Debate between Israelis and Palestinians

JIM WALEY: Well, organising a meeting between Jews and Arabs in the current climate in Israel has been so fraught with problems that it's a miracle that it's happening at all. Just finding a place where both sides feel safe has been rather difficult. We're in the American Colony Hotel in east Jerusalem, a location we've chosen for both practical and symbolic reasons. The hotel is right on the border between the Arab and Jewish parts of the city and it is traditionally regarded as neutral grounds. In fact, it was in room 16, downstairs, that the first secret contacts took place between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators almost a decade ago, contacts that led to the Oslo peace accords. Well, that peace is now almost dead. Today we'll try to establish whether there's any common ground to resurrect it. We're joined on my right by a group of Israelis, and on my left by a group of Palestinians. They come from all walks of life and hold a wide range of views.

Firstly, welcome to you all and I do thank you for giving us your time under such difficult circumstances. I want to start at the outset by saying that we're not here to rehash 4,000 years of history. What we want to do is look forward rather than back to try to see if there are any practical solutions that a majority on both sides would be willing to accept. On a positive note, I'd like to start by finding out what we can agree on rather than disagree, if that's possible. Is there anyone here who doesn't think that there should be two separate states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace? Anyone? Can I ask you why?

DAVID WILDER, ISRAELI SETTLER: It will put the existence of the state in jeopardy.

JIM WALEY: You wouldn't even try it?

DAVID WILDER: No.

JIM WALEY: From the other side?

MICHAEL TARAZI, PALESTINIAN LAWYER: I fundamentally believe that a state defined by a certain religion and ethnicity is discriminatory in nature and that the only fair solution is one state where all people, Christian, Jews, Muslims, Arab, Israeli, can live as equal citizens.

JIM WALEY: David Horowitz, how would this work? Would it be possible?

DAVID HOROWITZ, ISRAELI NEWSMAGAZINE EDITOR: The idea of one state living in peace alongside a second state, I have to say, is supported now by most Israelis. But most Israelis feel that the existing Palestinian leadership really spurned the best offer Israel could make, and still survive as a state under the last government of Ehud Barak. They feel that, Israelis feel, of course, that he offered much too much. But all Israelis pretty much will tell you that he offered everything that Israel could offer short of national suicide, and that having been spurned by Yasser Arafat, although in principle they agree to the two state idea, they don't think with this Palestinian leadership, there is a real will for reconciliation.

JIM WALEY: Was that a real offer, do you think?

DIANA BUTTU, PALESTINIAN LAWYER: Absolutely not. The Israeli offer was going to divide the Palestinian state into four separate cantons - three in the West Bank, and with the Gaza Strip, the fourth. They would have controlled our borders entirely. They would have controlled our air space, our water. It would not have been a peace between equals, it would have been a peace that would have been imposed on us.

EVE HARROW, ISRAELI SETTLER: I think this entire conversation is hypothetical in the extreme. We have a population of Arabs living amongst us who, from birth, incite their children to hate Jews, to want to grow up to be Shahidim, and kill as many Jews as possible. It's also happening now in the Israeli Arab population. So it's very well to talk about psychological borders and buffer zones, but we are fighting now against people who hate us for being Jews, who want a one state solution. They want it to be a country of Palestine instead of Israel. This is a war for our existence and I think until we get beyond that, there's really nothing else to talk about.

JIM WALEY: How do you get beyond that?

EVE HARROW: There has to be, first of all, the current regime of the Palestinian authority has to go. They have an always will be a bunch of terrorists and they're not good for anybody. Then we see if there's anyone to talk to that does believe in democracy the way those of us who understand the Western world understand what real freedoms are. Freedom does not entail the freedom of going into a discotheque and blowing everybody up. That's not freedom.

JIM WALEY: A bunch of terrorists, is that what you consider yourselves?

MARIANE ALBINA, PALESTINIAN AID WORKER: Well, many people might label me as a terrorist, Simply because I believe in resisting the occupation, and, for example, I believe that the occupation is the biggest terror in the world. How can you say that Israel is a democratic country when, for example, it says in their basic law that they are a democratic and a Jewish country and how can a democratic country be in occupation and power? It just shocks me how further the Israeli people elect, for example, Ariel Sharon, to be the PM - someone who has been known for his responsibility for the crimes, like in 1982, against Palestinians in Lebanon, it just shocks me.

