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Add an EventRaimondo: Smearing the Antiwar Movement [with accusations of anti-semitism]
As if to confirm what some opponents of this war have been saying – but not too loudly – about this being a war for Israel, the Bush administration is now "weighing an Israeli proposal for a joint operation in Iraq's western desert to disarm Iraqi missiles before they could be launched against Israel."
That this war has always been about Israel is a matter of simple geography. For all the President's palavering about the "threat to Americans" posed by Iraq, those "weapons of mass destruction" Saddam supposedly has couldn't even reach Europe, let alone the U.S. But Tel Aviv is well within range. Indeed, the prospect of Iraqi missiles raining down on Israel has been one of the chief deterrents against a move by Israel's far-right Likud government to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Arabs – a plan that is increasingly popular among Israelis and/or move the IDF back into Lebanon. The U.S. occupation of Iraq will eliminate that deterrent – and set up Israel to deal with Hizbollah and Syria in the regional conflagration to follow.
The oddly showy attempts by U.S. government officials to downplay the extent of U.S.-Israeli collaboration have never been too convincing – if they were, you see, the Israeli lobby in the U.S. would be outraged, and that would be the end of that. But who's kidding whom? The coming war in the Middle East will be a joint operation between Washington and Tel Aviv in every sense, not only militarily but also on the political and diplomatic fronts. In the blockbuster second issue of The American Conservative, Paul W. Schroeder, professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, disdained the Oedipal explanation for the origins of the President's war plans, writing:
"Much more plausible is the suggestion that this plan is being promoted in the interests of Israel. Certainly it is being pushed very hard by a number of influential supporters of Israel of the hawkish neoconservative stripe in and outside the administration (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and others) and one could easily make the case that a successful preventive war on Iraq would promote particular Israeli security interests more than general American ones."
Too easily, which is why the War Party is making a preemptive strike and declaring that the antiwar movement is "anti-Semitic." For to state the geographical and political reality of this war – that it is a war for Israel's sake, and for the sake of its powerful Christian evangelical "amen corner" in the Republican party – is to now be guilty of a "hate crime," according to Andrew Sullivan, pontificating in the London Times. Citing a New York Sun piece charging a recent "Not in Our Name" rally in New York City's Central Park with being a virtual Nuremberg rally, Sullivan smears the antiwar movement in America as a nascent American edition of the National Socialist German Workers Party:
"America's anti-war movement, still puny and struggling, is showing signs of being hijacked by one of the oldest and darkest prejudices there is. Perhaps it was inevitable. The conflict against Islamo-fascism obviously circles back to the question of Israel. Fanatical anti-semitism, as bad or even worse than Hitler's, is now a cultural norm across much of the Middle East. It's the acrid glue that unites Saddam, Arafat, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iran and the Saudis. And if you campaign against a war against that axis, you're bound to attract people who share these prejudices."
This, of course, is what the War Party is counting on. It doesn't matter that a few nut-balls on the edge of the crowd can hardly be said to fairly represent anyone's views but their own. The whole sleazy methodology of propagandists like Sullivan is to sling as much mud at the antiwar movement as possible, without regard for credibility, common sense, or even common decency – in the hope that a general impression will be created, nonetheless, like the residue of dogshit on a sidewalk.
If you read the original New York Sun piece, which Sullivan merely retails for general distribution, the patent unfairness of this particular smear technique is on full display:
"The anti-war demonstration in Central Park yesterday, one of several across the country over the weekend, was riddled with anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment, and in some cases classical anti-Semitism, as thousand of protesters assembled for what was ostensibly a show of harmless political dissent."
The idea is to mix in perfectly reasonable sounding critiques from the lips of antiwar protestors attesting to the centrality of Israel in this war – "America's support of Israel is unconscionable. [I don't] want my tax dollars spent going towards Israel's disenfranchisement of the Palestinians" – with a comment by one alleged participant who cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Throw in the names of Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Michael Lerner, and the sponsoring organization, and you have successfully smeared everyone in Central Park that day as a neo-Nazi stormtrooper. It works every time.
