American-Israeli honeymoon ruined by talk of a Palestinian state
By Rime Allaf (The Daily Star)
In the past, the few sporadic arguments between the US and Israel could have been likened to bouts of sibling rivalry, or to the inevitable squabbles that happen even in the best of families. The quarrels were unpleasant but brief, as both sides never forgot that in the end, they were bound by relations strong enough to overcome any misunderstanding. If they ever disagreed, the US and Israel eventually ended up supporting each other against the world.
The US (big brother) could always be counted on to be there for Israel (juvenile sister), excusing her every fault and giving the impression that big brother was in charge. And when they agreed, America also seemed to be leading, when in fact Israel led the dance most of the times.
A classic example of this pattern can be taken from the recent American and Israeli walkout from the World Racism Conference in Durban, South Africa, when Shimon Peres, Israel's foreign minister, explained on Israeli Radio why it would be preferable for the US to appear as the leader. "We will not do anything before the United States, to avoid the impression that the United States is serving Israel," elaborated Peres. "I can even say with appropriate modesty that the United States is slightly bigger than Israel, slightly stronger, and its voice carries more weight. So we have decided to be second voice, not first voice."
Modest Israel had thus decided that the slightly bigger and slightly stronger US should indeed appear to lead the way in many incidents of American-Israeli cooperation, as any big brother should. Lately, however, the relationship between the two states has begun to be much more evocative of a marital one, with the US as the weary husband, and Israel as the jealous wife.
Much has been said about Ariel Sharon's recent pathetic accusations that likened Israel to the sacrificed Czechoslovakia of 1938, and that warned the leader of the free world not to try to "appease" the Arabs at its expense a la Chamberlain. The Bush administration was understandably infuriated by this outburst, when all the US has ever done was support Israel. Not only is Israel far from being a Czechoslovakia, but everyone knows full well that the only appeasement that has taken place for several decades has been that of Israel at the expense of Arabs.
Upset, but not upset enough to break-up, the Bush administration exclaimed yet again its unwavering devotion to Israel. While bitterly deploring Sharon's statements, US officials went out of their way to remind Israel of its status in America's heart. Ari Fleischer, White House spokesman, said: "The president believes these remarks are unacceptable. Israel could have no better or stronger friend than the US and no better friend than President Bush." As for Secretary of State Colin Powell, he clearly tried to downplay the row in-between frantic phone conversations with Sharon, saying that "from time to time, we'll have these little cloudbursts, but that doesn't affect the strength of our relationship." Of course, as all couples know, marital bliss eventually returns when the foundation is deep enough, and when one of the partners is reassuring enough.
While America loudly protested its "innocence" at abandoning Israel, Sharon pushed his hysterical jolted-wife act to the limit, demonstrating utter contempt for the Bush administration's first real attempts to rally Arab support, to propose new ideas for peace in the Occupied Territories, and even to contemplate the actual establishment of a Palestinian state. God forbid, Sharon must have thought. Ever the bulldozer, he increased the pace of his military assault and ordered the heaviest offensive this year on Palestinians.
In true "couple who had a dispute, kissed and made up" fashion, both American and Israeli officials quickly declared that the row was over when Sharon expressed regret for his comments. Sharon concluded "it's completely behind us." But the new honeymoon might not be long-lived this time: unfortunately for Sharon, another US friend (who unlike Israel is actively fighting alongside America to achieve "enduring freedom") has also been referring to the concept of a Palestinian state, and playing host to Yasser Arafat. One can only imagine Sharon's angst and that of his spokesman, Raanan Gissin, who is obviously just as confused as his boss.
Referring to Arafat's Monday meeting with Tony Blair, Gissin said that it "certainly won't be conducive to forcing Arafat to stop terrorism, which he has not done." In their frustration, Gissin and Sharon forget that only last week they were congratulating Arafat precisely for "taking measures against terrorists" (ie killing students).
Speaking after his meeting with Arafat on Monday, the British prime minister clearly indicated that he considered a proper homeland for Palestinians an inevitability. "The end we desire : is a just peace in which Israelis and Palestinians live side by side, each in their own state, secure and able to prosper and develop," Blair said. "That is the only sensible outcome."
