whatever Arafat’s errors, the Palestinian people will continue to exist. As long as the Palestinian question is not resolved, the region will not know stability.Only a Palestinian state will preserve the Jewish and democratic character of Israel.
We do need international political and financial help to resolve that problem and that of the refugees, because as long as the refugee problem persists, even if a Palestinian state exists, it will poison our relationship.
AC: But the Israelis are traumatized by the Palestinian demand for the return of refugees.
AA: Let us stop worrying about what our adversaries say and ask what we, ourselves, want. We do not want the return of the refugees. But we can refuse only if Israel acknowledges unambiguously its role in the suffering of the Palestinians and its obligation to help solve the problem. Israel must accept the principle of the right of return and the PLO must commit itself to not question the Jewish identity of our state.
AC: What do you think of the view put forth by the head of Mossad of Israel in the front line of the “third world war” against terrorism?
AA: Anyone who equals Arafat with Bin Laden understand neither Arafat nor Bin Laden. The latter is the guru of a very harmful sect, but one that is very marginal to Islam; it aims to bring chaos and cares nothing about the international community. But Arafat dreams of being accepted by the international community -- since 1993, he has constantly made reference to it, demanding the application of the UN resolutions, while we, Israelis, refuse! If Bin Laden is killed, his sect may disappear with him. If we kill Arafat, the Palestinian people will continue to want its independence.
AC: Do you fear that the Palestinian Territories may become a quagmire?
AA: We say the Palestinians behave like “madmen,” but it is not madness but a bottomless despair. As long as there was a peace process -- the prospect of an end to the occupation -- Arafat could maneuver, incite or repress violence to better negotiate. When there is no more peace process, the more terrorists one kills the more strength their camp gains.
Yasser Arafat neither prepared nor triggered the Intifada. The explosion was spontaneous, against Israel, as all hope for the end of occupation disappeared, and against the Palestinian authority, its corruption, its impotence. Arafat could not repress it. The peace process is what allowed Arafat to be seen as the head of a national liberation movement rather than a collaborator of Israel. Without it, he can fight neither against the Islamists nor against his own base. The Palestinians would end up hanging him in the public square.
AC: From Oslo to Camp David, did Israel miss a rare opportunity for peace?
AA: Yes. It is not all the Israelis’ fault. The Palestinians, the international community, bear some responsibility, but we missed an extraordinary opportunity: the international situation was incredibly favorable after the fall of communism, the Gulf war, the emergence of globalization, all these phenomena led Israel to reexamine its own assumptions. Now, we are regressing.
AC: Do you favor a “unilateral separation” from the Palestinians?
AA: I do not like the word separation, it reminds me of South Africa. I favor unconditional withdrawal from the Territories -- preferably in the context of an agreement, but not necessarily: what needs to be done, urgently, is to withdraw from the Territories. And a true withdrawal, which gives the Palestinians territorial continuity in a Transjordan linked to Gaza, open to Egypt and Jordan. If they proclaim their own state, Israel should be the first to recognize it and to propose state to state negotiations, without conditions, on the basis of the Clinton proposals, to resolve all pending problems.
Monday, January 7
MCC Palestine Update #35
MCC Palestine Update #35
7 January 2002
Today, January 7, Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas, while Western churches mark Epiphany. Epiphanies are sorely needed in Palestine/Israel today, dramatic recognitions by the "wise ones" (or those who claim to be wise) that violence and injustice will buy neither security nor liberation, neither peace nor stability.
If the Magi were to make their trek to Bethlehem today, they would have to pass through (if their documents were valid) a variety of checkpoints, roadblocks and other obstacles. May roads be opened so that those who rule might come on bended knee before the nonviolent Messiah.
Below are three pieces of analyzing the current dire situation in Palestine/Israel, the first by veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avneri,the second by Palestinian-American critic Edward Said, and the final one by Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi.
1. So, Who Is Relevant?
Uri Avnery
Maariv, 25 December 2001
[The following article of Uri Avnery is the translation from Hebrew of his Ma'ariv column, published Tuesday, Dec. 25.]
The year 2001 is about to end, but at the last moment a new word – a Latin one to boot – has entered the Hebrew political lexicon: “irrelevant”. This is a new phase in the fatal duel between the two veteran gladiators, both experienced and shrewd, Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat. Sharon has declared that Arafat is “irrelevant”. Arafat has turned the tables by making a speech that focused world attention on him.All the while Sharon’s tanks are parked a hundred yards from Arafat’s office, their cannons aimed at his head.
If Sharon imagined that Arafat would run away or plead for his life, he doesn’t know the man. In 1982 I met him in a besieged West Beirut, during the heavy bombardments, when hundreds of Sharon’s agents were searching for him in order to kill him. He was in high spirits, at his best.
If Arafat imagined that by the speech he would disarm Sharon and cause him to stop, he doesn’t know the man. Sharon never lets up. When he encounters an obstacle, he goes around it. When he doesn’t get what he wants on the first try, he will wait and try again and again and again. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a clash between two great historic movements, Sharon and Arafat are their most outstanding representatives. Sharon is the ultimate Zionist. Arafat is the embodiment of the Palestinian national movement.
This is a clash between an irresistible force and an immovable object. On the one side, Zionism, whose consistent aim is to turn all the land between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan river (at least), which is called in Hebrew “The Land of Israel”, into a homogenous Jewish state. This to be achieved trough a “strategy of phases” - a Zionist method, and the settlers implement it.
On the other side is Palestinian nationalism, whose aim is to establish an independent Palestinian state on Palestinian land. For lack of an alternative, the Palestinians have given up 78% of the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea, which they call Filastin, and the intifada is designed to turn the other 22% into the State of Palestine.
When Sharon came to power, he presented himself as the benign grandfather, who loves sheep and children, and whose only desire is to enter the history books as the man who brought peace and security to the area. That was a successful fraud, in the spirit of “make war by tricks”. The Israeli public, which wants peace and longs for security, believed him and elected the Israeli de Gaulle, the old general who has lost his best comrades in battle and understands that nothing is more precious than peace.
For people who know Sharon, is was both sad and frightening to behold: a naive public following a pied piper. Sharon doesn’t care a damn either for peace or for security. For him they are signs of weakness and degeneration. From the moment of attaining power, he had a quite different agenda: to destroy the Oslo agreement, remove the Palestinian Authority and its armed forces, give new impetus to the settlement movement. For that purpose he acquired Shimon Peres on the cheap, in order to camouflage his true designs in the eyes of the world, and started the great campaign. (Actually, he had started it even earlier, when he went to
the Temple Mount and lit the fire.)