It worked during World War II, when smear-artists like John Roy Carlson – the Andrew Sullivan of his time – wrote screeds "exposing" leading America First antiwar organizers as "secret" Nazi collaborators. His technique was to masquerade as a sympathizer, and "interview" obscure anti-Semites, who, glad for the attention, happily babbled on about how "Roosevelt and the Jews" were dragging us into the war and he soon had them quoting copiously from the Protocols – a transparent forgery that anti-Semites and their accusers have gotten quite a lot of mileage out of since it was created by the Russian secret police in the 1800s.
However, it won't work this time: as our oddly childish chief executive said (or tried to say) the other day: "Fool me once, shame on you: fool me twice, shame on me." Saddam Hussein is not Hitler, but a tinpot despot, Iraq is not the Third Reich, only a broken-down half-starved cripple of a nation, and Susan Sarandon is not Elizabeth Dilling, no matter how hard you squint your eyes.
Sullivan's talents as a smear artist leave much to be desired. To begin with, citing the Sun, he quotes one demonstrator at the Central Park shindig as saying "If Bush goes with them and is too critical, he might lose [their] support…the international financiers have their hooks in everything." Sullivan then goes on to hiss: "Ah, those international financiers. Remember them?"
Ellipses alert! This is one of the favorite tactics of a lazy, and pretty careless, smear artist: the promiscuous use of ellipses to tie in unrelated subjects, and thus imply all sorts of things about your opponents. In the smear trade, they call this the old "word-twister." The problem is that it is always possible to go back to the source and check. In this case, the Sun also includes tell-tale ellipses at that crucial point in the sentence – so it's impossible to know what the poor guy, identified in the story as Amir Forghany of Queens, New York, meant to say. Oh well, he's a dirty filthy Arab, isn't he – aren't they all anti-Semites, anyway? Sullivan's rhetoric is designed to appeal to another sort of anti-Semitism – because, you know, Arabs are Semites, too.
And Sullivan's admirers have the nerve to compare him to Orwell? His mindlessly predictable propaganda is more like Winston Smith's screeds for the Ministry of Truth.
In explaining why we ought to all be head over heels in love with Israel, Sullivan announces that "an openly gay man just won election to the Knesset." What more do we need to know? During the Vietnam war, super-hawk Norman Podhoretz once declared that the antiwar movment was motivated by homosexual passion to save all those delectable young men from a certain death. But this sentiment, the homoerotic equivalent of the fabled "Vietnam Syndrome," has since been overcome by the new power-queen ethos of the post-Stonewall generation. Who cares how many of those cute little Palestinian teenagers are gunned down by Ariel Sharon's helicopter gunships: power trumps aesthetics for Sullivan every time. And get this:
"Compared with China, a ruthless dictatorship brutally occupying Tibet, Israel is a model of democratic governance. And unlike China's occupation of Tibet, Israel's annexation was a defensive action against an Arab military attack."
But of course the Chinese would explain their actions in the same "defensive" terms: they are "forced," they would aver, to occupy Tibet because of plots by Western powers. As for the Han Chinese "settlers" brought in by Beijing to "integrate" Tibet into the People's Republic, how are they different from the "settlers" from Brooklyn brought in by the Israelis to occupy olive groves that have been Palestinian for a thousand years? We are supposed to ensure and enforce a double-standard on behalf of Israel, or else be denounced as "anti-Semites." What balderdash. Yet like any deluded ideologue, particularly one as un-self-critical as Sullivan, he fails to see that this blatant hypocrisy just will not do. Instead he elevates his own premises to the status of "self-evident" axioms:
"To single [Israel] out for attack is so self-evidently bizarre that it prompts an obvious question: what are these anti-Israel fanatics really obsessed about?"
