(believed by many in Palestine to have been Ariel Sharon,
therefore in continuation: remarks by Paul J.Balles about the possible identify of the interviewed "soldier")
by Amos Oz, an Israeli writer,
published by the Israeli daily Davar in December 17, 1982.
[Z]: “You can call me anything you like. Call me a monster or a murderer. Just note that I don’t hate Arabs. On the contrary. Personally, I am much more at ease with them, and especially with the Bedouin, than with Jews. Those Arabs we haven’t yet spoilt are proud people, they are irrational, cruel and generous. It’s the Yids that are all twisted. In order to straighten them out you have to first bend them sharply the other way. That, in brief, is my whole ideology”.
“Call Israel by any name you like, call it a Judeo-Nazi state as does Leibowitz. Why not? Better a live Judeo-Nazi than a dead saint. I don’t care whether I am like Ghadafi. I am not after the admiration of the gentiles. I don’t need their love. I don’t need to be loved by Jews like you either. I have to live, and I intend to ensure that my children will live as well. With or without the blessing of the Pope and the other religious leaders from the New York Times. I will destroy anyone who will raise a hand against my children, I will destroy him and his children, with or without our famous purity of arms. I don’t care if he is Christian, Muslim, Jewish or pagan. History teaches us that he who won’t kill will be killed by others. That is an iron law”.
“Even if you’ll prove to me by mathematical means that the present war in Lebanon is a dirty immoral war, I don’t care. Moreover, even if you will prove to me that we have not achieved and will not achieve any of our aims in Lebanon, that we will neither create a friendly regime in Lebanon nor destroy the Syrians or even the PLO, even then I don’t care. It was still worth it. Even if Galilee is shelled again by Katyushas in a year’s time, I don’t really care. We shall start another war, kill and destroy more and more, until they will have had enough. And do you know why it is all worth it? Because it seems that this war has made us more unpopular among the so-called civilised world”.
“We’ll hear no more of that nonsense about the unique Jewish morality, the moral lessons of the holocaust or about the Jews who were supposed to have emerged from the gas chambers pure and virtuous. No more of that. The destruction of Eyn Hilwe (and it’s a pity we did not wipe out that hornet’s nest completely!), the healthy bombardment of Beirut and that tiny massacre (can you call 500 Arabs a massacre?) in their camps which we should have committed with our own delicate hands rather than let the Phalangists do it, all these good deeds finally killed the bullshit talk about a unique people and of being a light upon the nations. No more uniqueness and no more sweetness and light. Good riddance.”
“I personally don’t want to be any better than Khomeini or Brezhnev or Ghadafi or Assad or Mrs. Thatcher, or even Harry Truman who killed half a million Japanese with two fine bombs. I only want to be smarter than they are, quicker and more efficient, not better or more beautiful than they are. Tell me, do the baddies of this world have a bad time? If anyone tries to touch them, the evil men cut his hands and legs off. They hunt and catch whatever they feel like eating. They don’t suffer from indigestion and are not punished by Heaven. I want Israel to join that club. Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear me instead of feeling sorry for me.
Maybe they will start to tremble, to fear my madness instead of admiring my nobility. Thank God for that. Let them tremble, let them call us a mad state. Let them understand that we are a wild country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal, that we might go crazy if one of our children is murdered - just one! That we might go wild and burn all the oil fields in the Middle East! If anything would happen to your child, God forbid, you would talk like I do. Let them be aware in Washington, Moscow, Damascus and China that if one of our ambassadors is shot, or even a consul or the most junior embassy official, we might start World War Three just like that!”
……We are talking while sitting on the balcony of the pretty country house belonging to C. which is situated in a prosperous Moshav. To the west we see a burning sunset and there is a scent of fruit trees in the air. We are being served iced coffee in tall glasses. C. is about fifty years old. He is a man well known for his (military) actions. He is a strong, heavy figure wearing shorts but no shirt. His body is tanned a metallic bronze shade, the colour of a blond man living in the sun. He puts his hairy legs on the table and his hands on the chair. There is a scar on his neck. His eyes wander over his plantations. He spells out his ideology in a voice made hoarse by too much smoking:
“Let me tell me [sic] what is the most important thing, the sweetest fruit of the war in Lebanon: It is that now they don’t just hate Israel. Thanks to us, they now also hate all those Feinschmecker Jews in Paris, London, New York, Frankfurt and Montreal, in all their holes. At last they hate all these nice Yids, who say they are different from us, that they are not Israeli thugs, that they are different Jews, clean and decent.
Just like the assimilated Jew in Vienna and Berlin begged the anti-Semite not to confuse him with the screaming, stinking Ostjude, who had smuggled himself into that cultural environment out of the dirty ghettos of Ukraine and Poland. It won’t help them, those clean Yids, just as it did not help them in Vienna and Berlin. Let them shout that they condemn Israel, that they are all right, that they did not want and don’t want to hurt a fly, that they always prefer being slaughtered to fighting, that they have taken it upon themselves to teach the gentiles how to be good Christians by always turning the other cheek. It won’t do them any good. Now they are getting it there because of us, and I am telling you, it is a pleasure to watch.”
“They are the same Yids who persuaded the gentiles to capitulate to the bastards in Vietnam, to give it in to Khomeini, to Brezhnev, to feel sorry for Sheikh Yamani because of his tough childhood, to make love not war. Or rather, to do neither, and instead write a thesis on love and war. We are through with all that. The Yid has been rejected, not only did he crucify Jesus, but he also crucified Arafat in Sabra and Shatila. They are being identified with us and that’s a good thing! Their cemeteries are being desecrated, their synagogues are set on fire, all their old nicknames are being revived, they are being expelled from the best clubs, people shoot into their ethnic restaurants murdering small children, forcing them to remove any sign showing them to be Jews, forcing them to move and change their profession.
“Soon their palaces will be smeared with the slogan: Yids, go to Palestine! And you know what? They will go to Palestine because they will have no other choice! All this is a bonus we received from the Lebanese war. Tell me, wasn’t it worth it? Soon we will hit on good times. The Jews will start arriving, the Israelis will stop emigrating and those who already emigrated will return. Those who had chosen assimilation will finally understand that it won’t help them to try and be the conscience of the world. The ‘conscience of the world’ will have to understand through its arse what it could not get into its head. The gentiles have always felt sick of the Yids and their conscience, and now the Yids will have only one option: to come home, all of them, fast, to install thick steel doors, to build a strong fence, to have submachine guns positioned at every corner of their fence here and to fight like devils against anyone who dares to make a sound in this region. And if anyone even raises his hand against us we’ll take away half his land and burn the other half, including the oil. We might use nuclear arms. We’ll go on until he no longer feels like it…”
“…You probably want to know whether I am not afraid of the masses of Yids coming here to escape anti-Semitism smearing us with their olive oil until we go all soft like them. Listen, history is funny in that way, there is a dialectic here, irony. Who was it who expanded the state of Israel almost up the boundaries of the kingdom of King David? Who expanded the state until it covered the area from Mount Hermon to Raz Muhammad? Levi Eshkol. Of all people, it was that follower of Gordon, that softie, that old woman. Who, on the other hand, is about to push us back into the walls of the ghetto? Who gave up all of Sinai in order to retain a civilised image?
Beitar’s governor in Poland, that proud man Menahem Begin. So you can never tell. I only know one thing for sure: as long as you are fighting for your life all is permitted, even to drive out all the Arabs from the West Bank, everything.”
“Leibowitz is right, we are Judeo-Nazis, and why not? Listen, a people that gave itself up to be slaughtered, a people that let soap to be made of its children and lamp shades from the skin of its women is a worse criminal than its murderers. Worse than the Nazis … If your nice civilised parents had come here in time instead of writing books about the love for humanity and singing ‘Hear O Israel’ on the way to the gas chambers, now don’t be shocked, if they instead had killed six million Arabs here or even one million, what would have happened?
Sure, two or three nasty pages would have been written in the history books, we would have been called all sorts of names, but we could be here today as a people of 25 million!”
“Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us, to pull the rug from underneath the feet of the Diaspora Jews, so that they will be forced to run to us crying. Even if it means blowing up one or two synagogues here and there, I don’t care. And I don’t mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal. Then you can spruce up your Jewish conscience and enter the respectable club of civilised nations, nations that are large and healthy. What you lot don’t understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it.
True, it could have been finished in 1948, but you interfered, you stopped it. And all this because of the Jewishness in your souls, because of your Diaspora mentality. For the Jews don’t grasp things quickly. If you open your eyes and look around the world you will see that darkness is falling again. And we know what happens to a Jew who stays out in the dark. So I am glad that this small war in Lebanon frightened the Yids. Let them be afraid, let them suffer. They should hurry home before it gets really dark. So I am an anti-Semite? Fine. So don’t quote me, quote Lilienblum instead [an early Russian Zionist - ed.]. There is no need to quote an anti-Semite. Quote Lilienblum, and he is definitely not an anti-Semite, there is even a street in Tel Aviv named after him”. (C. quotes from a small notebook that was lying on his table when I arrived:)
‘Is all that is happening not a clear sign that our forefathers and ourselves … wanted and still want to be disgraced? That we enjoy living like gypsies.’ That’s Lilienblum. Not me. Believe me. I went through the Zionist literature, I can prove what I say”.
“And you can write that I am disgrace to humanity, I don’t mind, on the contrary. Let’s make a deal: I will do all I can to expel the Arabs from here, I will do all I can to increase anti-Semitism, and you will write poems and essays about the misery of the Arabs and be prepared to absorb the Yids I will force to flee to this country and teach them to be a light unto the gentiles. How about it?”
It was there that I stopped C.’s monologue for a moment and expressed the thought passing through my mind, perhaps more for myself than for my host. Was it possible that Hitler had not only hurt the Jews but also poisoned their minds? Had that poison sunk in and was still active? But not even that idea could cause C. to protest or raise his voice. After all, he said to have never shouted under stress, even during the famous operations his name is associated with. [Hat Tip: MPACUK]
They Swarm Like Killer Bees
By Paul J. Balles
Al-Jazeerah, March 18, 2004
In a recent article, I referred to an interview of Ariel Sharon that was reportedly conducted by Amos Oz saying that Sharon wanted to foment global anti-Semitism to con Jews into leaving the Diaspora and moving to Israel. See:
Why is Senator John Kerry kowtowing to Israel? By Paul J. Balles (Al-Jazeerah, March 6, 2004).
Following publication of the article I received a friendly email query from New Zealand asking whether I could comment on the authenticity of the quotation attributed to Oz. Though the inquirer didn’t say so, I surmised that he might have seen the one source on the Internet debunking the interview and attacking Holger Jensen, the writer/editor who quoted it in the Denver Rocky Mountain News.
In my response, I noted that judging from what's available on the Internet, Jensen had been cheated out of a career at which he excelled.
The Interview of Oz with Ariel Sharon was reportedly published in the Israeli daily Davar, Dec.17, 1982 and reported by the Independent Media Centre at http://jerusalem.indymedia.org/news/2002/05/26661.php , the Islamic Association for Palestine at http://www.iap.org/sharonisvile.htm , The Voices of Palestine at http://www.voicesofpalestine.org/ArielSharon.asp and several other sites.
The only denial of the article's authenticity came from Ricki Hollander in Camera long after Davar stopped publication.
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=372&x_article=372
Hollander claimed that the interview came from Oz's book In the Land of Israel. Hollander wrote, "Amos Oz never met nor interviewed Sharon. In fact, the so-called “interview” was a literary device taken from Oz's book In the Land of Israel. In the English version, the interviewee's identity is not revealed, and is referred to as Z (Flamingo/Fontana 1983)."
Notice how Hollander tried to deny it was an "interview" and called it a "literary device"; yet she referred to "the interviewee's identity" in the next sentence. Hollander attempted to claim that Z did not fit Sharon, adding "at one point Z refers to Sharon, Begin and General Eitan" without pointing out that Sharon (Z) could easily refer to himself in the context of the other two.
Holger Jensen, who Camera faulted, had actually got the quote from Palestinian sources, and when Camera called him on it, he immediately retracted (according to Camera) his use of the quote rather than sticking by his belief in the authenticity of the story as he received it until Camera provided definite proof of its falsity.
Camera went on a campaign to vilify Jensen, writing "Holger Jensen’s distortions and misrepresentations require swift and forthright correction! Act now!" To accommodate that, they added:
"Contact John Temple, the Editor and Vice President of the Rocky Mountain News. Politely urge that Holger Jensen be held to the usual journalistic standards that require accuracy, balance and accountability. Politely demand that the paper ensure Jensen’s false charges and malicious distortions are corrected and that they do not recur. Write John Temple at:..."
The result: Jensen resigned as editor of the Rocky Mountain News under great pressure from these thugs who use Mafioso tactics to break the bones of anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their extortionist services.
As it turned out, Camera attributed the statements to "another unnamed Israeli soldier who died 11 years ago...” How convenient! "Another unnamed Israel soldier"! Camera had the audacity to challenge sources of information and statements made, while they relied on "unnamed" soldiers to fit their biased preconceptions.
In other words Hollander didn't deny the statements were made to Oz, but simply denied Sharon made them! There are few organizations in America as rabid in their protection of Sharon or as vicious in their vengeance of Israeli critics as Camera. The only reason that several reliable Palestinian news sources seem to have lost out in this instance to a Zionist news mafia in America is because of the power that the Zionists wield there.
In another version of the story, the interviewee is identified not as Z but as C, but the story is the same. What Camera doesn't say is that the interview from the book appeared in the daily Davar. It's inconceivable that the Palestinians reporting the interview would have read the book. However, there was never any question that the passage appeared in the book.
Z (or C) says, "I don't care if I am like Ghadafi." Is that something that an ordinary soldier would say (as Camera asserts)? Oz refers to his interviewee as about 50 years old. At the time of the interview, Sharon was 54 years old. Later he says "I personally don't want to be any better than Khomeini or Brezhnev or Ghadafi or Assad or Mrs. Thatcher, or even Harry Truman who killed half a million Japanese with two fine bombs." Is this just any soldier speaking or the leader of the pack comparing himself with other leaders?
And further on, Z (or C) says "Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear me instead of feeling sorry for me." Why would "the world" feel anything for an insignificant soldier as Camera attempts to portray the character? Could Z (or C) be anyone else when Oz writes "he was said to have never shouted under stress, even during the famous operations his name is associated with"?
Another Palestinian source reports that "Amos Oz reproduced this interview, with others, in his book in Hebrew, 1982: Amos Oz: Poh va-sham be-Erets-Yisra'el bi-setav, 1982, republished by Am Oved, Tel-Aviv, 1986. The interview is on pages 70-82. Amos Oz does not mention the name of Sharon, but uses the abbreviation Z. The facts given by Amos Oz indicate that the person interviewed is Ariel Sharon."
http://www.voicesofpalestine.org/ArielSharon.asp
The fact that the story was translated into several languages accounts for the different references to Z and C (and even T in another translation).
There's an unfortunate "mea culpa" presumably written by Holger Jensen at http://www.broeckers.com/jensen.htm indicating that he talked with Amos Oz after the flare up by Camera and that Oz said he had never interviewed Sharon. Holger also said some had believed that Oz could well have been saying that "now covering his ass."
Jensen also noted that he "received a sympathetic e-mail from Israel Shamir, another prominent Russian-Israeli journalist and author, saying dozens of Israeli journalists had attributed those quotes to Sharon in the past." As Jensen has said elsewhere, "American journalists who cover the Middle East are accustomed to attacks by hate web sites such as CAMERA and Honest Reporting, which bombard their editors with demands they be fired for 'pro-Arab' or 'anti-Israel' views."
Camera and other similar groups hate writers like Jensen because they represent a voice for even-handedness in the Middle East; and the Zionist controlled media will not allow any news organization, editor or writer the right to balanced judgment. For the kind of fair reporting Jensen was doing, see a March 2002 article at http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/cra0212.htm
I must say that I was disappointed that Jensen caved in so easily. The sadistic Zionists at Camera couldn't resist rubbing his face in the mud once they got him down.
Websites like Camera (or ADL, etc.) are worse than contemptible for their derision of any critic of Israel or Zionism. Their despicable use of pressure and lobbying to ruin the career of any non-compliant follower of Zionism is nothing but cheap, self-serving sleaze and fake bravado. They swarm like killer bees to destroy any opposition.
The question of authenticity of the Oz report depends on who you believe. I tend to believe the underdog trying to report what he sees as fairly and accurately as he perceives it rather than reprehensible thugs who not only engage in character assassination but who would destroy anyone who doesn't yield to their pressure and intimidation. The intimidators also make a mockery of "freedom of speech."
*Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for 35 years. For more information, see http://www.writerfreelance.com and http://www.pballes.com
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Seven Palestinian Children Killed in Strawberry Fields
by Israeli Anti-Personnel Shells
reported by:
The Palestinian Non-Governmental Network (PNGO) 5jan05
Israeli anti-personnel shells, which throw out thousands of metal darts in a deadly cloud that rips apart everything it encounters, killed seven children between the ages of ten and 17 in a strawberry field in northern Gaza yesterday. Dr. Mohamed Sultan of the Beit Lahiya hospital said eleven were also wounded, four critically. Two of the survivors had double leg amputations, another a single leg amputation.