Those who assert that “Sharon has no political plan” are quite wrong. He has got a clear plan: to go on with the offensive and liquidate the Palestinian leadership, in order to break the spirit of the Palestinian people, bring Hamas to power, so that he will be able to say that there is nobody to talk with. He believes that the Palestinians will eventually flee the country (as in 1948) or resign themselves to a life in several isolated and surrounded enclaves (like South African Bantustans).
Faced with this onslaught, Arafat resorts to the classic Palestinian strategy: Sumud (steadfastness). Survival. Not to move. Not to surrender. Not to be dragged into a civil war. To use the meager means in his arsenal – political action, diplomacy, violence, in varying doses – in order to enable his people to hold on. His greatest asset is the ability of his people to absorb punishment, which makes Israeli generals mad with frustration.
The battle is far from finished. I believe it will end in a draw – no mean feat for the weaker side. And the draw will lead, inevitably, to a historical compromise.
2. Israel's dead end
Edward Said
Al-Ahram Weekly, 20-26 December 2001
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/565/op1.htm
Edward Said wonders: is Israel more secure now?
"The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through." Thus Mahmoud Darwish, writing in the aftermath of the PLO's exit from Beirut in September 1982. "Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?"
Nineteen years later, what was happening then to the Palestinians in Lebanon is happening to them in Palestine. Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began last September, Palestinians have been sequestered by the Israeli army in no fewer than 220 discontinuous little ghettos, and subjected to intermittent curfews often lasting for weeks at a stretch. No one, young or old, sick or well, dying or pregnant, student or doctor, can move without spending hours at barricades, manned by rude and deliberately humiliating Israeli soldiers. As I write, 200 Palestinians are unable to receive kidney dialysis, because for "security reasons" the Israeli military won't allow them to travel to medical centres. Have any of the innumerable members of the foreign media covering the conflict done a story about these brutalised young Israelis conscripts, trained to punish Palestinian civilians as the main part of their military duty? I think not.
Yasser Arafat was not allowed to leave his office in Ramallah to attend the emergency meeting of the Islamic Conference foreign ministers on 10 December in Qatar; his speech was read by an aide. The airport 15 miles away in Gaza and Arafat's two ageing helicopters had been destroyed the previous week by Israeli planes and bulldozers, with no one and no force to check, much less prevent, the daily incursions of which this particular feat of military daring was a part. Gaza Airport was the only direct port of entry into Palestinian territory, the only civilian airport in the world wantonly destroyed since World War II. Since last May, Israeli F-16s (generously supplied by the US) have regularly bombed and strafed Palestinian towns and villages, Guernica-style, destroying property and killing civilians and security officials (there is no Palestinian army, navy, or air force to protect the people); Apache attack helicopters (again supplied by the US) have used their missiles to murder 77 Palestinian leaders, for alleged terrorist offences, past or future. A group of unknown Israeli intelligence operatives have the authority to decide on these assassinations, presumably with the approval on each occasion of the Israeli Cabinet, and more generally, that of the US. The helicopters have also done an efficient job of bombing Palestinian Authority installations, police as well as civilian. During the night of 5 December, the Israeli army entered the five-storey offices of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in Ramallah and carried off the computers, as well as most of the files and reports, thereby effacing virtually the entire record of collective Palestinian life. In 1982, the same army under the same commander entered West Beirut and carted off documents and files from the Palestinian Research Centre, before flattening its structure. A few days later came the massacres of Sabra and Shatila.
The suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have of course been at work, as Sharon knew perfectly well they would be when, after a 10-day lull in the fighting in late November, he suddenly ordered the murder of the Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud: an act designed to provoke Hamas into retaliation and thus allow the Israeli army to resume the slaughter of Palestinians. After eight years of barren peace discussions, 50 per cent of Palestinians are unemployed and 70 per cent live in poverty on less than $2 a day. Every day brings with it unopposable land grabs and house demolitions. The Israelis even make a point of destroying trees and orchards on Palestinian land. Although five or six Palestinians have been killed in the last few months for every one Israeli, the old warmonger has the gall to keep repeating that Israel has been the victim of the same terrorism as that meted out by Bin Laden.
The crucial point in all this is that Israel has been in illegal military occupation since 1967; it is the longest such occupation in history and the only one anywhere in the world today. This is the original and continuing violence against which all the Palestinian acts of violence have been directed. On 10 December, for instance, two children aged three and 13 were killed by Israeli bombs in Hebron, yet at the same time an EU delegation was demanding that Palestinians curtail their violence and acts of terrorism. Five more Palestinians were killed on 11 December, all of them civilian, victims of helicopter bombings of Gaza's refugee camps. To make matters worse, as a result of the 11 September attacks, the word "terrorism" is being used to blot out legitimate acts of resistance against military occupation, and any causal or even narrative connection between the dreadful killing of civilians (which I have always opposed) and the 30-plus years of collective punishment is proscribed.
Every Western pundit or official who pontificates about Palestinian terrorism needs to ask how forgetting the fact of the occupation is supposed to stop terrorism. Arafat's great mistake, a consequence of frustration and poor advice, was to try to make a deal with the occupation when he authorised "peace" discussions between scions of two prominent Palestinian families and Mossad in 1992 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge. These discussions only discussed Israeli security; nothing at all was said about Palestinian security, nothing at all, and the struggle of his people to achieve an independent state was left to one side. Indeed, Israeli security to the exclusion of anything else has become the recognised international priority, which allows General Zinni and Javier Solana to preach to the PLO while remaining totally silent on the occupation. Yet Israel has scarcely gained more from these discussions than the Palestinians have. The Israeli mistake has been to imagine that by conning Arafat and his coterie into interminable discussions and tiny concessions, it would get general Palestinian quiescence. Every official Israeli policy thus far has made things worse rather than better for Israel. Ask yourself: is Israel more secure and more accepted now than it was 10 years ago?
The terrible and, in my opinion, stupid suicide raids against civilians in Haifa and Jerusalem over the weekend of 1 December should of course be condemned, but in order for these condemnations to make any sense, the raids must be considered in the context of Abu Hanoud's assassination earlier in the week, along with the killing of five children by an Israeli booby trap in Gaza -- to say nothing of the houses destroyed, the Palestinians killed throughout Gaza and the West Bank, the constant tank incursions, the endlessly grinding away of Palestinian aspirations, minute by minute, for the past 35 years. In the end, desperation only produces poor results, none worse than the green light George W and Colin Powell seem to have given Sharon when he was in Washington on 2 December (all too reminiscent of the green light Alexander Haig gave Sharon in May 1982). With their support went the usual ringing declarations turning the people under occupation and their hapless, inept leader into worldwide aggressors who had to "bring to justice" their own criminals even as Israeli soldiers were systematically destroying the entire Palestinian police structure which was supposed to do the arresting!