AHUVA PASSOW, ISRAELI ART CURATOR: When I walk, every day, down King George Street, which is in the centre of Jerusalem, to take the bus, which is also an act of faith to get to the Hebrew university on Mount Skopus, where I work, I don't want to have to worry "Will I make it?"

JIM WALEY: Arnold Roth has a very special story to tell. You're an Australian, and you would probably wake up in the morning every day and think about your daughter. Tell us what happened?

ARNOLD ROTH, ISRAELI SOFTWARE COMPANY MANAGER: My daughter, whose photograph I've brought along here, was one of the 16 people blown to pieces last summer, August, in the terrorist attack on the Sparrow Pizza store in Jerusalem. It's terribly difficult for people, like my wife and my children and myself, to listen to analyses of the Middle East conflict which talk about people's hurt feelings and frustrations in some political sense. Terror is a tactic which simply can't be excused under any conditions, and yet, we hear the Arab leadership doing double talk about it all the time. I, at the risk of damaging my heart, would like to hear from the Arabs in this room, a disagreement among themselves. If those people would simply put up their hand and say "I don't agree, "I don't agree with the other Arab next to me", I think I might fall off my chair.

JIM WALEY: Let's ask the Palestinians here. How many believe suicide bombings and terrorism can be justified if there is nowhere else to turn?

AMAR ABOU-ZIAD, PALESTINIAN STUDENT: I'm against suicide bombings. I mean, she was talking about going on a bus to the Hebrew University. That's where I study. I take the same bus. If someone decides to blow themselves up on that bus, I'm going to die and maybe she would die. So the person who is doing this is not going to make any difference, whether it's an Arab or a Jew. The objective of these people doing the suicide bombings is to destroy any hope for a peace process. That's the one thing. The second thing is we have to look at the whole picture. What makes a 26-year-old girl with a kid go blow herself up?

ARNOLD ROTH: What an indictment of the political and religious leadership of the Palestinian Arabs. Very few of the people who have gone out to destroy themselves and so many other lives, have done so from a position of being super-smart, super well-informed or super-mature. What's happening time and again is that old men like Yasser Arafat and his political cohorts are sending young people brainwashed, maybe under drugs, to their deaths, when they're dragging other people down. I think it's tragic. Do I have sympathy for them? I have sympathy for their entire people because while we've built one of the leading states in the world from every perspective that you can think of - medical and musical and who knows what else - they're still struggling to express their basic humanity and blaming us for it.

RAIA ROTEM, ISRAELI TEACHER: I'm a war widow myself. My husband was killed in '73. I didn't want him to go to the war even then. Now I think that the real heroes of Israeli society are the soldiers who refuse to go to the occupied territories. I think that what we are doing there, okay, I won't call it a massacre just in order to try and sound rational, but we are terrorising a whole population. I don't think that the suicide bomber is more horrible than demolishing a house on the people who live there, who inhabit it. I don't think that shooting from an aeroplane or bombing from an aeroplane, it's very clean, so it's not terror. We are acting as a terrorist state on the occupied territories.

JIM WALEY: It sounds as if you've got almost an ally on the other side.

MICHAEL TARAZI, PALESTINIAN LAWYER: I certainly hope we do. She's very human ally. She sees us as equal human beings, as we see her as an equal human being. That's what we have to promote inside Israel. I was very concerned to hear the statements on the other side. If you listen closely, it's extremely colonialist, extremely. "They have to prove their humanity. We are very much the superior race. "We've developed this wonderful country", without saying at whose expense. They were able to build a country - and this legacy isn't known at all in the outside world - at our expense. 75% of the Christian and Muslim population were either forcibly exiled or fled during the war that created Israel, and they have not been allowed to return for one reason and one reason only - we are not the right religion.

DAVID WILDER, ISRAELI SETTLER: Last night where I live, a 12-year-old child was hit by a bullet fragment and it just missed his head. Arab snipers, terrorist snipers shot into my house...

JIM WALEY: And you live on a settlement?

DAVID WILDER: I live in Hebron.

WOMAN IN GROUP: I just don't believe this!

