Israel is not completely without fault and Sharon is no saint. Like a bad marriage, there's blame on both sides. The "marriage" of the Israeli's and Palestinians is looking more like "War of the Roses". Remember Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas? Arafat and Sharon?
George S. Hishmeh: Is the US finally listening to Palestine?
/ Special to Gulf News / 04-09-2003
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Slowly, but surely, there has been a noteworthy turnaround – certainly more realism – in the reporting and writing on the Middle East, particularly on Iraq, and Palestine and Israel.
This is not to say it is widespread, but the first signs are that American journalists have become a little more observant, sometimes critical, of what they have been fed officially, probably because of the continued killing of American soldiers in Iraq and Israel's resumption of its 'targeted assassination' of Palestinians.
This has also been matched by some soul-searching by a few prominent Israelis and American Jews, like Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, and Arthur Hertzberg, a visiting professor at New York University and author of the forthcoming book, The Fate of Zionism.
Both decried the bankrupt policies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who does not appear to be keen on implementing the Quartet-sponsored roadmap which promises, in the words of US President George W. Bush, a "viable" Palestinian state alongside Israel by 2005.
Howard Kurtz, the media critic of the Washington Post and host of the CNN talk show, Reliable Sources, noted last Sunday that the American media are reluctant to declare "the situation in post-war Iraq a failure".
But, he went on, "numbers, journalists understand numbers, and the casualty (among US troops) behind these numbers all but ensures that while the Iraq story may ebb and flow, it will not go away". He observed that "the prevailing media picture in Iraq is that things are just falling apart".
Nevertheless, Kurtz, who was interviewing Tom Friedman, award-winning columnist of The New York Times, wondered why American journalists are "afraid" to make judgements like "look, it appears there are not enough Americans troops to keep the peace there".
Friedman answered: "One of the problems (is that) not a lot of journalists writing about this war have been to postwar Iraq... and because of that, I think that maybe more people have been willing to rely on what they've been told in Washington."
But, he maintained, "that's changing now".
The two did not dwell on the Middle East coverage, which is often mediocre. However, Friedman voiced some "fundamental" concerns about the turn of events there. He wondered whether the situation in Palestine at present is beyond the two-state solution "and we're now in a one-state solution".
He continued: "either this is going to become a bi-national state, in some way, or there's going to be, you know, some kind of ethnic cleansing."
Israel's recent killings of Hamas leaders – 10 have been killed in the past two weeks – have raised many questions here.
James Bennet, The New York Times correspondent in occupied Jerusalem, asked in an article this week: "There is something of a mystery to Israel's new campaign to kill members and leaders of Hamas, a mystery that goes to the heart of the standoff with the Palestinians.
"Why didn't Israel do this a year ago, or two years ago? And if it was a bad idea then, why is it a good idea now?" He complained that he did not find "very good answers".
Professor Hertzberg, in turn, saw the renewed cycle of violence in the Middle East as "another setback in (the US) role as a regional peace broker" and argued that there can be no resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict "unless the United States pressures the two parties to make concessions that they have refused for decades to make".
He proposed that the US apply "punitive economic measures" against the Palestinians to curtail the "war-makers" in this midst, and the Israelis "to force the end of settlement activity" – a step that "would find far greater support among Jews both in Israel and in the United States than many people in Washington imagine".
He attributed this support to the "pressing matter of demographics", explaining that the total population at present between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is more than 40 per cent Arab.
Considering the Arab birthrate, he wrote in an article last weekend, "there will be an Arab majority in, at most, 20 years" in this region.
But the harshest criticism voiced against Israeli policies came from the former Israeli parliamentary speaker in an article published in Forward, a New York-based Jewish weekly.
Burg, now a member of the Knesset, warned: "The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice."
He urged the Diaspora Jews to "pay heed and speak out (because) it is not possible to keep the whole (of Palestine) without paying a price".
Or else, he warned: "The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun." The choices for the Israeli people, in his opinion, are: "Jewish racialism or democracy. Colonies or hope for both peoples.
False visions of barbed wire, roadblocks and suicide bombers, or a recognised international order between two states and a shared capital in Jerusalem."
Burg, who was speaker from 1999 to 2003, added: "But there is no prime minister in Jerusalem. The disease eating away at the body of Zionism has already attacked the head."
Anyone listening in America?
The writer can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com
Israel ponders the durability of Rabin's peace legacy
{b]On the anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's death, Clinton invites Mideast leaders to US.
Ben Lynfield
Special to the Christian Science Monitor
JERUSALEM
Five years after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was gunned down by an ultra-nationalist assassin, his chief legacy, the Oslo agreement with Palestinians, is in danger of collapsing.