According to eyewitnesses, Israeli occupation military posts between the illegal Israeli settlements of Elei Sinai and Nisanit, located north of the Palestinian town of Beit Lahiya, fired a tank shell at a Palestinian agricultural area south of the fence that separates the two settlements from Beit Lahiya. The shell directly hit a number of Palestinian children who were farming their land.
Six of the boys who were killed were from the same family, and three were brothers. The names of the dead children are: Hani Mohammed Ghaben (17), and his brothers Bassam (14) and Mohammed (12); their cousins Rajeh Ghassan Ghaben (10), Jaber Abdullah Ghaben (15), Mohammed Hassan Ghaben (17); and a neighbor named Jibril Abdul Fattah al-Kaseeh (16).
The father of the three dead brothers was among the villagers who came to see the effects of the shelling. When he reached the site, he was shocked to see the scattered and bloody remains of his dead children. Medical staff and family members gathered the shredded body part of the children from the grass and clay.
Israeli violence has intensified in the run-up to the first Palestinian presidential elections in eight years. Since Yasser Arafat died, during a much-vaunted ‘window of opportunity for peace’, more than 75 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, many of them children. In the same period, no Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinians.
reported by:
The Palestinian Non-Governmental Network (PNGO) 5jan05
Israeli anti-personnel shells, which throw out thousands of metal darts in a deadly cloud that rips apart everything it encounters, killed seven children between the ages of ten and 17 in a strawberry field in northern Gaza yesterday. Dr. Mohamed Sultan of the Beit Lahiya hospital said eleven were also wounded, four critically. Two of the survivors had double leg amputations, another a single leg amputation.
According to eyewitnesses, Israeli occupation military posts between the illegal Israeli settlements of Elei Sinai and Nisanit, located north of the Palestinian town of Beit Lahiya, fired a tank shell at a Palestinian agricultural area south of the fence that separates the two settlements from Beit Lahiya. The shell directly hit a number of Palestinian children who were farming their land.
Six of the boys who were killed were from the same family, and three were brothers. The names of the dead children are: Hani Mohammed Ghaben (17), and his brothers Bassam (14) and Mohammed (12); their cousins Rajeh Ghassan Ghaben (10), Jaber Abdullah Ghaben (15), Mohammed Hassan Ghaben (17); and a neighbor named Jibril Abdul Fattah al-Kaseeh (16).
The father of the three dead brothers was among the villagers who came to see the effects of the shelling. When he reached the site, he was shocked to see the scattered and bloody remains of his dead children. Medical staff and family members gathered the shredded body part of the children from the grass and clay.
Israeli violence has intensified in the run-up to the first Palestinian presidential elections in eight years. Since Yasser Arafat died, during a much-vaunted ‘window of opportunity for peace’, more than 75 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, many of them children. In the same period, no Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinians.
Abu Nidal and Abu'l Abbas
World's most prolific terrorist
Biography:
The Abu Nidal Organization had operated for over 30 years, and was responsible for over 900 deaths. Targets included hijackings, bombings, and assassination of troublesome Palestinian leaders.
Abu Nidal AKA Sabri al-Banna, was was born in 1937, and there are various versions of his history.
One version has his family losing everything, in 1948, to the Jews, and he drifted from refugee camp to camp. He finally wound up in Saudi Arabia, where he started his terror organization, - Black September.
Another version has him as a son of an Arab mother and a Jewish father. He was outcast by his 1/2 brothers, and sisters, and was educated in Israel, and then Cairo.
He worked out of Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Lebanon. He died in August of 2002.
"The 'Abu the Terrorist' was really Mossad"
Author Patrick Seale wrote:
Confirming Seale's theory are top Middle East terrorism experts, including intelligence officers in Arab countries, and even within Abu Nidal's own organization.
All the European and Mid-East terror experts agree that Nidal was Mossad.
He was a protégé of Menacham Begins ... ran free for 30 yrs ...used to kill unwanted Palestinians
Seale pointed out the senseless and extremely brutal attacks only benefited Israel. Nidal had two thrusts:
He killed Palestinians that were a threat to Israel, and hijacked American and European jets.
Seale's hypothesis is based on four main points:
1. Abu Nidal killings have damaged the Palestinian cause to Israel's advantage.
2. Only 10% of the victims were Jewish, the other 90% were bystanders.
3. The lack of attacks on Israel.
4. Lack of involvement in the Intifada, and Israel's failure to retaliate against Abu Nidal's groups.
1970 Jordan
"Black September" hijacked four aircraft to Dawson's Field, a former RAF base in Zarga, Jordan, where they were destroyed.
Another aircraft, a Pan Am Boeing 747-100, was hijacked by two Palestinians and landed in Beirut for re-fueling. The hijackers then realized the 747 is too big to land on the short runway. Therefore, the aircraft was re-routed to Cairo, where it was destroyed.
The 1972 Munich Olympic massacre
Abu's organization, Black September, invaded the Munich's Olympic village, and took the Israeli Olympics team hostage. There was a standoff, and the Germans agreed to let the Nidal's operatives escape. They go to an airport were they are ambushed, and some of the terrorists were killed as well as 11 Israelis .
Israel has the Mossad assassinate the 11 Arabs connected, but don't touch Abu Nidal.
The odd part --- Abu Nidal killed from 1972 till 2002, and the Mossad never retaliated and killed him?
1976 ... Entebbe
Nidal's organization hijacked an Air France jet, and flew to Benghazi, Libya, where they released everyone but the Jewish passengers. Next they flew to Entebbe, Uganda, where Idi Amin ( an Israeli puppet), decided to help the hijackers.
Israel then pulled a rescue, portraying themselves as elite commandos, and the Arabs as despicable.
There have been three movies and eight books about the Entebbe raid.
1982 Paris
Nidal's group machine-gunned American tourists at Goldenberg's Restaurant in Paris.
Six people died, and 22, were wounded in the attack .
Most of the dead were non-Jewish American tourists
1985 Athens
Nidal's group fired a rocket at an Alia airliner as it took off from Athens airport.
1985 Greece
Egypt Air Flight 648, departing from Athens, was hijacked, and an Egyptian air marshal engages in a high-altitude gun fight. The pilot landed in Malta for additional fuel, and when officials refused fuel, the hijackers start shooting passengers point-blank in the head.
The 30-hour hostage drama ended with Egyptian commandos storming the plane, triggering a bloody grenade and gun battle. Sixty more people died in the raid, including two hijackers.
1985 Egypt
Four members of Nidal's group hijacked a cruise ship, and threw Leon Klinghoffer and his wheelchair into the ocean.
The terrorists surrendered to Hosni Mubarak, and he flew them to safety. Reagan had F-14 Tomcats intercept the airliner, and force it to land in Sicily.
The terrorists were released, and Israel never touched the ring-leader, because he was Mossad.
1985 Rome and Vienna
At the Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, Nidal's Black September teams machine-guned people at a ticket counter, killing 13 and wounding 75. At the same time, another team in hits Vienna's airport killing three people, and wounding 30.
Austrian police killed one of the gunmen, and captured the others.
1986 Berlin
Mossad inserted two agents into Tripoli, who broadcasted bogus messages about an upcoming bomb plot. The CIA intercepted the broadcast , and listened for weeks, thinking they were Libyans.
Nidal's group planted a bomb in a popular GI hang-out, the La Belle disco. The Mossad killed two US servicement, a Turkish woman, and maimed another 229 people.
Reagan bought into it, and bombed Libya as retaliation.
It took the US government 10 days to retaliate for the attack by bombing Libya - it took 15 years, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, to convict the attackers.
1986 A Sudanese airliner
was shot down by a Strela-7 missile. Nidal was believed to be behind this attack.
1986 Pakistan
Pan Am Fl 73 is hijacked by four armed men with Black September. It had 379 passenger on-board, and was en route from Karachi to JFK airport in New York.
As Pakistani security force tried storming the plane, Nidal's men threw grenades, killing 22, and seriously maiming another 150. The four terrorists were captured.
1986 Rome
Nidal's Black September hit a Boeing 727 (TWA Flight 840), flying from Rome to Athens, with a missile that did not explode. The plane landed ok.
1986 Turkey
Abu Nidal's organization attacked Istanbul's Neve Shalom synagogue, and killed 21 people.
1988 Athens
Posing as day tourists, Nidal's group boarded a Greek cruise ship, the 'City of Poros'. They waited until it went out to sea, then pulled machine guns and grenades from their backpacks, and swept the lounges and deck areas.
Nine passengers died, and 98 were injured.
1988 Scotland
Abu Nidal's 'Black September' planted a thermite bomb in the luggage compartment of a 747, and plane explodes over Lockerbie.
Nidal's lieutenant , Atef Abu Bakr, testified " That ' Black September ' was behind it".
...................
Another Terrorist Mastermind:
Abu'l Abbas
1985 Achille Lauro
The hi-jacking of the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro by "Palestinian terrorists" was later reliably reported by former IDF arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe in his 1992 book, Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network, to have been ordered and funded by Mossad.
Ben-Menashe revealed that Israeli intelligence organizations regularly engaged in "black operations," espionage activity designed to portray Palestinians and others in the worst possible light. "An example," wrote Ben-Menashe, "is the case of the 'Palestinian' attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. That was, in fact, an Israeli 'black' propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were. " According to Ben-Menashe, Israeli spymasters arranged the attack through "Abu'l Abbas, who, to follow such orders was receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons. Abbas . . . gathered a team to attack the cruise ship. The team was told to make it bad, to show the world what lay in store for other unsuspecting citizens if Palestinian demands were not met.
As the world knows, the group picked on an elderly American Jewish man in a wheelchair, killed him, and threw his body overboard. They made their point. But for Israel, it was the best kind of anti- Palestinian propaganda." It should be noted that in April 1996, Abbas returned to Gaza and in a show of support for Yasser Arafat apologized for the hi-jacking and the killing of the American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer without mentioning him by name, saying, "The hi-jacking was a mistake, and there were no orders to kill civilians." Abbas made no mention of Mossad involvement in the hi-jacking according to the April 23, 1996 Associated Press report.
Oddly the Mossad let Abbas live
Inexplicably, Abbas was allowed to go to Yugoslavia. An Italian court convicted 11 of 15 others associated with the hijacking, while Abbas and another terrorist were tried in absentia and found guilty. Abbas was sentenced to life in prison. Bassam al-Asker, one of the Achille Lauro hijackers, was granted parole in 1991. Ahmad Marrouf al-Assadi, another accomplice, disappeared in 1991 while on parole.
Abbas was never arrested. In 1990, he struck again from the sea, with an abortive speedboat attack on bathers on a beach near Tel Aviv.
Though he was sentenced to five life terms in Italy, and was wanted in the United States, Abbas remained a free man. He spent most of the years after the hijacking in Tunisia before moving to the Gaza Strip in April 1996, after the Palestinian Authority took control of the area as part of the peace agreement with Israel.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/achille.html
..........
Biography:
The Abu Nidal Organization had operated for over 30 years, and was responsible for over 900 deaths. Targets included hijackings, bombings, and assassination of troublesome Palestinian leaders.
Abu Nidal AKA Sabri al-Banna, was was born in 1937, and there are various versions of his history.
One version has his family losing everything, in 1948, to the Jews, and he drifted from refugee camp to camp. He finally wound up in Saudi Arabia, where he started his terror organization, - Black September.
Another version has him as a son of an Arab mother and a Jewish father. He was outcast by his 1/2 brothers, and sisters, and was educated in Israel, and then Cairo.
He worked out of Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Lebanon. He died in August of 2002.
"The 'Abu the Terrorist' was really Mossad"
Author Patrick Seale wrote:
Abu Nidal was undoubtedly a Mossad agent. Practically every job he did benefited Israel.
Confirming Seale's theory are top Middle East terrorism experts, including intelligence officers in Arab countries, and even within Abu Nidal's own organization.
All the European and Mid-East terror experts agree that Nidal was Mossad.
He was a protégé of Menacham Begins ... ran free for 30 yrs ...used to kill unwanted Palestinians
Seale pointed out the senseless and extremely brutal attacks only benefited Israel. Nidal had two thrusts:
He killed Palestinians that were a threat to Israel, and hijacked American and European jets.
Seale's hypothesis is based on four main points:
1. Abu Nidal killings have damaged the Palestinian cause to Israel's advantage.
2. Only 10% of the victims were Jewish, the other 90% were bystanders.
3. The lack of attacks on Israel.
4. Lack of involvement in the Intifada, and Israel's failure to retaliate against Abu Nidal's groups.
1970 Jordan
"Black September" hijacked four aircraft to Dawson's Field, a former RAF base in Zarga, Jordan, where they were destroyed.
Another aircraft, a Pan Am Boeing 747-100, was hijacked by two Palestinians and landed in Beirut for re-fueling. The hijackers then realized the 747 is too big to land on the short runway. Therefore, the aircraft was re-routed to Cairo, where it was destroyed.
The 1972 Munich Olympic massacre
Abu's organization, Black September, invaded the Munich's Olympic village, and took the Israeli Olympics team hostage. There was a standoff, and the Germans agreed to let the Nidal's operatives escape. They go to an airport were they are ambushed, and some of the terrorists were killed as well as 11 Israelis .
Israel has the Mossad assassinate the 11 Arabs connected, but don't touch Abu Nidal.
The odd part --- Abu Nidal killed from 1972 till 2002, and the Mossad never retaliated and killed him?
1976 ... Entebbe
Nidal's organization hijacked an Air France jet, and flew to Benghazi, Libya, where they released everyone but the Jewish passengers. Next they flew to Entebbe, Uganda, where Idi Amin ( an Israeli puppet), decided to help the hijackers.
Israel then pulled a rescue, portraying themselves as elite commandos, and the Arabs as despicable.
There have been three movies and eight books about the Entebbe raid.
1982 Paris
Nidal's group machine-gunned American tourists at Goldenberg's Restaurant in Paris.
Six people died, and 22, were wounded in the attack .
Most of the dead were non-Jewish American tourists
1985 Athens
Nidal's group fired a rocket at an Alia airliner as it took off from Athens airport.
1985 Greece
Egypt Air Flight 648, departing from Athens, was hijacked, and an Egyptian air marshal engages in a high-altitude gun fight. The pilot landed in Malta for additional fuel, and when officials refused fuel, the hijackers start shooting passengers point-blank in the head.
The 30-hour hostage drama ended with Egyptian commandos storming the plane, triggering a bloody grenade and gun battle. Sixty more people died in the raid, including two hijackers.
1985 Egypt
Four members of Nidal's group hijacked a cruise ship, and threw Leon Klinghoffer and his wheelchair into the ocean.
The terrorists surrendered to Hosni Mubarak, and he flew them to safety. Reagan had F-14 Tomcats intercept the airliner, and force it to land in Sicily.
The terrorists were released, and Israel never touched the ring-leader, because he was Mossad.
1985 Rome and Vienna
At the Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, Nidal's Black September teams machine-guned people at a ticket counter, killing 13 and wounding 75. At the same time, another team in hits Vienna's airport killing three people, and wounding 30.
Austrian police killed one of the gunmen, and captured the others.
1986 Berlin
Mossad inserted two agents into Tripoli, who broadcasted bogus messages about an upcoming bomb plot. The CIA intercepted the broadcast , and listened for weeks, thinking they were Libyans.
Nidal's group planted a bomb in a popular GI hang-out, the La Belle disco. The Mossad killed two US servicement, a Turkish woman, and maimed another 229 people.
Reagan bought into it, and bombed Libya as retaliation.
It took the US government 10 days to retaliate for the attack by bombing Libya - it took 15 years, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, to convict the attackers.
1986 A Sudanese airliner
was shot down by a Strela-7 missile. Nidal was believed to be behind this attack.
1986 Pakistan
Pan Am Fl 73 is hijacked by four armed men with Black September. It had 379 passenger on-board, and was en route from Karachi to JFK airport in New York.
As Pakistani security force tried storming the plane, Nidal's men threw grenades, killing 22, and seriously maiming another 150. The four terrorists were captured.
1986 Rome
Nidal's Black September hit a Boeing 727 (TWA Flight 840), flying from Rome to Athens, with a missile that did not explode. The plane landed ok.
1986 Turkey
Abu Nidal's organization attacked Istanbul's Neve Shalom synagogue, and killed 21 people.
1988 Athens
Posing as day tourists, Nidal's group boarded a Greek cruise ship, the 'City of Poros'. They waited until it went out to sea, then pulled machine guns and grenades from their backpacks, and swept the lounges and deck areas.
Nine passengers died, and 98 were injured.
1988 Scotland
Abu Nidal's 'Black September' planted a thermite bomb in the luggage compartment of a 747, and plane explodes over Lockerbie.