Arafat is hemmed in on all sides, an ironic result of his bottomless wish to be all things Palestinian to everyone, enemies and friends alike. He is at once a tragically heroic figure and a bumbling one. No Palestinian today is going to disavow his leadership, for the simple reason that, despite all his wafflings and mistakes, he is being punished and humiliated because he is a Palestinian leader, and in that capacity, his mere existence offends purists (if that's the right word) like Sharon and his American backers. Except for the health and education ministries, both of which have done a decent job, Arafat's Palestinian Authority has not been a brilliant success. Its corruption and brutality stem from Arafat's apparently whimsical, but actually very meticulous, way of keeping everyone dependent on his largesse; he alone controls the budget, and he alone decides what goes on the front pages of the five daily newspapers. Above all, he manipulates and sets up against each other the 12 or 14 -- some say 19 or 20 -- independent security services, each of which is structurally loyal to its own leaders and to Arafat at the same time, without being able to do much more for its people than arrest them when enjoined to do so by Arafat, Israel and the US. The 1996 elections were designed for a term of three years, but Arafat has shilly-shallied with the idea of calling new ones, which would almost certainly challenge his authority and popularity in a serious way.
He and Hamas have had a well-publicised entente of sorts since the latter's June bombings: Hamas wouldn't go after Israeli civilians if Arafat left the Islamic parties alone. Sharon killed off the entente with Abu Hanoud's assassination: Hamas retaliated and there was nothing to stop Sharon squeezing the life out of Arafat, with American support. Having destroyed Arafat's security network, his jails and offices, and having physically imprisoned him, Sharon made demands that he knows can't be met (even though Arafat, with a few cards up his sleeve, has managed, astonishingly, to half comply). Sharon stupidly believes that, having dispensed with Arafat, he can make a series of independent agreements with local warlords, and divide 40 per cent of the West Bank and most of Gaza into several non-contiguous cantons whose borders would be controlled by the Israeli army. How this is supposed to make Israel more secure eludes most people, but not, alas, the ones with the relevant power.
That still leaves out three players, or groups of players, two of whom, in his racist way, Sharon gives no weight to. First, the Palestinians themselves, many of whom are far too intransigent and politicised to accept anything less than unconditional Israeli withdrawal. Israel's policies, like all such aggressions, produce the opposite effect to the one intended: to suppress is to provoke resistance. Were Arafat to disappear, Palestinian law provides for 60 days of rule by the speaker of the Assembly (an unimpressive and unpopular Arafat hanger-on called Abul-'Ala, much admired by Israelis for his "flexibility"). After that, a succession struggle would ensue between other Arafat cronies such as Abu Mazen and two or three of the leading (and capable) security chiefs -- notably, Jibril Rajoub of the West Bank and Mohamed Dahlan in Gaza. None of these people has Arafat's stature or anything resembling his (perhaps now lost) popularity. Temporary chaos is the likely result: we must face it, Arafat's presence has been an organising focus for Palestinian politics, in which millions of other Arabs and Muslims have a very large stake.
Arafat has always tolerated, indeed supported a plurality of organisations which he manipulates in various ways, balancing them against each other so that no one predominates except his Fatah. New groups are emerging, however; secular, hardworking, committed, dedicated to a democratic polity in an independent Palestine. Over these groups, the Palestinian Authority has no control at all. But it should also be said that no one in Palestine is willing to accede to the Israeli-US demand for an end to "terrorism," although it will be difficult to draw a line in the public mind between suicidal adventurism and actual resistance to the occupation, as long as Israel continues its bombings and oppression of all Palestinians, young and old.
The second group are the leaders in the rest of the Arab world who have a vested interest in Arafat, despite their evident exasperation with him. He is cleverer and more persistent than they are, and he knows the hold he has on the popular mind in their countries, where he has cultivated two separate Arab constituencies, the Islamists and the secular nationalists. Both feel under attack, even though the latter has hardly been noticed by the vast number of Western experts and Orientalists who take Bin Laden -- rather than the much larger number of Muslim and non-Muslim secular Arabs who detest what Bin Laden stands for and what he has done -- to be the paradigmatic Muslim. In Palestine for example, recent polls have found that Arafat and Hamas are now about equal in popularity (both hover between 20 and 25 per cent), with the majority of citizens favouring neither. (But, even as he has been cornered, Arafat's popularity has shot up.) The same division, with the same significant plague-on- both-your-houses majority, exists in the Arab countries, where most people are put off either by the corruption and brutality of the regimes or by the reductiveness and extremism of the religious groups -- most of which are more interested in the regulation of personal behaviour than they are in matters like globalisation or producing electricity and jobs.
Arabs and Muslims might well turn against their own rulers were Arafat seen as being choked to death by Israeli violence and Arab indifference. So he is necessary to the present landscape. His departure will only seem natural when a new collective leadership emerges among a younger generation of Palestinians. When and how that will happen is impossible to tell, but I'm quite certain that it will happen.
The third group of players includes the Europeans, the Americans and the rest, and frankly, I don't think they know what they're doing. Most of them would gladly be rid of Palestine as a problem and, in the spirit of Bush and Powell, would not be unhappy if the vision of a Palestinian state were somehow realised, as long as someone else did it. Besides, they would find functioning in Middle East difficult if they didn't have Arafat to blame, snub, insult, prod, pressure, or give money to. The mission of the EU and General Zinni seems senseless and will have no effect on Sharon and his people. The Israeli politicians have concluded correctly that the Western governments are, in general, on their side and they can continue what they do best, regardless of Arafat and his people's fruitless begging to negotiate.
The slowly emerging group of Palestinians, both in Palestine and in the Diaspora, is beginning to learn and use tactics that solidly place a moral onus on the West and Israel to address the issue of Palestinian rights, not just of the Palestinian presence. In Israel, for example, an audacious Knesset member, the Palestinian Azmi Bishara, has been stripped of his parliamentary immunity and will soon be on trial for incitement to violence. Why? Because he has long stood for the Palestinian right of resistance to occupation, arguing that, like every other state in the world, Israel should be the state of all of its citizens, not just of the Jewish people. For the first time, a major Palestinian challenge on Palestinian rights is being mounted inside Israel (not on the West Bank), with all eyes on the proceedings. At the same time, the Belgian attorney-general's office has confirmed that a war crimes case against Sharon can go forward in that country's courts. A painstaking mobilisation of secular Palestinian opinion is underway and will slowly overtake the Palestinian Authority. The moral high ground will soon be reclaimed from Israel, as the occupation becomes the focus of attention and as more and more Israelis realise that there is no way to continue indefinitely a 35-year occupation.