PEACE PIONEER: Dalia Rabin pays tribute to her late father, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in Tel Aviv Saturday.
ELIZABETH DALZIEL/AP
And as a week of Israeli tributes to Mr. Rabin's memory began Saturday night with a rally in Tel Aviv that drew tens of thousands of people, both Israelis and Palestinians reflected on the course of his legacy. The week also coincides with a bid by President Clinton to end more than five weeks of Palestinian-Israeli violence and restart Middle East peace talks.
In the eyes of the Israeli right-wing and much of the public, the intifadah, or Palestinian uprising, has proven Rabin's approach of launching self-rule and then negotiating final arrangements with the Palestinians to be a dangerous mistake.
"The naive idea of bringing [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat from Tunis with his people, arming them, and thinking it would produce peace was absurd," says Naomi Blumenthal, a Likud party member of the Knesset.
Yesterday, two Palestinians were killed during clashes in the Gaza Strip, the first deaths in violence in two days. And over the weekend, a US-based medical rights group, Physicians for Human Rights, blamed the Israeli Army for using excessive force against Palestinian rioters, saying, they aimed "to injure and kill, not to avoid loss of life and injury." Israelis deny such allegations.
Meanwhile, analysts attribute much of damage to the Oslo accord to the fact that both sides consider themselves victims.
While the Palestinians have experienced the violence as an Israeli onslaught and have endured the brunt of the casualties, Israelis, too, feel victimized. And it is this sense of being attacked that right-wing hawks are trying to capitalize on.
Events such as last week's car bombing in Jerusalem that killed two civilians, and the daily shooting by Palestinian fighters into the Jewish settlement of Gilo on the edge of Jerusalem, are all being blamed on the Oslo agreement and alleged weakness by the government.
"Everything has to be halted and we need to reassess the situation," says Ms. Blumenthal. "We need to learn the lessons and to move away from the thinking of those who deluded themselves that they have a peace partner."
Advocates of the 1993 Oslo agreement to launch Palestinian self-rule concede that they are losing more and more ground as the the fighting continues.
"I would say that the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin is now at stake," says Labor Party Knesset member Yossi Katz. "We are at a crucial point, and time is against us. If in the next few weeks there is no Israeli-Palestinian agreement, the activities of the Palestinian extremists will become a daily event, and Israel will have no choice but to establish a unity government [with Likud]."
Likud leader Ariel Sharon is demanding that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak renounce limited concessions over Jerusalem and other issues offered to the Palestinians during the Camp David summit in July. The Palestinians, for their part, said Mr. Barak's proposals fell short of the independent state with Jerusalem as its capital to which they aspire. They have also taken sharp issue with continued expansion of Jewish settlements.
Despite Israeli recognition that Arafat has made an effort to rein in some of the violence during the past few days, Israeli analysts are not holding out much hope for the separate meetings after election day between President Clinton and Arafat and Barak.
"Barak has avoided a unity government to give Clinton a month of grace, since he has invested so much in the process," says Leslie Susser, diplomatic correspondent for The Jerusalem Report magazine. "But he is quite skeptical. Once he goes to Washington and everything fails there, he will go back to the unity strategy and see out the rest of the intifadah, which he expects to last for months."
At the Tel Aviv rally, Minister of Regional Cooperation Shimon Peres gave an impassioned defense of the Oslo agreement. The former prime minister who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Arafat said the Oslo process had narrowed the differences with the Palestinians to a point where they could be bridged, enabling a peace treaty with Jordan and breakthroughs in relations with the Arab world.
Invoking Rabin's memory, Mr. Peres said: "My friend and partner Yitzhak, the missing captain: The sea has not abated, the journey is not finished, the waves are breaking and gales are tossing the deck. But we have not folded, nor will we fold, the sails."
Palestinian Authority Environment Minister Youssef Abu Safieh, meanwhile, said that had Rabin lived, "Israel's attacks against the Palestinians" would not have taken place.
"We remember Yitzhak Rabin's positions during the first intifadah when he spoke about breaking the bones of the Palestinians," Mr Safieh said. "But we saw that he changed and was committed to the peace process and to fulfilling what he signed. We don't think that Barak is serious about peace."
Katz recalled that Rabin had kept up the negotiations with Palestinians despite deadly bombings by Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement. "I am aware that more and more Israelis, even from the center, prefer to neglect the peace track," he said. "We may lose many supporters, but my view is that politicians must lead the public and not be led by it. Five years after the murder of Rabin, it is our duty to continue seeking all routes to peace."
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Abbas may not have reigned in Hamas during the roadmap process, but Sharon refused to show any restraint either. Both sides see themselves as victims.
What about the Arab residents of Israel pre-1947? Should they pack their bags and move to "Trans-Jordan"?
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