Middle East Archives II
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Meet the brave... Meet the Children of the Intifada ... Meet the soul of the Palestinian people ...
picture provided by: Nizar Sakhnini
NO RETURN = NO PEACE
NO JUSTICE = NO PEACE
OCCUPATION AND SUPPRESSION MEANS RESISTANCE
"History shows that there are no invincible armies."
~ Josef Stalin ~
See Video of Murder of 12 yr Old Muhammed Aldurra and his father Jamal who was injured taken by French TV Crew or See frame by frame picture
Concessions, or International Law? Omar Turk ~ Dec. 30
Scare Arafat, Eric Silver ~ 29 December
Clinton's Proposals: What's Hard For Barak And What Arafat Takes Exception To, Nahum Barnea ~ Dec. 29
Who Believes In Hocus-Pocus? Guy Bechor ~ Dec. 29
The Moral Problem, Arjan El Fassed ~ Dec. 29, 2000
Israelis, Americans Hope For PA 'Yes' To Peace Plan, Ha'aretz Staff ~ Dec. 29
Negev Leaders Begin Fight Against Transfer of Land to Palestinians, Iris Baram ~ Dec. 29
Settlers Say Evacuation Means War, By Margot Dudkevitch, Jerusalem Post ~ Dec. 29
Barak Campaign Intends To Reveal Classified Portion Of Sabra And Shatilla Massacre Report, Yossi Verter ~ Dec. 29
Clinton: Then and Now on Refugees, Sherri Muzher ~ Dec. 29
Sham Summit Promised Little For The Palestinians, By Robert Fisk ~ December 29
Violence Shatters Palestinian Boom - But Mideast Flare-up Seen as Just 'Hiccup', Stephanie Nolen ~ December 29, 2000
Talks With U.N. Should Respect Iraq's Principles, XINHUA ~ Dec. 29
Iraq Urges AL Intervention to Halt U.S., British Aggressions, XINHUA ~ Dec. 29
Iraq Ready To Resume UN Talks When Embargo Is Lifted, AFP ~ Dec. 29
Two-Faced Discrimination, David Yerushalmi ~ December 28
Iraq Calls For Dialogue With Kuwait, Saudi On Eve of Gulf Summit, AFP ~ Dec. 28
Israeli Troops Injure 3 Attackers at Border, Lebanon Says, AP ~ December 28
The Making Of A Palestinian, Jaffer Ali ~ Dec. 28
Media Spin Remains in Sync With Israeli Occupation, By Norman Solomon ~ Dec. 28
They Entered Qana, By Nizar Qabbani ~ Dec. 28
A View From the Other Side. . .The 100,000 Are Already Here, By Avraham Tal ~ Dec. 28
A Palestinian View of Clinton's Mideast Proposals, by Rashid L. Khaladi ~ December 28
Sweating the Details in The Middle East, By Cameron W. Barr ~ Dec. 28
Bahija Réghaï - a Letter to Jean Chrétien, Prime Minister of Canada - Israeli Palestinian Peace Negotiations, By Bahija ~ Dec. 28
An Intifada in Search of a Leadership, By Amira Hass ~ December 27
Peace Can't Be Built on These Fictions, by Ali Abunimah ~ December 27
Saudis, Egyptians tell Arafat to Wait for Bush, Reuters ~ Dec. 27
Mideast Summit Called Off, By Greg Myre ~ Dec. 27
Palestinian Refugees Could Pose an Obstacle, Bahija Réghaï ~ Dec. 27
Clinton Peace Plan Opposed: Only a Third of Israelis, Palestinians Support His Proposals, By Matthew Kalman ~ Dec. 27
A Flawed Peace Plan - Editorial, Times Union ~ December 27
Option Of Reaching Agreement With Bush Prior To Israeli Elections Being Examined, by Ben Caspit and Eli Kamir ~ Dec. 27
INS Must Stop Using Secret Evidence, By Niels W. Frenzen ~ December 21
Bethlehem Diary, by Toine van Teeffelen ~ October 23-30
Concessions, or International Law?
Omar Turk ~ Dec. 30, 2000
Editor,
This letter is in response to the editorial (or zionist spin more appropriately), "A flawed peace plan," Editorial -- Times Union, December 27, 2000.
The first line of the editorial is correct, but is applied to the wrong side. Yes, the proposals are "one-sided and inadequate," but against the Palestinians!