DAVID WILDER: I live in Hebron. Snipers shot into my house and missed two of my girls by the distance between the two of us. They both could have been killed. There are bullet holes still in my walls. These people are Arabs who want to destroy the State of Israel - period.

JIM WALEY: Do you want to destroy the State of Israel?

DIANA BUTTU: I don't want to destroy the State of Israel. I simply want to destroy its occupation.

JIM WALEY: And you?

AMAR ABOU-ZIAD: I just have one question for him. He totally doesn't want a Palestinian state. What's the solution? What's he offering? They think that the Palestinians are being given something on the side, that they are being allowed to stay in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It is the fact that 3.3 million Palestinians are living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. You can't change that. You have to give these people their rights. Well, when you talk about the right people, going back to the suicide bombing issue, it's simple. We don't have a life. When they describe the effects of suicide bombings in Israel they say people are afraid to go to the movies or sit in cafes and restaurants. I don't have any place that has movies for me to go to. I don't have any nightclubs; I don't have anywhere to go.

DAVID HOROWITZ: The saddest noise in this room in the time that I've been sitting here was the laughter on that side at the news that this 12-year-old boy was killed in Hebron.

WOMAN IN GROUP: He wasn't killed.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Sorry, was injured...

WOMAN IN GROUP: It was because he lived in Hebron.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Yes, but you see ...

JIM WALEY: Just a second.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Yes, I mean, where is it amusing? Why did that make this child somehow ... Please, please, I haven't shouted at anybody. I've sat here quite quietly and I won't interrupt you. I think that was tremendously sad. It was because it was as though because this boy lived on a settlement he was fair game. Now, Israel as soon as Yasser Arafat in the late 1980s said he was prepared to negotiate with Israel, began negotiating with Arafat. When Yitzhak Rabin was elected PM in 1992, Israel tried to make this partnership work. There were suicide bombings throughout the '90s even when Rabin was PM - even, in other words, when there was a very reasonable Israeli PM. The Israeli Government under Barak attempted to end the occupation. It would have given up almost all, if not all, of the territory.

JIM WALEY: I would like a response on that, particularly about the laughter to start with. What were you laughing at?

DIANA BUTTU: What we were laughing at is the fact that this gentleman lives in Hebron, in a settlement inside Hebron.

JIM WALEY: What's wrong with that?

DIANA BUTTU: There are 400 settlers who live in the town of Hebron who have literally placed a population of 130,000 people under siege because of the fact that they do not belong there and under international law they are not supposed to be there. Under the Oslo Agreements they are not supposed to be there. Yet, the Israeli Government continues to give them both incentives and protection to stay in that area.

MICHAEL TARAZI: I can just add to that point in Hebron.

JIM WALEY: Hang on.

MICHAEL TARAZI: Just so your viewers really understand, Hebron is in the centre of the occupied Palestinian territories and what they've done is they've taken the very heart of that town and turned it into a Jewish settlement right in the centre of this Arab Palestinian town. Of course, we as Palestinians can't go into the centre of Tel Aviv and set up a settlement, but of course that's a different story. But we should be very clear. They have Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians as they prayed in the mosque and instead of condemning it they have put up a shrine to him and has the Israeli government condemned that? No. Have they forced these people to take down the shrine to this murderer? No. And then he wonders why it is that people don't like them.

DAVID WILDER: In terms of why should a Jew be able to live in Hebron, I think if an American was told that he could not live in Boston or if an Australian was told he could not live in Melbourne, he would be upset. Hebron is the first Jewish city in the land of Israel, where Jews have lived continuously since the days of Abraham for thousands of years.

MICHAEL TARAZI: I actually agree with you. I understand the Jewish historical connection to Hebron. I see no reason why a Jew shouldn't have a right to live in Hebron. My only question is why do you as a Jew have a right to live in Hebron and have full political and civil rights but I as a Christian Arab or perhaps Dianne as a Muslim Arab don't have the right to return to Jaffa where we're originally from?

JIM WALEY: That's not a bad question, is it, Arnold?

ARNOLD ROTH: He's asking good questions and I get the sense that we're in the presence of a lawyer or even more than one lawyer. The question is not a bad question but, you know, there are some real problems that all of us have to cope with. The lady talking about how hard it is to deal with children and their fears rings a very sympathetic note. I completely agree. I'm terribly, terribly upset at the use by ...