Besides, as the US war against terrorism spreads, more unrest is almost certain; far from closing things down, US power is likely to stir them up in ways that may not be containable. It's no mean irony that the renewed attention on Palestine came about because the US and Europeans need to maintain an anti-Taliban coalition.
3. Image and Reality: The Role of the U.S. in the Middle East
Hanan Ashrawi
MIFTAH, 28 December 2001
At no time in history have the short sightedness and narrow self-interest of American policy makers had such a devastating impact on the realities of the Arab world and the Middle East, and by necessity on American national interests and standing.
Without delving into the historical roots of repeated American blunders in the region, it is time to point out the dangerous implications of the current American policy and its potential for generating massive instability and conflict.
The most glaring fault lies first and foremost in the total subjugation of American decision making to the priorities and policies of the Israeli government-a government that happens to be the most extremist, ideological, hard line, militaristic, and irresponsible since the creation of the state of Israel (see Georgie Anne Geyer's "Faltering U.S. policy in the Middle East," The Washington Times, Dec. 20, 2001, p. A 19).
Whether as a result of gullibility, inherent (strategic) bias, or a determined avoidance of any confrontation with major Jewish and pro-Israeli lobbyists and campaign funders, both American executive and legislative branches seem to be bent on pursuing a precarious course that threatens not only to wreak havoc in the region, but also to lay to rest any hope of salvaging the image, influence, and interests of the US throughout the region.
Instead of hiring suspect spin-doctors and Hollywood image-makers, it behooves the US administration to re-examine both its words and deeds (as well as its silence and inaction) when it comes to the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the Arab world.
Arab public opinion, hitherto blithely ignored by successive American administrations, relates to the US in relation to its role in, and impact on, fundamental regional/national issues-the most compelling, emotive, and visible expression being the Palestinian question.
Over five decades of dispossession and displacement, over three decades of military occupation, over a decade of American involvement in the "peace process," left the Palestinians more visibly victimized with a daily loss of lives, rights, lands, and even the most basic human consideration.
Throughout, the US was seen as the staunchest ally of Israel, supplying it with billions of dollars (estimated at $ 92 to date), sophisticated weaponry (used to shell, bomb, assassinate, and kill Palestinians on a daily basis), and with blind political cover (24 UN Security Council veto's to date).
Turning a blind eye to the ongoing, extremely provocative, and illegal Israeli settlement activities, the US also "sponsored" a peace process that gave Israel a free hand in acquiring more Palestinian land and in carrying out other "unilateral actions" (particularly in the illegal annexation of occupied East Jerusalem) with full impunity.
With every agreement renegotiated, modified, or even negated in action, the American sponsors exonerated all Israeli violations and abuses while putting intolerable pressure on the weaker Palestinian side to show "flexibility" and seriousness of intent.
Such a punitive peace process became an abstract political exercise for its own sake, with no legality, substance, or relationship to behavior on the ground. Deliberately ignoring the increasing pain of the Palestinian people and the escalating cruelty of the Israeli occupation, the US exhibited alarming insensitivity to the victims and total collusion with the occupiers, leading ultimately to the tragic breakdown of September 28, known as the second intifada. The fact that all signs were in place, all symptoms visible, was brushed away by the willfully oblivious "sponsor" who failed to acknowledge the most basic human component of this "political process."
This has been the most consistent aspect of the oft-repeated double-standards charge leveled against the US, a negation of the humanity of the Palestinians and the dubious or suspended or negated applicability of international law and legality to the Palestinian condition.
The only America expression of regret, sorrow, or outrage over loss of life came when the victims were Israeli, while thousands of Palestinians were killed or assassinated by the Israeli occupation with full impunity and total human disregard.
Overall, the negotiating process ignored the applicability of UN resolutions, the asymmetry of power that required protection for the Palestinians and accountability for the Israelis (at least in compliance with the Fourth Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law), and an effective system of mediation and arbitration to resolve disputes in a decisive and objective manner.
With the added (or basic) consideration of Israel's disproportionate power and influence in the domestic arena, US policy became hostage to the enormous pressures and influence of a major special interest group-the pro-Israeli lobby and its institutions in the US.
Maintaining such a biased and one-sided monopoly on the politics of the region and the course of the peace process, the US excluded all other global players, including the UN, the EU, major Arab countries (including close American allies), and anybody else who wanted to invest in peace making or who could counter the extreme one-sidedness of the Americans-even for their own good.
Hence, Israel ended up calling the shots, not only as the occupying power wielding force against the Palestinians, but also as the formulator of US policy and conduct (sometimes by proxy through its American lobby and institutions), and finally for the whole world.
The ultimate "triumph" came when the European and UN leaderships adopted wholesale the political diction and parameters of the Israeli-American alliance as the defining factors for their role and activities in the region. Israel became the gatekeeper of the peace process, and all stood in line waiting for permission to play a role and expressing their willingness to pay the price.
The natural outcome was a flawed peace process, non-binding agreements with no applicability on the ground or legitimacy, and the escalation of Palestinian victimization.
Now that these fatal flaws have run their course, leading to the tragic breakdown and the intifada of September 2000, it is time to learn from the mistakes of the past.
The post September 11 world has signaled an end to American isolationism or to its selective intervention with no consequences. The question of the "responsibility of power" has become more compelling.
However, the danger inherent in the concept is its exclusive translation into military power or negative intervention, while claiming sole rights on redefining friend and foe, ally and enemy, in accordance with temporary and subjective criteria.
Therein lies the difference between "responsibility" and "arrogance" of power.
Its moral imperative lies in positive, constructive, and peaceful intervention that focuses on human, rather than on military, security.
In the Palestinian-Israeli context, this requires a rapid and effective "interventionist" peace initiative to replace the current lethal dynamic and to provide the parties with a political alternative.
First and foremost, it should bring about a "separation" of the parties by lifting the Israeli siege and blockades on Palestinian areas and curbing Israel's brutal assaults against the Palestinians.
Instead of adopting the "terrorist" label and repeating the "stop the violence" mantra, the US, more than ever, is called upon to demonstrate its own distinctiveness and to carry out a parallel "separation" from the language, policies, brutality, extremism, and violations of the Israeli occupation.
As a major liability, Israel has done the most to discredit the US and undermine its standing, not only in the region, but throughout the world.
A courageous distancing (as well as a critical distance) is essential if the US is seeking to address the causes of conflict and terrorism by adopting a responsible and long-term strategy.
Pounding the Palestinians into submission, or delegitimizing their leadership as well as their human reality, will succeed only in fanning the flames and discrediting the US even further.
Restoring confidence and hope require the full mustering of US prestige and standing behind a legitimate and politically forceful peace offensive.