The writer repeatedly refers to "concessions" by both sides to lead to a "secure piece." On what grounds does he base the "concessions" to be made by the Palestinians? Certainly not International Law. Do I really need to remind the world of UN Resolution after UN Resolution, guaranteeing the right of return AND compensation to Palestinian refugees and the return of occupied Palestinian land? Does complying to International Law interpret into a concession?
I, and any rational thinking person, do not.
Does the writer want us also to believe that the Haram Al Sharief (Noble Sanctuary) is not a Muslim holy site, and thus should not be under Palestinian control? For many years the Isreali occupation forces have prevented Palestinian Muslims from worshipping at the third holiest site in Islam. And has, in the past few months, only allowed boys under 12, and men over 45, from praying at the site. Does he/she believe that any Palestinian will accept the status quo?
I, and any rational thinking person, do not.
The author then admits that 350 people have been killed in the past three months, and that many are children, but then belittles the reader with the comment, "Palestinian children have been sacrificed by their elders for the sake of turning world opinion against Israel." Does this person live in such a thick blanket of hate and ignorance, that he/she doesn't see that Palestinians are being killed by bullets and missiles, fired from Isreali tanks and helicopters? Does he/she think that Palestinians are sub-human, and thus would want their children killed for "world opinion"? Does he/she think that "world opinion" is more important to Palestinians than the lives of their children?
I, and any rational thinking person, do not.
The writer then tells the reader of the "fears a flood of Palestinian settlers," that "would skew the country's demographics and politics." The author is obviously is ignorant to the 52 year plight of the Palestinian refugee, and would prefer to see the people suffer in squalid refugee camps on land not their own, rather than return them to there rightful homes and property that was stolen from them. All this, as not to change "demographics." What about the million or so non-Jewish Russian immigrants that are now living on Palestinian lands? Does he/she think that Palestinian refugees will give up their most fundamental human rights for "demographics?"
I, and any rational thinking person, do not.
So, as you see, the irrational spin and untruths, cannot hide the FACTS that the RIGHT OF RETURN, soverenty over the Haram Al Sharief and Jerusalem, and FREEDOM for the Palestinian people, as prescribed by International Law, is the only way to "secure" a real and just peace in the Middle East. Any less than that, is unacceptable to me, or any rational thinking person, and that is---guaranteed.
END
Eric Silver in Jerusalem, The Independent - 29 December
The United States is orchestrating an international drive to persuade Yasser Arafat to accept American bridging proposals as a basis for concluding a final peace agreement with Israel. The Palestinian President was reported yesterday to have received 50 telephone calls from world leaders urging him not to give up.
The campaign was launched after Egypt early yesterday cancelled a summit meeting at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh between Mr Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak. Mr Arafat said after emergency talks in Cairo yesterday with the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, that he was "still examining" President Bill Clinton's ideas. Plans for the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to go to Washington this weekend have been put on hold.
However, despite yesterday's bomb attacks in Tel Aviv and Gaza, none of the protagonists is ready to pronounce the last rites on the peace process that began in Oslo seven years ago. The less pessimistic Israeli commentators still suggest that Mr Arafat is going to the brink in the hope of squeezing one more concession out of Mr Barak, who is desperate for something tangible to show the voters in prime ministerial elections barely six weeks away.
Others are questioning whether Mr Arafat is psychologically ready to put an end to the conflict, even though he must know that the alternative to Mr Barak's flexibility is the intransigence of his right-wing Likud challenger, Ariel Sharon.
The Sharm el-Sheikh summit, due to have taken place yesterday, unravelled on Wednesday night after the Palestinians sent a letter to the Americans that had so many reservations that Washington refused to take it seriously.
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, at a late night cabinet meeting, Mr Barak secured a majority of 10 to two in favour of accepting the Clinton draft as a basis for a deal, provided the Palestinians accepted it too. But when he was informed of the Palestinian letter, Mr Barak abruptly changed his mind about going to Sharm. After yesterday's Mubarak-Arafat meeting, he again dropped tentative plans to join them in Cairo. An Israeli official insisted last night that nothing would move until they heard from the Palestinians.
