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| Volume VIII, September 2001, Number 3 |
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| EDITOR'S NOTE |
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Israel Shahak has died. A professor of chemistry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a
human-rights activist, he was an uncompromisingly honest observer of the state
of Israel, where he had immigrated with his mother when he was 12, following
their liberation from a Nazi concentration camp. In a dozen articles written
for this journal starting in the spring of 1986, Shahak explained for an
American audience some taboo subjects: the consistent aims of Zionist policies,
the motivations and political usefulness of the religious settlers, the
techniques used by Israel to expropriate Palestinian land, and the relationship
between Israel and organized American Jewish groups. He was also critical of the PLO, but he treated Palestinians with
dignity and was a mentor to many of them. His articles have lost none of their salience, particularly since Israel
has made such a sharp turn to the right. As a memorial tribute, we have begun putting the Shahak pieces on the
Council's web site, www.mepc.org. They offer insights that are unobtainable in the major U.S. media.
At a time when the American elite is lauding the courage of Washington Post owner Katharine Graham
for publishing hard truths about her own government, it is wise to remember
that the boundaries of respectable public debate are rather narrow where Israel
is concerned. Jews like Israel Shahak –
Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk and many others -- are labeled self-hating because
they are not afraid to criticize the behavior of the State of Israel and its
mainly Jewish inhabitants. Falk, a professor at Princeton and a member of the national advisory committee of the
Middle East Policy Council, is actually getting death threats -- and not from
antisemites -- for having narrated a BBC documentary on the 1982 massacres of
Palestinians in Lebanon's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which Ariel Sharon
facilitated. Chomsky has often
emphasized U.S. responsibility for Israeli outrages: "We give them money and say, do what you like -- and we know what
they like."
Because they speak up for Israel's victims, these critics are
non-persons to the American elite and mass media. Being Jews makes them potentially credible, therefore doubly
unacceptable as commentators on both the commercial and public networks. Occasionally an op-ed gets published that
breaks the mold. During the past few
weeks, former deputy editorial-page editor Stephen Rosenfeld has criticized
Sharon's policies in The Washington Post,
and so has Wendy Pearlman, a Harvard doctoral candidate living in a West Bank
village. An eyewitness to military occupation -- ethnic cleansing, collective
punishment, expropriation of land and water, bulldozing of homes and orchards,
insertion of highways, checkpoints, barricades and armed colonists (a.k.a. settlers)
– she writes: "The checkpoint is not a
security measure designed to prevent terrorists from transporting bombs. It is a political tactic aimed at making
Palestinians suffer in order to break their wills . . . .In its fear of terrorism, Israel employs
warlike violence that drives people to terrorism."
Henry Siegman of the Council on Foreign Relations has also
written an article in The International
Herald Tribune (co-owned by the Times
and Post) pointing out that Israel
has based its "peace process" on "false and insulting assumptions" that can
only engender Palestinian resistance. He exhorts the United States and Europe to "affirm viable Palestinian
statehood as the goal of the political process." This would involve standing up to the Israel lobby, which had
quickly put its "official" spin on why the Camp David summit meeting of July
2000 did not result in an agreement. This spin was promoted by influential voices from President Clinton to
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times: Arafat is to blame; the
Palestinians missed another opportunity to earn their "rights" by giving Israel
what it wants.
If the spin had been different last fall and winter, when
productive talks were still going on, perhaps the Israeli public would have
hesitated to elect Sharon. In the past,
whenever Washington has applied even light pressure, Israelis have paid
attention, knowing their vulnerability. That sort of reminder was not forthcoming from either the Clinton or
Bush administrations when it might have counted. The spin has done its job and become the quasi-official record
from Camp David. But lately some new
interpretations have appeared. Robert Malley, President Clinton's National
Security Council adviser on the Middle East, has written a detailed account in The New York Review of Books (August 15)
revealing Clinton's exasperation with Barak and the Israeli leadership. His account of what was not offered meshes
with that of Ahmad Qureia, the top Palestinian negotiator. A front-page article
by Debra Sontag in the July 26 New York Times also presented this more nuanced view.
Malley had preceded his New York Review effort with an op-ed in the July 8 Sunday New York Times, "Fictions about the Failure at Camp David," in
which he exploded three myths: 1) that Camp David was an ideal test of Arafat's
intentions, 2) that Israel's offer met most if not all legitimate Palestinian
aspirations, and 3) that the Palestinians made no concessions to Israel. The Palestinians expected a state with
contiguous territory and thought they had rights, just as Israel does. They lost sight of the fact that there is no
party to guarantee an international agreement in the Middle East except the
United States. What is needed is an end
to the occupation of the territory seized by Israel in 1967, but, like the
Democrats, the Republicans now in power are apparently too divided to oppose
even a leader as extremist as Ariel Sharon on this point. The best that could be done is apparently
the Sharm el-Sheikh (Mitchell) Agreement, which the United States, the
Europeans, the Palestinians and perhaps even the Israelis accept as a way back
to negotiations. Because this report
has taken on the aura of holy writ, we have reprinted the full text in this
journal. Mild as it may seem, the
report does identify the settlements as the main problem, implying that the
"violence" of the Palestinians is a tactic employed to protest this occupation
policy.
Many analysts believe a negotiated settlement will eventually
be accomplished. Senator Mitchell, leader of the international group that
drafted the report, argues for it based on his six-year endurance feat as a
mediator in Northern Ireland. In a
speech he presented at the University of Maryland (see p. 44) the senator
describes his efforts to get into the report the pain and suffering of both
sides in a fair and balanced manner. Oslo was a negotiated process; Mitchell is a way back to something like
it, probably even incorporating the progress made at Taba last December, when
the two sides were alone together. The work goes on. Well-known intellectuals
and activists from both the Israeli and Palestinian camps met in early July in
a town north of Jerusalem to try to keep the peace dialogue viable. They issued a joint statement calling for a
two-state solution based on the 1967 borders and U.N. Security Council
resolutions 242 and 338.
This basis for a settlement has been in place for three decades
and shows no sign of disappearing, but how much time remains before the only
option will be a faith-based initiative from Hamas? Meanwhile, the United States is isolating itself and risking its
strategic interests in the Arab/Muslim world and beyond (see the proceedings of
the Iran/Iraq seminar, p. 71). The
leader of the most important U.S. ally in the region, Crown Prince Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia, has reportedly refused two recent invitations to visit the White
House. According to a Zogby
International poll conducted in June, this move has made him the most popular
leader in the Middle East.
Anne Joyce
August 1, 2001
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