Sharon must understand that he does not own the agenda, but that the peoples of the region are in possession of their own futures through a legitimate alternative that only the US can bring about to nullify the Israeli war offensive.
A clear articulation of the objectives has to follow the framework of the Powell speech of November 19, 2001: ending the occupation, withdrawal of Israel to the June 4, 1967 lines, removal of settlements, establishing the independent and viable Palestinian state, and bringing about a just and equitable solution to the Palestinian refugee question-all based on the appropriate UN resolutions and the land-for-peace equation.
The road map must include the implementation of all agreements and of the Mitchell and Tenet plans immediately and without any preconditions or forced sequencing.
Unconditional negotiations must also proceed immediately with full third-party participation and guarantees, including the US, Europe, the UN, Arab countries, Russia, and Norway-among others.
Mechanisms for even-handed intervention and arbitration must be in place, with the prior consent of the parties to ensure compliance.
On the ground, international monitors must provide the "quiet" and "ceasefire" conditions required for the conduct of the talks.
Simultaneously, the reconstruction of all that had been destroyed by Israel must commence, while the Palestinians must commit to the nation-building process that would ensure a genuinely democratic state with full respect for the rule of law and human rights, and with accountable and efficient institutions.
Clearly, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. All the building blocks of peace have been identified and are accessible. The real need is for the political will on the part of the US and the international community to start the process.
By necessity, this requires standing up to Israel and liberating international policy from the militarism, greed, obstinacy, abuses, and arrogance of the Sharon government.
That, in itself, is a good thing, with an intrinsic value.
Its impact on peace making, on Palestine and Israel, and on the image and credibility of the US will be beyond measure.
7 January 2002
Today, January 7, Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas, while Western churches mark Epiphany. Epiphanies are sorely needed in Palestine/Israel today, dramatic recognitions by the "wise ones" (or those who claim to be wise) that violence and injustice will buy neither security nor liberation, neither peace nor stability.
If the Magi were to make their trek to Bethlehem today, they would have to pass through (if their documents were valid) a variety of checkpoints, roadblocks and other obstacles. May roads be opened so that those who rule might come on bended knee before the nonviolent Messiah.
Below are three pieces of analyzing the current dire situation in Palestine/Israel, the first by veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avneri,the second by Palestinian-American critic Edward Said, and the final one by Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi.
1. So, Who Is Relevant?
Uri Avnery
Maariv, 25 December 2001
[The following article of Uri Avnery is the translation from Hebrew of his Ma'ariv column, published Tuesday, Dec. 25.]
The year 2001 is about to end, but at the last moment a new word – a Latin one to boot – has entered the Hebrew political lexicon: “irrelevant”. This is a new phase in the fatal duel between the two veteran gladiators, both experienced and shrewd, Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat. Sharon has declared that Arafat is “irrelevant”. Arafat has turned the tables by making a speech that focused world attention on him.All the while Sharon’s tanks are parked a hundred yards from Arafat’s office, their cannons aimed at his head.
If Sharon imagined that Arafat would run away or plead for his life, he doesn’t know the man. In 1982 I met him in a besieged West Beirut, during the heavy bombardments, when hundreds of Sharon’s agents were searching for him in order to kill him. He was in high spirits, at his best.
If Arafat imagined that by the speech he would disarm Sharon and cause him to stop, he doesn’t know the man. Sharon never lets up. When he encounters an obstacle, he goes around it. When he doesn’t get what he wants on the first try, he will wait and try again and again and again. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a clash between two great historic movements, Sharon and Arafat are their most outstanding representatives. Sharon is the ultimate Zionist. Arafat is the embodiment of the Palestinian national movement.
This is a clash between an irresistible force and an immovable object. On the one side, Zionism, whose consistent aim is to turn all the land between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan river (at least), which is called in Hebrew “The Land of Israel”, into a homogenous Jewish state. This to be achieved trough a “strategy of phases” - a Zionist method, and the settlers implement it.
On the other side is Palestinian nationalism, whose aim is to establish an independent Palestinian state on Palestinian land. For lack of an alternative, the Palestinians have given up 78% of the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea, which they call Filastin, and the intifada is designed to turn the other 22% into the State of Palestine.
When Sharon came to power, he presented himself as the benign grandfather, who loves sheep and children, and whose only desire is to enter the history books as the man who brought peace and security to the area. That was a successful fraud, in the spirit of “make war by tricks”. The Israeli public, which wants peace and longs for security, believed him and elected the Israeli de Gaulle, the old general who has lost his best comrades in battle and understands that nothing is more precious than peace.
For people who know Sharon, is was both sad and frightening to behold: a naive public following a pied piper. Sharon doesn’t care a damn either for peace or for security. For him they are signs of weakness and degeneration. From the moment of attaining power, he had a quite different agenda: to destroy the Oslo agreement, remove the Palestinian Authority and its armed forces, give new impetus to the settlement movement. For that purpose he acquired Shimon Peres on the cheap, in order to camouflage his true designs in the eyes of the world, and started the great campaign. (Actually, he had started it even earlier, when he went to
the Temple Mount and lit the fire.)
Those who assert that “Sharon has no political plan” are quite wrong. He has got a clear plan: to go on with the offensive and liquidate the Palestinian leadership, in order to break the spirit of the Palestinian people, bring Hamas to power, so that he will be able to say that there is nobody to talk with. He believes that the Palestinians will eventually flee the country (as in 1948) or resign themselves to a life in several isolated and surrounded enclaves (like South African Bantustans).
Faced with this onslaught, Arafat resorts to the classic Palestinian strategy: Sumud (steadfastness). Survival. Not to move. Not to surrender. Not to be dragged into a civil war. To use the meager means in his arsenal – political action, diplomacy, violence, in varying doses – in order to enable his people to hold on. His greatest asset is the ability of his people to absorb punishment, which makes Israeli generals mad with frustration.
The battle is far from finished. I believe it will end in a draw – no mean feat for the weaker side. And the draw will lead, inevitably, to a historical compromise.
2. Israel's dead end
Edward Said
Al-Ahram Weekly, 20-26 December 2001
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/565/op1.htm
Edward Said wonders: is Israel more secure now?
"The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through." Thus Mahmoud Darwish, writing in the aftermath of the PLO's exit from Beirut in September 1982. "Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?"
Nineteen years later, what was happening then to the Palestinians in Lebanon is happening to them in Palestine. Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began last September, Palestinians have been sequestered by the Israeli army in no fewer than 220 discontinuous little ghettos, and subjected to intermittent curfews often lasting for weeks at a stretch. No one, young or old, sick or well, dying or pregnant, student or doctor, can move without spending hours at barricades, manned by rude and deliberately humiliating Israeli soldiers. As I write, 200 Palestinians are unable to receive kidney dialysis, because for "security reasons" the Israeli military won't allow them to travel to medical centres. Have any of the innumerable members of the foreign media covering the conflict done a story about these brutalised young Israelis conscripts, trained to punish Palestinian civilians as the main part of their military duty? I think not.