While any reasonable person wanting peace would consider these comments encouraging, albeit vague and unlikely to elicit any real action for the time being, it is clear that Ariel Sharon (who can be described with many adjectives, but not "reasonable") will try to hinder this newfound American and British conscience from going too far. Already, assassinations of Palestinian figures have resumed with a vengeance, and many other creative measures of oppression continue. Among other things, Israel has threatened to cut off Gaza's electricity supply if it doesn't immediately pay its arrears (which the PA hasn't been able to do, suffering severe economic difficulties since Israel imposed a blockade a year ago). Israel has also seized yet another chunk of land in Gaza, to build a new road for Jewish settlers. No one is objecting.
If Sharon's initial apprehension had been that the US and Britain really wanted to fight all terrorism (therefore including his), surely he now realizes that he is not on the list which speaks volumes for Operation Enduring Freedom's "objectivity."
Despite the declarations by the American administration and the British Cabinet, the Palestinian people have been increasingly suppressed not only by Israel, but by the Palestinian Authority itself. The latter, not content with its recent clamp down, is awaiting the arrival of riot gear generously sent by the US, including an ample supply of batons to ensure that dignities, if not bones, can be broken. It would not even surprise me to hear that Arafat had to sign an affidavit prior to the shipment of the riot gear, promising that it would only be used on Palestinians, and not in self-defense against Israeli assaults not that batons and helmets could do much in the face of F-16s, tanks and bulldozers anyway.
But in spite of this complete dominion of Palestinian lives, Sharon still seems to be worried. Perhaps he hides in his arrogant criminality a premonition of what might make an oppressed people snap. Hoping that America will not give Palestinians their fair due, and that the alliance against terrorism will not even try to punish him, perhaps he senses that in the end, it might be batons, and not fighter jets, that prove to be the catalyst in securing Palestinian independence. Perhaps Sharon fears his lifetime partner may not be able to permanently misguide an increasingly questioning public opinion. Perhaps Sharon worries that he has walked on the grounds of Al-Aqsa for the last time.
(Rime Allaf is a writer and specialist in Middle East affairs. She is a consultant in international communications and new economy business. She wrote this commentary for The Daily Star)
We are being reoccupied
Mustafa Barghouthi
Tuesday October 23, 2001
The Guardian
The government of Ariel Sharon has finally revealed itself as a government of war. Since his election, we in Palestine have warned of his violent and aggressive behaviour and been fearful of what he would unleash on Palestinians and Israelis. Now his real intention - to destroy the peace process he never agreed with - has been unmasked.
Sharon is using the current international situation to damage irreparably the work of the past 10 years, which brought the Israeli and Palestinian people closer than ever before to a peaceful solution of their conflict.
Sharon, who declared after last week's assassination of Israeli minister Rehavam Zeevi that "starting from today everything is different", has in the past four days overseen a military invasion into areas of Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Beit Sahour, Qalqilya and Tulkarm. At the same time, tanks and troops are building up on the borders of other cities, including Nablus and Hebron.
Thus has begun the gradual reoccupation of the Palestinian areas by the Israeli military, expanding the Israeli occupation into the mere 18% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Already 26 people have died during these Israeli invasions - including Riham Abu Ward, an 11-year-old girl in Jenin, who was killed by Israeli gunfire inside her school. Around 250 people have been wounded.
By reoccupying, Sharon appears to hope he can wipe out the Palestinian Authority and destroy the political entity representing the Palestinian people, while at the same time destroying the will of the Palestinians to resist occupation. These invasions are also destroying homes, schools, buildings, roads - the infrastructure developed since the Oslo agreements. By doing so, the potential for a future Palestinian state is also being destroyed, and with it the potential for peace and coexistence.
And, despite Israeli revulsion at the assassination of their own tourism minister, the Sharon government continues to use assassination. In the past eight months, 63 Palestinians have been killed by Israel's assassination policy, including 22 bystanders, three of whom died within 12 hours of Zeevi.
The last 48 hours have witnessed a dangerous deterioration in the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian cities of Beit Jala, Bethlehem and Ramallah. Thousands of people remain under curfew and today will be the fifth day. They are unable to get medical treatment, medicines, food or milk for children. Shooting by the Israeli army is indiscriminate. Yesterday Issa Khalil was shot in the chest while standing outside the Hussein Hospital in Beit Jala and Johnny Thaljiyeh was killed by Israeli soldiers in Manger Square in Bethlehem.
