-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2002/0420/4081028421FR20LEWIS.html
}}}>Begin
Israel corrupted from within by colonial views
20/04/2002
MIDDLE EAST: Palestinians are more sceptical than ever that Israel will
give up dominion over the occupied territories, writes Anthony Lewis
In the days after the 1967 war, when Israel was celebrating its great victory, an
Israeli
I know warned that triumph could lead to disaster. Capture of the West Bank, East
Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, he said, would tempt Israel to settle those territories.
That would mean colonialism, with all its arrogance and inhumanity. It would
undermine the character of Israel.
And it came to pass. The settlement process, carried on for more than three
decades, has been sustained by colonial methods: suppressing the local population,
seizing land, giving settlers superior legal status. The consequences have been as
my Israeli friend foresaw, corrupting. Now the attempt to extend Israel's dominion
threatens its hard-won asset of international legitimacy.
>From the day of its rebirth as a state in 1948, Israel had to struggle for acceptance.
The Arab world refused to recognise the state or even, for a long time, to call it by
its
name. Anwar Sadat's visit in 1977 meant so much to Israelis because it represented
acceptance. Then, in 1993, the Oslo Agreement brought recognition of Israel's
legitimacy by the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Palestinian negotiators at Oslo assumed that Israel would gradually abandon the
settlements and withdraw to something very like its pre-1967 borders. But Oslo left
those steps to further negotiation, and they did not happen. The settlement process
continued unchecked after Oslo. (Peace Now reported this March that an aerial
survey of the West Bank showed 34 new settlement sites built in the last year.) More
than 200,000 settlers now live in the West Bank. Settlements, some of them really
small cities, and special highways for the settlers have effectively cut the West Bank
into cantons separated by Israeli military forces and checkpoints.
At Camp David in 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to withdraw from (by
different estimates) between 86 and 91 percent of the West Bank; but his proposal
would have left in place barrier settlements and roads that divide the territory.
Yasser
Arafat said no. Many of us who long for a peaceful end to the conflict thought Mr
Arafat's refusal even to explore Mr Barak's offer was a terrible mistake. But in the
Palestinians' view, seven years after Oslo they were justifiably sceptical of Israel's
willingness ever to give up effective dominion over the occupied territories.
After Camp David, the conflict rose to new levels of bloodshed and destruction.
Palestinians carried out appalling acts of terrorism. Hamas's suicide bombers and
then elements of Arafat's Fatah attacked civilians in cafés and pizzerias. Israel
retaliated with what in time became its biggest military operation since it invaded
Lebanon 20 years ago.
Israeli voters, frightened by terror, brought to power in February 2001 the man who
through decades had demonstrated his belief that the answer to Palestinian
aspirations is force, Ariel Sharon. Under Prime Minister Sharon, Israeli forces laid
siege to the West Bank and Gaza, virtually confining the inhabitants to their own
villages and towns. (The Economist said the siege cut the occupied territories "into
200 disconnected enclaves.")
Bulldozers destroyed houses and ploughed up olive groves. Israel often responded
to acts of terror by punishing people who had not committed the terror, using F-16s
to destroy Palestinian Authority police buildings and shelling other sites from naval
ships. When terrorists crossed from Egypt and killed Israeli soldiers near the Gaza
Strip, Israel demolished 59 houses in a refugee camp miles away. The siege has
wasted the Palestinian economy, increasing unemployment levels to 35 per cent in
the West Bank and 50 per cent in Gaza. A World Bank report at the end of March
said Israeli restrictions had brought the Palestinian economy close to collapse.
Recently Kofi Annan wrote to Mr Sharon protesting that Israel had wounded or killed
"hundreds of innocent non-combatant civilians," fired on ambulances, and blocked
medical access to the wounded. At the climax of Mr Sharon's retaliatory campaign,
Israeli forces entered several cities and refugee camps that were supposed to be
under Palestinian Authority control, then smashed through the walls of houses and
rounded up hundreds of men for interrogation.
Israel carried out assassinations of alleged Palestinian terrorists, a practice that
amounted to conviction and execution without trial.
Particular incidents may show the nature of Mr Sharon's policy better than
generalities. In the early morning hours of March 8th, Israeli tanks and armoured
troop carriers went into the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, firing shells and
machine guns to discourage resistance. Issa Faraj was playing with his children in
their home when two bullets killed him.