MICHAEL TARAZI: Why can't I move out of Jaffa?

JIM WALEY: Just a moment.

DIANA BUTTU: Why doesn't he answer the question?

JIM WALEY: Let's have an answer.

ARNOLD ROTH: Was your question why can't you move back to Jaffa?

DIANA BUTTU: Yes.

ARNOLD ROTH: Because that's how life is, you know. There's always kinds of ... LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

DIANA BUTTU: That's good because you've now acknowledged, you've actually acknowledged, that it's power.

JIM WALEY: Hang on. You'll have a right of reply.

ARNOLD ROTH: I'm in the presence of lawyers, you're still not judges, so allow me to answer, please. We can't all have everything we want and in the case of conflict between the Jewish population here and the Palestinian Arab population here, there is a tremendous need for compromise. The need for compromise has been exaggerated over the years because of catastrophic mistakes made by your side, catastrophic mistakes which have caused more than one commentator to say that the Palestinian Arabs have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. It happens time and again... excuse me, madam. The opportunities have come and they've been frittered away. The opportunity given by the Camp David talks of a couple of years ago, of the peace negotiations back in 1993 and the Oslo process - the Oslo process was really the turning point. Had the Oslo process developed in the way that all of us wanted it to, please give me the chance to address your question...

DIANA BUTTU: You haven't answered our question.

ARNOLD ROTH: Why can't I go back to Jaffa?

JIM WALEY: Hang on.

ARNOLD ROTH: Let me quote to you from a speech on Palestinian television of last Friday. Listen to it, because then I think we can come out of this with something optimistic. We can all agree on what it is we really need to fight. "Anyone who does not attain martyrdom in these days should wake in the middle of the night and say 'My God, why have you deprived me of martyrdom for your sake, for the martyr lives next to Allah." This was from Palestinian television last Friday.

DIANA BUTTU: Yes, it's true, we have to make compromises and we have compromised. We recognised Israel's right to exist on 78% of our historic homeland. We simply ask for recognition of our right to exist on the remaining 22% and we haven't received that right and I haven't heard that from the other side at all. In fact, we've seen the opposite. Instead of moving, the formula has always been one of land for peace. It's a simple formula and it works. Instead, what the Israeli side will have you believe is that we're supposed to give them peace first and then they'll think about talking about giving up some of the land. It won't work. It has never proven to work and the only way that we will move forward is to recognise that the land for peace formula is the only one that will get us out of this current crisis and out of this conflict.

JIM WALEY: Just one quick point from you.

MICHAEL TARAZI: I have another quick question. Basically, the answer to my question was, "It's tough luck. "You can't go back because that's just the way life is "and we don't want you back". I don't think that's a fair answer and I think you can understand why so many people feel so discriminated against by Israeli policy. Do you recognise my right to be here as a Christian or a Muslim?

DAVID WILDER: I believe that anybody who is willing to live peacefully within the State of Israel, may live.

MICHAEL TARAZI: Well, where's my passport?

JIM WALEY: I would just like to ask ...

MICHAEL TARAZI: Where's my passport?

JIM WALEY: Just one moment. We have a problem because we've got to go to a commercial break and we'll be back with more of 'Sunday' in a moment.

JIM WALEY: Welcome back. There are so many subjects we could be discussing today, but I really want to try and be positive and take this debate forward and I guess we can't do that without mentioning leadership. Now, are all the Palestinians here happy with Yasser Arafat as their leader? Who isn't?

MICHAEL TARAZI: Who is not? (Seven people put up their hands)

JIM WALEY: Who is not. Why aren't you?

MICHAEL TARAZI: First, we have to understand that he is the democratically elected leader and it doesn't mean that I would have voted for him. Nevertheless, he is the person we have to deal with. I think just as there were mistakes made on the Israeli side, particularly around the period of Camp David, I would have preferred to see our president be a bit more visionary with respect to what was going on, because from our perspective, even though there was a lot of progress going on in the negotiation level, there wasn't a whole lot of progress going on the ground, and I think it was his responsibility or the leadership's responsibility to sort of connect those two. If he had come out after Camp David and spoken not only to the Palestinian people but to the Israeli people as well and said, "Look, we made a lot of progress. "It's still very far from what's required under international law "but please be patient; we're almost there", that would have been, I think, very helpful for both communities. It didn't happen. It's easy to say in hindsight it should have happened, but I think that kind of leadership is more of what we need.