The "obsession," unfortunately, is all on the other side. For some reason, a cadre of American pundits, from George Will to Sullivan to Bill Bennett, etc. ad nauseam, is obsessed with promoting Israel's national interests above our own. At least, I guess Sullivan is an American. Though this ex-Brit (or dual citizen?) smearing some of his fellow Americans as proto-Nazis in a British newspaper seems, at best, in poor taste, and at worst a subtle appeal to European anti-Americanism, i.e. you know how those ignorant Yanks are, they hate everyone Jews, fags, you-name-it.
What is "self-evidently bizarre," however, is that Sullivan seems to be publicly losing his mind. It happens to a lot of people with AIDS. Dementia sets in, eventually, and, no matter how many drug cocktails they take, in the end virtually all succumb to mania and mental deterioration. The rabid, frothy-mouthed tone of Sullivan's recent writings, combined with a telltale literary sloppiness, is really kind of sad. Thus, we see the progression in Sullivan's piece, from the first mention of the Protocols, cited by a single demonstrator, to the end of the article, in which the war-maddened Sullivan fantasizes a mass distribution of the infamous forgery: "No wonder they are selling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Central Park"! he screeches. The poor boy is hallucinating.
It's time for Sullivan to throw in the towel before he does any more damage to what is left of his reputation. I remain an admirer of his book, Virtually Normal, which dared to debunk gay victimology and even called into question oppressive "anti-discrimination" laws favoring gays, but his writings on the war – his entire post-9/11 output – bring to mind the ravings of the syphilitic Nietzsche.
Sullivan and his "warblogger" friends want the antiwar movement to be "puny and struggling." But it wasn't the War Party that lit up the congressional switchboards during the debate of the war resolution. The calls were overwhelmingly anti-war, and on Main Street, America, antiwar sentiment is growing. That's why Sullivan and the New York Sun – a newspaper set up explicitly on account of dissatisfaction over the alleged "anti-Semitism" of the New York Times (!) – have launched this libel early on, hauling out this old canard and running it up the flagpole. Hardly anyone is saluting, however. How many times can they drag out the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, fer chrissake, and employ the same victimological illogic that not even Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton get away with anymore? The state of Israel and its American amen corner no more represent Jews worldwide than Al Sharpton and Robert Mugabe represent all People of Color, and it's high time somebody said so.
The calculation of the War Party is that, by smearing anyone who dares to identify the real politics of this war, they can equate antiwar sentiment with anti-Semitic agitation. As if the interests of Israel and of all Jews everywhere are identical – and as if this war really does serve Israel's interests, which it doesn't, as Professor Schroeder is good enough to point out:
"A preemptive war on Iraq would be as counterproductive in the long run as the Israeli occupation of Lebanon engineered by Ariel Sharon or the current Sharon/Likud efforts to destroy Palestinian resistance and terrorism and abort any independent Palestinian state by sheer military force. There are better ways for America to ensure Israel's survival…."
While I would venture that Israel is well-equipped to look after its own survival, thanks to the involuntary generosity of American taxpayers, Professor Schroeder's remark about the historical significance of the coming war is worth repeating and remembering:
"It would represent something to my knowledge unique in history. It is common for great powers to try to fight wars by proxy, getting smaller powers to fight for their interests. This would be the first instance I know where a great power (in fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy of a small client state."
As one particularly self-important bore with a literary tick of major proportions and delusions of grandeur habitually puts it:
"Indeed."
Justin Raimondo
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Most of the pro-palestinian movement in the west does not want Jews to have to leave.
Stop smearing. Stop lying. Be decent.
This is just a smear campaign. They can't debate the issues, so they resort to smears to dehumanize their opponents. This is no different than what happened to Jews vis a vis the "Protocols."
Oh please. The Palestinians I know have demanded the Jews leave the lands they stole in 1948. They have a right to demand such. I've never heard any of them say they want the Jews to stay in the land. Hate to disappoint but my own personal experience tells me otherwise.