Both Israelis and Palestinians wanted the US president to be more specific. He is believed to have spelled out principles rather than a blueprint for peace. The difference was that Mr Arafat seemed to be saying "No, but...," while Mr Barak was saying "Yes, but..." Mr Clinton's guidelines have not yet been published, but Nahum Barnea reported yesterday in Yediot Aharonot, the biggest-selling Hebrew daily, that they run to six pages. According to this account the President proposed that Israel give up 94-96 per cent of the West Bank.
It is also taken as axiomatic that Israel will withdraw from the entire Gaza Strip. Some 80 per cent of the West Bank settlers would be concentrated in blocks close to the old Green Line border, which would be annexed to Israel. The Palestinians would be compensated with land in Israel's Negev desert adjacent to the Gaza Strip. The key to security concerns, Yediot Aharonot reported, would be an international force to supervise implementation of the deal. The evacuation would be staggered over three years. A small Israeli force would stay for a further three years in the Jordan valley. Israel would also retain three early-warning stations. On the make-or-break issue of Jerusalem, Mr Clinton proposed Israeli rule over Israeli neighbourhoods and Jewish holy places, Palestinian rule over Arab neighbourhoods and Muslim and Christian holy places. Mr Clinton suggested full de facto Palestinian control over the Haram al-Sharif, but that a way should be found to respect Jewish reverence for the site, which to them is the Temple Mount.
On the second crucial issue of up to 3.5 million Palestinian refugees who have not given up hope of returning to their old homes inside Israel, the President acknowledged a right of return to "historic Palestine", but not specifically to Israel. He suggested that they be absorbed in the new Palestinian state, in areas that Israel would transfer to Palestine, in Middle East countries where they are already living, in third countries that would welcome them as immigrants, and (to a lesser degree) in Israel.
According to the Nahum Barnea account, Mr Clinton ended with the veiled threat: "When I leave my job, all my ideas go with me. You will have to start again from scratch." Yasser Arafat, it seems, does not scare that easily.
END
Clinton's Proposals: What's Hard For Barak And What Arafat Takes Exception To
by Nahum Barnea, Yedioth Ahronoth ~ Dec. 29
Ehud Barak is waging a battle these days on two contradictory fronts: he must persuade the Israelis that the basic lines of the agreement, as formulated by Clinton, are a victory for Israel, while persuading Arafat that this is it, Israel has reached the limit of its concessions. There is nothing left to squeeze.
Barak accepted the ideas positively. However, his team prepared several dozen reservations, either in order to improve the agreement or for bargaining purposes. Arafat, in contrast to Barak, believes that the president's outlines are not fair. That is what the Americans understood last night from the heap of reservations he submitted to them.
All in all, the ideas reflect the victory of demography over every other component in the lives of the two people. Demography wins out over geography, over history, over ideology. The rule Clinton set for Jerusalem -- areas populated by Arabs be Palestine, areas populated by Jews are Israel -- is valid, in effect, for all the territories: areas where there is massive Jewish settlement become Israel, empty areas or those populated by Arabs become Palestinian. The borders would be a knotty problem of enclaves for both sides.
For 80 years, since Trumpeldor and Tel Hai, the Zionist movement has been debating the question of how borders are set, by diplomatic demands or by the Jewish settler. The Left believed at one time in settlement and the Right believed in diplomatic efforts. Then they reversed.
Clinton's guidelines decide this debate in an interesting way. Quantity is the decider. Isolated settlements would be evacuated or dried up. Because of the political and humane difficulty in evacuating settlers, settlement blocs become of primary importance. Keeping Maale Adumim, Givat Zeev, the Etzion Bloc, the Modiin Bloc, the Ariel Bloc and others is a great achievement for Barak, but it is very likely that because of that, he could not get more in Jerusalem.
Most Israelis believed that the compromise between the Palestinians and us would be somewhere inside the territories captured in '67. The Palestinians saw the compromise as the Green Line. But the precedent set in the agreement signed by Begin won: In general, Israel returns to the Green Line.
The president did not set out the ideas in writing. He preferred to dictate them to the sides, word by word. American sources stressed last night that this is not an "American plan," but rather the parameters, the guidelines, to end the conflict between the two sides.
At the outset, Clinton states the price: Israel will concede 94-96% of the West Bank and give areas inside Israel to the Palestinians, that come to half, or a third, of what the latter will give. Leasing is also an option (Palestinian sources mention an Israeli proposal to lease Kiryat Arba and the Jewish Quarter in Hebron, and perhaps the northern part of the Gaza Strip).