Instead of acting as the international community has asked by resolving the Palestinian-Israeli problem, Sharon is making the situation increasingly perilous. Shimon Peres has promised that the army will not stay in the newly occupied neighbourhoods. But that is exactly what Moshe Dayan promised in 1967, and more than 34 years have passed since then. The result is that the current Israeli military occupation is becoming the longest occupation in modern history.
We cannot afford to ignore parallels with history. In 1982, the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London was used to justify the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when Sharon was minister of defence. The initial invasion left more than 20,000 people dead; by the time the Israeli army withdrew last year, thousands more had lost their lives and the history of Israel was forever tarred with the massacres of Sabra and Shatila. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians can afford a repetition of such past mistakes.
Nor should Sharon believe he can defy history. Colonialist ventures have eventually been destroyed when the occupied people has fought for its independence. In Algeria, it cost a million lives, but independence was eventually achieved. The Israeli government and people need to remember that these acts of revenge and retaliation, regarded by Sharon as "solutions" to the problem, are in fact increasing the danger for all of us. They also obscure the real reason we find ourselves teetering on the abyss, namely that Israel occupies most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Only by addressing this fundamental issue can we arrive at a future free of today's horrors.
·Mustafa Barghouthi is president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees and was a delegate in the Madrid peace negotiations.
Call us when you have changed your thinking
By Danny Rabinowitz
A year has passed since the tragic events in which Arab citizens of Israel were shot dead by members of the Israel police force. It will be a long time before the wounds that were opened in those incidents will heal.
Many of those who belong to the Jewish mainstream in Israel still believe it is their role to re-educate the Arab community, and this re-education process must also be accompanied by the elements of punishment. On the other hand, many Arabs have a deep and dangerous sense of despair.
The prospect of egalitarian citizenship, a hope to which the members of an entire generation in the Arab community dedicated a good part of their lives, collapsed in the thunder of the shots fired by the police officers. The vision of Jewish-Arab brotherhood was swallowed up by the mourning chants of the bereaved mothers and by the cries for revenge at the funerals and at the memorial ceremonies.
The relative quiet of the Arab community in Israel this past year is misleading. During the first few months following those tragic events, it was the quiet of shock and fear. These feelings have dissipated somewhat; however, beneath the surface surges the mighty current of a natural, self-evident, identification with the Palestinian people and with its national struggle.
The generation that set the tone in the events of October 2000, the young men and women in their early 20s, are not subservient like their grandparents who lived through the events of 1948, nor are they naive like their parents who stood their ground politically on Land Day in 1976. These young Arab women and men in Israel circa 2001 are very familiar with Israeli culture and have a much better knowledge of that culture than did their parents or grandparents.
However, these young people, at the same time, display an unprecedented sense of determination in their desire to disconnect themselves from the State of Israel in its present format. They have no patience for the declarations of politicians about equality.
"Call us when you have changed your thinking," they tauntingly address the Jewish majority in Israel and then go back to the business of advancing themselves and their communities.
The struggle over the status of the Arab citizens of Israel is not a zero-sum game, and it is not being conducted between only two groups. It is part of a wider struggle, which is enfolding in the context of a variegated tribal reality. A number of subgroups are competing for the right to define the state and its values and are indirectly competing for the right to a share in the state's resources - land, capital, political strength, and identity.
If the hegemonic group tries to seize control of everything, there will never be peace in this land. Peace will come only if the group that has emerged victorious in the internal struggle wisely does what the Americans, who have emerged victorious in the global struggle for control of economic and cultural resources, never thought of doing - namely, to triumph without leaving the losers alone in the dark to suffer starvation and to feel deceived and bitter.
The dilemma facing the Jewish majority in Israel has come into sharper focus in the wake of the recent events of last October. On the one hand, there is the approach that advocates a campaign of punishment and which demands not only that the domination by the Jewish majority of the Arab minority continue but that it be intensified by means of the negation of civil rights and by means of other "sticks" - with a small piece of carrot thrown in from time to time.
This approach, which was supported by many members of the Jewish public in Israel until the October riots, has developed thick, tangled roots in the wake of those events. One of the reasons why this approach is enticing and seductive is the phenomenal manner in which the Israeli public discourse has managed to conceal the price tag in the folds of the discourse's garment - relinquishing of the principles of natural equality and genuine democracy, a dangerous slide toward an apartheid-style "democracy of the master race," and living on borrowed time until the violent and inevitable uprising of the victims of this regime.