Nidal's lieutenant , Atef Abu Bakr, testified " That ' Black September ' was behind it".
...................
Another Terrorist Mastermind:
Abu'l Abbas
1985 Achille Lauro
The hi-jacking of the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro by "Palestinian terrorists" was later reliably reported by former IDF arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe in his 1992 book, Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network, to have been ordered and funded by Mossad.
Ben-Menashe revealed that Israeli intelligence organizations regularly engaged in "black operations," espionage activity designed to portray Palestinians and others in the worst possible light. "An example," wrote Ben-Menashe, "is the case of the 'Palestinian' attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. That was, in fact, an Israeli 'black' propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were. " According to Ben-Menashe, Israeli spymasters arranged the attack through "Abu'l Abbas, who, to follow such orders was receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons. Abbas . . . gathered a team to attack the cruise ship. The team was told to make it bad, to show the world what lay in store for other unsuspecting citizens if Palestinian demands were not met.
As the world knows, the group picked on an elderly American Jewish man in a wheelchair, killed him, and threw his body overboard. They made their point. But for Israel, it was the best kind of anti- Palestinian propaganda." It should be noted that in April 1996, Abbas returned to Gaza and in a show of support for Yasser Arafat apologized for the hi-jacking and the killing of the American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer without mentioning him by name, saying, "The hi-jacking was a mistake, and there were no orders to kill civilians." Abbas made no mention of Mossad involvement in the hi-jacking according to the April 23, 1996 Associated Press report.
Oddly the Mossad let Abbas live
Inexplicably, Abbas was allowed to go to Yugoslavia. An Italian court convicted 11 of 15 others associated with the hijacking, while Abbas and another terrorist were tried in absentia and found guilty. Abbas was sentenced to life in prison. Bassam al-Asker, one of the Achille Lauro hijackers, was granted parole in 1991. Ahmad Marrouf al-Assadi, another accomplice, disappeared in 1991 while on parole.
Abbas was never arrested. In 1990, he struck again from the sea, with an abortive speedboat attack on bathers on a beach near Tel Aviv.
Though he was sentenced to five life terms in Italy, and was wanted in the United States, Abbas remained a free man. He spent most of the years after the hijacking in Tunisia before moving to the Gaza Strip in April 1996, after the Palestinian Authority took control of the area as part of the peace agreement with Israel.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/achille.html
..........
(Don’t) Mention the word J**
by William Bowles
Speaking at a memorial for the victims of a Palestinian attack that took place 26 years ago, [Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev] Boim said: “What is it about Islam as a whole and the Palestinians in particular? Is it some form of cultural deprivation? Is it some genetic defect? There is something that defies explanation in this continued murderousness.” [Likud Knesset Member Yehiel] Hazan subsequently stated: “He’s right. It’s been a known fact for many years that Arabs slaughter and murder Jews, without any connection to land. It’s imprinted in their blood. It’s something genetic. I haven’t done research, but there’s no possibility of explaining it differently. You can’t believe an Arab, even one who’s 40 years in his grave.”
Mention the word Jew in anything except reverential tones and it’s like calling the Pope a paedophile. Talk about walking on soft-boiled eggs as Muddy Waters used to sing.
Such is the lock the Zionist propaganda machine has on the way anything to do with Israel is reported that even ‘Jews’ are not exempt from the wrath of the Zionist disinfo blitz as the various vicious campaigns being conducted on university campuses amply demonstrate against so-called self-hating Jews who don’t fall into line behind the mythology of the Zionist state testifies to.
Now many in the West excuse this craven obeisance by putting it down to some kind of collective guilt about the ‘Holocaust’, oh that such guilt should extend to my Roma brethren, who were also exterminated in their millions and to this day, remain the ‘niggers’ of Europe, excluded, ghettoized and victimised. Where are the endless stream of documentaries and rending of garments concerning our treatment of the Roma people? Where are the daily news stories about the continued treatment of the Roma right across Europe, let alone what the Nazis did to them sixty years ago?
However, talk of Jews as a ‘race’ controlling the media, banks etc, is not only incorrect, it entirely misses the point about the role Zionism plays in the imperialist project and indeed the key role that Zionism has played throughout the 20th century as a weapon of imperialism. Worse still, Zionism has virtually nothing to do with being Jewish, it’s yet another sleight of hand pulled by imperialism. Being Jewish, which aside from its religious connection is very much a state of mind, which just goes to show how successful the propaganda has been in creating an illusion about the Jewish ‘race’.
We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel … Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.
– Rafael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, quoted in Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1983, and The New York Times, April 14, 1983
Can you imagine what the reaction of the Western media would have been if the statement above had been made by a Palestinian, or indeed anyone who is not Jewish? So how is it that Israeli Zionists can get away with such obviously racist statements?
Central to the issue of Israel and ‘Jews’ is the ideology of racism as an essential element in the class war being waged against all who oppose the imperium. An ideology used to divide and rule, an ideology so pervasive that it completely determines any and all debate about Israel, whether it be the ‘right’ that Jews allegedly have to ‘return’ through to the way the West regards Palestinians and its brazen acceptance of being ‘Jewish’ as a justification for theft, murder and oppression.
Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial. – Ariel Sharon
For anyone has been following the massive propaganda campaign that has been conducted over the ‘evacuation’ of settlers in Gaza, one thing is clear; Palestinians are obviously non-people for how else can one explain the gulf between press coverage of the relocation of the settlers with the following statistics
1,719 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip from the end of September 2000 until today; and according to various estimates, some two-thirds of them were unarmed and were not killed in battles or during the course of attempts to attack a military position or a settlement.
Based on figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, of those killed, 379 were children under the age of 18; 236 were younger than 16; 96 were women; and 102 were the objectives of targeted liquidations during the course of which the Israel Defense Forces also killed another 95 individuals who, according to the military too, were “innocent” bystanders.
Some 9,000 Gaza residents were injured; 2,704 homes to some 20,000 people were razed by the IDF’s bulldozers and assault helicopters; 2,187 were partially destroyed. Some 31,650 dunams of agricultural land were left scorched.
‘The remaining 99.5 percent’ Amira Hass
Were such statistics to be about Israelis, again, imagine the clamour in the Western media! There is only one explanation for the existence of such a vast chasm between press coverage of Israel and that of the Palestinians and that is the role racism plays in reducing Palestinians to that of sub-humans, but don’t take my word for it, let the Zionists own words speak for them
[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs – Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset – New Statesman, June 25, 1982.
And these words are by no means the exception, they underpin the central thrust of the Israeli state’s propaganda war which is to project ‘Jews’ as the eternal victim, and of course, the epithet ‘anti-semite’ is synonymous with any criticism made of the Israeli state’s colonial/imperialist objectives.
May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them.
It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones – Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef , Ha’aretz April 12, 2001
Is this Osama bin Laden speaking or the so-called pinnacle of Western civilisation, our ‘Judeo-Christian’ culture? And the propaganda campaign is endless without a day passing when there isn’t some reference to the ‘plight’ of the Jews in the Western media. Interminable documentaries on the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis but rarely a mention of the many millions of others who were exterminated using the same methodical and ruthless system. So complete is the appropriation of the Holocaust by the Zionists I am surprised the word hasn’t been trademarked.
And the following statement sums up the policy of the state of Israel and points to how fundamental the role of racism is in relegating first and foremost Palestinians and then the Arabs to that of a sub-human species from the very beginning of the founding of Israel, hence betraying the notion that the current response is to Palestinian ‘terrorists’.
The state… must see the sword as the main if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may know it MUST invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation and revenge… And above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space – Diary of Moshe Sharett, Israeli’s first Foreign Minister from 1948-1956, and Prime Minister from 1954-1956.
The parallels with the Nazi concept of ‘lebensraum’ or loving space is not lost on me even if it is ignored by the Western media.
Instead, Western media coverage continues to misrepresent the reality of the illegal Israeli occupation, so we read in an article titled ‘Israeli PM faces West Bank gamble’ on the BBC News Website, 25/8/05
Even as Israeli forces moved in to clear four West Bank settlements, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon reaffirmed his commitment to settlement construction.
Mr Sharon was referring to the large blocs of Ariel and Maale Adumim, and controversial plans for new suburbs linking the latter to Jerusalem.
He has made no secret of his intention to hold on the major West Bank blocs.
No mention of the fact that all the settlements on the West Bank are illegal, instead they are presented to us “controversial”. The piece ends once again by placing the responsibility on the Palestinians
Much now depends upon what happens in Gaza.
Will the Palestinians focus on peaceful reconstruction or will radical groups seek to use the abandoned settlements as launch-pads for attacks into Israel?
Will violence simply move from Gaza to the West Bank, where the Israeli Army will still patrol the area of the evacuated settlements?
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4176822.stm
Thus the issue of the vast bulk of the illegal settlements on the West Bank is neatly sidestepped as the BBC’s report is already setting the stage for the next series of hoops that the Palestinians will have to jump through.
Through continually misrepresenting the reality of continued land grabs, not to mention the genocidal policies of Sharon’s government in carving up what’s left of any putative ‘Palestinian state’, as being dependent on the actions of Palestinian “radicals”, the media avoid the issue of Israel’s illegal policies. And in fact, the BBC article, quoted from above, doesn’t once mention that the actions of Israel are in fact illegal under international law as well as innumerable UN resolutions going back for thirty years.
What has to be emphasised is the fact that I picked the BBC article pretty well at random, it could have been one of literally dozens of articles from a wide range of ‘news’ sources, all of whom ignore the fundamental reality of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians and focus instead on how ‘unreasonable’ the Palestinians are, or how they had to ‘curb’ the actions of ‘radicals’ before Israel even conceded to rehousing a mere 2% or so of the 450,000 illegal settlers on what’s left of any future Palestine. And note here that unlike the 2700 Palestinian homes destroyed by the Israelis since September 2000, with armoured bulldozers and helicopter gunships, sometimes with the inhabitants still inside, the Israeli settlers will be rehoused (at US taxpayers expense), many on the continually expanding settlements on the West Bank. The same cannot be said of the Palestinians whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed.
As some reportage has made plain, Gaza is now one big prison instead of four, yet what this means, what it says about Israeli policies toward the Palestinians is still ignored by the mainstream press, even as the words are uttered. There can only be one explanation for such a deliberate myopia and that is a racism so entrenched in Western news coverage that it can blatantly ignore the awful injustice of Israeli actions and policies. It points once more to something I will continue express ‘til I die, that the ideology of racism is a major stumbling block to opening peoples’ eyes to what is going on in the world and that until we face this reality, we cannot begin to deal with our rulers actions, let alone our own role in allowing the continuance of such an unjust world.
Speaking at a memorial for the victims of a Palestinian attack that took place 26 years ago, [Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev] Boim said: “What is it about Islam as a whole and the Palestinians in particular? Is it some form of cultural deprivation? Is it some genetic defect? There is something that defies explanation in this continued murderousness.” [Likud Knesset Member Yehiel] Hazan subsequently stated: “He’s right. It’s been a known fact for many years that Arabs slaughter and murder Jews, without any connection to land. It’s imprinted in their blood. It’s something genetic. I haven’t done research, but there’s no possibility of explaining it differently. You can’t believe an Arab, even one who’s 40 years in his grave.”
Mention the word Jew in anything except reverential tones and it’s like calling the Pope a paedophile. Talk about walking on soft-boiled eggs as Muddy Waters used to sing.
Such is the lock the Zionist propaganda machine has on the way anything to do with Israel is reported that even ‘Jews’ are not exempt from the wrath of the Zionist disinfo blitz as the various vicious campaigns being conducted on university campuses amply demonstrate against so-called self-hating Jews who don’t fall into line behind the mythology of the Zionist state testifies to.
Now many in the West excuse this craven obeisance by putting it down to some kind of collective guilt about the ‘Holocaust’, oh that such guilt should extend to my Roma brethren, who were also exterminated in their millions and to this day, remain the ‘niggers’ of Europe, excluded, ghettoized and victimised. Where are the endless stream of documentaries and rending of garments concerning our treatment of the Roma people? Where are the daily news stories about the continued treatment of the Roma right across Europe, let alone what the Nazis did to them sixty years ago?
However, talk of Jews as a ‘race’ controlling the media, banks etc, is not only incorrect, it entirely misses the point about the role Zionism plays in the imperialist project and indeed the key role that Zionism has played throughout the 20th century as a weapon of imperialism. Worse still, Zionism has virtually nothing to do with being Jewish, it’s yet another sleight of hand pulled by imperialism. Being Jewish, which aside from its religious connection is very much a state of mind, which just goes to show how successful the propaganda has been in creating an illusion about the Jewish ‘race’.
We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel … Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.
– Rafael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, quoted in Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1983, and The New York Times, April 14, 1983
Can you imagine what the reaction of the Western media would have been if the statement above had been made by a Palestinian, or indeed anyone who is not Jewish? So how is it that Israeli Zionists can get away with such obviously racist statements?
Central to the issue of Israel and ‘Jews’ is the ideology of racism as an essential element in the class war being waged against all who oppose the imperium. An ideology used to divide and rule, an ideology so pervasive that it completely determines any and all debate about Israel, whether it be the ‘right’ that Jews allegedly have to ‘return’ through to the way the West regards Palestinians and its brazen acceptance of being ‘Jewish’ as a justification for theft, murder and oppression.
Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial. – Ariel Sharon
For anyone has been following the massive propaganda campaign that has been conducted over the ‘evacuation’ of settlers in Gaza, one thing is clear; Palestinians are obviously non-people for how else can one explain the gulf between press coverage of the relocation of the settlers with the following statistics
1,719 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip from the end of September 2000 until today; and according to various estimates, some two-thirds of them were unarmed and were not killed in battles or during the course of attempts to attack a military position or a settlement.
Based on figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, of those killed, 379 were children under the age of 18; 236 were younger than 16; 96 were women; and 102 were the objectives of targeted liquidations during the course of which the Israel Defense Forces also killed another 95 individuals who, according to the military too, were “innocent” bystanders.
Some 9,000 Gaza residents were injured; 2,704 homes to some 20,000 people were razed by the IDF’s bulldozers and assault helicopters; 2,187 were partially destroyed. Some 31,650 dunams of agricultural land were left scorched.
‘The remaining 99.5 percent’ Amira Hass
Were such statistics to be about Israelis, again, imagine the clamour in the Western media! There is only one explanation for the existence of such a vast chasm between press coverage of Israel and that of the Palestinians and that is the role racism plays in reducing Palestinians to that of sub-humans, but don’t take my word for it, let the Zionists own words speak for them
[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs – Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset – New Statesman, June 25, 1982.
And these words are by no means the exception, they underpin the central thrust of the Israeli state’s propaganda war which is to project ‘Jews’ as the eternal victim, and of course, the epithet ‘anti-semite’ is synonymous with any criticism made of the Israeli state’s colonial/imperialist objectives.
May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them.
It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones – Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef , Ha’aretz April 12, 2001
Is this Osama bin Laden speaking or the so-called pinnacle of Western civilisation, our ‘Judeo-Christian’ culture? And the propaganda campaign is endless without a day passing when there isn’t some reference to the ‘plight’ of the Jews in the Western media. Interminable documentaries on the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis but rarely a mention of the many millions of others who were exterminated using the same methodical and ruthless system. So complete is the appropriation of the Holocaust by the Zionists I am surprised the word hasn’t been trademarked.
And the following statement sums up the policy of the state of Israel and points to how fundamental the role of racism is in relegating first and foremost Palestinians and then the Arabs to that of a sub-human species from the very beginning of the founding of Israel, hence betraying the notion that the current response is to Palestinian ‘terrorists’.
The state… must see the sword as the main if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may know it MUST invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation and revenge… And above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space – Diary of Moshe Sharett, Israeli’s first Foreign Minister from 1948-1956, and Prime Minister from 1954-1956.
The parallels with the Nazi concept of ‘lebensraum’ or loving space is not lost on me even if it is ignored by the Western media.
Instead, Western media coverage continues to misrepresent the reality of the illegal Israeli occupation, so we read in an article titled ‘Israeli PM faces West Bank gamble’ on the BBC News Website, 25/8/05
Even as Israeli forces moved in to clear four West Bank settlements, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon reaffirmed his commitment to settlement construction.
Mr Sharon was referring to the large blocs of Ariel and Maale Adumim, and controversial plans for new suburbs linking the latter to Jerusalem.
He has made no secret of his intention to hold on the major West Bank blocs.
No mention of the fact that all the settlements on the West Bank are illegal, instead they are presented to us “controversial”. The piece ends once again by placing the responsibility on the Palestinians
Much now depends upon what happens in Gaza.
Will the Palestinians focus on peaceful reconstruction or will radical groups seek to use the abandoned settlements as launch-pads for attacks into Israel?
Will violence simply move from Gaza to the West Bank, where the Israeli Army will still patrol the area of the evacuated settlements?