80% of the settlers would be in blocs with territorial contiguity. A minimal number of Palestinians would be annexed to Israel (according to sources in the negotiations -- tens of thousands).
The key to security will be an international force. The force would only leave by mutual consent. It would supervise the implementation of the agreement. The agreement would be carried out over three years, with the international force coming into the area in stages. At the end of the process, a small Israeli force would remain for another three years in specific spots in the Jordan Valley under the auspices of the international force. If the atmosphere is positive, the Israeli force could leave sooner.
There would be three early warning stations, manned by Israelis. Palestinian liaison officers would have a presence in the stations (Israel is considering whether it would not be better to have aerial stations with airships). After a period of ten years the issue of the stations would be re-examined, by mutual consent.
The IDF would be allocated areas in the Jordan Valley to deploy military forces during emergencies. The IDF could only bring in troops after an emergency situation was declared in Israel, after a mobilization of the reserves and after the international force is notified. Roads would be allocated for the troops' entry, but these roads would be under Palestinian control (at Camp David, in the security talks between Maj. Gen. Yanai and Gilead Sher with Abu Ala and Mohammed Dahlan, five roads were mentioned for the plateau above the Jordan Valley. For example, the area between Nebi Moussa and the Jericho Valley).
The Palestinians would have sovereignty over the skies, but both sides would work out arrangements for training flights and the air force's operational flights (in effect, there is Palestinian consent to allow the air force to act as usual. The Atarot airport in northeast Jerusalem would be operated jointly).
According to Clinton's blueprint, a gap remains between the sides over the issue of demilitarization. Israel demands that Palestine be demilitarized. The Palestinians speak of a "situation of limited arming."
Clinton suggests a formula for a compromise: a non-militarized state. The security of Palestine would be based on a strong local force and on the international force, for defending its borders and for deterrence.
As for Jerusalem and the refugees, the president felt that the gaps had more to do with phrasing than essence. In other words, in practical terms, agreement was reached. What remains is the symbolic, rhetorical problem. Jerusalem: Whatever is Arab becomes Palestinian. Whatever is Jewish -- Israeli. This principle would also be applied to the Old City (the president does not say so, but both sides agreed that the Old City would have to have a unique regime with strong international involvement. That is also the status of the churches. The idea of full internationalization for the Old City was discussed or rather the Old City as well as sensitive areas around it such as the Mount of. Olives and the City of David. However each side demanded sovereignty over the areas most sensitive to it -- Israel, the Western Wall and Jewish Quarter; the Palestinians, the Temple Mount and Moslem Quarter.)
The president calls on the sides to draw up a map for Jerusalem that gives maximum contiguity to both sides (sometimes this contiguity is not achieved by an area but by means of a road. Problems of implementation, both sides admit, are extremely difficult, mainly in north Jerusalem).
As for the Temple Mount, Clinton says that the gap is not over practical administration, but over sovereignty as a formal term, and the need to respect the religious beliefs of both sides. The Palestinians would have full control, de facto, of Haram a-Sharif, but nonetheless a way would be found to respect the beliefs of the Jewish people and there would be international supervision.
On this matter the president raises various alternatives: Palestinian sovereignty for the Temple Mount compound but with Jewish links to the Holy of Holies and the area underneath the mount. Or alternatively, joint sovereignty over the excavations under the mount and behind the Western Wall.
Refugees: Israel, the president states, is willing to recognize the moral and material suffering caused as a result of the '48 war and the need to share in the international efforts to rehabilitate them.
The basic gap is over the right of return. The president understands how hard it is for the Palestinian leadership to appear as if it has abandoned this principle. On the other hand, Israel cannot accept immigration that would be against its policy and change its Jewish character. Palestine would be the focus for absorbing refugees who wish to return. Five systems of rehabilitation would be offered: in Palestine, in areas that Israel would transfer to Palestine, in countries where refugees live today, in third countries, and in Israel.
The right to be rehabilitated to Palestine would be in full. In other countries, it would be according to those countries' wishes. Israel would announce its policy for absorbing refugees.
The Palestinian people has the right to return to historical Palestine. There is no specific right of return to Israel itself, but there is the right in principle to return to the region.
Refugees in Lebanon would have first priority. Both sides agree that implementation would constitute the realization of UN Resolution 194 on refugees.
All the pretty words lead to one practical point: there is no right of return into Israel unless Israel unilaterally decides to accept this. If the final agreement looks like this, Israelis can relax.