If all you listen to is Israeli propaganda, then of course you would be left with such an impression. Fact is, the Palestinians' true voice is suppressed in the media so you would never know what they say or think -- you are only told what their enemies, the Israelis, want you to think of the Palestinians' positions. Nothing could be further from the truth though.
This is a very interesting talk.
VIDEO:
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/amp_ashrawi_cu.ramShe gave Madeleine "ThePriceIsWorthIt" Albright a piece of her mind during her convocation speech. You can just imagine what she said. If you want to read it, here it is:
Upstaged but Not Silenced
The speech below, however, is what I find truly inspirational. She shows the spirit of the Palestinian people in the face of Israeli atrocities.
VIDEO:
Forward to 29 minutes into this to hear Fadia's speech to 70,000 demonstrators gathered in DC last Aprilhttp://www.freespeech.org/fsitv/ramfiles/DN042202_vid.ram
Two States or One?
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 21 November 2002
When the PLO formally recognized Israel within its internationally recognized borders and agreed to a two-state solution in 1993, like most Palestinians, I swallowed hard but accepted it. We believed that this unprecedented historic compromise, though bitter, was necessary to bring about peace. Those who completely rejected the creation of a state limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- a mere twenty two percent of the country in which Palestinians were an overwhelming majority just fifty years ago -- were relegated to the margins of the Palestinian movement, both on the left and the Islamist right.
Israel gave everyone the impression that it would agree to a Palestinian state, and that it was only a matter of working out the technical formalities. But almost 10 years later, Israel has still never recognized the Palestinian right to statehood, much less agreed to the creation of such a state. On the contrary, in practice it has done everything to make the emergence of such a state impossible by continuing to furiously build colonies all over the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The settler population in the West Bank has more than doubled since 1993, and not a day goes by without further colonization.
Because this policy has succeeded in solidifying Israeli control, and has, as intended, rendered a rational partition of the country virtually impossible, an increasing number of Palestinians, including some representatives of the Palestinian Authority, have started to talk once again about bi-nationalism -- the creation of a single democratic state for Israelis and Palestinians -- as the only viable solution to the conflict.
This idea is horrifying to many Israelis, who view it as a plot to "destroy Israel" since the vastly higher birth rate among Palestinians will soon make them a majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, just as they were until 1948.
None are more horrified by this prospect than Israel's traditional "peace camp," represented by the Labor and Meretz parties. And yet, because of its liberal values, the "peace camp" is unable to embrace formal apartheid or ethnic cleansing to "solve the demographic problem" as do Israel's right wing parties. The liberals want both the benefits of Jewish privilege that comes from living in a "Jewish state" while at the same time being faithful to their democratic values. They have shown themselves to be entirely bankrupt morally, intellectually and politically, and to have no serious ideas whatsoever for resolving the conundrum of their hypocrisy. They embrace Palestinian statehood warmly in theory but miss no opportunity to undermine and sabotage it in practice and to present proposals for meaningless and nominal statehood within a greater Israel.
I am one of those who accepted the two-state solution (although I opposed the Oslo Accords because I believed they could not lead to that goal) not enthusiastically, but because it offers Palestinians and Israelis a chance at normalcy from which they could one day -- like the European Union -- build a future of peace and prosperity from the ashes of war and hatred. Moreover, an international legal framework already exists for the transition from the current situation to Palestinian statehood, at least in theory making the path easier than to any other solution.
For Palestinians, giving up the seventy-eight percent of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 is giving up a part of themselves. It is gut-wrenchingly hard, and for some impossible. I respect that. For millions of Palestinians this is the land from which they, their parents or grandparents were expelled, in which homes and farms, shops and factories, churches and mosques, an entire society, was uprooted in exchange for decades of dispossession, misery in refugee camps, and demonization by Israel and its apologists. But, like millions of others, I was prepared to accept it for the sake of peace.