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4176822.stm
Thus the issue of the vast bulk of the illegal settlements on the West Bank is neatly sidestepped as the BBC’s report is already setting the stage for the next series of hoops that the Palestinians will have to jump through.
Through continually misrepresenting the reality of continued land grabs, not to mention the genocidal policies of Sharon’s government in carving up what’s left of any putative ‘Palestinian state’, as being dependent on the actions of Palestinian “radicals”, the media avoid the issue of Israel’s illegal policies. And in fact, the BBC article, quoted from above, doesn’t once mention that the actions of Israel are in fact illegal under international law as well as innumerable UN resolutions going back for thirty years.
What has to be emphasised is the fact that I picked the BBC article pretty well at random, it could have been one of literally dozens of articles from a wide range of ‘news’ sources, all of whom ignore the fundamental reality of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians and focus instead on how ‘unreasonable’ the Palestinians are, or how they had to ‘curb’ the actions of ‘radicals’ before Israel even conceded to rehousing a mere 2% or so of the 450,000 illegal settlers on what’s left of any future Palestine. And note here that unlike the 2700 Palestinian homes destroyed by the Israelis since September 2000, with armoured bulldozers and helicopter gunships, sometimes with the inhabitants still inside, the Israeli settlers will be rehoused (at US taxpayers expense), many on the continually expanding settlements on the West Bank. The same cannot be said of the Palestinians whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed.
As some reportage has made plain, Gaza is now one big prison instead of four, yet what this means, what it says about Israeli policies toward the Palestinians is still ignored by the mainstream press, even as the words are uttered. There can only be one explanation for such a deliberate myopia and that is a racism so entrenched in Western news coverage that it can blatantly ignore the awful injustice of Israeli actions and policies. It points once more to something I will continue express ‘til I die, that the ideology of racism is a major stumbling block to opening peoples’ eyes to what is going on in the world and that until we face this reality, we cannot begin to deal with our rulers actions, let alone our own role in allowing the continuance of such an unjust world.
Camp David Redux
Anatomy of a Frame-Up
By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
A few months ago, nearly five years after the collapse of the July 2000 Camp David summit at which President Bill Clinton expected to forge an historic Middle East peace agreement, a leading member of Clinton's negotiating team publicly acknowledged that rather than serve as a true mediator in peace negotiations, successive U.S. administrations including Clinton's have acted as "Israel's attorney." Writing on the Washington Post op-ed page in May 2005, Aaron David Miller admitted that Clinton and company followed Israel's lead "without critically examining what that would mean for our own interests, for those on the Arab side and for the overall success of the negotiations." The Clinton team's practice of running everything past Israel first "stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking. Far too often . . . our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one -- Israel." The result was utter failure; in these circumstances, no agreement could possibly meet Palestinian as well as Israeli needs.
Miller is a rarity among generations of senior policymakers who have been unable or unwilling to look back at their own policies and actions with frank honesty. Not surprisingly, the memoirs thus far published by the other policymakers involved in the Camp David collapse exhibit none of Miller's honesty. One should never, of course, take at face value the testimony of those who oversaw a years-long policy that ended in tatters, but these particular retrospectives are remarkably disingenuous. It is obviously difficult for anyone to acknowledge that a policy so patently misguided was enthusiastically pursued through Clinton's two terms (and, in the case of people like Miller and senior negotiator Dennis Ross, through three terms, going back to George H.W. Bush). This is what makes Miller's exposé so telling.
What Miller essentially reveals, although he does not say this explicitly, is that because it could not separate itself from Israel's interests and Israel's demands, the Clinton administration is ultimately responsible not only for the collapse of the peace process at Camp David, but for setting in motion everything that has followed: the intifada that erupted two months later, the five years (so far) of Palestinian-Israeli violence since then, the atrocities of Ariel Sharon's governance of the occupied Palestinian territories, and the end of Palestinian national hopes for a long time to come. Beyond all this, the continuation of the set of policies on the Palestinian issue that Clinton and company put in place probably wipes out any real hope of reducing terrorism against the U.S. and its allies. Although U.S. and other Western policymakers refuse to acknowledge this, Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, supported by the U.S., is a major cause of the hatred and resentment that spawned terror attacks such as September 11. As Israeli historian Avi Shlaim recently observed, "For most Arabs and Muslims the real issue in the Middle East is not Iraq, Iran or democracy but Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people and America's blind support for Israel." This perception intensified on Clinton's watch.
Clinton and his negotiators were so eager, in pursuit of Israel's interests and of Clinton's much-ballyhooed "legacy," to forge a peace agreement at all costs before the end of his term, and were so outraged when the Palestinians refused to relinquish their hope for true independence and sovereignty by complying with Israel's inadequate offer at Camp David, that they quite deliberately shifted the entire onus for failure onto the Palestinians. At a time when everyone, and certainly every policymaker, should have known that Palestinian frustration with the slow, unproductive pace of the seven-year-old peace process and the continued consolidation of Israel's occupation was near the point of explosion, Clinton's obvious effort to blame the Palestinians and side unreservedly with Israel when Israel did not get its way constituted an open invitation to violent upheaval.
The Myths
The myths about Camp David, and particularly about Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's supposedly "generous offer," have become part of an urban legend by now, particularly among those many commentators, friends of Israel, and instant experts who feel constrained to relieve Israel of any culpability for the Camp David collapse or the intifada that followed. Five years later, whenever the subject of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict comes up in any public discussion or commentary, it is unfailingly asserted that the Palestinians, and specifically Yasir Arafat, acting out of pure cussedness or pure hatred for Jews, rejected an Israeli peace offer of unbelievable generosity, an offer that would have given the Palestinians a state on 90 -- or sometimes 95 or 97 -- percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza, with all the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem as a capital. Had it not been for the Palestinians' turn to violence, so the myth goes, we would not now have Ariel Sharon in office, there would be a satisfactory peace, there would be no killings, and so on.
What the myths ignore is, first and foremost, that Barak's offers both at Camp David and six months later at the final negotiating session at Taba, Egypt, were not generous by any objective measure. The offers went further than any previous Israeli proposal had, but, since Israel had never before put forth any proposals on the key, so-called final-status issues, this says nothing. In fact, what the supposedly generous offer would have given the Palestinians would have been a state in four pieces, three in the West Bank plus Gaza, with a capital made up of Palestinian neighborhoods not contiguous either to each other or to the rest of the state. The major Israeli settlements, housing fully 80 percent of the 200,000 West Bank settlers and 100 percent of the almost 200,000 additional settlers in East Jerusalem, would have remained in place; the 300-mile road network throughout the West Bank built to connect the settlements and accessible only to Israelis would have remained in place; the "state" left to the Palestinians would have been a mere colony of Israel -- non-viable and indefensible, without borders with any state but Israel, totally at Israel's mercy.
Jeff Halper, the Israeli anthropologist and activist who heads the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and has extensively studied all aspects of the occupation, frequently points out that territory does not equate to sovereignty and that even a prison gives 95 percent of its space to the prisoners, while the prison walls, the cell doors, and occasional towers and other points of control constitute the controlling five percent. Under Barak's offer, the five percent (or three or ten percent) remaining in Israel's control -- made up of settlements, Israeli-only roads separating Palestinian from each other, checkpoints impeding movement, all of what Halper calls a "matrix of control" -- would have given Israel continued dominance over Palestine.
The ability of Clinton and his negotiators to ignore these realities, at the time of Camp David and to this day, is striking evidence of the truth of Miller's indictment and stands as testimony to their refusal to view anything about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict except through an Israeli prism.
Another critical truth that the Camp David myths ignore is the abysmal condition in which Palestinians lived during the seven years preceding Camp David, beginning with the Oslo agreement of September 1993, when the peace process was supposed to be moving along smoothly. Israel expanded settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem throughout the Oslo years, nearly doubling the number of settlers, at a time when negotiations over Israel's withdrawal from these territories should have been in train. The entire system of limited access roads connecting the settlements was constructed in these years. Gazans were imprisoned behind an impenetrable fence built in the 1990s to surround that entire territory. A system of closure was imposed on the West Bank and Gaza that prevented Palestinians from working inside Israel and that consequently severely damaged the Palestinian economy. Israel allocated the West Bank's underground water resources so that Israeli settlers consumed six or seven times the water per capita that was allocated to Palestinians; Israeli settlements had swimming pools and gardens, while Palestinian villages often went without running water.
The West Bank was divided into a checkerboard of areas under varying types of partial Palestinian or full Israeli administrative and security control, designed primarily to protect Israeli settlements and limit Palestinians to small, non-contiguous segments of land. As a result, Israeli military checkpoints were set up throughout the West Bank, severely impeding the movement of people and goods from one Palestinian town and village to another. Whereas before the Oslo agreement Israel had imposed what one Ha'aretz analyst characterizes as a "hovering occupation" in which the Israeli military and civil administration controlled the external borders of the occupied territories but minimized interference in Palestinian daily lives, when peace became more nearly a real prospect, a relatively distant military occupation turned into an in-your-face reality for Palestinians, with checkpoints and observation towers, a computerized system of permits and movement controls, roadblocks, and Israeli tanks outside their towns. The result, this analyst has pointed out, is that "most Palestinians have not experienced Oslo as a peace process. Instead of hope, they received militaristic strangulation from Israel, a corrupt self-government that depends on Israel in a humiliating way, and prolonged poverty. The long and the short of it is that the Palestinian hope for peace and independence had collapsed long before September 2000," when the intifada broke out.
These facts put the lie to the Israeli and U.S. claims that the intifada was orchestrated by Arafat for political gain and was motivated by some kind of unfathomable culture of hatred for Jews rather than any legitimate grievance. In actuality, the intifada grew out of years of escalating oppression under Israel's occupation, along with utter frustration over what appeared after Camp David to be the end of any hope for peace and independence. The concerted U.S. campaign to blame Arafat and the Palestinians for rejecting what they were repeatedly told was "the best deal they would ever get" came as the final straw, convincing the Palestinians that peace with Israel and real independence were not on the horizon. In this atmosphere, Ariel Sharon's deliberately provocative visit to the site of the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, two months after Camp David virtually guaranteed an explosion. The Clinton team's obliviousness to the facts of the Palestinian situation and to the impact of their campaign of blame is further confirmation that as Israel's lawyer they were blind to any but Israel's point of view.
The fact that the so-called "generous offer" of Ehud Barak is a blatant lie --one that constitutes one of the most serious distortions of the historical record in modern times, ranking at least as high in terms of geostrategic significance as the Bush administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- goes blithely unnoticed in the mainstream media, among the general public, and in policymaking circles. But unlike the WMD lie, this myth persists, this lie grows like topsy. It comes up whenever a peace plan is put forth; it arises as Israel's excuse whenever harsh Israeli control measures in the occupied territories are publicized; it was rehashed ad nauseam when Arafat died in November 2004; it was re-rehashed when Mahmoud Abbas was elected to succeed Arafat two months later; and it has been used to propagate further myths, such as that the Palestinians seek Israel's destruction and, most damaging to prospects for peace, that first Arafat and now Abbas are not proper partners for peace.
The typical assertion about Camp David and its aftermath usually runs along the lines of a New York Times article several years later in which the correspondent (Ethan Bronner, a Times editor, later to become deputy foreign editor, who should know better) recounted a badly skewed "history" of supposed Palestinian hatred of Jews and concluded with what he thought was the "worst of all": "in 2000, when Israel offered Yasir Arafat more than 90 percent of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip for a Palestinian state, his rejection was accompanied by a terrorist war that shows no signs of stopping." Something like this line has also become a mantra for Times columnist Thomas Friedman and many others.
A Book of Truths
The truth of things, which comes clear only in bare outline from Aaron Miller's brief op-ed, becomes crystal clear in a remarkable book by a young graduate student who, with no vested interest in any particular version of the story, interviewed most of the principals involved in the peace process, as well as several lower ranking functionaries, and produced an account of U.S. policymaking that is strikingly honest and revealing. In The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process, Clayton E. Swisher demonstrates that asking the right questions -- something no one in the media has yet attempted to do -- can unearth the real story beneath the self-interested distortions of those involved and the hype put out by a media completely locked in to the Israeli perspective.
Swisher's story, covering the peace process during Barak's two years in office, with an emphasis on U.S. policymaking, is a tale of an incredibly ham-handed diplomatic effort. Clinton and his negotiating team come across as a kind of gang that couldn't shoot straight. Swisher describes turf squabbles between Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and most particularly between an egotistical Dennis Ross and, at one time or another, virtually everyone else. Albright, it comes clear repeatedly, knew virtually nothing about the issues; both Israelis and Palestinians, in fact, generally avoided her because she lacked mastery of the topic. Summit meetings, between Syrians and Israelis and later Palestinians and Israelis, are shown to be extremely poorly prepared. The U.S. mediators made little effort to narrow positions before the summits, and there was little of the give-and-take essential in negotiations. One State Department official tells Swisher that at Camp David everything was "very loosy-goosy," with no prepared texts and no detailed position papers, because "that's the way Dennis liked to run things."
Throughout the Camp David summit, no one ever presented a formalized, written proposal covering the major issues. Nor, incredibly, did the U.S. keep any written record of what went on during the two weeks of negotiations. When the Israelis asked Ross a month later for a reconstruction of what had occurred at the summit, Ross acknowledged that there was nothing in writing. Things got no better as the final months of Clinton's administration went on. Miller confesses to Swisher that the so-called "parameters" that Clinton finally presented in late December 2000 -- the first time the Clinton team had ventured to adopt a policy position -- were still being revised the very day they were presented, meaning that, as Miller notes, "we were not ready." This was less than a month before the end of eight years in office. Clinton and company lacked a clear strategy and "dithered" over what exactly the parameters were to define.
The dithering over its own position even months after Camp David and the poor preparation for the summit in the first place were entirely attributable to the utter reluctance of Clinton et al. to take any steps without Israel's approval. The ruinous effect on the peace process of this obeisance to Israel comes through loud and clear in Swisher's account, one interlocutor after another making it patently evident that the strong tilt toward Israel is what ultimately upended negotiations. Albright, in a rare mood of candor, all but apologizes several times for not having pressed Israel harder. She tells Swisher that when Barak first came to office in 1999, succeeding the very intransigent Benjamin Netanyahu, the Clinton people were so pleased to see him that they simply assumed he had "enough of a political strategic view" to move ahead on negotiations, but they were mistaken. She acknowledges that throughout the process "we should have been much harder" on Israel, particularly on Israeli settlements, which Barak was expanding at a faster rate than Netanhayu had.
The book is filled with statements by U.S. officials indicating an almost automatic deferral to Israel's demands. One unnamed senior White House official, asked why it took so many months after Camp David to release Clinton's parameters, tells Swisher, "There were certain proposals that Barak didn't want put forward because he didn't think he could sell them back home. Also, realize that the U.S. is pro-Israeli. Clinton was the first president who first reached out to Palestinians -- like no other -- but at the end of the day, Clinton was a pro-Israeli president. When push came to shove . . . if Barak said don't put this in front of him, [Clinton] wasn't going to."
This very neatly sums up the entire story of the Clinton administration's role in the peace process. Swisher himself concludes that the U.S. acted as "an extra negotiator for the Israelis and an apologist for Barak's plans to sustain the occupation." One State Department official who was present at Camp David says, "Look, you never go into a negotiation without knowing an endgame! We went in to the most high-stakes of negotiations not only not knowing the endgame; we didn't know what Israel's positions were. . . . We saw them unfolding in front of us."
At the most critical point in 50-plus years of dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict, the United States, in a breathtaking abdication of responsibility, allowed Israel alone to set the starting point, the pace, and the agenda of what was to have been an historic, conflict-ending peace agreement.
Probably most appalling in this story of a monumental U.S. policy failure is that the major U.S. players had virtually no understanding of the Palestinians, despite seven years of what can only be called intense dealings with them. Clinton's policymakers did not understand what the Palestinians were enduring under Israeli occupation; conveniently forgot the huge concession the Palestinians had made a dozen years earlier by recognizing Israel's existence in 78 percent of original Palestine; had no appreciation of the significance for Palestinians of the massive spread of Israeli settlements throughout the only territory remaining for a Palestinian state; did not understand the critical need from the Palestinian standpoint for a reasonable resolution to the refugee problem; and fathomed nothing of how totally impossible it was for Arafat or any Muslim or Arab leader to agree to Israel's demand for sovereignty over Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. They simply did not "get it," and Swisher's interviews demonstrate that most of these U.S. movers and shakers, with the belated exception of Miller, still steadfastly refuse to recognize the reasons for their failure.
Even an Israeli negotiator laments that "The American team didn't know the substance. It is one thing to know the principles of an agreement, and another to master the details. If you don't have a rich, sophisticated understanding of the issue, when you are confronted by reality you are left paralyzed," without the breadth of knowledge to be creative or to be able to compromise. At Camp David, Swisher himself notes, even after seven years, "Ross was still nowhere near the most basic understanding of what the Palestinians would consider minimally acceptable regarding territory." Fundamentally, as Swisher points out but Ross has apparently never grasped, as the occupying power with total control over "the very thing the Palestinians wanted -- a state -- the Israelis would naturally have to be more forthcoming [than the Palestinian side]; this could only occur if the central mediator stood between both parties and demonstrated a willingness to 'swing elbows.'" But neither Ross nor any of his colleagues, including Clinton, saw the need to do this.