Yasser Arafat was not allowed to leave his office in Ramallah to attend the emergency meeting of the Islamic Conference foreign ministers on 10 December in Qatar; his speech was read by an aide. The airport 15 miles away in Gaza and Arafat's two ageing helicopters had been destroyed the previous week by Israeli planes and bulldozers, with no one and no force to check, much less prevent, the daily incursions of which this particular feat of military daring was a part. Gaza Airport was the only direct port of entry into Palestinian territory, the only civilian airport in the world wantonly destroyed since World War II. Since last May, Israeli F-16s (generously supplied by the US) have regularly bombed and strafed Palestinian towns and villages, Guernica-style, destroying property and killing civilians and security officials (there is no Palestinian army, navy, or air force to protect the people); Apache attack helicopters (again supplied by the US) have used their missiles to murder 77 Palestinian leaders, for alleged terrorist offences, past or future. A group of unknown Israeli intelligence operatives have the authority to decide on these assassinations, presumably with the approval on each occasion of the Israeli Cabinet, and more generally, that of the US. The helicopters have also done an efficient job of bombing Palestinian Authority installations, police as well as civilian. During the night of 5 December, the Israeli army entered the five-storey offices of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in Ramallah and carried off the computers, as well as most of the files and reports, thereby effacing virtually the entire record of collective Palestinian life. In 1982, the same army under the same commander entered West Beirut and carted off documents and files from the Palestinian Research Centre, before flattening its structure. A few days later came the massacres of Sabra and Shatila.
The suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have of course been at work, as Sharon knew perfectly well they would be when, after a 10-day lull in the fighting in late November, he suddenly ordered the murder of the Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud: an act designed to provoke Hamas into retaliation and thus allow the Israeli army to resume the slaughter of Palestinians. After eight years of barren peace discussions, 50 per cent of Palestinians are unemployed and 70 per cent live in poverty on less than $2 a day. Every day brings with it unopposable land grabs and house demolitions. The Israelis even make a point of destroying trees and orchards on Palestinian land. Although five or six Palestinians have been killed in the last few months for every one Israeli, the old warmonger has the gall to keep repeating that Israel has been the victim of the same terrorism as that meted out by Bin Laden.
The crucial point in all this is that Israel has been in illegal military occupation since 1967; it is the longest such occupation in history and the only one anywhere in the world today. This is the original and continuing violence against which all the Palestinian acts of violence have been directed. On 10 December, for instance, two children aged three and 13 were killed by Israeli bombs in Hebron, yet at the same time an EU delegation was demanding that Palestinians curtail their violence and acts of terrorism. Five more Palestinians were killed on 11 December, all of them civilian, victims of helicopter bombings of Gaza's refugee camps. To make matters worse, as a result of the 11 September attacks, the word "terrorism" is being used to blot out legitimate acts of resistance against military occupation, and any causal or even narrative connection between the dreadful killing of civilians (which I have always opposed) and the 30-plus years of collective punishment is proscribed.
Every Western pundit or official who pontificates about Palestinian terrorism needs to ask how forgetting the fact of the occupation is supposed to stop terrorism. Arafat's great mistake, a consequence of frustration and poor advice, was to try to make a deal with the occupation when he authorised "peace" discussions between scions of two prominent Palestinian families and Mossad in 1992 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge. These discussions only discussed Israeli security; nothing at all was said about Palestinian security, nothing at all, and the struggle of his people to achieve an independent state was left to one side. Indeed, Israeli security to the exclusion of anything else has become the recognised international priority, which allows General Zinni and Javier Solana to preach to the PLO while remaining totally silent on the occupation. Yet Israel has scarcely gained more from these discussions than the Palestinians have. The Israeli mistake has been to imagine that by conning Arafat and his coterie into interminable discussions and tiny concessions, it would get general Palestinian quiescence. Every official Israeli policy thus far has made things worse rather than better for Israel. Ask yourself: is Israel more secure and more accepted now than it was 10 years ago?
The terrible and, in my opinion, stupid suicide raids against civilians in Haifa and Jerusalem over the weekend of 1 December should of course be condemned, but in order for these condemnations to make any sense, the raids must be considered in the context of Abu Hanoud's assassination earlier in the week, along with the killing of five children by an Israeli booby trap in Gaza -- to say nothing of the houses destroyed, the Palestinians killed throughout Gaza and the West Bank, the constant tank incursions, the endlessly grinding away of Palestinian aspirations, minute by minute, for the past 35 years. In the end, desperation only produces poor results, none worse than the green light George W and Colin Powell seem to have given Sharon when he was in Washington on 2 December (all too reminiscent of the green light Alexander Haig gave Sharon in May 1982). With their support went the usual ringing declarations turning the people under occupation and their hapless, inept leader into worldwide aggressors who had to "bring to justice" their own criminals even as Israeli soldiers were systematically destroying the entire Palestinian police structure which was supposed to do the arresting!
Arafat is hemmed in on all sides, an ironic result of his bottomless wish to be all things Palestinian to everyone, enemies and friends alike. He is at once a tragically heroic figure and a bumbling one. No Palestinian today is going to disavow his leadership, for the simple reason that, despite all his wafflings and mistakes, he is being punished and humiliated because he is a Palestinian leader, and in that capacity, his mere existence offends purists (if that's the right word) like Sharon and his American backers. Except for the health and education ministries, both of which have done a decent job, Arafat's Palestinian Authority has not been a brilliant success. Its corruption and brutality stem from Arafat's apparently whimsical, but actually very meticulous, way of keeping everyone dependent on his largesse; he alone controls the budget, and he alone decides what goes on the front pages of the five daily newspapers. Above all, he manipulates and sets up against each other the 12 or 14 -- some say 19 or 20 -- independent security services, each of which is structurally loyal to its own leaders and to Arafat at the same time, without being able to do much more for its people than arrest them when enjoined to do so by Arafat, Israel and the US. The 1996 elections were designed for a term of three years, but Arafat has shilly-shallied with the idea of calling new ones, which would almost certainly challenge his authority and popularity in a serious way.