The sides did not reach agreement on supervision for Palestine's external borders with Jordan and Egypt. The Palestinians demand full control over the crossings. Israel demands invisible Israeli supervision or American supervision. Another problem is guarding the border with Jordan: would this be by Palestinian forces or international forces who would thwart the infiltration of would-be immigrants.
The real problem with the right of return is not in the agreement, but in reality. If Palestine's external border is not efficiently blocked, and the border with Israel is open, what we will have is creeping right of return, with thousands of Palestinians from Palestine and the Diaspora living and working in Jaffa, Haifa and Tel Aviv.
The capital of Palestine, says the president, would be el-Kuds. The agreement would mark an end to the conflict. It would obligate the release of all prisoners.
Israel would receive, so the president says, a true end to the conflict, tangible security, it would maintain its link to religious values, it would have 80% of the settlers added to Israel and it would have a Greater Jerusalem, recognized by the world.
He adds a veiled threat to the sides: When I leave my job, he says, all my ideas go with me. You will have to start from zero. Arafat, judging by his non-final moves yesterday, is not impressed by the threat. He has heard them once before, at the end of Camp David.
END
Guy Bechor, Yedioth Ahronoth ~ Dec. 29
Will he or won't he sign an agreement, will he or won't he accept the American proposals? This question has occupied the government over the last few days, and it is always in regard to Yasser Arafat personally. As if by his signature the dream of "awda" (return) will evaporate and a one hundred year old violent national conflict will end. This personal approach of the Israeli government to the Palestinians was also illustrated upon the outbreak of the Intifada, when the decision to begin violence was attributed to Arafat, and the assumption was that he had exclusive control over the violence. Just as there was a simplistic approach in that battle, and the Israeli leadership finally understood that in the Palestinian spectrum there are many colors, the situation is now the same, with peace. This concentration on Arafat alone, as if he were the only Palestinian player in the issue of peace, and only by his order does anything happen, is misleading for the same reason.
The State of Israel has become used to dealing with the Arab governments and with narrow, elite margins in the Arab societies. It was easy, because these governments displayed a pragmatic approach, and Arab countries are centralist and completely control their public. Thus it was possible to reach two peace contracts, with Egypt and with Jordan. But that was also the curse of these contracts: they are still contracts with governments, not with societies, and so are fragile and lacking a stable base.
This is not so in Palestinian society. The Palestinian Authority does not have centralized authority like the other Arab countries. It is the most open and critical of Arab societies and so Yasser Arafat's status was seriously damaged during this last Intifada. This could be an advantage from Israel's perspective, because Palestinian society is the only Arab society at the moment that can really reach a social and complete peace with its immediate neighbor, Israeli society. But it is also a disadvantage, because a personal, improvised agreement with Arafat could well be rejected by it. That would mean the continuation of violence, even after the signing of an agreement, which could be seen as illegitimate by this society. Because, of course, the test of every agreement is its implementation, not the fact that it was reached.
The Oslo agreement was reached by Israel with the PLO, which was then in exile, disconnected from the Palestinian public, from its pains and dreams. This is not the case today. This means that Arafat, who knows well the strength of his society and the degree of its bitterness, might make demands that are impossible from Israel's perspective, or he might sign in the end, but the agreement signed will not be implemented by him or by his public. In both cases, the chances of achieving reconciliation with the Palestinian public will be postponed for many years. This will be eternal proof that it is impossible to reach a real understanding with the Palestinians, and the desperation on both sides will grow.
With such lamentable opening statistics, and with Israeli society embittered and angry, the Israeli government now expects Arafat to do some sort of political hocus pocus and shift his people from a situation of fighting, hostility and anger to a position of peace, friendship and fraternity. It is hardly likely in the allotted time, with the psychological damage of the Intifada, the undermining of trust on both sides and the relations between this government and the Palestinian population, that this can happen. Why look far -- is Ehud Barak able to do this in Israeli society?
END
Arjan El Fassed ~ Dec. 29, 2000
Every state is composed of human beings, the vast majority of whom accept and act upon a set of moral principles, aspects of a general code of distinguishing right and wrong. All human action may be judged, with varying accuracy and relevance, in moral terms. The moral issue becomes pertinent when commands of the state to the individual represent a direct contradiction of what that individual has been taught to regard as right and good. The classic instance is the taking of human life.