JIM WALEY: The allegation has been made that Yasser Arafat has been manipulating a lot of the suicide bombers. Do you believe that?

MARIANE ALBINA: I totally do not, because if I tell you, Jim, "Go to the roof and just throw yourself and die," you wouldn't because you have things to lose. Many Palestinians are living a life where they have nothing to lose, seriously, and they think that by their death they're going to bring something positive and I don't think it's incited by Arafat because that makes the political process even much worse for him. So I definitely don't think he incites such acts and I want the people to know even if people don't agree Yasser Arafat to be our president, let's say, they do see him as struggling for the Palestinian cause.

HUDA IMAM, PALESTINIAN OFFICE MANAGER: I was never a big fan of Yasser Arafat, as many Palestinians feel, but at this stage I support him 100% because I feel that Sharon's siege for Arafat, and I would add, with the Americans' endorsement for this siege to Arafat is touching me as a Palestinian because he's my leader and this is why he became even more popular now than ever he was in the past.

JIM WALEY: Let me take the question to the Israelis. Do you think there would be a better chance of meaningful negotiations without Ariel Sharon as your PM?

EVE HARROW: Israel is really a democracy, not like the PA where, you know, Assad was also elected by 99% of the Syrian population and no-one even thinks for a second that it's a democracy, and it is the same with the PA. Ariel Sharon will be PM as long as the majority of Israelis want him to. I think that the fact that he's PM is a sign of how Israelis feel vis-a-vis the Palestinian Arabs. There is an assumption here that Arafat would actually fight terror if given the opportunity, when his signature on the manifest of the Carin A boat and other documents that have been seized show that he himself is leading the terrorists and he's in no way, shape or form going to fight it. I think what needs to be understood by the Australian audience that's watching this show is that no-one on the other side of this room can really say if they're anti-Arafat because then they would be labelled collaborators and would be lynched and killed, probably by dawn, and they have to be... yes, it was couched, you can support him, but I didn't usually. They have to be very, very careful. We Israelis can say whatever we want because we do live in a free society and that's why you hear a lot of dissension here, which is a sign of our free society and that's why you don't hear it on the other side of the room.

EVE HARROW: Believe me, we are occupied, you know, but we are very free. We haven't got any problem of security and we haven't got any problem of democracy and we do not fear anyone, believe me, not even the big Israeli tanks in front of a young child. Thank you.

JIM WALEY: What I would like to do at this stage is to ask if there was something you could suggest that would break the ice and start the negotiations rolling, what would you suggest?

DAVID WILDER: You know, negotiation is a process of give and take. Since the beginning of Oslo we've been giving and they've been taking. Any further negotiation would only be very detrimental to the future of the State of Israel.

MONZER FARHMI, PALESTINIAN BOOKSELLER: My recipe, Sir, is total withdrawal for the Israelis, take the settlements with them, build a wall between both people, and leave us alone. Leave us alone. We will absorb the refugees. Just leave us alone, if that's what they want. Build a big wall and they have no political, economic or anything to do with us or the Arab world.

DAVID HOROWITZ: The gentleman over there who said, "Just build a wall, leave us on the other side of it, pull back to the '67 borders", I just want to give people context here. There was an opinion poll in the Israeli newspaper 'Mareve' last weekend and it showed 52% to 42% of Israelis backing the Saudi peace initiative. The Saudi peace initiative says pull back to the '67 borders. In other words, there's a majority in Israel that is basically saying "We want the kind of compromise that you see as the solution." So why aren't Israelis all rushing to vote for a government that would do that, because this is comes to the crux of everything that you've said: most Israelis do not believe that even if they were to end the occupation, that that would be enough. They think that it would be used as a first step or another step towards the effort to destroy Israel. Barak, for example, offered far reaching concessions on Jerusalem.

JIM WALEY: Why is it such a difficult stumbling block? Why is Jerusalem itself, the issue of Jerusalem?

MARIANE ALBINA: I think at this point it's psychological. Everyone knows that the Muslims pray with their back towards Jerusalem and even at the time when this part of Jerusalem was under Jordanian control, the Arab population didn't grow at all, while it's tripled under Israeli rule. And so it's clear that the only time they really care about Jerusalem is when the Jews have it and that holds for the past 3,000 years.