He and Hamas have had a well-publicised entente of sorts since the latter's June bombings: Hamas wouldn't go after Israeli civilians if Arafat left the Islamic parties alone. Sharon killed off the entente with Abu Hanoud's assassination: Hamas retaliated and there was nothing to stop Sharon squeezing the life out of Arafat, with American support. Having destroyed Arafat's security network, his jails and offices, and having physically imprisoned him, Sharon made demands that he knows can't be met (even though Arafat, with a few cards up his sleeve, has managed, astonishingly, to half comply). Sharon stupidly believes that, having dispensed with Arafat, he can make a series of independent agreements with local warlords, and divide 40 per cent of the West Bank and most of Gaza into several non-contiguous cantons whose borders would be controlled by the Israeli army. How this is supposed to make Israel more secure eludes most people, but not, alas, the ones with the relevant power.
That still leaves out three players, or groups of players, two of whom, in his racist way, Sharon gives no weight to. First, the Palestinians themselves, many of whom are far too intransigent and politicised to accept anything less than unconditional Israeli withdrawal. Israel's policies, like all such aggressions, produce the opposite effect to the one intended: to suppress is to provoke resistance. Were Arafat to disappear, Palestinian law provides for 60 days of rule by the speaker of the Assembly (an unimpressive and unpopular Arafat hanger-on called Abul-'Ala, much admired by Israelis for his "flexibility"). After that, a succession struggle would ensue between other Arafat cronies such as Abu Mazen and two or three of the leading (and capable) security chiefs -- notably, Jibril Rajoub of the West Bank and Mohamed Dahlan in Gaza. None of these people has Arafat's stature or anything resembling his (perhaps now lost) popularity. Temporary chaos is the likely result: we must face it, Arafat's presence has been an organising focus for Palestinian politics, in which millions of other Arabs and Muslims have a very large stake.
Arafat has always tolerated, indeed supported a plurality of organisations which he manipulates in various ways, balancing them against each other so that no one predominates except his Fatah. New groups are emerging, however; secular, hardworking, committed, dedicated to a democratic polity in an independent Palestine. Over these groups, the Palestinian Authority has no control at all. But it should also be said that no one in Palestine is willing to accede to the Israeli-US demand for an end to "terrorism," although it will be difficult to draw a line in the public mind between suicidal adventurism and actual resistance to the occupation, as long as Israel continues its bombings and oppression of all Palestinians, young and old.
The second group are the leaders in the rest of the Arab world who have a vested interest in Arafat, despite their evident exasperation with him. He is cleverer and more persistent than they are, and he knows the hold he has on the popular mind in their countries, where he has cultivated two separate Arab constituencies, the Islamists and the secular nationalists. Both feel under attack, even though the latter has hardly been noticed by the vast number of Western experts and Orientalists who take Bin Laden -- rather than the much larger number of Muslim and non-Muslim secular Arabs who detest what Bin Laden stands for and what he has done -- to be the paradigmatic Muslim. In Palestine for example, recent polls have found that Arafat and Hamas are now about equal in popularity (both hover between 20 and 25 per cent), with the majority of citizens favouring neither. (But, even as he has been cornered, Arafat's popularity has shot up.) The same division, with the same significant plague-on- both-your-houses majority, exists in the Arab countries, where most people are put off either by the corruption and brutality of the regimes or by the reductiveness and extremism of the religious groups -- most of which are more interested in the regulation of personal behaviour than they are in matters like globalisation or producing electricity and jobs.
Arabs and Muslims might well turn against their own rulers were Arafat seen as being choked to death by Israeli violence and Arab indifference. So he is necessary to the present landscape. His departure will only seem natural when a new collective leadership emerges among a younger generation of Palestinians. When and how that will happen is impossible to tell, but I'm quite certain that it will happen.
The third group of players includes the Europeans, the Americans and the rest, and frankly, I don't think they know what they're doing. Most of them would gladly be rid of Palestine as a problem and, in the spirit of Bush and Powell, would not be unhappy if the vision of a Palestinian state were somehow realised, as long as someone else did it. Besides, they would find functioning in Middle East difficult if they didn't have Arafat to blame, snub, insult, prod, pressure, or give money to. The mission of the EU and General Zinni seems senseless and will have no effect on Sharon and his people. The Israeli politicians have concluded correctly that the Western governments are, in general, on their side and they can continue what they do best, regardless of Arafat and his people's fruitless begging to negotiate.
The slowly emerging group of Palestinians, both in Palestine and in the Diaspora, is beginning to learn and use tactics that solidly place a moral onus on the West and Israel to address the issue of Palestinian rights, not just of the Palestinian presence. In Israel, for example, an audacious Knesset member, the Palestinian Azmi Bishara, has been stripped of his parliamentary immunity and will soon be on trial for incitement to violence. Why? Because he has long stood for the Palestinian right of resistance to occupation, arguing that, like every other state in the world, Israel should be the state of all of its citizens, not just of the Jewish people. For the first time, a major Palestinian challenge on Palestinian rights is being mounted inside Israel (not on the West Bank), with all eyes on the proceedings. At the same time, the Belgian attorney-general's office has confirmed that a war crimes case against Sharon can go forward in that country's courts. A painstaking mobilisation of secular Palestinian opinion is underway and will slowly overtake the Palestinian Authority. The moral high ground will soon be reclaimed from Israel, as the occupation becomes the focus of attention and as more and more Israelis realise that there is no way to continue indefinitely a 35-year occupation.
Besides, as the US war against terrorism spreads, more unrest is almost certain; far from closing things down, US power is likely to stir them up in ways that may not be containable. It's no mean irony that the renewed attention on Palestine came about because the US and Europeans need to maintain an anti-Taliban coalition.
3. Image and Reality: The Role of the U.S. in the Middle East
Hanan Ashrawi
MIFTAH, 28 December 2001
At no time in history have the short sightedness and narrow self-interest of American policy makers had such a devastating impact on the realities of the Arab world and the Middle East, and by necessity on American national interests and standing.
Without delving into the historical roots of repeated American blunders in the region, it is time to point out the dangerous implications of the current American policy and its potential for generating massive instability and conflict.
The most glaring fault lies first and foremost in the total subjugation of American decision making to the priorities and policies of the Israeli government-a government that happens to be the most extremist, ideological, hard line, militaristic, and irresponsible since the creation of the state of Israel (see Georgie Anne Geyer's "Faltering U.S. policy in the Middle East," The Washington Times, Dec. 20, 2001, p. A 19).
Whether as a result of gullibility, inherent (strategic) bias, or a determined avoidance of any confrontation with major Jewish and pro-Israeli lobbyists and campaign funders, both American executive and legislative branches seem to be bent on pursuing a precarious course that threatens not only to wreak havoc in the region, but also to lay to rest any hope of salvaging the image, influence, and interests of the US throughout the region.
Instead of hiring suspect spin-doctors and Hollywood image-makers, it behooves the US administration to re-examine both its words and deeds (as well as its silence and inaction) when it comes to the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the Arab world.