For most of the Americans, the basic issue came down to a mere mathematical one, and they lost themselves in a forest of percentages. Clinton used to boast that he knew the geography of the West Bank so well he could draw a map in his sleep, but in fact he only saw that map in two dimensions; neither he nor any of the others understood the territorial issue as it played out on the ground. Ross was fond of saying that in any negotiation, neither side could expect to gain 100 percent of what it wanted -- a statement intended pointedly to tell the Palestinians that they could never expect the return of all of the occupied territories, despite the fact that those territories constituted less than one-quarter of original Palestine and the Palestinians had long since conceded Israel's right to the other three-quarters.
Within this limiting parameter, the U.S. simply played around with percentages of territory. Even Miller failed to get it. One leading Palestinian negotiator tells Swisher that shortly before Camp David he had asked Miller how much of the occupied territories Miller thought the Palestinians could accept for a state and Miller responded, astoundingly, 70 percent. This would be 70 percent of the West Bank, which constituted only 22 percent of original Palestine. The Palestinian exploded angrily, telling Miller he was "miserably misinformed," that in fact the Palestinians could not accept anything less than 100 percent, plus or minus a few small parcels of land to be swapped on a one-for-one basis for parcels of Israeli territory. Miller was shocked, indicating an almost unbelievable level of ignorance after more than a decade in which he had personally been involved with the Palestinian issue. If the Americans had not all been operating from an Israeli perspective, they could not possibly have so badly misunderstood the Palestinians.
Perhaps this was the beginning of Miller's enlightenment, but the lesson did not take with any of the other senior members of Clinton's team. Whenever in the lead-up to Camp David the Israelis proposed to return 66 percent or 76 percent of the West Bank, the U.S. team, still failing to understand the Palestinian position, never objected and never attempted to narrow the huge gap. When the gap did narrow at Camp David -- a function of increased Israeli but not U.S. recognition of the possibilities -- the U.S. members were still merely dickering with numbers. At one point Albright considered it a simple matter just to split the difference between a Palestinian demand for 98 percent and an Israeli readiness to relinquish no more than 92 percent -- as if the mathematical mid-point of 95 percent, although not based on anything real on the ground, could somehow magically resolve all outstanding Palestinian territorial problems. Arbitrarily flipping off two or three or ten percent here or there does not make the territory remaining to the Palestinians contiguous or viable or defensible, does not address fundamental issues of control over territory, and does not make the Palestinians truly independent or sovereign in their own territory.
As has been evident since the day Camp David collapsed, Yasir Arafat became the focus and the easy scapegoat for all the Americans' frustrations over their own failures. Their excuses for the collapse of negotiations -- almost all adopted wholesale from Barak -- centered entirely on Arafat. He could not bring himself to end the conflict, he could not make the change from revolutionary to statesman, he wanted and indeed fostered turmoil and violence in order to improve his bargaining position, he rejected Barak's generous offer without offering any counterproposal, he rejected even Clinton's "parameters," and so on. According to Swisher, the Palestinians he spoke to, as well even as some Israelis and Americans, believed that putting the entire onus of blame on the Palestinians -- which Clinton had sworn before the summit he would not do and which left the Palestinians with virtually no hope of ever ending the occupation -- was the proximate cause of the intifada that erupted two months later.
The deliberate distortions and myths about supposed Palestinian intransigence have been repeated and perpetuated by each of the principals and picked up and made into legend by media commentators. Clinton spent Inauguration Day 2001, according to Swisher, telling the incoming Bush team about his disappointment with Arafat, who he said had torpedoed the peace process, and he urged Colin Powell not to invest any energy dealing with the Palestinian leader. Ross, who actually worked with an Israeli negotiator in the middle of the night before the summit collapsed to draft Clinton's "blame speech," casting Arafat as the bad guy and Barak as the courageous risk-taker, also briefed the Bush team. He spent four hours with Powell during the transition and reportedly told the incoming secretary of state not to believe a word Arafat said because he was "a con man."
Ross has continued to play the blame game ever since. In voluminous interviews (including with Swisher) and commentaries over the last several years, as well as in his own memoirs, Arafat always figures as the culprit and as Ross's central obsession. The obsession -- fed by Barak, shared to a great degree by Clinton, and magnified by an Israel-centric media in the U.S. -- became a comfortable retreat for Americans who could not acknowledge U.S. responsibility and would not acknowledge Israel's responsibility, so closely bound was the U.S. to Israel. Swisher ends his account with a semi-apology from Miller, who participated in Ross's four-hour briefing of Powell. "You don't want to give centrality to how you fucked up," Miller confessed. "Dennis could have never brought himself to do it, and neither could I."
The Roots of Failure
Because of its thorough examination of the thinking and the policy path followed by the Clinton negotiating team and, as noted, because he thought to ask the right questions about the policymakers' motivations, Swisher's book stands as probably the best and certainly the most revealing of several retrospectives on Camp David and the peace process. (One other book that also stands out as an honest and disinterested account is Shattered Dreams, by French journalist Charles Enderlin. Although it too is based on interviews with all the principals from the U.S., Israel, and Palestine, it does not focus as Swisher's account does on U.S. motivations. Among the myriad article-length recaps of Camp David, an August 2001 New York Review of Books piece co-authored by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, participants at Camp David on the U.S. and the Palestinian delegations respectively, provides a very well informed if brief assessment of the negotiations and is virtually the only one not written from a U.S.-Israeli perspective.)
The importance of Swisher's book is that it pieces together all the evidence necessary to demonstrate inescapably that Clinton and company's pronounced tilt toward Israel was the major, and perhaps the only, reason for the collapse of the peace process. A pro-Israeli tilt in U.S. policy was obviously not unique to the Clinton administration, but it was under Clinton that the Israel-centered mindset that had always determined U.S. policymaking finally ran up against a need for the kind of balanced approach that would have taken Palestinian concerns into account equally with Israeli concerns. The Clinton team was unable to overcome its biases and the blindness those biases produced long enough to function as a truly honest mediator between the two sides.
Clinton and company dropped all pretense of U.S. neutrality after Camp David. One of the most significant but least noted comments in the virulent U.S.-led campaign to paint Arafat as the culprit was Clinton's veiled accusation on Israeli television that Arafat had actively worked at the summit to thwart Israel's aspirations. "I kept telling the Palestinians," he said, "and I will say again to the world, that you cannot make an agreement over something as important as Jerusalem . . . if it is required of one side to say I completely defeated the interest of the other side." Clinton's attribution to Arafat of such malevolence, charging that his purpose was to "completely defeat" Israel's interests rather than advance a Palestinian interest in part of Jerusalem, was indicative of the kind of Israel-focused mindset that had long pervaded American thinking. (It was no doubt also indicative of Clinton's desire to boost the electoral prospects of his wife Hillary, then running for a Senate seat from New York, where pro-Israeli credentials are thought to be essential.) Because of this focus on the Israeli perspective to the exclusion of the Palestinian viewpoint, all Palestinian actions are viewed according to their impact on Israel, as if Palestinians always act only against Israel, never for themselves.
For the same reasons, the U.S. tends to take Israel's maximum position as the norm and the standard of reasonableness, and "progress" in negotiations is judged according to that maximum: any Israeli movement away from the maximum, however insignificant, is applauded; any Palestinian failure to accept Israel's position is condemned. Although he would undoubtedly not acknowledge that he was describing anything inappropriate, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman captured the Clinton attitude, and the general American attitude, a few days after Camp David when he observed that Clinton's criticism of Arafat had demonstrated that "there is in the U.S. view a level of Israeli compromise that is right and fair, and beyond which Israel should not be expected to go. It is not just a bottomless pit of give-aways." Israel's interests are supreme, in other words, both to Friedman and to Clinton, and Palestinians are judged according to how well they accommodate, or at least refrain from interfering with, those interests.
Given this general attitude, one can only assume that Clinton must have been totally dismissive, or perhaps mystified, when near the end of the summit Arafat responded to Clinton's anger, according to Swisher, by trying to put the situation in perspective. "You say the Israelis moved forward," Arafat said to Clinton, "but they are the occupiers. They are not being generous -- they are not giving from their pockets but from our land. I am only asking that UN Resolution 242 be implemented. I am speaking only about 22 percent of Palestine, Mr. President." (Emphasis added.)
Camp David was the culmination of a mindset that had been forming and molding itself for decades. Despite the understanding Clinton had exhibited for broad Palestinian concerns, when negotiations came down to the specifics of critical questions like Jerusalem and borders, he proved unable to shift his thinking away from a primary focus on Israel's needs and Israel's demands. Like many Americans, particularly in the Southern Baptist tradition, Clinton had grown up on myths about Israel. He writes in his 2004 memoir, My Life, that an old pastor and mentor had told him while he was governor of Arkansas that he would probably be president some day but that God would "never forgive you if you don't stand by Israel." The pastor did not argue that Israel had not mistreated the Palestinians, but he thought God intended the Jews "to be at home" in the Holy Land and that the Palestinians' problems could only be solved through peace and security for Israel.
Such notions of the priority of Israeli interests, taught early in life, inevitably find their way into policy. All of Clinton's principal negotiators, moreover, had what they all acknowledged was an emotional commitment to Israel. This conditioning and ingrained way of thinking is evident in the memoirs thus far published. Clinton's own memoir and others by Albright and Ross add up to an embarrassing collection of apologias for a badly misguided U.S. policy and provide striking evidence of how little the U.S., in its myopic attitude toward Israel, understood the Palestinian position.
Clinton's memoir is actually most notable for how little it says. For a man of such widely recognized analytical acumen, this much-heralded policy wonk writes a remarkably unwonkish memoir, a prosaic compendium of "who struck Johns" and "who said what to whoms" almost totally lacking in analysis. But he does manage to insert frequent snide asides about Arafat's failure to do as Clinton and the Israelis wanted and his inability to move forward as rapidly in negotiations as Clinton's time in office was receding. The memoirs reveal a president wholly dedicated to safeguarding Israel's interests and unable even to fathom the Palestinians' interests. Clinton's anger that Arafat would not take risks for Israel's security, or for Clinton's own legacy, is obvious.
Albright's memoir, Madam Secretary, is an even more abject statement of U.S. devotion to Israel's perspective. The Israelis gave "all they could" at Camp David, in Albright's view, whereas Arafat gave "no sign that his vision extended to anything more forward-looking than victory over Israel." When the intifada broke out, "Barak was personally involved in trying to calibrate the response in ways that would minimize loss of life" (an outrageous distortion after Israel fired more than a million rounds at Palestinian protesters in the first few days of the intifada, before any suicide bombings had occurred, and killed 117 Palestinians, one-quarter of them children, in the first month). In the end, she says, the "core failure was the Palestinians' obsessive focus not on how much could be gained but on the relatively little they would be required to give up." Palestinians could have had a state but instead they brought on the election of Ariel Sharon and they are left with "their legalisms, their misery, and their terror."
Barak and Sharon themselves could not have improved on this astounding anti-Palestinian catalog. Little wonder that the Palestinians got nowhere toward getting their point across at Camp David, to say nothing of advancing toward a just peace.
Clinton's and Albright's retrospectives are strikingly self-centered, even in their titles, but the prize for self-absorption goes to Dennis Ross, whose memoir, The Missing Peace, is an 800-page pat on his own back. Clinton is always asking Ross what to do, according to Ross's account, based almost entirely on his own notes over the years. He knew the parties better than anyone; he was always on the phone or in a private meeting with this or that leader; in the first Bush administration, "I persuaded [James] Baker and [George H.W.] Bush" to take various actions. Frequent comments like "knowing Rabin as I did" dot his pages; Rabin frequently "shared highly sensitive views with me." But far more important than his manifestations of ego are Ross's frank statements of the pro-Israeli perspective from which he was coming. Early in the book, he lays out his policy parameters: "Any effort at peacemaking must be premised on a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship. . . . Criticism was legitimate, but creating a breach in the relationship was not. . . . My approach to the peace process was shaped by the conviction that Israel must feel secure if it was to take risks for peace." If there were no other evidence of his extreme tilt toward Israel, this alone would stand out as an unmistakable clue to his devotion to Israel and whatever it demanded. One wonders why, as a supposed middleman in negotiations, Ross did not also operate under the conviction, to paraphrase what he says of Israel, "that the Palestinians must feel secure if they were to take risks for peace."
But the Palestinians received no such consideration. More's the pity, for a just, more or less equitable peace forged at Camp David would have prevented the intifada, which might then have headed off Osama bin Laden and prevented September 11, which would in turn have prevented the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The possibilities are intriguing to imagine; the consequences of a too-pronounced leaning toward Israel are frightening to dwell on.
Lost Hope
Although an honest Aaron Miller acknowledged to Swisher that none of the principal U.S. players in the negotiations was capable of giving a frank appraisal of what occurred because "the personal agenda and heat of the moment have colored it," the media and public opinion throughout the U.S. know only the distorted story as it emerged from these principal players when the summit collapsed. Clinton and company set the mood and cast the story in concrete on that day five years ago, and no amount of reappraisal, none of the second thoughts or reconsiderations, have made it through the media curtain that dropped across the Palestinian side of the story on that day. Like the old cliché about the correction to an erroneous but much-publicized newspaper story appearing only on page 30, buried deep inside the paper and never getting anything like the attention of the original story, the damage done by the U.S. at Camp David was done permanently the day Clinton gave the "blame speech." The Palestinians lost hope; the peace movement in Israel felt it had been betrayed by the Palestinians; the media in the U.S., ever eager to blame the Palestinians, picked up the message and have never since retracted or reassessed. Very few know, or are likely ever to know, the real story of how the Clinton administration undermined the Palestinians and undermined all prospects for peace.
By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
A few months ago, nearly five years after the collapse of the July 2000 Camp David summit at which President Bill Clinton expected to forge an historic Middle East peace agreement, a leading member of Clinton's negotiating team publicly acknowledged that rather than serve as a true mediator in peace negotiations, successive U.S. administrations including Clinton's have acted as "Israel's attorney." Writing on the Washington Post op-ed page in May 2005, Aaron David Miller admitted that Clinton and company followed Israel's lead "without critically examining what that would mean for our own interests, for those on the Arab side and for the overall success of the negotiations." The Clinton team's practice of running everything past Israel first "stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking. Far too often . . . our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one -- Israel." The result was utter failure; in these circumstances, no agreement could possibly meet Palestinian as well as Israeli needs.
Miller is a rarity among generations of senior policymakers who have been unable or unwilling to look back at their own policies and actions with frank honesty. Not surprisingly, the memoirs thus far published by the other policymakers involved in the Camp David collapse exhibit none of Miller's honesty. One should never, of course, take at face value the testimony of those who oversaw a years-long policy that ended in tatters, but these particular retrospectives are remarkably disingenuous. It is obviously difficult for anyone to acknowledge that a policy so patently misguided was enthusiastically pursued through Clinton's two terms (and, in the case of people like Miller and senior negotiator Dennis Ross, through three terms, going back to George H.W. Bush). This is what makes Miller's exposé so telling.
What Miller essentially reveals, although he does not say this explicitly, is that because it could not separate itself from Israel's interests and Israel's demands, the Clinton administration is ultimately responsible not only for the collapse of the peace process at Camp David, but for setting in motion everything that has followed: the intifada that erupted two months later, the five years (so far) of Palestinian-Israeli violence since then, the atrocities of Ariel Sharon's governance of the occupied Palestinian territories, and the end of Palestinian national hopes for a long time to come. Beyond all this, the continuation of the set of policies on the Palestinian issue that Clinton and company put in place probably wipes out any real hope of reducing terrorism against the U.S. and its allies. Although U.S. and other Western policymakers refuse to acknowledge this, Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, supported by the U.S., is a major cause of the hatred and resentment that spawned terror attacks such as September 11. As Israeli historian Avi Shlaim recently observed, "For most Arabs and Muslims the real issue in the Middle East is not Iraq, Iran or democracy but Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people and America's blind support for Israel." This perception intensified on Clinton's watch.
Clinton and his negotiators were so eager, in pursuit of Israel's interests and of Clinton's much-ballyhooed "legacy," to forge a peace agreement at all costs before the end of his term, and were so outraged when the Palestinians refused to relinquish their hope for true independence and sovereignty by complying with Israel's inadequate offer at Camp David, that they quite deliberately shifted the entire onus for failure onto the Palestinians. At a time when everyone, and certainly every policymaker, should have known that Palestinian frustration with the slow, unproductive pace of the seven-year-old peace process and the continued consolidation of Israel's occupation was near the point of explosion, Clinton's obvious effort to blame the Palestinians and side unreservedly with Israel when Israel did not get its way constituted an open invitation to violent upheaval.