DIANA BUTTU: I'll never deny the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, nor will I ever deny the Muslim connection or the Christian connection to Jerusalem, as this woman has tried to do. Instead, I think what we need to do is we need to look forwards. We need to have Jerusalem as the capital of both states, a Palestinian state and the State of Israel and that's what we need to do in order to resolve this conflict.

JIM WALEY: What's wrong with that idea?

DAVID WILDER: If Temple Mount, God forbid, was ever to be not in our hands, that whole area would be totally off limits to anybody who is not Muslim.

RAIA ROTEM, ISRAELI TEACHER: How many people are you ready to sacrifice for a holy place?

DAVID WILDER: So let's live in a virtual Israel; we'll leave the state.

RAIA ROTEM: This is not a virtual Israel.

DAVID WILDER: That's what you're saying.

RAIA ROTEM: This is not a virtual Israel. This is a place where people can live and see some hope in their real life. This is not some kind of holy idea. These are people who are living here. How many people are you ready to sacrifice for holy places? I don't get it?

MICHAEL TARAZI: Christians in the Gaza Strip for the last six years have not been able to get to Jerusalem to pray. Someone 10km up the road in Ramallah cannot get to Jerusalem to pray, whether they're Christian or a Muslim. For this man... from Bethlehem they cannot even get to Jerusalem to pray. For this man to stand up there and talk about making access available to everyone when they, the Israeli Government, right now, has made it impossible for Christians and Muslims to get to Jerusalem to pray, is entirely unacceptable.

JIM WALEY: We touched on the settlement issue quite frequently in our first part of the program. I just wonder whether you feel that there is a possibility of withdrawal from those settlements as part of the concession? (David Wilder shakes his head) Not under any circumstances?

DAVID WILDER: Not under any circumstances.

JIM WALEY: Not even with compensation?

DAVID WILDER: Why should I have to leave my home? Do you want to know something? In Israeli politics there's a political party that uses as its headline 'Transfer' and we're told that that's racist. It's racist to think of moving an Arab out of his home, but it's not racist to think of moving a Jew out of his home. Why not?

AMAR ABOU-ZIAD: I'm sorry, the people in Hebron are known, amongst Palestinians, as the most racist. And, allow me to say this - most racist Israelis there are, who spare no moment to hurt and harm Palestinians. So with these it would be hard to live because the way they educate their children is that the Arabs are not allowed to be here and we just drive them out.

RAIA ROTEM TO DAVID WILDER: That's not true. I've seen pictures in Israeli television of girls going in the marketplace and turning over fruit and vegetables and the Israeli soldiers are forced - are forced - to protect her.

DAVID WILDER: What do you do when your neighbour has just been stabbed, or somebody's just been shot? You sit back and say ...

RAIA ROTEM: No, of course you go and piss on people and shoot them ...

DAVID WILDER: Maybe that's what you'd do ...

RAIA ROTEM: No, that's what you do and your friends.

ARNOLD ROTH: There's a tough nut here. What needs to be accepted is that Jews, as long as there have been Jews in the world, have had a special kind of attachment to this land. We look at things like Joseph's Tomb, tremendously religiously significant, destroyed overnight the minute that the Palestinian Arabs could. The Mount of Olives in Eastern Jerusalem destroyed by the Jordanian Arabs when they were in occupation the minute that they could. I would like to trust. I think we need to build up trust. The track record is catastrophic.

SARI HANAFI, PALESTINIAN REFUGEE WORKER: You dare you talk about trust? I mean, I mean, you negotiate and you take the land, you negotiate and you take the land, and at the end of the negotiations will be no land any more to negotiate for it.

JIM WALEY: Do these refugees have any hope of returning?

DAVID HOROWITZ: If Yasser Arafat, as he did at Camp David, insisted in principle on a right of return for 4 million Palestinians to Israel, what he was really saying was he wanted all of the land for his state, but he also wanted 4 million of his people to come in Israel, which would have meant, of course, not Israel and Palestine side by side coexisting, but Palestine and an Israel that would rapidly become Palestine as well.

MICHAEL TARAZI: Really, what they're saying is people can't come back because of their religion. If we were Jews we would be able to go back.