Following a provocative visit by Israeli war criminal Ariel Sharon to the holy site of Al-Haram al-Sharif in occupied Jerusalem and Israel's excessive and disproportionate violent aggression against the Palestinian people, killing 319 Palestinians and wounding more some 10,000, once again we are reminded that peace does not come without justice. Once again we are reminded that no peace will be just and durable when it is not based on a foundation of universal human rights and international law, that is built on morality and ethical conduct.
No moral code makes a senseless death morally justifiable, and sanity argues that the continued existence of humankind is a desirable goal. The force of international morality is given form by means of an international consensus. Whether expressed formally in the resolutions of the United Nations or informally by a rather amorphous "world public opinion" shaped and directed by global broadcast media, collective moral judgment is now a factor that policymakers cannot avoid taking into account. The global concern over human rights is a prime example.
However, the basic rights of Palestinians are still denied. The world agreed that Palestinians are human beings with the right to life, liberty and security of person. The world believed that the process of liberation is irresistible and irreversible and that, in order to avoid serious crises, an end must be put to colonialism and all practices of segregation and discrimination associated therewith. The subjection of the Palestinians to Israeli subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights, is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations and is an impediment to the promotion of world peace and co-operation.
Likewise, the world, formally recognized the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, their right to their property and to the income derived from their property. The world, through the United Nation, recognized that the continued displacement and dispossession of Palestinian refugees has arisen from the denial of their inalienable rights under the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and declared that full respect for the inalienable rights of the people of Palestine is an indispensable element in the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.
The distinguished American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson, formerly a US Supreme Court Justice, made this famous assertion in his opening statement: "And let me make clear that if this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment." This crucial promise to the future has not been kept.
There have been no serious effort to apply these legal standards, despite the numerous occasions on which universal human principles have been flagrantly violated by Israel. The international community has failed to carry out their moral responsibility. The terrible events that take place in Palestine, involving the loss of lives of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children, raise important issues concerning the legal responsibility of the political and military leaders of Israel.
The world cannot overlook the extent to which Israeli participation in prior massacres directed against the Palestinian people creates a most disturbing pattern of a political struggle carried on by means of mass terror directed at civilians, including women, children and the aged. Many well-documented occurrences of Israeli terror over the years have taken place.
Israel is clearly responsible for grave violations of international law, and the political and military leaders involved in the undertaking are individually liable for their roles in aiding and abetting the perpetration of massacres, as well as for their failure to apprehend, or even to accuse or lay complaint against, those principally responsible for directing the massacre and those who committed these atrocities.
Human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated. This approach, adopted by the international community at the World Conference on Human Rights, applies also to peace. Strict adherence, de facto and de jure, to international human rights law and international humanitarian law is the prerequisite for creating trust and strengthening security in the wider sense. The Israeli occupation of Palestine is the root cause of human rights violations in the area.
However, until such time as authoritative institutions enforce these rights and the world recognizes that its morality will be judged on its fulfillment of its legal and moral obligations, morality will continue to be a limitation on state action, difficult to define but impossible to ignore.
END
Israelis, Americans Hope For PA 'Yes' To Peace Plan
Ha'aretz Staff ~ Dec. 29, 2000
In the aftermath of terror strikes in Tel Aviv and the Gaza Strip, and Yasser Arafat's reservations over U.S. President Bill Clinton's peace proposals, pessimism engulfed officials in Washington and Jerusalem yesterday.
Working behind the scenes, American officials strenuously pressured Arafat, hoping to wrest a positive PA commitment to the proposals. Refraining from casting blame upon either of the sides for stalling the momentum generated earlier in the week after he presented his proposal, Clinton indicated that no meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders will be held until the sides embrace the basic framework he has submitted.
"There's no point in additional talks if the two sides don't first accept the parameters I've presented," Clinton stated yesterday. Scarcely concealing his frustration stemming from Arafat's refusal to make a commitment to the proposals, the U.S. President quipped that "it's true that we are all operating under a deadline, but only some of us know what that deadline is." Last Saturday, when talks ended in Washington, the U.S. President asked both sides to reply to his proposals by the middle of the week.
Clinton emphasized yesterday that his proposals are an attempt to settle disputed issues in a fashion suited to the "basic needs" of both sides.