Although I recognize that the two-state solution will soon become impracticable, if it is not already, due Israel's relentless settlement construction, I believe it may still have a last chance if Israel is willing to embrace the following principles:
1) Israel must recognize that the Palestinians have already made an historic compromise by accepting a state in only twenty-two percent of their homeland, and that no further concessions can justly be asked of them. Israel must declare that by conquering seventy eight percent of Palestine in 1948, far more than was allotted to it in the 1947 UN partition plan, it has completely fulfilled its territorial ambitions and will not seek any more expansion.
2) Israel must immediately cease all construction in the occupied territories, including "natural growth" and all the other devices that are used to disguise ongoing settlement building. Israel must immediately stop confiscating Palestinian land either for building settlements or settler roads.
3) Israel must agree that the goal of any further negotiations is a complete end to the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem within a fixed, early period, and agree to withdraw under neutral international supervision and guarantees.
4) Israel must recognize an independent, sovereign Palestinian state whose borders are those of June 4, 1967, with minor, agreed-upon modifications to rectify anomalies, such as divided villages and bisected roads. Any land ceded on one side of the line must be compensated with land of equal size, value and utility on the other side, as close as possible to the exchanged land.
5) Israel must agree to evacuate all settlements in the occupied territories, without exception, including settlements in and around occupied East Jerusalem.
6) Jerusalem, as an open city, would be the capital of two states. A formula for sharing power fairly between Palestinians and Israelis, with guaranteed access to holy places for peoples of all faiths, would replace the illegal Israeli occupation "municipality" imposed on the city since 1967. This could be accomplished by various formulas. If the Palestinians agree to allow any settlements to remain in and around Jerusalem, Israel must compensate both the State of Palestine and the private land owners for the land, and the settlers must agree to live either as Palestinian citizens or permanent residents under Palestinian laws. If Palestinians agree that some Israeli settlers can remain in East Jerusalem then Israel must agree to allow Palestinians to return to the homes from which they were expelled in West Jerusalem in 1947-48.
7) The most difficult issue is the right of return of Palestinian refugees and compensation and restitution for their property and suffering. The right to return is an individual legal right and is not negated by the two-state solution. At the same time, recognition of Israel as a sovereign state means acknowledging a political reality and interest that will have to be factored into any formula to implement the right of return. It is not difficult to imagine solutions which fall between the maximalist positions of both sides and which simultaneously take into account Israel's concerns, and provide Palestinian refugees with real choices, including return to their original homes, as mandated by UN Resolution 194. Palestinians could, for example, agree among themselves to a system of priority where those with the greatest need to return get to choose first (among the choices Palestinian refugees whose original homes no longer exist might be offered is a home in an evacuated Israeli settlement). Israel will not be able to get away with a merely symbolic recognition of Palestinian refugee rights, but nor would millions of refugees suddenly flood back as in the Israeli "nightmare" scenario. There is ground in between that can be reached through negotiations and international mediation.
Palestinian private property remains inviolate and all property seized by Israel, even of those who choose not to return, must be returned to its owners or paid for at the fair market price, including use and interest. Clinton Administration Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat set out some sensible principles for dealing with property confiscated from European Jews and others by Nazi Germany, which could be adopted here. The same principles should apply to any Jews who were forced to leave Arab states as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
These conditions represent an enormous historic compromise. They call for two states, a Jewish Israel on seventy eight percent of the territory of historic Palestine and a State of Palestine on just twenty two percent. They call for full recognition of Israel within secure and recognized borders, the implementation of UN resolutions, sharing of Jerusalem and a just resolution to the refugee problem that respects refugee rights as well as Israel's needs.
From this basis, Israelis, Palestinians and later perhaps Jordanians, Egyptians, Lebanese and Syrians, might after a couple of generations feel they can join together in something like the European Union. That would be a choice freely made among sovereign peoples. I could live with this, and, though I do not speak for anyone but myself, I believe that other Palestinians could too -- indeed this is basically what millions of them thought they were endorsing when they elected Yasir Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority.