ARNOLD ROTH: Shame on you. Shame on you.

MICHAEL TARAZI: If we were Jews.

JIM WALEY: Why do you say "shame on you"?

ARNOLD ROTH: The resort to the racist argument is beneath all contempt. You've put forward the proposition, to an audience that largely doesn't know what goes on here, that Israel is as if a Jewish ghetto. What a lot of nonsense. Anyone ...

MICHAEL TARAZI: Why can't I go back? Because I'm a Christian.

ARNOLD ROTH: Why can't you go and live in Australia, for heaven's sake? For the same reason.

MICHAEL TARAZI: Because I'm from Jaffa.

ARNOLD ROTH: Because there is a law and there is a principle and we can't all have what we want.

SARI HANAFI: I don't understand what the meaning of that is. There were indigenous people was in Jaffa and Haifa before you came. So this is a colonial history and you repeat it again and again.

ARNOLD ROTH: May I point out to you that the man who murdered my daughter has the surname Al Misri. Do any one of you here speak Arabic?

MAN IN GROUP: Yes.

ARNOLD ROTH: What does his name mean?

MAN IN GROUP: Egypt.

ARNOLD ROTH: "Egyptian" is what it means. So this man is lecturing us about massacres of Aboriginals in Australia. Give me a break.

AMAR ABOU-ZIAD: Just one question: Why is it that according to Israeli law a Jew who has a history of 5,000 years ago, who has a history here from 5,000 years ago, can come and get Israeli citizenship and a Palestinian who was forced out of his house 50 years ago is not allowed to come back to his land or to any of this area to see his family and lives in the worst situations possible? I just want an answer to that.

MARIANE ALBINA: There's a small point that needs to be understood here. In 1948 the Arabs started the war and they lost. There's a price to be paid for losing a war and that is why he's not in Jaffa today.

RAIA ROTEM: Of course the right of return is really the hard core now that is dividing the Israeli population, more than the settlements, because there is real fear of changing the demographic balance and that is understood. But what the Israeli government is denying the Palestinian people is the recognition that Israel is responsible for creating the refugee problem. If we could give the Palestinians this recognition, I'm sure that the right to return will be implemented only in the symbolic, on a symbolic level. Nobody thinks ... listen, I've never lived in a house that was once an Arabic house. In '68 I was a student, I lived there in a rental apartment and there was a gentleman and he knocked on my door and he said in very broken English, "Sorry, could I see this apartment? It used to be mine. I had a baby in my arms at that time." And I wished that the floor will open its mouth and I would be swallowed on the stone, on the porch, and I never after that lived in an ex-Arab house. I know that my family from Poland, the ones that survived Auschwitz, when they came back and they saw their Poland neighbours living in their houses, they said "Get the hell out of here." I know what they felt. I don't want to make anybody feel that way.

JIM WALEY: A quick question: Do you feel you're in a minority among your fellow Israelis?

RAIA ROTEM: Yes. Alas, yes.

JIM WALEY: A comment? I saw you shaking your head.

AHUVA PASSOW: I think that the right of return is really a recipe for the disappearance of Israel and I don't think that there's any way that any Israeli Government will accept that.

JIM WALEY: We're seriously running out of time at this point. I just want to wrap it up by asking you can anyone from outside knock your heads together and say, "For God's sake, try and solve this problem"?

DIANA BUTTU: There was recently an initiative by the Saudi Government that was adopted by the entire Arab world and it's very simple. It says to Israel: "Withdraw from all of the territories that you occupied in 1967 and you will have peace, security and normalisation." So you're hearing it from the Arab world. You've heard it from the Palestinians themselves and you've heard it also from the United Nations. What more do you need?

RAIA ROTEM: There should be some kind of international interference here and then this is the only way. I'm not talking about army. I don't know in what form or shape, but the international community has to decide that this is a ticking bomb, this situation is a ticking bomb and they have to come here and bang our two heads together and force us to make peace.

JIM WALEY: On that note, I'd like to thank you all very much for participating in this debate. I'm not sure we're going to win the Nobel Peace Prize but I hope we've managed to lift the lid, a little bit, on what is a very complex and protracted issue. So, that's it from Jerusalem for the moment. After the break, it's back to Sydney.