O the same day, March 8th, Israeli tanks and troops took over a Lutheran Church
school in Bethlehem, the Dar al-Kalima School. It is on a hilltop, and the troops used
it as an outpost for surveillance of the city. After a few days they left, and
officials of
the school re-entered it. They sent an e-mail about what they found: smashed iron
external doors and wooden interior ones, crosses taken down and destroyed, graffiti
on the walls and other acts of what officials called "pure vandalism and hatred."
Sharon's policy of massive retaliation has troubled an increasing number of Israelis,
too. In February, more than 200 military reservists said they would refuse to serve
their required annual active duty in the occupied Palestinian territories, where they
said Israel was "dominating, expelling, starving, and humiliating an entire people."
By mid-March, some 170 more reservists had joined them. A thousand former
officers, among them generals, called on Israel to withdraw unilaterally.
Some Israeli and outside analysts suggested that Prime Minister Sharon had a
purpose beyond deterring terrorism in his harsh actions: to prevent the resumption of
political negotiations with the Palestinians looking to a final peace agreement. As
Henry Siegman, a Middle East specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, put it:
"The Sharon government seeks pretexts to avoid a political process, not ways to
renew it."
Mr Siegman suggested that Mr Sharon's resumption of targeted assassinations
during a period when a cease-fire ordered by Mr Arafat last December had
dramatically reduced violence, was a provocation designed to produce new acts of
terror, which it did.
Mr Sharon has always fought the Palestinian vision of a viable state. He played a
leading part in the creation of the settlements, and he opposed the Oslo Agreement.
Uri Avnery, a pro-peace Israeli who over the years has written three biographical
essays about Sharon, two with his co-operation, wrote this January that Mr Sharon's
"minimum" aim now was "to imprison the Palestinians in several enclaves ... each
one surrounded by settlements, by-pass roads and the army. In these big prison
camps, the Palestinians will be allowed to 'manage their own affairs,' supplying
cheap labour and a captive market. He does not care if they are called 'a Palestinian
state'."
Mr Sharon's "maximum" aim, Mr Avnery said, was "to exploit a war situation or a
world crisis to expel all Palestinians (including those who are Israeli citizens) from
the
country."
An Israel that achieved Mr Sharon's "minimum," much less his "maximum," would
not be regarded as legitimate by much of the world. That is not just because the goal
of Israeli acquisition of territory by force would be deemed impermissible, although
several Security Council resolutions make it so. It is because the means Israel has
used to maintain its domination of the occupied territories are unacceptable. As it
happens, the means are also spectacularly ineffective as a deterrent to terrorism.
Every assassination, every smashed refugee camp brings new recruits to the
Palestinian organizations that target Israelis.
The Bush administration has also brought disaster on itself by its response to
Sharon's policy. For a year and more it gave Sharon a blank cheque, offering no
objection to his most brutal actions and supporting his confinement of Mr Arafat in a
few square blocks of Ramallah-a step that predictably raised Mr Arafat's approval
ratings among Palestinians.
Both US diplomats and State Department officials in Washington knew of Mr
Sharon's well- advertised views. Yet when Mr Sharon said on March 4th that the
Palestinians had to be "battered" and "beaten," Secretary of State Colin Powell and
President Bush indicated that they were shocked - and began applying pressure on
Mr Sharon.
Bush officials were similarly dense in their failure to understand the effect on the
Arab world of what was being done to the Palestinians. Vice President Dick Cheney
seemed surprised when he toured the Middle East in late March and government
after government told him that US support of Israel's tactics made it impossible to
approve of any American action against Iraq. It is hard to know whether the best
adjective for American policy toward the conflict over the last year is stupid or
shameful.
The Israeli reservists who have refused to serve in the occupied territories call the
current phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the "war of the settlements." That
is to
say that the issue is unambiguous: occupation. There can be peace only when Israel
withdraws from the territories it conquered in 1967, leaving an uninterrupted West
Bank as part of a viable Palestine. (As Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia said in
his recent proposal, there could be adjustments to incorporate some settlements into
Israel, for example to thicken Israel's narrow waist - if comparable territory, perhaps
bordering on the Gaza Strip, were transferred to Palestine.)