The problem is that there is not one major Israeli party or leader who is willing to put such a vision to the Israeli people. Even the most "dovish" want to keep most of the settlers where they are, annex large chunks of the West Bank, keep control of most of Jerusalem, and reject categorically any discussion of the right of return. No allowance is made for the massive compromises already made by the Palestinians, and more still are demanded. Israeli sociologist Jeff Halper argues that it is already too late and Israel's "matrix of control" in the occupied territories cannot, in effect, be dismantled. If Halper is right, then nothing any Israeli leader says will save the two-state solution. But if he is wrong and it can be saved, time is very short and we must hear a commitment to completely end the occupation from the Israelis now. After all, they are the principal beneficiaries of this solution.
The whole world is waiting, not least the Arab world which again held out its hand to Israel last March when the Arab League unanimously reaffirmed its commitment to a two-state solution.
Sadly, though, the political field in Israel looks unlikely produce anyone who will seize this golden opportunity. I believe, therefore, that Israel will likely miss the boat on the two-state solution, and we will have to think about what it will be like to live together in one state, and more importantly how to get there peacefully because no road map exists. For me, that is not a bad thing. I have no problem with the idea of living with Israelis, as long as we are equal before the law and in practice. I do not see the births or immigration of Jews as a "demographic time bomb" to be regarded with horror, nor am I frightened of having next door neighbors who speak a different language or worship in different ways. I embrace human and cultural diversity, no less in the land where my parents were born, than I do here in the United States.
I am prepared to accept two states as a practical solution to the conflict and do everything in my power to make it work. However, the mere trappings of nationalism -- flags, anthems, stately buildings, and passports -- mean absolutely nothing to me in themselves and I would just as soon do away with them. What matters is the content: does the flag represent true independence and sovereignty? Does the anthem represent common humanist values? Do the buildings enclose genuinely democratic institutions that do justice? Does a passport give its holder the freedom to travel the world and live securely in his homeland? These are the questions that matter.
Palestine/Israel could be two countries with a border between them that may one day lose its significance, just as the border between France and Germany has lost its power to divide people. Or, it could be one country for two peoples. I do not really care as long as we choose one path quickly and stick to it, and that, in the end, Israelis and Palestinians enjoy peace, democracy and human rights together, not at each other's expense.
True peace, whatever way we choose to achieve it, has a price. The powerful must give up some of their power and share it with the weak, or conflict is inevitable. Both a genuine two-state solution, as well as a single democratic state, would require that Israelis relinquish their monopoly on power in a manner they have never seriously considered thus far. Peace only came to South Africa when whites realized this and gave up their monopoly on power. Israel is far from that point and still seems to be looking for a way to avoid the choice. That means discussion about how to live together will remain only academic, while conflict and bloodshed rage on.
http://www.electronicintifada.net/v2/article896.shtml
A State for All Its Citizens—One Palestinian’s Dream of Peace
By Samah Jabr
For the past two years I have longed to be able to spend a Sunday in New York’s Central Park. I remember it as a place where people of every color, race and creed enjoy the blossom of pink spring flowers. The park’s wonderful configuration of elm trees provided shade for a diversity of people: Chinese giving backrubs; Africans selling their crafts on the sidewalks; a gorgeous black model in a flimsy dress sitting next to a young white man; an Eastern-looking scholar with a long beard and a short cloak leaning on the grass and enjoying his privacy; young boys with kippas playing competitively on their skateboards; sporty women in every possible outfit and hairstyle, looking after little kids, jogging or walking their dogs along the green grass. It is a diversity in which I revel.South Africa, too, is a rainbow nation. After the defeat of constitutional prejudice and the barriers of apartheid, South Africa is on the right path for peace. Freedom was the first step—now the battle for advancement, and against crime and disease goes on.
I yearn for these places precisely because, just as the walls have come down in South Africa, they are being raised in my homeland. The most infamous of these is the huge wall being established on the illusory Green Line separating Israeli-inhabited areas from Palestinians and their homes. Those of us who live here know that walls do not reduce violence or stop Israeli tanks or Palestinian bombers. They do, however, separate those of us who are willing to meet each other. Walls emphasize stereotypes and deepen the sectarian hatred and animosity on both sides. Walls are being built here to shatter into pieces our dream of peace.
