-Caveat Lector-
On Mon, 9 Oct 2000 23:22:05 -0500 (CDT) Michael Eisenscher
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The Los Angeles Times
October 9, 2000
Israel Must Submit to a Multinational Investigation
by Daoud Kuttab
There are plenty of reasons why Palestinians insist on the need
for an independent inquiry into the violence of the past two weeks
that has resulted in the killing of more than 80 civilian Palestinians,
many of them children. The United States should support this request,
which will surely calm the situation on the ground.
Israel wants Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to act like its puppet
and order his own people not to protest the illegal occupation of
their land. But Arafat is under tremendous public pressure not to
allow Israel to get away with this kind of criminal violence against
civilians. He will have to produce concrete results before any
thought of a return to a peace process can get a footing. An
investigation and an effective mechanism to ensure the protection
of the civilian Palestinians is not only necessary but it is the
right of people under military occupation according to international
law. If Israel is innocent, it should have no reason to worry about
the results of such an independent inquiry.
The U.S. abstained Saturday when the U.N. Security Council approved
a resolution condemning Israel's use of force and backing "a speedy
and objective inquiry" into the fighting. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright has not even sent her condolences to the innocent
Palestinians who were killed by Israeli soldiers using U.S.-made
machine guns.
The situation has been brewing for the past few months as Israeli
negotiators have been refusing to accept any agreement in which
they would have to give up sovereignty over the third-holiest mosque
in Islam, Al Aqsa mosque. In recent negotiations at Camp David,
Palestinians agreed to cede sovereignty over the Western Wall and
the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem to Israel, as part of a peace
agreement. U.N. Resolution 242, which is supposed to be the basis
for the talks, calls on Israel to withdraw from areas it occupied
in the 1967 war.
This holy hill called the Temple Mount by Jews is usually filled
with thousands of Muslim worshipers every day. On special religious
occasions the number of worshipers praying in the mosque and
surrounding areas reaches more than a quarter of a million people.
Muslims have been praying at this site continuously for more than
a thousand years.
Palestinian leaders have been warning for some time that the
situation is very tense. Aware of the sensitivities around this
holy site, a senior Palestinian official a month ago called on
Israel not to turn the political conflict into a religious one.
Within days came the visit by Ariel Sharon, the right-wing Israeli
leader, to Haram al Sharif. (Sharon is the general who was chastised
by an Israeli inquiry for his role in the massacres of Palestinians
in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982.) Instead
of Israel's leaders admitting their present mistake, and attempting
to calm their own soldiers who are using live ammunition, they
brought in tanks and helicopters with the expressed aim of trying
to crush the popular Palestinian revolt. Later they offered to
withdraw the tanks if Arafat ordered the protests stopped. They
have continuously refused any multinational scrutiny in the criminal
actions of their own occupation.
This is not the first time that Israel used exaggerated force
against Palestinian demonstrators and then turned around and blamed
the victims. Ten years ago, Israeli soldiers killed 17 Palestinians
at the Haram al Sharif compound. I helped a "60 Minutes" team
determine what happened. Their results completely contradicted
the Israeli version of events. Mike Wallace and his team found that
the rabbi of the Western Wall had lied to the press when he claimed
that loud speakers from the mosque were saying "idbah al yahood"
(kill the Jews). An amateur video shot by an American tourist and
later shown at the U.N. shows that all the Muslim leaders speaking
on the public address system had been trying to calm the Palestinians
by asking them to stop throwing stones and not to endanger their
own lives.
The "60 Minutes" team also showed that Benjamin Netanyahu, then a
senior official in the Likud government, had misled the press by
showing huge rocks that he said had been thrown by Palestinians.
A visit by "60 Minutes" to the mosque and a camera shot of the
20-foot-high wall belied the possibility of any person being able
to throw such huge rocks. Months later, an Israeli government
inquest backed up what the "60 Minutes" team had discovered.
The international community should not allow Israel once more to
get away with murder. Israel has another choice--simply admit its
mistakes, ask for forgiveness and come to the peace table with
proposals that comply with international law and can become the
basis for a true peace.
Daoud Kuttab Is the Director of the Institute of Modern Media at
Al Quds University.
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