The Myths
The myths about Camp David, and particularly about Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's supposedly "generous offer," have become part of an urban legend by now, particularly among those many commentators, friends of Israel, and instant experts who feel constrained to relieve Israel of any culpability for the Camp David collapse or the intifada that followed. Five years later, whenever the subject of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict comes up in any public discussion or commentary, it is unfailingly asserted that the Palestinians, and specifically Yasir Arafat, acting out of pure cussedness or pure hatred for Jews, rejected an Israeli peace offer of unbelievable generosity, an offer that would have given the Palestinians a state on 90 -- or sometimes 95 or 97 -- percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza, with all the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem as a capital. Had it not been for the Palestinians' turn to violence, so the myth goes, we would not now have Ariel Sharon in office, there would be a satisfactory peace, there would be no killings, and so on.
What the myths ignore is, first and foremost, that Barak's offers both at Camp David and six months later at the final negotiating session at Taba, Egypt, were not generous by any objective measure. The offers went further than any previous Israeli proposal had, but, since Israel had never before put forth any proposals on the key, so-called final-status issues, this says nothing. In fact, what the supposedly generous offer would have given the Palestinians would have been a state in four pieces, three in the West Bank plus Gaza, with a capital made up of Palestinian neighborhoods not contiguous either to each other or to the rest of the state. The major Israeli settlements, housing fully 80 percent of the 200,000 West Bank settlers and 100 percent of the almost 200,000 additional settlers in East Jerusalem, would have remained in place; the 300-mile road network throughout the West Bank built to connect the settlements and accessible only to Israelis would have remained in place; the "state" left to the Palestinians would have been a mere colony of Israel -- non-viable and indefensible, without borders with any state but Israel, totally at Israel's mercy.
Jeff Halper, the Israeli anthropologist and activist who heads the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and has extensively studied all aspects of the occupation, frequently points out that territory does not equate to sovereignty and that even a prison gives 95 percent of its space to the prisoners, while the prison walls, the cell doors, and occasional towers and other points of control constitute the controlling five percent. Under Barak's offer, the five percent (or three or ten percent) remaining in Israel's control -- made up of settlements, Israeli-only roads separating Palestinian from each other, checkpoints impeding movement, all of what Halper calls a "matrix of control" -- would have given Israel continued dominance over Palestine.
The ability of Clinton and his negotiators to ignore these realities, at the time of Camp David and to this day, is striking evidence of the truth of Miller's indictment and stands as testimony to their refusal to view anything about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict except through an Israeli prism.
Another critical truth that the Camp David myths ignore is the abysmal condition in which Palestinians lived during the seven years preceding Camp David, beginning with the Oslo agreement of September 1993, when the peace process was supposed to be moving along smoothly. Israel expanded settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem throughout the Oslo years, nearly doubling the number of settlers, at a time when negotiations over Israel's withdrawal from these territories should have been in train. The entire system of limited access roads connecting the settlements was constructed in these years. Gazans were imprisoned behind an impenetrable fence built in the 1990s to surround that entire territory. A system of closure was imposed on the West Bank and Gaza that prevented Palestinians from working inside Israel and that consequently severely damaged the Palestinian economy. Israel allocated the West Bank's underground water resources so that Israeli settlers consumed six or seven times the water per capita that was allocated to Palestinians; Israeli settlements had swimming pools and gardens, while Palestinian villages often went without running water.
The West Bank was divided into a checkerboard of areas under varying types of partial Palestinian or full Israeli administrative and security control, designed primarily to protect Israeli settlements and limit Palestinians to small, non-contiguous segments of land. As a result, Israeli military checkpoints were set up throughout the West Bank, severely impeding the movement of people and goods from one Palestinian town and village to another. Whereas before the Oslo agreement Israel had imposed what one Ha'aretz analyst characterizes as a "hovering occupation" in which the Israeli military and civil administration controlled the external borders of the occupied territories but minimized interference in Palestinian daily lives, when peace became more nearly a real prospect, a relatively distant military occupation turned into an in-your-face reality for Palestinians, with checkpoints and observation towers, a computerized system of permits and movement controls, roadblocks, and Israeli tanks outside their towns. The result, this analyst has pointed out, is that "most Palestinians have not experienced Oslo as a peace process. Instead of hope, they received militaristic strangulation from Israel, a corrupt self-government that depends on Israel in a humiliating way, and prolonged poverty. The long and the short of it is that the Palestinian hope for peace and independence had collapsed long before September 2000," when the intifada broke out.
These facts put the lie to the Israeli and U.S. claims that the intifada was orchestrated by Arafat for political gain and was motivated by some kind of unfathomable culture of hatred for Jews rather than any legitimate grievance. In actuality, the intifada grew out of years of escalating oppression under Israel's occupation, along with utter frustration over what appeared after Camp David to be the end of any hope for peace and independence. The concerted U.S. campaign to blame Arafat and the Palestinians for rejecting what they were repeatedly told was "the best deal they would ever get" came as the final straw, convincing the Palestinians that peace with Israel and real independence were not on the horizon. In this atmosphere, Ariel Sharon's deliberately provocative visit to the site of the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, two months after Camp David virtually guaranteed an explosion. The Clinton team's obliviousness to the facts of the Palestinian situation and to the impact of their campaign of blame is further confirmation that as Israel's lawyer they were blind to any but Israel's point of view.
The fact that the so-called "generous offer" of Ehud Barak is a blatant lie --one that constitutes one of the most serious distortions of the historical record in modern times, ranking at least as high in terms of geostrategic significance as the Bush administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- goes blithely unnoticed in the mainstream media, among the general public, and in policymaking circles. But unlike the WMD lie, this myth persists, this lie grows like topsy. It comes up whenever a peace plan is put forth; it arises as Israel's excuse whenever harsh Israeli control measures in the occupied territories are publicized; it was rehashed ad nauseam when Arafat died in November 2004; it was re-rehashed when Mahmoud Abbas was elected to succeed Arafat two months later; and it has been used to propagate further myths, such as that the Palestinians seek Israel's destruction and, most damaging to prospects for peace, that first Arafat and now Abbas are not proper partners for peace.
The typical assertion about Camp David and its aftermath usually runs along the lines of a New York Times article several years later in which the correspondent (Ethan Bronner, a Times editor, later to become deputy foreign editor, who should know better) recounted a badly skewed "history" of supposed Palestinian hatred of Jews and concluded with what he thought was the "worst of all": "in 2000, when Israel offered Yasir Arafat more than 90 percent of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip for a Palestinian state, his rejection was accompanied by a terrorist war that shows no signs of stopping." Something like this line has also become a mantra for Times columnist Thomas Friedman and many others.
A Book of Truths
The truth of things, which comes clear only in bare outline from Aaron Miller's brief op-ed, becomes crystal clear in a remarkable book by a young graduate student who, with no vested interest in any particular version of the story, interviewed most of the principals involved in the peace process, as well as several lower ranking functionaries, and produced an account of U.S. policymaking that is strikingly honest and revealing. In The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process, Clayton E. Swisher demonstrates that asking the right questions -- something no one in the media has yet attempted to do -- can unearth the real story beneath the self-interested distortions of those involved and the hype put out by a media completely locked in to the Israeli perspective.
Swisher's story, covering the peace process during Barak's two years in office, with an emphasis on U.S. policymaking, is a tale of an incredibly ham-handed diplomatic effort. Clinton and his negotiating team come across as a kind of gang that couldn't shoot straight. Swisher describes turf squabbles between Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and most particularly between an egotistical Dennis Ross and, at one time or another, virtually everyone else. Albright, it comes clear repeatedly, knew virtually nothing about the issues; both Israelis and Palestinians, in fact, generally avoided her because she lacked mastery of the topic. Summit meetings, between Syrians and Israelis and later Palestinians and Israelis, are shown to be extremely poorly prepared. The U.S. mediators made little effort to narrow positions before the summits, and there was little of the give-and-take essential in negotiations. One State Department official tells Swisher that at Camp David everything was "very loosy-goosy," with no prepared texts and no detailed position papers, because "that's the way Dennis liked to run things."
Throughout the Camp David summit, no one ever presented a formalized, written proposal covering the major issues. Nor, incredibly, did the U.S. keep any written record of what went on during the two weeks of negotiations. When the Israelis asked Ross a month later for a reconstruction of what had occurred at the summit, Ross acknowledged that there was nothing in writing. Things got no better as the final months of Clinton's administration went on. Miller confesses to Swisher that the so-called "parameters" that Clinton finally presented in late December 2000 -- the first time the Clinton team had ventured to adopt a policy position -- were still being revised the very day they were presented, meaning that, as Miller notes, "we were not ready." This was less than a month before the end of eight years in office. Clinton and company lacked a clear strategy and "dithered" over what exactly the parameters were to define.
The dithering over its own position even months after Camp David and the poor preparation for the summit in the first place were entirely attributable to the utter reluctance of Clinton et al. to take any steps without Israel's approval. The ruinous effect on the peace process of this obeisance to Israel comes through loud and clear in Swisher's account, one interlocutor after another making it patently evident that the strong tilt toward Israel is what ultimately upended negotiations. Albright, in a rare mood of candor, all but apologizes several times for not having pressed Israel harder. She tells Swisher that when Barak first came to office in 1999, succeeding the very intransigent Benjamin Netanyahu, the Clinton people were so pleased to see him that they simply assumed he had "enough of a political strategic view" to move ahead on negotiations, but they were mistaken. She acknowledges that throughout the process "we should have been much harder" on Israel, particularly on Israeli settlements, which Barak was expanding at a faster rate than Netanhayu had.
The book is filled with statements by U.S. officials indicating an almost automatic deferral to Israel's demands. One unnamed senior White House official, asked why it took so many months after Camp David to release Clinton's parameters, tells Swisher, "There were certain proposals that Barak didn't want put forward because he didn't think he could sell them back home. Also, realize that the U.S. is pro-Israeli. Clinton was the first president who first reached out to Palestinians -- like no other -- but at the end of the day, Clinton was a pro-Israeli president. When push came to shove . . . if Barak said don't put this in front of him, [Clinton] wasn't going to."
This very neatly sums up the entire story of the Clinton administration's role in the peace process. Swisher himself concludes that the U.S. acted as "an extra negotiator for the Israelis and an apologist for Barak's plans to sustain the occupation." One State Department official who was present at Camp David says, "Look, you never go into a negotiation without knowing an endgame! We went in to the most high-stakes of negotiations not only not knowing the endgame; we didn't know what Israel's positions were. . . . We saw them unfolding in front of us."
At the most critical point in 50-plus years of dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict, the United States, in a breathtaking abdication of responsibility, allowed Israel alone to set the starting point, the pace, and the agenda of what was to have been an historic, conflict-ending peace agreement.
Probably most appalling in this story of a monumental U.S. policy failure is that the major U.S. players had virtually no understanding of the Palestinians, despite seven years of what can only be called intense dealings with them. Clinton's policymakers did not understand what the Palestinians were enduring under Israeli occupation; conveniently forgot the huge concession the Palestinians had made a dozen years earlier by recognizing Israel's existence in 78 percent of original Palestine; had no appreciation of the significance for Palestinians of the massive spread of Israeli settlements throughout the only territory remaining for a Palestinian state; did not understand the critical need from the Palestinian standpoint for a reasonable resolution to the refugee problem; and fathomed nothing of how totally impossible it was for Arafat or any Muslim or Arab leader to agree to Israel's demand for sovereignty over Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. They simply did not "get it," and Swisher's interviews demonstrate that most of these U.S. movers and shakers, with the belated exception of Miller, still steadfastly refuse to recognize the reasons for their failure.
Even an Israeli negotiator laments that "The American team didn't know the substance. It is one thing to know the principles of an agreement, and another to master the details. If you don't have a rich, sophisticated understanding of the issue, when you are confronted by reality you are left paralyzed," without the breadth of knowledge to be creative or to be able to compromise. At Camp David, Swisher himself notes, even after seven years, "Ross was still nowhere near the most basic understanding of what the Palestinians would consider minimally acceptable regarding territory." Fundamentally, as Swisher points out but Ross has apparently never grasped, as the occupying power with total control over "the very thing the Palestinians wanted -- a state -- the Israelis would naturally have to be more forthcoming [than the Palestinian side]; this could only occur if the central mediator stood between both parties and demonstrated a willingness to 'swing elbows.'" But neither Ross nor any of his colleagues, including Clinton, saw the need to do this.
For most of the Americans, the basic issue came down to a mere mathematical one, and they lost themselves in a forest of percentages. Clinton used to boast that he knew the geography of the West Bank so well he could draw a map in his sleep, but in fact he only saw that map in two dimensions; neither he nor any of the others understood the territorial issue as it played out on the ground. Ross was fond of saying that in any negotiation, neither side could expect to gain 100 percent of what it wanted -- a statement intended pointedly to tell the Palestinians that they could never expect the return of all of the occupied territories, despite the fact that those territories constituted less than one-quarter of original Palestine and the Palestinians had long since conceded Israel's right to the other three-quarters.
Within this limiting parameter, the U.S. simply played around with percentages of territory. Even Miller failed to get it. One leading Palestinian negotiator tells Swisher that shortly before Camp David he had asked Miller how much of the occupied territories Miller thought the Palestinians could accept for a state and Miller responded, astoundingly, 70 percent. This would be 70 percent of the West Bank, which constituted only 22 percent of original Palestine. The Palestinian exploded angrily, telling Miller he was "miserably misinformed," that in fact the Palestinians could not accept anything less than 100 percent, plus or minus a few small parcels of land to be swapped on a one-for-one basis for parcels of Israeli territory. Miller was shocked, indicating an almost unbelievable level of ignorance after more than a decade in which he had personally been involved with the Palestinian issue. If the Americans had not all been operating from an Israeli perspective, they could not possibly have so badly misunderstood the Palestinians.
Perhaps this was the beginning of Miller's enlightenment, but the lesson did not take with any of the other senior members of Clinton's team. Whenever in the lead-up to Camp David the Israelis proposed to return 66 percent or 76 percent of the West Bank, the U.S. team, still failing to understand the Palestinian position, never objected and never attempted to narrow the huge gap. When the gap did narrow at Camp David -- a function of increased Israeli but not U.S. recognition of the possibilities -- the U.S. members were still merely dickering with numbers. At one point Albright considered it a simple matter just to split the difference between a Palestinian demand for 98 percent and an Israeli readiness to relinquish no more than 92 percent -- as if the mathematical mid-point of 95 percent, although not based on anything real on the ground, could somehow magically resolve all outstanding Palestinian territorial problems. Arbitrarily flipping off two or three or ten percent here or there does not make the territory remaining to the Palestinians contiguous or viable or defensible, does not address fundamental issues of control over territory, and does not make the Palestinians truly independent or sovereign in their own territory.
As has been evident since the day Camp David collapsed, Yasir Arafat became the focus and the easy scapegoat for all the Americans' frustrations over their own failures. Their excuses for the collapse of negotiations -- almost all adopted wholesale from Barak -- centered entirely on Arafat. He could not bring himself to end the conflict, he could not make the change from revolutionary to statesman, he wanted and indeed fostered turmoil and violence in order to improve his bargaining position, he rejected Barak's generous offer without offering any counterproposal, he rejected even Clinton's "parameters," and so on. According to Swisher, the Palestinians he spoke to, as well even as some Israelis and Americans, believed that putting the entire onus of blame on the Palestinians -- which Clinton had sworn before the summit he would not do and which left the Palestinians with virtually no hope of ever ending the occupation -- was the proximate cause of the intifada that erupted two months later.
The deliberate distortions and myths about supposed Palestinian intransigence have been repeated and perpetuated by each of the principals and picked up and made into legend by media commentators. Clinton spent Inauguration Day 2001, according to Swisher, telling the incoming Bush team about his disappointment with Arafat, who he said had torpedoed the peace process, and he urged Colin Powell not to invest any energy dealing with the Palestinian leader. Ross, who actually worked with an Israeli negotiator in the middle of the night before the summit collapsed to draft Clinton's "blame speech," casting Arafat as the bad guy and Barak as the courageous risk-taker, also briefed the Bush team. He spent four hours with Powell during the transition and reportedly told the incoming secretary of state not to believe a word Arafat said because he was "a con man."
Ross has continued to play the blame game ever since. In voluminous interviews (including with Swisher) and commentaries over the last several years, as well as in his own memoirs, Arafat always figures as the culprit and as Ross's central obsession. The obsession -- fed by Barak, shared to a great degree by Clinton, and magnified by an Israel-centric media in the U.S. -- became a comfortable retreat for Americans who could not acknowledge U.S. responsibility and would not acknowledge Israel's responsibility, so closely bound was the U.S. to Israel. Swisher ends his account with a semi-apology from Miller, who participated in Ross's four-hour briefing of Powell. "You don't want to give centrality to how you fucked up," Miller confessed. "Dennis could have never brought himself to do it, and neither could I."
