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Essays
The best decade of our lives
by Yossi Beilin
The
Six Day War, whose 38th anniversary was yesterday, divides my life
exactly as it divides the life of the state: A third before the war and
two-thirds after it. It would be correct to say that during nearly all
of the latter period I have tried to save myself, ourselves, from the
terrible mistake we made; instead of sticking to a war of defense and
then returning home, like after all the reprisal operations, we
remained in the territories. All I am trying to do is to enable my
grandchildren to live in this land as I lived during the quietest and
most beautiful decade of its life - 1957-1967.
It is true that
there was the Lavon Affair - a botched sabotage operation in Egypt in
1954 - and incidents in the north and even on Mount Scopus, and lots of
problems concerning the definition of "Who is Jew," and riots in Wadi
Salib and a recession. But during this entire period, only 20 people
were killed by hostile operations. The "austerity" regime was replaced
by rapid economic growth. Higher education, culture and science
flourished like never before. Military service was two and a half years
and was even shortened to two years and two months. Children traveled
on buses and parents did not fear for their lives.
Israel of the
1960s was a country that was flourishing and sure of itself, absorbing
aliyah, connected with East and West and a big sister for newly
independent African countries. The world saluted Israel's amazing
successes in the fields of agriculture, the military and the absorption
of new immigrants, and it seemed like nothing could stop it. Studies
published in the 1960s predicted that within 25 years, Israel would be
among the world's developed countries. These studies did not take into
consideration the war and the blindness that took hold of us in its
aftermath.
I
shared this blindness. I was a private and became a private first class
at the end of the war. While in the Golan and Sinai, I heard about the
conquest of Jerusalem and was ecstatically happiness. I experienced six
years of illusions before realizing the senselessness of Moshe Dayan's
declaration, "Better Sharm el-Sheikh than peace;" the mistake of not
returning the West Bank to King Hussein in exchange for peace, because
of the Allon Plan's demand to annex about 20 percent of it; and the
crazy nonsense of Abba Eban's "Auschwitz borders."
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Copyright (c)
2005
The Daily Star
Seeking alternatives to a third Palestinian intifada
By Rami G. Khouri
Last
week, two important developments took place that captured the dilemma
facing the Palestinian people. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas went to Washington to meet with American leaders and make his
case for firmer American involvement in the dormant Palestinian-Israeli
peace-making process; and the South African Council of Churches
endorsed the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott
of Israel (PACBI). These
two approaches - political engagement via the U.S. and civil,
nonviolent resistance and confrontation - represent two of the three
principal strategies considered by most Palestinians. The
third approach, military resistance and terror attacks against Israeli
troops and civilians, initiated a decade ago by Hamas, is now
momentarily suspended. In the
few days I spent in Jordan last week at a regional conference, I
sounded out officials and political activists from Jordan and
Palestine, along with ordinary citizens, to understand better the real
context of Abbas' U.S. visit. I also spoke by phone with a range of
informed Palestinians inside Palestine, to gauge public sentiments
there during this pivotal and potentially historic moment, thanks to
recent developments and imminent new ones. The
shaky cease-fire between Palestinians and Israelis cannot hold if
current conditions persist, mainly because daily life for the vast
majority of ordinary Palestinians living under direct or indirect
Israeli military occupation remains very difficult and immensely
humiliating. Israelis, the Arab world and the rest of the world do not
seem to pay much attention to this, though you would think that the
eruption of two Palestinian national uprisings in the past 16 years
would catch someone's attention. This
pressure cooker situation is likely to be exacerbated by two critical
events coming up in the next three months: the Israeli unilateral
withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the completion around Jerusalem of
the Israeli separation barrier (also known variously as the "security
fence" and the "apartheid wall"). Pressure on the Palestinians will
increase dramatically, especially as Arab East Jerusalem is cut off
from its natural hinterland in the West Bank. |
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w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
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Scenes from the filming of Haim Yavin's series on the settlers: "It's not Jewish, what we are doing there." (Muki Schwartz)
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| Our man in the territories |
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By Tom Segev |
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No
one knew until now what veteran television journalist Haim Yavin
thought about the news he has been announcing for more than three
decades, and he is so nonpartisan that one wondered whether he had an
opinion of his own at all. Now, at 72, he is coming out of the closet:
"Since 1967 we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing
another people," he says in "Yoman Masa" ("Diary of a Journey"), which
he filmed in the West Bank.
For two and a half years, Yavin
wandered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with a small hand-held
camera, which he operated himself, without a technical crew. Here and
there he was reviled as the representative of the hostile leftist
media, but in general the settlers spoke to him on the assumption that
he was their man, and justly so: Until now he was everyone's man. The
film he brought back seems intended to salve his conscience: "I cannot
really do anything to relieve this misery, other than to document it,
so that neither I nor those like me will be able to say that we saw
nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing," he says in the film, and in
response to a question asserts: "I did not move left. The country moved
right."
He filmed people who waited for hours at checkpoints and
says this has no security justification. Settlers who heard from him
about a woman who was not allowed to get to a hospital and therefore
was forced to give birth at a checkpoint, try to reassure him: If only
the Israelis are able to maintain domestic harmony, "Mohammed" will
make coffee both for them and for him. Yavin responds: "I am not
willing to rule another people, not willing for `Mohammed' to make me
coffee." He tells again of the woman who was forced to give birth at a
checkpoint and says, "It is not Jewish, what we are doing there."