You may be surprised to know that I am speaking here not of a physical structure, but of the “two-state solution.” These days my ears are full of the region’s cries of war that grow ever louder with time. But the “peace” that the world and the Israeli left wish upon us is based on walls: a two-state proposal that is misleadingly or mistakenly being called a “solution.”
This “solution” will only maintain the exclusivity of occupation and propagate Zionism’s profound inequality in land proportion and resources, water, economy, advancement and—most importantly—military, between the two states. This is a “solution” that will reward the foreign occupiers by awarding them legal status and normal relationships in the Middle East, while giving us Palestinians bits and pieces of our homeland, cantons that are separated from each other by Jewish-only settlements and their safe roads.
This two-state “solution” advocates a demilitarized “Palestinian state” that has no direct borders with any of its Arab neighbors but instead is surrounded by the Middle East’s only nuclear power. A “transient state,” says the American administration, that will be bestowed on one condition: that we Palestinians behave and “elect” a “reformed” and “democratic” authority (by “Israeli-American” standards)—and that only after another three more years of occupation.
And so, while Israel continues bringing its 2,000-year “refugees” to this land, and extolling its war criminals as national heroes and electing them prime minister, we Palestinians are expected to give up the right of return to over 60 percent of the Palestinian nation, to abandon our political prisoners and to condemn our freedom fighters. Instead of the single infamous Jericho Casino, the new Palestinian Authority might build a dozen, and we’ll continue having no factories, no infrastructure and no basic elements of independence.
The two-state “solution” does not meet any minimal ambition of peace, freedom and a dignified future for Palestinians. It jeopardizes our basic human and national rights of self-sovereignty. Except for municipal matters like collecting our own garbage, our nation will be totally dependent on the state of Israel. And we will be expected to do something in return, like collecting the garbage of the “neighbors,” washing their dishes and continuing to provide cheap labor to our tormentors and oppressors.
For these reasons, the two-state “solution” has a very poor prognosis. Yes, it can impose a truce and temporary stability—but not a real peace. The profound inequality on which it is based will bring recurrent flare-ups of violence in the not-too-distant future.
Its poor chance of success is not the only reason to oppose it, however. I oppose it because it has no appeal to the average Palestinian. We all know that it is simply a less ugly mask of occupation that will make the Israelis look more beautiful to the world, while continuing to oppress us—to the world’s silence. This “solution” has been introduced as a means of making Palestinians bow to the inevitable.
The Palestinians are a cosmopolitan nation, however. We are the descendants of a mixture of cultures and civilizations that have lived in this land since the Stone Age. We have Canaanite, Semite, Aramaic, Arab, Turkish, African and European blood in our veins. Here we were born, and here our forefathers have lived. A common history, a common passion for the one homeland and the same bleeding wound unite us.
We are not xenophobic or exclusive. We are Muslims, Christians, indigenous Jews, Baha’is and Druze. Over the centuries our doors were open to foreigners. The Armenians fleeing genocide found shelter among Palestinians, Africans came to Palestine as pilgrims, were caught by the magic of Jerusalem and have stayed here ever since. The early Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution were accepted within the Palestinian community, worked with Palestinians, lived in their towns, and intermarried with them. According to the Palestinian National Charter, the document that lays out our national principles, Jews who immigrated to Palestine before the1948 Nakba are still considered Palestinians.
Unlike the Armenian refugees, however, the European Zionist Jews brought with them their guns and a vile colonialist agenda. They came to claim Palestinian land as their territory and to shove the Palestinians away to create room for more and more occupiers. The international community shamelessly supported the occupation to rid itself of their own “Jewish problem” at home.
Our rejection of the Zionist project is based on the rejection of foreign occupation, the unjust partition plan and the theft of our homeland and resources—not to mention the human crimes that have been committed to realize the Jewish dream of an exclusive state.