On the one hand, there is a need for presenting an approach that assigns supreme importance to the principle of equal citizenship. This approach is diametrically opposed to the principle that the right to participate in the life of the state and to enjoy the resources of the state depends on the individual's ethno-national identity.
This principle, however, is a complete distortion of the present situation. The real danger lies in Israel's obstinate adherence to its ethno-national self-definition as a "Jewish state." This spirit is carrying Israeli society and the state as a whole toward a slippery slope at the bottom of which there is an intensification of ethnic oppression - a violent, dark syndrome that has already been termed the "dark side of democracy."
The Arab citizens of Israel have a special role to play in the multi-group struggle over the future of the state. Their success will depend, of course, on the ability of the Jewish majority to harness the emotional resources needed to turn its ethno-territorial project into a comprehensive liberal democracy.
Such a dramatic about-face will signal the choice of a path that can enable this strife-ridden state to survive and to prosper despite its powerful internal tensions. If the Arabs fail in this mission and if the illusion of the seemingly unified Jewish ethnic project remains dominant for another generation or two, there is the distinct possibility that a much more extensive social and political collapse could take place here. The responsibility for that failure would be shared by everyone.
Rising Above the Daily Killings
By Sam Bahour and Michael Dahan
October 18, 2001
With the assassination of right-wing Israeli Minister Rehavam Ze'evi, the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians is once again on the front burner. In the coming days, neither side of this bitter conflict will be at a loss for rhetoric to explain their positions.
If you are Palestinian, the late Minister Ze'evi represented one of the most racist elements in the Israeli political spectrum. His political worldview called for the forced transfer of Palestinians from their indigenous homes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the rest of the Arab world. His death comes after the Israeli cabinet, of which he was part, successfully and openly carried out 60 political assassinations of Palestinians over the past 12 months.
The Palestinians who claimed responsibility for this assassination clearly picked a delicate time for their actions, a time that has the potential to destroy the recent U.S. rapprochement of bringing the two warring sides back to relative stability after one full year of deadly confrontations.
If you are Israeli, the assassination of Minister Ze'evi should come as a rude wake-up call that the arrogance of believing that total security can be sustained while still illegally occupying another people's land is a falsehood. Minister Ze'evi lived a political life that most Israelis, like all Palestinians, despised. He was for illegal settlements, against the Oslo Peace Process, and worked all his life to put the issue of forceful transfer of Palestinians on the Israeli mainstream agenda. By his appointment to the extremist cabinet of Ariel Sharon, Israelis witnessed the worst of their people leading their country during the worst of times. This was highlighted two days prior to Minister Ze'evi's death when he submitted his resignation as Minster and stated he would only reconsider if Israel militarily occupied the Palestinian city of Hebron or if his fellow peace-oriented Minister, Shimon Peres, resigned from the cabinet.
Large parts of the Israeli establishment, by using his assassination as the backdrop to make Minister Ze'evi a national hero and to re-occupy part of Palestine, have the same agenda as those who carried out the attack. Both wish to stop the renewed U.S. efforts to bring the parties to the negotiating table in a serious fashion with a serious agenda.
Now the limelight is not on the well-tuned propaganda machines of Israelis and Palestinians, but rather on the U.S. administration and its actions in the days to come.
In the days prior to this assassination, the Western world, led by the U.S., was clear. The parties must commit to a ceasefire, come back to the negotiating table, and aim to establish a viable, independent Palestinian State through peaceful means.
If the U.S. rapprochement during the past two weeks is sincere, then it is expected that the objects of the daily cycle of violence will not detract from the U.S.-led peace initiative. The real test of the new era after the September attack on the U.S. is now. The U.S. has an inherent moral, political, and security interest to rise above the daily headlines and create the framework for and oversee implementation of a just peace in the Middle East.
For the U.S. to stop at anything less than an immediate end to the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem and the Israeli recognition of a viable, independent Palestinian State, built on principles and resolutions of International Law, would be to give a gift to the assassins of Israeli Minister Rehavam Ze'evi and would indeed give merit to the warped political agenda of the rightwing Minister himself.
(Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American living in the besieged Palestinian City of Al-Bireh in the West Bank and can be reached at <sbahour@palnet.com>. Michael Dahan is an Israeli-American political scientist living in Jerusalem and can be reached at <mdahan@attglobal.net>.)