The Roots of Failure
Because of its thorough examination of the thinking and the policy path followed by the Clinton negotiating team and, as noted, because he thought to ask the right questions about the policymakers' motivations, Swisher's book stands as probably the best and certainly the most revealing of several retrospectives on Camp David and the peace process. (One other book that also stands out as an honest and disinterested account is Shattered Dreams, by French journalist Charles Enderlin. Although it too is based on interviews with all the principals from the U.S., Israel, and Palestine, it does not focus as Swisher's account does on U.S. motivations. Among the myriad article-length recaps of Camp David, an August 2001 New York Review of Books piece co-authored by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, participants at Camp David on the U.S. and the Palestinian delegations respectively, provides a very well informed if brief assessment of the negotiations and is virtually the only one not written from a U.S.-Israeli perspective.)
The importance of Swisher's book is that it pieces together all the evidence necessary to demonstrate inescapably that Clinton and company's pronounced tilt toward Israel was the major, and perhaps the only, reason for the collapse of the peace process. A pro-Israeli tilt in U.S. policy was obviously not unique to the Clinton administration, but it was under Clinton that the Israel-centered mindset that had always determined U.S. policymaking finally ran up against a need for the kind of balanced approach that would have taken Palestinian concerns into account equally with Israeli concerns. The Clinton team was unable to overcome its biases and the blindness those biases produced long enough to function as a truly honest mediator between the two sides.
Clinton and company dropped all pretense of U.S. neutrality after Camp David. One of the most significant but least noted comments in the virulent U.S.-led campaign to paint Arafat as the culprit was Clinton's veiled accusation on Israeli television that Arafat had actively worked at the summit to thwart Israel's aspirations. "I kept telling the Palestinians," he said, "and I will say again to the world, that you cannot make an agreement over something as important as Jerusalem . . . if it is required of one side to say I completely defeated the interest of the other side." Clinton's attribution to Arafat of such malevolence, charging that his purpose was to "completely defeat" Israel's interests rather than advance a Palestinian interest in part of Jerusalem, was indicative of the kind of Israel-focused mindset that had long pervaded American thinking. (It was no doubt also indicative of Clinton's desire to boost the electoral prospects of his wife Hillary, then running for a Senate seat from New York, where pro-Israeli credentials are thought to be essential.) Because of this focus on the Israeli perspective to the exclusion of the Palestinian viewpoint, all Palestinian actions are viewed according to their impact on Israel, as if Palestinians always act only against Israel, never for themselves.
For the same reasons, the U.S. tends to take Israel's maximum position as the norm and the standard of reasonableness, and "progress" in negotiations is judged according to that maximum: any Israeli movement away from the maximum, however insignificant, is applauded; any Palestinian failure to accept Israel's position is condemned. Although he would undoubtedly not acknowledge that he was describing anything inappropriate, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman captured the Clinton attitude, and the general American attitude, a few days after Camp David when he observed that Clinton's criticism of Arafat had demonstrated that "there is in the U.S. view a level of Israeli compromise that is right and fair, and beyond which Israel should not be expected to go. It is not just a bottomless pit of give-aways." Israel's interests are supreme, in other words, both to Friedman and to Clinton, and Palestinians are judged according to how well they accommodate, or at least refrain from interfering with, those interests.
Given this general attitude, one can only assume that Clinton must have been totally dismissive, or perhaps mystified, when near the end of the summit Arafat responded to Clinton's anger, according to Swisher, by trying to put the situation in perspective. "You say the Israelis moved forward," Arafat said to Clinton, "but they are the occupiers. They are not being generous -- they are not giving from their pockets but from our land. I am only asking that UN Resolution 242 be implemented. I am speaking only about 22 percent of Palestine, Mr. President." (Emphasis added.)
Camp David was the culmination of a mindset that had been forming and molding itself for decades. Despite the understanding Clinton had exhibited for broad Palestinian concerns, when negotiations came down to the specifics of critical questions like Jerusalem and borders, he proved unable to shift his thinking away from a primary focus on Israel's needs and Israel's demands. Like many Americans, particularly in the Southern Baptist tradition, Clinton had grown up on myths about Israel. He writes in his 2004 memoir, My Life, that an old pastor and mentor had told him while he was governor of Arkansas that he would probably be president some day but that God would "never forgive you if you don't stand by Israel." The pastor did not argue that Israel had not mistreated the Palestinians, but he thought God intended the Jews "to be at home" in the Holy Land and that the Palestinians' problems could only be solved through peace and security for Israel.
Such notions of the priority of Israeli interests, taught early in life, inevitably find their way into policy. All of Clinton's principal negotiators, moreover, had what they all acknowledged was an emotional commitment to Israel. This conditioning and ingrained way of thinking is evident in the memoirs thus far published. Clinton's own memoir and others by Albright and Ross add up to an embarrassing collection of apologias for a badly misguided U.S. policy and provide striking evidence of how little the U.S., in its myopic attitude toward Israel, understood the Palestinian position.
Clinton's memoir is actually most notable for how little it says. For a man of such widely recognized analytical acumen, this much-heralded policy wonk writes a remarkably unwonkish memoir, a prosaic compendium of "who struck Johns" and "who said what to whoms" almost totally lacking in analysis. But he does manage to insert frequent snide asides about Arafat's failure to do as Clinton and the Israelis wanted and his inability to move forward as rapidly in negotiations as Clinton's time in office was receding. The memoirs reveal a president wholly dedicated to safeguarding Israel's interests and unable even to fathom the Palestinians' interests. Clinton's anger that Arafat would not take risks for Israel's security, or for Clinton's own legacy, is obvious.
Albright's memoir, Madam Secretary, is an even more abject statement of U.S. devotion to Israel's perspective. The Israelis gave "all they could" at Camp David, in Albright's view, whereas Arafat gave "no sign that his vision extended to anything more forward-looking than victory over Israel." When the intifada broke out, "Barak was personally involved in trying to calibrate the response in ways that would minimize loss of life" (an outrageous distortion after Israel fired more than a million rounds at Palestinian protesters in the first few days of the intifada, before any suicide bombings had occurred, and killed 117 Palestinians, one-quarter of them children, in the first month). In the end, she says, the "core failure was the Palestinians' obsessive focus not on how much could be gained but on the relatively little they would be required to give up." Palestinians could have had a state but instead they brought on the election of Ariel Sharon and they are left with "their legalisms, their misery, and their terror."
Barak and Sharon themselves could not have improved on this astounding anti-Palestinian catalog. Little wonder that the Palestinians got nowhere toward getting their point across at Camp David, to say nothing of advancing toward a just peace.
Clinton's and Albright's retrospectives are strikingly self-centered, even in their titles, but the prize for self-absorption goes to Dennis Ross, whose memoir, The Missing Peace, is an 800-page pat on his own back. Clinton is always asking Ross what to do, according to Ross's account, based almost entirely on his own notes over the years. He knew the parties better than anyone; he was always on the phone or in a private meeting with this or that leader; in the first Bush administration, "I persuaded [James] Baker and [George H.W.] Bush" to take various actions. Frequent comments like "knowing Rabin as I did" dot his pages; Rabin frequently "shared highly sensitive views with me." But far more important than his manifestations of ego are Ross's frank statements of the pro-Israeli perspective from which he was coming. Early in the book, he lays out his policy parameters: "Any effort at peacemaking must be premised on a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship. . . . Criticism was legitimate, but creating a breach in the relationship was not. . . . My approach to the peace process was shaped by the conviction that Israel must feel secure if it was to take risks for peace." If there were no other evidence of his extreme tilt toward Israel, this alone would stand out as an unmistakable clue to his devotion to Israel and whatever it demanded. One wonders why, as a supposed middleman in negotiations, Ross did not also operate under the conviction, to paraphrase what he says of Israel, "that the Palestinians must feel secure if they were to take risks for peace."
But the Palestinians received no such consideration. More's the pity, for a just, more or less equitable peace forged at Camp David would have prevented the intifada, which might then have headed off Osama bin Laden and prevented September 11, which would in turn have prevented the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The possibilities are intriguing to imagine; the consequences of a too-pronounced leaning toward Israel are frightening to dwell on.
Lost Hope
Although an honest Aaron Miller acknowledged to Swisher that none of the principal U.S. players in the negotiations was capable of giving a frank appraisal of what occurred because "the personal agenda and heat of the moment have colored it," the media and public opinion throughout the U.S. know only the distorted story as it emerged from these principal players when the summit collapsed. Clinton and company set the mood and cast the story in concrete on that day five years ago, and no amount of reappraisal, none of the second thoughts or reconsiderations, have made it through the media curtain that dropped across the Palestinian side of the story on that day. Like the old cliché about the correction to an erroneous but much-publicized newspaper story appearing only on page 30, buried deep inside the paper and never getting anything like the attention of the original story, the damage done by the U.S. at Camp David was done permanently the day Clinton gave the "blame speech." The Palestinians lost hope; the peace movement in Israel felt it had been betrayed by the Palestinians; the media in the U.S., ever eager to blame the Palestinians, picked up the message and have never since retracted or reassessed. Very few know, or are likely ever to know, the real story of how the Clinton administration undermined the Palestinians and undermined all prospects for peace.
The Shame of It All
Watching the Gazan Fiasco
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
A great charade is taking place in front of the world media in the Gaza Strip. It is the staged evacuation of 8000 Jewish settlers from their illegal settlement homes, and it has been carefully designed to create imagery to support Israel's US-backed takeover of the West Bank and cantonization of the Palestinians.
There was never the slightest reason for Israel to send in the army to remove these settlers. The entire operation could have been managed, without the melodrama necessary for a media frenzy, by providing them with a fixed date on which the IDF would withdraw from inside the Gaza Strip. A week before, all the settlers will quietly have left with no TV cameras, no weeping girls, no anguished soldiers, no commentators asking cloying questions of how Jews could remove other Jews from their homes, and no more trauma about their terrible suffering, the world's victims, who therefore have to be helped to kick the Palestinians out of the West Bank.
The settlers will relocate to other parts of Israel and in some cases to other illegal settlements in the West Bank handsomely compensated for their inconvenience. Indeed, each Jewish family leaving the Gaza Strip will receive between $140,000 and $400,000 just for the cost of the home they leave behind. But these details are rarely mentioned in the tempest of reporting on the "great confrontation" and "historical moment" brought to us by Sharon and the thieving, murderous settler-culture he helped create.
On ABC's Nightline Monday night, a reporter interviewed a young, sympathetic Israeli woman from the largest Gaza settlement, Neve Dekalim - a girl with sincerity in her voice, holding back tears. She doesn't view the soldiers as her enemy, she says, and doesn't want violence. She will leave even though to do so is causing her great pain. She talked about the tree she planted in front of her home with her brother when she was three; about growing up in the house they were now leaving, the memories, and knowing she could never return; that even if she did, everything she knew would be gone from the scene. The camera then panned to her elderly parents sitting somberly amid boxed-up goods, surveying the scene, looking forlorn and resigned. Her mother was a kindergarten teacher, we are told. She knew just about all of the children who grew up here near the sea.
In the 5 years of Israel's brutal suppression of the Palestinian uprising against the occupation, I never once saw or heard a segment as long and with as much sentimental, human detail as I did here; never once remember a reporter allowing a sympathetic young Palestinian woman, whose home was just bulldozed and who lost everything she owned, tell of her pain and sorrow, of her memories and her family's memories; never got to listen to her reflect on where she would go now and how she would live. And yet in Gaza alone more than 23,000 people have lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers and bombs since September 2000 -- often at a moment's notice on the grounds that they "threatened Israel's security." The vast majority of the destroyed homes were located too close to an IDF military outpost or illegal settlement to be allowed to continue standing. The victims received no compensation for their losses and had no place waiting for them to relocate. Most ended up in temporary UNRWA tent-cities until they could find shelter elsewhere in the densely overcrowded Strip, a quarter of whose best land was inhabited by the 1% of the population that was Jewish and occupying the land at their expense.
Where were the cameramen in May 2004 in Rafah when refugees twice over lost their homes again in a single night's raid, able to retrieve nothing of what they owned? Where were they when bulldozers and tanks tore up paved streets with steel blades, wrecked the sewage and water pipes, cut electricity lines, and demolished a park and a zoo; when snipers shot two children, a brother and sister, feeding their pigeons on the roof of their home? When the occupying army fired a tank shell into a group of peaceful demonstrators killing 14 of them including two children? Where have they been for the past five years when the summer heat of Rafah makes life so unbearable it is all one can do to sit quietly in the shade of one's corrugated tin roof -- because s/he is forbidden to go to the sea, ten minutes' walking distance from the city center? Or because if they ventured to the more open spaces they became walking human targets? And when their citizens resisted, where were the accolades and the admiring media to comment on the "pluck," the "will" and "audacity" of these "young people"?
On Tuesday, 16 August, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that more than 900 journalists from Israel and around the world are covering the events in Gaza, and that hundreds of others are in cities and towns in Israel to cover local reactions. Were there ever that many journalists in one place during the past 5 years to cover the Palestinian Intifada?
Where were the 900 international journalists in April 2002 after the Jenin refugee camp was laid to waste in the matter of a week in a show of pure Israeli hubris and sadism? Where were the 900 international journalists last fall when the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza lay under an Israeli siege and more than 100 civilians were killed? Where were they for five years while the entire physical infrastructure of the Gaza Strip was being destroyed? Which one of them reported that every crime of the Israeli occupation from home demolitions, targeted assassinations and total closures to the murder of civilians and the wanton destruction of commercial and public property- increased significantly in Gaza after Sharon's "Disengagement" Plan - that great step toward peace - was announced?
Where are the hundreds of journalists who should be covering the many non-violent protests by Palestinians and Israelis against the Apartheid Wall? Non-violent protesters met with violence and humiliation by Israeli armed forces? Where are the hundreds of journalists who should be reporting on the economic and geographic encirclement of Palestinian East Jerusalem and of the bisection of the West Bank and the subdivision of each region into dozens of isolated mini-prisons? Why aren't we being barraged by outraged reports about the Jewish-only bypass roads? About the hundreds of pointless internal checkpoints? About the countless untried executions and maimings? About the torture and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons?
Where were these hundreds of journalists when each of the 680 Palestinian children shot to death by Israeli soldiers over the last 5 years was laid to rest by grief-stricken family members? The shame of it all defies words.
Now instead report after report announces the "end to the 38 year old occupation" of the Gaza Strip, a "turning point for peace" and the news that "it is now illegal for Israelis to live in Gaza." Is this some kind of joke?
Yes, it is "illegal for Israelis to live in the Gaza Strip" as colonizers from another land. It has been illegal for 38 years. (If they wish to move there and live as equals with the Palestinians and not as Israeli citizens they may do so.)
Sharon's unilateral "Disengagement" plan is not ending the occupation of Gaza. The Israelis are not relinquishing control over the Strip. They are retaining control of all land, air and sea borders including the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza/Egypt border where the Egyptians may be allowed to patrol under Israel's watchful eye and according to Israel's strictest terms. The 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza remain prisoners in a giant penal colony, despite what their partisan leaders are attempting to claim. The IDF is merely redeploying outside the Gaza Strip, which is surrounded by electrical and concrete fences, barbed wire, watchtowers, armed guards and motion censors, and it will retain the authority to invade Gaza on a whim. Eight thousand Palestinian workers working in Israel for slave wages will soon be banned from returning to work. Another 3,200 Palestinians who worked in the settlements for a sub-minimum-wage have been summarily dismissed without recourse to severance pay or other forms of compensation. Still others will lose their livelihoods when the Israelis move the Gaza Industrial Zone from Erez to somewhere in the Negev desert.
The World Bank reported in December 2004 that both poverty and unemployment will rise following the "Disengagement" even under the best of circumstances because Israel will retain full control over the movement of goods in and out of Gaza, will maintain an enforced separation of the West Bank and Gaza preventing the residents of each from visiting one another, and will draw up separate customs agreements with each zone severing their already shattered economies-- and yet we are forced to listen day in and day out to news about this historic peace initiative, this great turning point in the career of Ariel Sharon, this story of national trauma for the brothers and sisters who have had to carry out the painful orders of their wise and besieged leader.
What will it take to get the truth across to people? To the young woman of Neve Dekalim who can speak her words without batting an eyelash of embarrassment or shame? As the cameras zoom in on angry settlers poignantly clashing with their "brothers and sisters" in the Israeli army, who will be concerned about their other brothers and sisters in Gaza? When will the Palestinian history of 1948 and 1967, and of each passing day under the violence of dispossession and dehumanization, get a headline in our papers?
I am reminded of an interview I had this summer in Beirut with Hussein Nabulsi of Hizbullah an organization that has had nothing to do with the movement for Palestinian national liberation whatsoever, but one that has become allied with those it sees as the real victims of US and Israeli policies and lies. I remember his tightly shut eyes and his clenched fists as he asked how long Arabs and Muslims were supposed to accept the accusations that they are the victimizers and the terrorists. "It hurts," he said in a whispered ardor. "It hurts so much to watch this injustice every day." And he went on to explain to me why the Americans and the Israelis with their monstrous military arsenals will never be victorious.