Israeli officials hope that Arafat's unenthusiastic response to Clinton this week was a tactical ploy. Israeli sources even cited a new potential breakthrough date, January 1st, a day when Arafat will meet with a committee formed to oversee resolutions reached by the recent Arab states summit. "Perhaps Arafat will try to muster Arab support for possible concessions" during this meeting, one source speculated.
After two meetings totaling eight and a half hours, Israel's cabinet decided at 2:30 A.M. Thursday to accept Clinton's peace proposals. A government statement described the proposals as a "contribution to the resumption of intensive talks" Israel, the statement added, "will request a number of clarifications on subjects pertaining to its vital interests."
Only two government ministers (Rabbi Michael Melchior, who is overseas, and Roni Milo) opposed the decision; two other ministers (Matan Vilnai and Ra'anan Cohen) abstained.
PA Chairman Yasser Arafat met yesterday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo. The PA Chairman's visit to Cairo came instead of an anticipated discussion in Sharm al-Sheikh that was supposed to have involved Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Arafat and Mubarak. The Sharm al-Sheikh discussion was canceled as a result of Arafat's noncommittal reply to Clinton. Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami informed his Egyptian counterpart, Amr Moussa, that the Sharm al-Sheikh discussion should not be held before Arafat submits a final reply to Clinton.
Mubarak's meeting with Arafat yesterday was part of a sustained effort undertaken by the Egyptian President to promote the American peace proposals, while incorporating some revisions consistent with Palestinian demands.
After returning to Gaza, Arafat described his meeting with Mubarak as "important, necessary and productive." Arafat said that he does not rule out the possibility of his participating in a summit meeting with Ehud Barak.
Other Palestinian spokesmen rejected yesterday suggestions that the PA is responsible for derailing the peace process anew. They suggested that Clinton's proposals deviate in crucial respects from standards outlined by UN resolutions. "We took up the peace process in order to apply international law," stated top PA negotiator Saeb Erekat.
Erekat declared that "absolute clarity" concerning Clinton's proposals is vital. Erekat chided U.S. officials for utilizing an approach he described as "constructive ambiguity;" in an effort to reach an agreement, he added, important matters cannot be addressed using vague formulations.
U.S. officials interpreted yesterday's pipe bomb explosion in Tel Aviv as a demonstration of the imperative of reaching an agreement. The terror strike was another reminder of the need "to work together" in opposition to the enemies of the peace process, the White House Spokesman stated.
Meantime U.S. officials disclosed additional details of Clinton's proposals yesterday, correcting some reports that have appeared recently in Middle East media. Among other clarifications, the officials indicated that Clinton's plan refers explicitly to Palestinian "sovereignty" on the Temple Mount; also, though under an agreement Israel would acknowledge "emotional and financial damages" suffered by Palestinian refugees since 1948, the accord's formulations do not blame it for the refugee situation.
According to a report published in The New York Times, leaders from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have expressed support of the U.S. peace plan in conversations with Clinton. American sources say these affirmative responses reverse the intransigent opposition shown by Arab leaders to proposals aired at Camp David last summer. Samir Ragab, the editor of the state-run Egyptian daily Al-Gomhuria who has close ties with Mubarak, wrote yesterday that Egypt favors continual negotiation and revision of peace proposals, and adamantly opposes a "take it or leave it" approach. He also claimed that Arabs will be unable to assent to an agreement which leaves Israel in charge of areas on and below the Temple Mount area. "Several high-ranking sources have informed me," Ragab wrote, "that there is no avoiding re-formulating several clauses [in Clinton's proposal] pertaining to the subject of control of areas on and below the Temple Mount, and that consultations continue between the sides in an attempt to 'revise' the American proposals."
END
Negev Leaders Begin Fight Against Transfer of Land to Palestinians
By Iris Baram, Ha'aretz Correspondent ~ Dec. 29
On Thursday morning, the heads of Negev settlements began preparing for their battle against the government's plan to transfer a segment of the Negev to the Palestinian Authority. According to the government plan, which exchanges land for a permanent agreement, 150 square kilometers of the Halutza sand dunes will go to the Palestinians.
During a protest Thursday morning in Nitzana, Luba Eliav, a Nitzana resident and longtime Labor Party member, announced that he opposes the transferal of land. The heads of the local councils of Kadesh Barnea, Kmehin, Azua and Nitzana announced their intention to form a protest committee and called on others in the Negev to join them. The chairman of the Negev Development Authority, Shmuel Rifman, called on all heads of local councils to join the fight for the entire Negev.