Although any nation would demand that foreign occupiers take their guns and luggage and go home, I do acknowledge that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very complex. The emergence of two generations of Israelis born in the land their forefathers occupied makes thing infinitely more confused. It means that this conflict will not be solved until we recognize the presence and the humanity of the other, rectify the wounds of the past, acknowledge the wrong that has been done to Palestinians and then undo those wrongs as best we can.
As the human crisis in occupied Palestine haunts me, and a humanistic, just solution to it puzzles me, I recall the joy of diversity and peace in Central Park and South Africa. Hope for me lies in a multi-national, multi-ethnic pluralistic democratic state of historic Palestine for all its citizens. Palestinians who were born in Palestine, the descendants of those dispossessed and expelled by military force, those Israelis born in the land, and the Jews who arrived here before the Israeli occupation, rather than the immigrant occupiers, all have the moral right to live in a free, democratic Palestine as equal citizens; in which one person equals one vote.
Zionists and their friends will say that what I am proposing means their extermination. “You are asking us to commit mass suicide,” one Israeli “peacemaker” told me. In fact, I’m calling for their moral and ethical liberation from the sin of occupation, for their freedom from pathological fear and the neurosis of security, all the while restoring their human rights as equal citizens in a free country.
Fundamental Palestinian Demands
The right of return should be restored to our refugees—it is up to them whether they exercise it or not. Freedom to all our political prisoners is a cardinal pillar to peace in the region. War criminals should be tried and punished for their actions. As for the occupiers and their collaborators in the Palestinian community, a workable solution based on respect for human rights and international law should be negotiated.
While this is not an easy solution, it is the closest there is to earthly justice. It must be implemented slowly but surely (as opposed to just slowly), to prepare the Palestinians to accept their oppressors as equal citizens, and to prepare the Israelis for shedding their privileges that rest on exploitation in order to earn their acceptance as equal citizens.
This is not my fantasy of peace—it is my hope of peace. The undoing of colonization has been achieved throughout history. South Africa is a living example of the triumph of hope and reconciliation over oppression and prejudice. Palestine can be the latest such inspiration.
I’m not every Palestinian, but neither am I alone among Palestinians. I’m a voice of hope willing to speak out when other voices are caught up in fear and despair. My call is a call of humanity and freedom that has not been silenced through intimidation or temptation, and never will be. Even when I am denied many of my very basic human rights, I choose to exercise the right to hope for and dream of a better future for a home and a people I so dearly love.
Samah Jabr is a medical intern in her native city of Jerusalem.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/sept-oct02/0209010.htmlFree Palestine!
Some Palestinians do feel this way. But to extropolate that therefore this is how "Palestinians" feel, is a catagory error.
See:
http://www.intrepidsoftware.com/fallacy/compos.htm
It is also worth noting that the disolving of the State of Israel, is not predicated on Jews moving out of Palestine, only on their relating to the other people who live there as equals.
See:
http://www.intrepidsoftware.com/fallacy/cq.htm
I have yet to have any tell me otherwise, and I would estimate I personally spoken to 300+ reagrding these matters. I'm not denying some may feel differently, but I haven't found them yet. When I do, I report back and let you know.
Free Palestine!
I agree with him 100% that the war on Iraq is largely due to Israel's pressuring of the U.S. to do so. Iraq is simply not that important, yet Israel is trying to get the U.S. to fight all it's enemies (the world) starting with the Arab world.
This NEVER would have been the case if the UN didn't give away land that was not theirs to give away in the first place to Eastern European Jewish Zionists!
If Israel never had been created (a major mistake and major injustice to the Palestinian people), we would not find ourselves in the position we are today-- on the brink of WWIII, mostly because of U.S. support for racist, apartheid Israel.
There is oil in many places around the world! On top of that, nuclear power and natural power and hydrogen power is available. Oil is not the issue--- racist Zionism IS!