Arab public opinion, hitherto blithely ignored by successive American administrations, relates to the US in relation to its role in, and impact on, fundamental regional/national issues-the most compelling, emotive, and visible expression being the Palestinian question.
Over five decades of dispossession and displacement, over three decades of military occupation, over a decade of American involvement in the "peace process," left the Palestinians more visibly victimized with a daily loss of lives, rights, lands, and even the most basic human consideration.
Throughout, the US was seen as the staunchest ally of Israel, supplying it with billions of dollars (estimated at $ 92 to date), sophisticated weaponry (used to shell, bomb, assassinate, and kill Palestinians on a daily basis), and with blind political cover (24 UN Security Council veto's to date).
Turning a blind eye to the ongoing, extremely provocative, and illegal Israeli settlement activities, the US also "sponsored" a peace process that gave Israel a free hand in acquiring more Palestinian land and in carrying out other "unilateral actions" (particularly in the illegal annexation of occupied East Jerusalem) with full impunity.
With every agreement renegotiated, modified, or even negated in action, the American sponsors exonerated all Israeli violations and abuses while putting intolerable pressure on the weaker Palestinian side to show "flexibility" and seriousness of intent.
Such a punitive peace process became an abstract political exercise for its own sake, with no legality, substance, or relationship to behavior on the ground. Deliberately ignoring the increasing pain of the Palestinian people and the escalating cruelty of the Israeli occupation, the US exhibited alarming insensitivity to the victims and total collusion with the occupiers, leading ultimately to the tragic breakdown of September 28, known as the second intifada. The fact that all signs were in place, all symptoms visible, was brushed away by the willfully oblivious "sponsor" who failed to acknowledge the most basic human component of this "political process."
This has been the most consistent aspect of the oft-repeated double-standards charge leveled against the US, a negation of the humanity of the Palestinians and the dubious or suspended or negated applicability of international law and legality to the Palestinian condition.
The only America expression of regret, sorrow, or outrage over loss of life came when the victims were Israeli, while thousands of Palestinians were killed or assassinated by the Israeli occupation with full impunity and total human disregard.
Overall, the negotiating process ignored the applicability of UN resolutions, the asymmetry of power that required protection for the Palestinians and accountability for the Israelis (at least in compliance with the Fourth Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law), and an effective system of mediation and arbitration to resolve disputes in a decisive and objective manner.
With the added (or basic) consideration of Israel's disproportionate power and influence in the domestic arena, US policy became hostage to the enormous pressures and influence of a major special interest group-the pro-Israeli lobby and its institutions in the US.
Maintaining such a biased and one-sided monopoly on the politics of the region and the course of the peace process, the US excluded all other global players, including the UN, the EU, major Arab countries (including close American allies), and anybody else who wanted to invest in peace making or who could counter the extreme one-sidedness of the Americans-even for their own good.
Hence, Israel ended up calling the shots, not only as the occupying power wielding force against the Palestinians, but also as the formulator of US policy and conduct (sometimes by proxy through its American lobby and institutions), and finally for the whole world.
The ultimate "triumph" came when the European and UN leaderships adopted wholesale the political diction and parameters of the Israeli-American alliance as the defining factors for their role and activities in the region. Israel became the gatekeeper of the peace process, and all stood in line waiting for permission to play a role and expressing their willingness to pay the price.
The natural outcome was a flawed peace process, non-binding agreements with no applicability on the ground or legitimacy, and the escalation of Palestinian victimization.
Now that these fatal flaws have run their course, leading to the tragic breakdown and the intifada of September 2000, it is time to learn from the mistakes of the past.
The post September 11 world has signaled an end to American isolationism or to its selective intervention with no consequences. The question of the "responsibility of power" has become more compelling.
However, the danger inherent in the concept is its exclusive translation into military power or negative intervention, while claiming sole rights on redefining friend and foe, ally and enemy, in accordance with temporary and subjective criteria.
Therein lies the difference between "responsibility" and "arrogance" of power.
Its moral imperative lies in positive, constructive, and peaceful intervention that focuses on human, rather than on military, security.
In the Palestinian-Israeli context, this requires a rapid and effective "interventionist" peace initiative to replace the current lethal dynamic and to provide the parties with a political alternative.
First and foremost, it should bring about a "separation" of the parties by lifting the Israeli siege and blockades on Palestinian areas and curbing Israel's brutal assaults against the Palestinians.
Instead of adopting the "terrorist" label and repeating the "stop the violence" mantra, the US, more than ever, is called upon to demonstrate its own distinctiveness and to carry out a parallel "separation" from the language, policies, brutality, extremism, and violations of the Israeli occupation.
As a major liability, Israel has done the most to discredit the US and undermine its standing, not only in the region, but throughout the world.
A courageous distancing (as well as a critical distance) is essential if the US is seeking to address the causes of conflict and terrorism by adopting a responsible and long-term strategy.
Pounding the Palestinians into submission, or delegitimizing their leadership as well as their human reality, will succeed only in fanning the flames and discrediting the US even further.
Restoring confidence and hope require the full mustering of US prestige and standing behind a legitimate and politically forceful peace offensive.
Sharon must understand that he does not own the agenda, but that the peoples of the region are in possession of their own futures through a legitimate alternative that only the US can bring about to nullify the Israeli war offensive.
A clear articulation of the objectives has to follow the framework of the Powell speech of November 19, 2001: ending the occupation, withdrawal of Israel to the June 4, 1967 lines, removal of settlements, establishing the independent and viable Palestinian state, and bringing about a just and equitable solution to the Palestinian refugee question-all based on the appropriate UN resolutions and the land-for-peace equation.
The road map must include the implementation of all agreements and of the Mitchell and Tenet plans immediately and without any preconditions or forced sequencing.
Unconditional negotiations must also proceed immediately with full third-party participation and guarantees, including the US, Europe, the UN, Arab countries, Russia, and Norway-among others.
Mechanisms for even-handed intervention and arbitration must be in place, with the prior consent of the parties to ensure compliance.
On the ground, international monitors must provide the "quiet" and "ceasefire" conditions required for the conduct of the talks.
Simultaneously, the reconstruction of all that had been destroyed by Israel must commence, while the Palestinians must commit to the nation-building process that would ensure a genuinely democratic state with full respect for the rule of law and human rights, and with accountable and efficient institutions.
Clearly, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. All the building blocks of peace have been identified and are accessible. The real need is for the political will on the part of the US and the international community to start the process.
By necessity, this requires standing up to Israel and liberating international policy from the militarism, greed, obstinacy, abuses, and arrogance of the Sharon government.
That, in itself, is a good thing, with an intrinsic value.
Its impact on peace making, on Palestine and Israel, and on the image and credibility of the US will be beyond measure.
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