That is the dovish view of how peace can be achieved. Everyone knows what a final
agreement would look like. The borders of the new Palestine would be something
like what President Clinton proposed following Camp David - and what the two sides
discussed at Taba in Egypt in January 2001 - including the West Bank, all of the
Gaza Strip, and the predominantly Palestinian parts of East Jerusalem. The other
claim Mr Arafat made - a right of return for Palestinian refugees - could not be
included except in some symbolic way, controlled by Israel.
In February, in an opinion article for the New York Times, Mr Arafat called for
"creative solutions to the plight of the refugees while respecting Israel's demographic
concerns." That sounds reasonable, but what he means can only emerge in a
negotiation.
THE Israeli right wing, and influential American conservative supporters of Israel, do
not believe in the two-state solution. They contend that Yasser Arafat has not really
accepted Israel's right to exist. They argue that Palestinians, most of them, want not
just to reclaim the occupied territories, but to destroy Israel. So they would make no
more concessions to the Palestinians. They would rely on force to keep what Israel
has now. Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister who threatens Mr Sharon
from the right, would be even harsher. And to his right there are those whose solution
is to "transfer" all the Palestinians out of Palestine.
A significant recent recruit to the right's pessimism about Palestinian intentions is
Benny Morris, an Israeli history professor who outraged conservatives by writing, in a
1988 book, that the thousands of Arabs who fled the new Israel in 1948 in large part
did so not because of broadcast advice from the Arab world - as the traditional Israeli
thesis had it - but because Israeli fighters forced or frightened them into fleeing.
This
February, writing in the Guardian, Mr Morris did not renounce that view of history. But
he had come to believe, he said, that today the Palestinian leadership really denies
Israel's legitimacy. "This question of legitimacy," he wrote, "seemingly put to rest by
the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian peace treaties, is at the root of current
Israeli despair and my own 'conversion'."
Mr Morris called Mr Arafat "an inveterate liar." For a few years through Oslo in 1993,
he said, Mr Arafat and the PLO "seemed to have acquiesced in the idea of a
compromise. But since 2000 the dominant vision of a 'Greater Palestine' has surged
back to the fore." Lately, he noted, Mr Arafat has taken to questioning whether there
was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. He thus refuses, Morris said, "to recognise
the history and reality of the 3,000-year-old Jewish connection to the land of Israel."
Then, in his article, Mr Morris took a sharp turn. "Don't get me wrong," he wrote. "I
favour an Israeli withdrawal from the territories - the semi-occupation is corrupting
and immoral, and alienates Israel's friends abroad..." But Mr Morris said he did not
believe a two-state solution would last. Mr Arafat was incapable, he wrote, of really
giving up the right of return - of looking the refugees in the eye and telling them, "I
have signed away your birthright, your hope, your dream."
I can agree with some of what Mr Morris says. Yasser Arafat is not the leader
Palestinians deserve; he has not been able to make the transition from guerrilla
chieftain to statesman, to bring his people with him, to inspire the trust of his one-
time enemies. His Palestinian Authority is undemocratic and corrupt. His denial of
the existence of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem is despicable.
Mr Arafat allowed terrorism to flourish to a point where he probably could not stop it
.
In the end, though, the pessimists have no solution. Military force to keep control of
the West Bank has failed. The settlements do not give Israel security "depth," as the
right wing likes to say, but put heavy burdens on the Israel Defence Force. Think of
the troops committed and the lives lost to protect the Israeli settlements that take up
a quarter of the stiflingly overcrowded Gaza Strip.
It is overwhelmingly clear now that there is no hope of ending terrorism until the
Palestinians see a realistic prospect of negotiating a viable state of their own.
- Reprinted with permission from the New York Review of Books. ©2002 NYREV,
Inc. Anthony Lewis is an author and columnist with the New York Times
© The Irish Times
End<{{{
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Forwarded as information only; no automatic endorsement
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe
simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do not
believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do
not believe in anything simply because it is written in Holy Scriptures. Do not
believe in anything merely on the authority of Teachers, elders or wise men.
Believe only after careful observation and analysis, when you find that it
agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all.
Then accept it and live up to it."
The Buddha on Belief, from the Kalama Sutta
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will
teach you to keep your mouth shut."
--- Ernest Hemingway
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