He believes in withdrawal so that a Palestinian state
will be established and peace will come. "That is the only thing I can
believe in. Other than that I have nothing to believe in - only in
bloodshed," he tells a female settler. His thoughts move to the roots
of Zionist existence. When he hears people describe Zionism as an
expression of racism and colonialism, he is outraged, of course, he
says, but on returning from the West Bank, he asks himself what remains
of the "true Zionism," the Zionism of peace and equal rights: the
Zionism of the settlements?
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© 2005 Arabic Media
Internet Network - Internews Middle East
May 24, 2005
'Sentinels of
the causes' undermine Palestinian freedom
By Ray
Hanania*
Irrational rejectionism is a disease in the Arab and Islamic Worlds
that stands in the way of Palestinian freedom and promotes intolerance. It
broadens Israel’s
occupation to create a self-occupation mentality.
It must be stopped.
Suffering under years of Israel’s oppressive occupation and by the
suppression of Democracy and freedom in the Arab World, too many
Palestinians find all they have left is to criticize and reject.
When it comes to Israel,
there is a lot to criticize. But when it comes to preserve the Palestinian
nation by achieving peace, rejection must give way to compromise.
Palestinians are burdened by self-appointed “sentinels of the causes” who
claim to protect many of the sacred cows of the Palestinian national
tragedy such as the Right of Return.
But instead of protecting these causes, these “sentinels of the causes”
create a destructive environment that encourages extreme acts of violence.
That violence goes far beyond the rights of resistance and instead include
the immoral acts of suicide bombings and the murder of Israeli civilians
or other Palestinians.
Recently, the “sentinels of the causes” turned their ugliness on Sari
Nusseibeh, the president of al-Quds University. Nusseibeh is a leading
moderate and co-signer of the Geneva Accords which defines a vision of a
two-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis.
Nusseibeh dares to prompt Palestinians to find ways out of the conflict
through non-violence and uses free speech to define a new public dialogue.
This week, Nusseibeh weighed in on the emotional debate over whether or
not Israel’s Bar Illan University should affiliate with a college in
Ariel, a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.
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The
Palestinian-Israeli conflict has undergone a metamorphosis since 1948,
when it was accurately defined as being between Arabs and Jews.
However, it has now become a struggle between those who accept the
finality of the war in 1948 and its consequences, and those who have
not.
1948 made Israel an
irreversible reality in the Middle East, thereby undermining
Palestinian aspirations to reclaim what was lost during that tumultuous
year. However, 1948 also defined the limitations of Israeli ambitions,
and defined the boundaries of the Israeli state if Israel were ever to
win peace and acceptance from the Palestinian people and its Arab
neighbors. Since his
election in January, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has
made it abundantly clear where he stands. Despite being a president
without a state, he has campaigned and won a mandate for compromise and
peaceful negotiations. He has spent the first 100 days of his term
taking control of a chaotic security apparatus and corrupt bureaucracy.
He has started coordinating on the security situation with the Bush
administration's envoy, General William Ward, and on the disengagement
plan for Gaza and a small portion of the northern West Bank with the
Israelis. He has made key appointments to assure financial transparency
and referred high officials to the attorney general for corruption
investigations. Above all, he has been able to secure an extended
period of nonviolence against the Israelis by negotiating a "quiet"
period with militant extremists whom he cannot control by force. Abbas
comes to Washington later this week having rapidly compiled an
impressive record of reform and security achievements, which should
establish his credibility and earn him political support. He has risked
everything to pursue a negotiated end to the conflict. The
public posture of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon conveys neither
much support for Abbas, nor does it give him much credit for his
achievements. Sharon, despite real political problems, has to
demonstrate how far he is willing to go to pursue peace beyond
unilateral disengagement. From Israel's perspective there are two items
on the agenda for 2005: the disengagement plan and Palestinian reform.
Discussion of final-status issues, like borders, settlements, Jerusalem
and Palestinian refugees, has been placed in the deep freeze. For
the Palestinians to believe that peace is possible, they need an
immediate and palpable improvement in the quality of their lives
through an easing of the harsh realities of occupation and economic
improvement. The Bush administration is engaged in bringing about such
relief, but time is of the essence. |
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Understanding history and
the path to peace making
James J. Zogby
I was speaking of the role that
“losing control of their history” had played in
defining the Palestinian psyche during the last century,
when a somewhat aggravated Israeli in the audience
challenged my assessment. He disagreed, he said, because
the Palestinians had had many opportunities to define
their history and they had squandered each of them. In
any case, he insisted, Israel bore no responsibility for
this Palestinian problem. I replied that he could, if
he wished, deny the reality of Palestinian history and he
could also deny Israel's role in that history. But the
price for such denial was great.
Refusing to acknowledge the history of the
“other”, with whom you are in conflict, and
rejecting any responsibility for shaping their history,
only serves to prolong the conflict in which you are
engaged.
The fact is that Arabs did lose control of their
ability to shape their own history in the 20th century.
It began with Britain and France's post-World War I
betrayal, their dismemberment of the Arab east and their
promise of Palestine to the Zionist movement. This loss
of control was compounded by the influx of Jewish
immigrants into Palestine, the Zionist victory in 1948,
and the resultant refugee crisis.
The 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and,
their transformation into “de-developed”
dependencies, the rapid expansion of settlements and
roads into the heart of these territories, the closure
and encirclement of Jerusalem, the wall and the daily
acts of humiliation and collective punishments to which
the Palestinians were subjected, all have combined to
complete the picture of a “loss of control”. |
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Essays 
