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The Washington Spectator
Can Coexistence Exist in the Promised Land? Some readers of our December I issue, headlined "Israel and Palestine on the Edge of an Abyss," accused us me, the editor, and our guest writer, Kathleen Christison of being "anti Semitic" for raising questions about U.S. and Israeli policy in the endless combat between Israelis and Palestinians, which now seems to be getting more confrontational and bloodier with every passing day.
In its 28 years of publication, the four page Tfashington Spectator has not published letters to the editor, but they are carefully read. The editor apologizes for not, so far, finding time to reply individually to one and all. There were a few notes of congratulation among the 50 or so harsh critiques of the December I issue. A few readers ordered extra copies to share with family and friends, and some even sent thank you checks to help keep our threadbare non profit operation going. To fulfill our published commitment to say more on the Israel Palestinian conflict, we did two things. We shared the incoming letters with Kathleen Christison, and we invited her response. After we had received her comments, we consulted two other Middle East experts. Both thoght she had made a useful analysis of this sensitive subject. One of them, a State Department consultant, asked not to be named in print. The other was David K. Shipler, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a former colleague at the New York Times. Shipler ran the Jerusalem bureau of the Times from 1979 to 1984, was later its chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, and is the author of Arab and Jew Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, now in paperback. Among other things, his book reports the under reported fact that "many Palestinians have been the victims of expulsion, displacement and war." In a recent (January 7) Times op ed piece, Shipler wrote that both Israelis and Palestinians "know how to provoke sensations of insecurity and humiliation, but not how to induce compromise. They know how to infuriate but not how to soothe, and soothing fears is a prerequisite to building coexistence. Neither side has figured out how to win by giving the other what it needs." What follows is Christison's further comment on that impasse
and By Kathleen Christison A number of readers seem to have focused on a distorted history of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, one that has been popular for decades but has been shown to be inaccurate by Israeli scholars over the last dozen years. Contrary to a widely believed story, Palestinians did not leave Palestine in 1948 because they were ordered to do so by Arab military commanders who wanted a clear field to "push the Jews into the sea." Using declassified Israeli archival material, several Israeli historians including Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe have shown that the approximately 700,000 Palestinians who fled in 1948 did so out of fear of the warfare raging around them or, in several well documented cases, because they were expelled by Israeli forces. I particularly recommend Morris's book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem ] 94 7 1949. This more accurate history demonstrates that from the start, Palestinian grievances have been rooted not in hatred of Jews, as is mistakenly believed by some, but in the loss of their homes and their national locus. COMBAT CHRONOLOGY After World War 1, Jewish immigration increased throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, causing occasional outbreaks of violence by Arabs fearful of becoming a minority population. By 1939, as World War 11 began, the ethnic balance was 69 percent Arab and 31 percent Jewish. When the war ended, the Palestine issue was turned over to the new United Nations. Despite the population disparity, and despite the fact that Jews owned only 7 percent of the land, when the UN voted in 1947 to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state it allotted 55 percent of the territory to the minority Jews. Arabs objected, not only to the way the land was allocated but to the act of partition itself to the fact that an international body had carved a state specifically for Jews out of a land that Palestinians regarded as entirely theirs. The 1956 war was a joint effort by Israel, which was attempting to deter cross border raids by Palestinian guerrillas from Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, and by Britain and France, angered by Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal. The 1967 war began with Egyptian threats against Israel, Egypt's expulsion of a UN peacekeeping force stationed in the Sinai since 1956, and its closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. In a pre emptive attack in June 1967, Israel destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground and captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. It later captured the Golan Heights from Syria and took the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in the aftermath of that war, called for Israel's withdrawal from territories it had captured in return for full peace and recognition from the Arabs. This was the origin of the "land for peace" concept, but it didn't work. In October 1973, Egypt and Syria initiated a two front attack on Israel in hope of recapturing the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. Israel pushed the Arab forces back, but the war led to a negotiating process that eventually resulted in a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979 and to the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Sinai desert in 1982. War began again in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, to the north, in a failed attempt to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The Israelis occupied most of southern Lebanon, held its capital, Beirut, under siege for two months, and became involved in the massacre of nearly 1,000 civilians in Palestinian refugee camps. Israel established a permanent occupation of an area