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
A great charade is taking place in front of the world media in the Gaza Strip. It is the staged evacuation of 8000 Jewish settlers from their illegal settlement homes, and it has been carefully designed to create imagery to support Israel's US-backed takeover of the West Bank and cantonization of the Palestinians.
There was never the slightest reason for Israel to send in the army to remove these settlers. The entire operation could have been managed, without the melodrama necessary for a media frenzy, by providing them with a fixed date on which the IDF would withdraw from inside the Gaza Strip. A week before, all the settlers will quietly have left with no TV cameras, no weeping girls, no anguished soldiers, no commentators asking cloying questions of how Jews could remove other Jews from their homes, and no more trauma about their terrible suffering, the world's victims, who therefore have to be helped to kick the Palestinians out of the West Bank.
The settlers will relocate to other parts of Israel and in some cases to other illegal settlements in the West Bank handsomely compensated for their inconvenience. Indeed, each Jewish family leaving the Gaza Strip will receive between $140,000 and $400,000 just for the cost of the home they leave behind. But these details are rarely mentioned in the tempest of reporting on the "great confrontation" and "historical moment" brought to us by Sharon and the thieving, murderous settler-culture he helped create.
On ABC's Nightline Monday night, a reporter interviewed a young, sympathetic Israeli woman from the largest Gaza settlement, Neve Dekalim - a girl with sincerity in her voice, holding back tears. She doesn't view the soldiers as her enemy, she says, and doesn't want violence. She will leave even though to do so is causing her great pain. She talked about the tree she planted in front of her home with her brother when she was three; about growing up in the house they were now leaving, the memories, and knowing she could never return; that even if she did, everything she knew would be gone from the scene. The camera then panned to her elderly parents sitting somberly amid boxed-up goods, surveying the scene, looking forlorn and resigned. Her mother was a kindergarten teacher, we are told. She knew just about all of the children who grew up here near the sea.
In the 5 years of Israel's brutal suppression of the Palestinian uprising against the occupation, I never once saw or heard a segment as long and with as much sentimental, human detail as I did here; never once remember a reporter allowing a sympathetic young Palestinian woman, whose home was just bulldozed and who lost everything she owned, tell of her pain and sorrow, of her memories and her family's memories; never got to listen to her reflect on where she would go now and how she would live. And yet in Gaza alone more than 23,000 people have lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers and bombs since September 2000 -- often at a moment's notice on the grounds that they "threatened Israel's security." The vast majority of the destroyed homes were located too close to an IDF military outpost or illegal settlement to be allowed to continue standing. The victims received no compensation for their losses and had no place waiting for them to relocate. Most ended up in temporary UNRWA tent-cities until they could find shelter elsewhere in the densely overcrowded Strip, a quarter of whose best land was inhabited by the 1% of the population that was Jewish and occupying the land at their expense.
Where were the cameramen in May 2004 in Rafah when refugees twice over lost their homes again in a single night's raid, able to retrieve nothing of what they owned? Where were they when bulldozers and tanks tore up paved streets with steel blades, wrecked the sewage and water pipes, cut electricity lines, and demolished a park and a zoo; when snipers shot two children, a brother and sister, feeding their pigeons on the roof of their home? When the occupying army fired a tank shell into a group of peaceful demonstrators killing 14 of them including two children? Where have they been for the past five years when the summer heat of Rafah makes life so unbearable it is all one can do to sit quietly in the shade of one's corrugated tin roof -- because s/he is forbidden to go to the sea, ten minutes' walking distance from the city center? Or because if they ventured to the more open spaces they became walking human targets? And when their citizens resisted, where were the accolades and the admiring media to comment on the "pluck," the "will" and "audacity" of these "young people"?
On Tuesday, 16 August, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that more than 900 journalists from Israel and around the world are covering the events in Gaza, and that hundreds of others are in cities and towns in Israel to cover local reactions. Were there ever that many journalists in one place during the past 5 years to cover the Palestinian Intifada?
Where were the 900 international journalists in April 2002 after the Jenin refugee camp was laid to waste in the matter of a week in a show of pure Israeli hubris and sadism? Where were the 900 international journalists last fall when the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza lay under an Israeli siege and more than 100 civilians were killed? Where were they for five years while the entire physical infrastructure of the Gaza Strip was being destroyed? Which one of them reported that every crime of the Israeli occupation from home demolitions, targeted assassinations and total closures to the murder of civilians and the wanton destruction of commercial and public property- increased significantly in Gaza after Sharon's "Disengagement" Plan - that great step toward peace - was announced?
Where are the hundreds of journalists who should be covering the many non-violent protests by Palestinians and Israelis against the Apartheid Wall? Non-violent protesters met with violence and humiliation by Israeli armed forces? Where are the hundreds of journalists who should be reporting on the economic and geographic encirclement of Palestinian East Jerusalem and of the bisection of the West Bank and the subdivision of each region into dozens of isolated mini-prisons? Why aren't we being barraged by outraged reports about the Jewish-only bypass roads? About the hundreds of pointless internal checkpoints? About the countless untried executions and maimings? About the torture and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons?
Where were these hundreds of journalists when each of the 680 Palestinian children shot to death by Israeli soldiers over the last 5 years was laid to rest by grief-stricken family members? The shame of it all defies words.
Now instead report after report announces the "end to the 38 year old occupation" of the Gaza Strip, a "turning point for peace" and the news that "it is now illegal for Israelis to live in Gaza." Is this some kind of joke?
Yes, it is "illegal for Israelis to live in the Gaza Strip" as colonizers from another land. It has been illegal for 38 years. (If they wish to move there and live as equals with the Palestinians and not as Israeli citizens they may do so.)
Sharon's unilateral "Disengagement" plan is not ending the occupation of Gaza. The Israelis are not relinquishing control over the Strip. They are retaining control of all land, air and sea borders including the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza/Egypt border where the Egyptians may be allowed to patrol under Israel's watchful eye and according to Israel's strictest terms. The 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza remain prisoners in a giant penal colony, despite what their partisan leaders are attempting to claim. The IDF is merely redeploying outside the Gaza Strip, which is surrounded by electrical and concrete fences, barbed wire, watchtowers, armed guards and motion censors, and it will retain the authority to invade Gaza on a whim. Eight thousand Palestinian workers working in Israel for slave wages will soon be banned from returning to work. Another 3,200 Palestinians who worked in the settlements for a sub-minimum-wage have been summarily dismissed without recourse to severance pay or other forms of compensation. Still others will lose their livelihoods when the Israelis move the Gaza Industrial Zone from Erez to somewhere in the Negev desert.
The World Bank reported in December 2004 that both poverty and unemployment will rise following the "Disengagement" even under the best of circumstances because Israel will retain full control over the movement of goods in and out of Gaza, will maintain an enforced separation of the West Bank and Gaza preventing the residents of each from visiting one another, and will draw up separate customs agreements with each zone severing their already shattered economies-- and yet we are forced to listen day in and day out to news about this historic peace initiative, this great turning point in the career of Ariel Sharon, this story of national trauma for the brothers and sisters who have had to carry out the painful orders of their wise and besieged leader.
What will it take to get the truth across to people? To the young woman of Neve Dekalim who can speak her words without batting an eyelash of embarrassment or shame? As the cameras zoom in on angry settlers poignantly clashing with their "brothers and sisters" in the Israeli army, who will be concerned about their other brothers and sisters in Gaza? When will the Palestinian history of 1948 and 1967, and of each passing day under the violence of dispossession and dehumanization, get a headline in our papers?
I am reminded of an interview I had this summer in Beirut with Hussein Nabulsi of Hizbullah an organization that has had nothing to do with the movement for Palestinian national liberation whatsoever, but one that has become allied with those it sees as the real victims of US and Israeli policies and lies. I remember his tightly shut eyes and his clenched fists as he asked how long Arabs and Muslims were supposed to accept the accusations that they are the victimizers and the terrorists. "It hurts," he said in a whispered ardor. "It hurts so much to watch this injustice every day." And he went on to explain to me why the Americans and the Israelis with their monstrous military arsenals will never be victorious.
The remaining 99.5 percent
By Amira Hass
"I want to ask you as a Jew to a Jewess," the young man said a few days ago. In these days, a beginning such as this invites a dialogue of the kind in which we have been drowning for several weeks now - a dialogue in which the definition "Jew" has been appropriated to describe some type of unique entity, one that is set apart from the other human species, a superior one. Sometimes it's the Jewish boy with his arms raised from the Warsaw Ghetto; sometimes it's the young girl whose orange shirt bears the slogan, "We won't forget and we won't forgive;" and sometimes it's the soldier who refuses to evacuate a Jew. A unique entity of ties of blood, sacredness and land.
"As a Jew to a Jewess," said the young man, who turned out to be a tourist from South America who has family in Israel and also understands Hebrew. It was at the Erez crossing, among the barbed-wire fencing, the locked gates, the revolving gates, the intimidating guard towers, the soldiers using special cameras to keep an eye on the handful of individuals passing through, and the booming loudspeakers through which they bark out their orders in Hebrew to women who have been waiting in the heat for five hours to go visit their sons imprisoned at the Be'er Sheva jail.
"Is it possible," he continued with his question, "that the Israelis, who are so nice and good - after all, I have family here - are unaware of the injustice they have caused here?" The images of destruction left behind by Israel in Palestinian Gaza and witnessed by him in the past few days have left a look of shock in his eyes. "I am a Jew, and my father is a Holocaust survivor, and I grew up on totally different values of Judaism - social justice, equality and concern for one's fellow man."
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As naive as it may have been, the question was like a breath of fresh air. Here was a Jew who was voicing his opinion on the fate of 1,300,000 people, while the entire world appeared to be focused on every one of the 8,000 Jews who are moving house. Here was a Jew who was moved by what have become dry numbers - 1,719 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip from the end of September 2000 until today; and according to various estimates, some two-thirds of them were unarmed and were not killed in battles or during the course of attempts to attack a military position or a settlement.
Based on figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, of those killed, 379 were children under the age of 18; 236 were younger than 16; 96 were women; and 102 were the objectives of targeted liquidations during the course of which the Israel Defense Forces also killed another 95 individuals who, according to the military too, were "innocent bystanders."
Some 9,000 Gaza residents were injured; 2,704 homes to some 20,000 people were razed by the IDF's bulldozers and assault helicopters; 2,187 were partially destroyed. Some 31,650 dunams of agricultural land were left scorched.
The Israeli responses to these numbers are standard: They invited it upon themselves, or: What do they expect when they fire Qassams at children and peaceful homes, or try to infiltrate and murder citizens in their houses - that the IDF won't come to their defense?
A direct line is drawn between these questions, which expressed the public's support for the Israeli assault policy, and participating in the sorrow of the evacuees and the wonderment at this "magnificent chapter" in the history of the Zionist settlement enterprise - a direct line of fundamental belief in the Jews' super-rights in this land. Indeed, one can join those who are amazed by the settlers in general, and the Gaza Strip settlers in particular.
What talent it takes to live for 35 years in a flourishing park and splendid villas just 20 meters from overcrowded, suffocated refugee camps. What talent it takes to turn on the sprinklers on the lawns, while just across the way, 20,000 other people are dependent on the distribution of drinking water in tankers; to know that you deserve it, that your government will pave magnificent roads for you and neglect (prior to Oslo, before 1994) to the point of destruction the Palestinian infrastructure. What skill it takes to step out of your well-cared-for greenhouse and walk unmoved past 60-year-old fruit-bearing date trees that are uprooted for you, roads that are blocked for you, homes that are demolished for you, the children who are shelled from helicopters and tanks and buried alongside you, for the sake of the safety of your children and the preservation of your super-rights.
For the sake of about half a percent of the population of the Gaza Strip, a Jewish half-percent, the lives of the remaining 99.5 percent were totally disrupted and destroyed - worthy of wonderment indeed. And also amazing is how most of the other Israelis, who did not go themselves to settle the homeland, suffered this reality and did not demand that their government put an end to it - before the Qassams.
A big, well-fed goat was removed from the Gaza Strip this week. And therefore, the sense of relief felt by many of the 99.5 percent is understandable - although it is a far cry from the reality emerging from the so-superficial media reports that are focusing on the celebrations of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. In the words last week in the Khan Yunis refugee camp of a former worker at one of the settlements: "The settlements divided the Strip into three or four prisons. Now, we will live in one big prison - a more comfortable one, but a prison nevertheless."
"I want to ask you as a Jew to a Jewess," the young man said a few days ago. In these days, a beginning such as this invites a dialogue of the kind in which we have been drowning for several weeks now - a dialogue in which the definition "Jew" has been appropriated to describe some type of unique entity, one that is set apart from the other human species, a superior one. Sometimes it's the Jewish boy with his arms raised from the Warsaw Ghetto; sometimes it's the young girl whose orange shirt bears the slogan, "We won't forget and we won't forgive;" and sometimes it's the soldier who refuses to evacuate a Jew. A unique entity of ties of blood, sacredness and land.
"As a Jew to a Jewess," said the young man, who turned out to be a tourist from South America who has family in Israel and also understands Hebrew. It was at the Erez crossing, among the barbed-wire fencing, the locked gates, the revolving gates, the intimidating guard towers, the soldiers using special cameras to keep an eye on the handful of individuals passing through, and the booming loudspeakers through which they bark out their orders in Hebrew to women who have been waiting in the heat for five hours to go visit their sons imprisoned at the Be'er Sheva jail.
"Is it possible," he continued with his question, "that the Israelis, who are so nice and good - after all, I have family here - are unaware of the injustice they have caused here?" The images of destruction left behind by Israel in Palestinian Gaza and witnessed by him in the past few days have left a look of shock in his eyes. "I am a Jew, and my father is a Holocaust survivor, and I grew up on totally different values of Judaism - social justice, equality and concern for one's fellow man."
Advertisement
As naive as it may have been, the question was like a breath of fresh air. Here was a Jew who was voicing his opinion on the fate of 1,300,000 people, while the entire world appeared to be focused on every one of the 8,000 Jews who are moving house. Here was a Jew who was moved by what have become dry numbers - 1,719 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip from the end of September 2000 until today; and according to various estimates, some two-thirds of them were unarmed and were not killed in battles or during the course of attempts to attack a military position or a settlement.
Based on figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, of those killed, 379 were children under the age of 18; 236 were younger than 16; 96 were women; and 102 were the objectives of targeted liquidations during the course of which the Israel Defense Forces also killed another 95 individuals who, according to the military too, were "innocent bystanders."
Some 9,000 Gaza residents were injured; 2,704 homes to some 20,000 people were razed by the IDF's bulldozers and assault helicopters; 2,187 were partially destroyed. Some 31,650 dunams of agricultural land were left scorched.
The Israeli responses to these numbers are standard: They invited it upon themselves, or: What do they expect when they fire Qassams at children and peaceful homes, or try to infiltrate and murder citizens in their houses - that the IDF won't come to their defense?
A direct line is drawn between these questions, which expressed the public's support for the Israeli assault policy, and participating in the sorrow of the evacuees and the wonderment at this "magnificent chapter" in the history of the Zionist settlement enterprise - a direct line of fundamental belief in the Jews' super-rights in this land. Indeed, one can join those who are amazed by the settlers in general, and the Gaza Strip settlers in particular.
What talent it takes to live for 35 years in a flourishing park and splendid villas just 20 meters from overcrowded, suffocated refugee camps. What talent it takes to turn on the sprinklers on the lawns, while just across the way, 20,000 other people are dependent on the distribution of drinking water in tankers; to know that you deserve it, that your government will pave magnificent roads for you and neglect (prior to Oslo, before 1994) to the point of destruction the Palestinian infrastructure. What skill it takes to step out of your well-cared-for greenhouse and walk unmoved past 60-year-old fruit-bearing date trees that are uprooted for you, roads that are blocked for you, homes that are demolished for you, the children who are shelled from helicopters and tanks and buried alongside you, for the sake of the safety of your children and the preservation of your super-rights.
For the sake of about half a percent of the population of the Gaza Strip, a Jewish half-percent, the lives of the remaining 99.5 percent were totally disrupted and destroyed - worthy of wonderment indeed. And also amazing is how most of the other Israelis, who did not go themselves to settle the homeland, suffered this reality and did not demand that their government put an end to it - before the Qassams.
A big, well-fed goat was removed from the Gaza Strip this week. And therefore, the sense of relief felt by many of the 99.5 percent is understandable - although it is a far cry from the reality emerging from the so-superficial media reports that are focusing on the celebrations of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. In the words last week in the Khan Yunis refugee camp of a former worker at one of the settlements: "The settlements divided the Strip into three or four prisons. Now, we will live in one big prison - a more comfortable one, but a prison nevertheless."
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