along the Lebanon Israel border that continued for 18 years, until former Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew Israeli forces in May 2000. In 1987, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, seeking an end to Israel's 20 year occupation there, began a popular uprising, or intifada largely without weapons except stones. In 1988, the PLO formally recognized Israel's existence and declared its acceptance of the two state formula, under which Israel would live in peace inside its 1967 borders and a Palestinian state would be established in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, taking up 22 percent of Israel, with a shared capital in Jerusalem. Several readers stated their belief that Palestinians still want to destroy Israel and have never expressed a desire for peace. This view is best summed up by one reader, who said he has not heard, "coming from anyone on the Palestinian side, a simple statement such as 'Yes, we are interested in establishing peace with Israel in such a way that our two peoples can live side by side in our own lands."' In fact, Palestinians have said this frequently. In 1988 when the PLO recognized Israel's existence and accepted the two state formula, Yasir Arafat publicly affirmed "the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to exist in peace and security . . . including the state of Palestine, Israel, and other neighbors." Again, in 1993, when Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo agreement, the PLO recognized Israel's existence. In 1996 the PLO rescinded its charter calling for the destruction of Israel. All mainstream Palestinian representatives still speak of the need to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and to establish a Palestinian state in those areas, and in those areas alone. What, then, are the Palestinian grievances I spoke of in the article? Several readers asked for "a straightforward listing." Here it is: Having already given up all claims to 78 percent of Palestine, the Palestinians signed the Oslo agreement in the expectation that it would bring an end to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and lead to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. U.N. Resolution 242, which the Oslo agreement promised to implement in full, demands Israel's withdrawal from these territories. But during the years of the peace talks, between 1993 and the collapse of the Camp David summit in July 2000, Israel expanded its colonization of these territories, nearly doubling the number of Israeli settlers and settlements. Although Palestinians had local autonomy in some areas, their towns were encircled by Israeli checkpoints, necessitating long and often humiliating delays in the movement of people, food, medicine, manufacturing supplies, mail, and even ambulances from one town to another. Scarce water was allocated so that 200,000 Israeli settlers received as much as 2 million Palestinian residents. These are the Palestinian grievances that sparked the uprising that erupted in September 2000. Several readers indicated a belief that, at Camp David, Israel offered the Palestinians "everything they wanted" but that Arafat rejected the offer and began a "war of terrorism." On the contrary, what Israel actually offered was continued colonial existence in four disconnected sections, each surrounded by Israeli territory, giving the Palestinians neither sovereignty nor security. Israelis would have refused to live in an indefensible state like that, and so did the Palestinians. THE BOTTOM LINE There will be no peace until Israel withdraws from these territories and permits the Palestinians a small state that is independent and viable. Israel's insistence on perpetuating its domination of all of Palestine leaves the Palestinians with no hope and no stake in peace, and ultimately gives them no reason for reconciliation with Israel. Other readers revealed a belief that ultimately the only thing that matters in the conflict and the attempt to mend it is that Israel's concerns trump Palestinian concerns, because past Jewish suffering gives Israel, as one reader put it, a "greater need for security." This is the reason there has been no resolution of the conflict. The U.S. could guarantee the security of both Israel and a Palestinian state in any peace agreement, but it will not be possible to have peace if one side's security takes such precedence over the other's. The principal U.S. failing throughout the peace process has been its refusal to recognize that a stable peace cannot be forged when the interests of one side are almost completely ignored. Some readers maintained that claims that Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinian children during the uprising have been disproved. One claimed that Palestinian parents deliberately place their young children on the front lines so that Israeli soldiers will kill them when they "retaliate" against stone throwers. In fact, instances of deliberate shooting of Palestinian children by Israeli soldiers have been well documented in both the Israeli and the U.S. press. In the October 2001 issue of Harper ~, an article by a New York Times reporter, Chris Hedges, recounts an incident that he witnessed in which Israeli soldiers taunted Palestinians in Gaza, saying over loudspeakers: "Come on, dogs. Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!" They then shot into a group of 10 and 11 year old Palestinian boys running over a sandbank, killing one and seriously wounding four. "Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered," Hedges wrote, "but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and then murder them for sport." The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem reports that 69 Palestinian children under the age of 15 have been killed in the uprising's first 16 months more than one every week for over a year. Another 92 teenagers between the ages of 15 and 17 were also killed in this period. Tragically, 27 Israeli minors died too in Palestinian terrorists' attacks in Israel. Ironically, the charge that Palestinian parents deliberately make cannon fodder of their children is a charge British authorities made against Jewish parents when British soldiers shot and killed Jewish youngsters demonstrating against the British Mandate in the 1940s. The callous charge is an easy dodge by occupation authorities trying to deny culpability for indefensible acts. IN THE CLASSROOM This is an issue that has pined currency in the U.S., thanks to the efforts of the right wing Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP). It has designed a website devoted to translated passages from Palestinian textbooks and has publicized them in full page ads in U.S. newspapers. . This propaganda campaign is an example of deliberate distortion by politicians in Israel and the U.S. whose agenda is the justification of Israel's occupation. Several scholais including an Israeli scholar who heads a study team from Hebrew University, an American Jewish professor at George Washington University who has studied the textbook issue carefully, and a Palestinian education experthave examined the textbook passages in question and concluded that the translations posted on CMIP's website are badly distorted or simply wrong. The texts do not, as claimed, call for the destruction of Israel or teach children to hate Israel, and new Palestinian textbooks introduced in grades 1, 2, 6 and 7, in 2000 and 2001, have toned down passages in the old Jordanian texts that they replaced. They are freer of negative stereotypes. The general view of these scholars is that the new texts have tended to ignore the Israel Palestinian conflict, carefully finessing issues that remain unresolved, and have dealt primarily with the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. For instance, although CMIP charges that maps in Palestinian texts teach the destruction of Israel because they delineate no Israeli borders, CMIP does not point out that the maps draw no borders for Palestine either or that maps in textbooks for Israeli children still define Israel as extending across all of Palestine, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, and show no Palestinian towns in the area of the West Bank and Gaza But those who attack the behavior of Palestinian children and the content of Palestinian school books dodge the basic issue. The root problem in the conflict remains Israel's continued occupation and colonization of areas that do not belong to it, either legally or morally. Enrongste It won't be another Watergate, and it may not be another Whitewater. But you know something gritty is coming when the Wall Street Journal calls the investigation of the Bush administration's Enron scandal "a milestone" and predicts that even Congressional Republicans won't be nice about it at the upcoming committee interrogations. The Journal says that Enron's $623,000 in gifts to President Bush's various political campaigns, plus other millions doled out to buy favors from various members of Congress, "may prove that if you spend too much too openly to buy political influence, politicians may find you radioactive when you really need help." Enron crookedly covered up its impending bankruptcy so that its top executives could sell their stock at top dollar before its price plunged. Beyond that, the New York Times has found that Enron had paid members of Congress, and the corporate lobbyists who persuaded them to do it, millions of dollars to allow the company to create 881 subsidiaries in taxhaven countries like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Barbados, Hong Kong and Singapore. This allowed Enron to pay no U.S. income tax in four of the last five years. Not a dime. That part of the Enron exposd may not be what the president meant when he said no new taxes, "over my dead body." It's hard to believe, but from 1996 to 2000 Enron also claimed the cost of the stock options it gave to its board members and corporate executives not reported to stockholders as tax refundable expenses worth $399 million in tax refunds from the U.S. Treasury. As they begin to see that Enron is such an anachronism that it should be renamed Enronchronism, and its demise, after paying off half of Washington to further itself such an irony that it could be renamed Enrony, even its hot Republican friends on Capitol Hill and in the White House, too, will cool to it now. Among other things that we and conservative Republicans now learn is that Enron's expansion into the high speed,'broadband Internet business included an exploration of selling sex videos ("Mr. President, the Christian Coalition is on line one"). The Enron debacle has inspired an investigative Washington action group, the Center for Public Integrity (www.public i.org on the web) to list by name and dollars gained the Enron executives who made themselves richer at their employees' expense. They rushed to sell $1.1 billion in Enron stock that they secretly learned was about to bottom out and plunge the company into history's biggest bankruptcy, yet the employees were prevented from selling the Enron stock in their 40 1 k retirement plans. It also lists 14 top officials of the Bush administration who owned Enron stock, once worth as much as $886,000. No one knows yet whether they, too, were tipped off to sell fast. Still, Enron should be given a good government award for effectively killing President Bush's scheme to privatize Social Security by steering working people to invest some of their S.S. input in the stock market. Enron's gross campaign gift financing of many, if not most, members of Congress may also revive hope of some kind of campaign finance reform. And as for big business's drive to continue easing government ovei sight of tricky corporate shenanigans forget it. It's been shredded, like Enron's incriminating documents. Telepoison A humorous gloss on the mindlessness of TV and its endless commercials came to us in the mail recently. It draws its inspiration from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Remember ... Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. . ."? It was signed, and apparently written, by Isabel Di Caprio. Here is an excerpt:
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