Next week the heads of the Negev settlements plan on a mass protest across the street from government offices and calling for the establishment of additional settlements in the Negev, as well as strengthening the settlement near Nitzana.
END
Settlers Say Evacuation Means War
By Margot Dudkevitch, Jerusalem Post ~ Dec. 29, 2000
JERUSALEM (December 29) - Settlers warned yesterday that if Prime Minister Ehud Barak signs an agreement with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat leading to mass evacuation of settlements, the inevitable consequence will be civil war, a new war with the Arabs, or both.
A peace treaty is expected to lead to the dismantlement of up to 100 settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and the Jordan Valley.
"Arafat's dream is to be the Herzl of a Palestinian state," said Benny Kashriel chairman of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, adding "the settlement community is facing the battle of its life, people are fighting for their homes and livelihood, I believe it will be a harsh, bitter and violent battle."
Settlers are preparing a string of activities, including a hunger strike scheduled to start on Sunday, and street protests and demonstrations.
Kashriel, who is mayor of Ma'aleh Adumim, said that Barak's reported readiness to give up sovereignty over the Temple Mount and large areas of Samaria, Binyamin, Hebron, Gush Etzion and the Judean Desert is still not the full story.
"According to information I have received, Barak is willing to make additional concessions in order to reach an agreement. If an agreement isn't reached it won't be because of Barak but Arafat, who has realized that if the violence and bloodshed continues he has more to gain," he said.
Kashriel added that even if an agreement between the sides is reached, the Palestinians won't sit back quietly, they will want more, but by then the situation will be far worse. "The Jerusalem neighborhood of Maalot Dafna is only 50 meters from Sheikh Jarra and Shuafat is only 100 meters from Givat Hamivtar. The Palestinians encouraged by their success will perpetrate more attacks," he said.
Yesha Council spokeswoman Yehudit Tayar called Barak's actions irresponsible and willful. "He appears to be callously ignoring the continued violence and bloodshed," she said. "He plans to abandon tens of thousands of Israeli citizens and evict thousands more in his distorted and obscene attempt to whip the public into an agreement with terrorists." Yesterday Peace Now harshly protested the decision by Housing Minister Binyamin Eliezer to continue to renew the former government's designation of the settlements as areas of highest national priority.
The movement's Prof. Galia Golan said she found it hard to understand how Barak could have authorized such a decision at such a sensitive moment.
"Further development of the settlements, especially places like Netzarim and Psagot, can only lead to more bloodshed and make the achievement of a viable peace accord more difficult than it already is" she said. "We call upon the Prime Minister to immediately reverse the decision."
END
Barak Campaign Intends To Reveal Classified Portion Of Sabra And Shatilla Massacre Report
By Yossi Verter, Ha'aretz Correspondent ~ Dec. 29, 2000
MK Elie Goldschmidt, head of public relations for the re-election campaign of Prime Minister Ehud Barak, announced Friday that the Labor party will act to reveal the classified portion of the Kahan Commission report on the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Beirut in which Christian militias slaugtered hundreds of Palestinians. Likud chair and primeministerial candidate Ariel Sharon was Defense Minister at the time.
"Sharon's role in the Lebanon war must be revealed to the public," Goldschmidt said, adding that as of late the Likud candidate has adorned the mask of an older and wiser man, but "he has no plan and no way to achieve piece." According to Goldschmidt, Sharon is orchestrating a "masquerade," but the public must know "that with his actions of the past 20 years, most importantly during the Lebanon war, Sharon distanced Israel from peace."
Two of the slogans to be used by the Barak campaign - "We cannot return to the days of Sharon" and "Israel must have peace" - were revealed at a press conference Friday. The press conference, held at the new Labor headquarters in the Hatikva neighborhood of southern Tel Aviv, marked the launch of Barak's PR campaign.
Goldschmidt stressed the Likud also understands the problems presented by a Sharon candidacy, and therefore is working to conceal during the campaign. He called on Sharon to participate in as many as possible debates with Barak, "in order for him to say if he intends to reach peace with the Palestinians and prevent diplomatic and security deterioration, after he proclaimed that he would not shake Arafat's hand and opposed the peace agreement with Jordan."
Head of the Barak campaign's response team, Environment Minister Dalia Itzik, described the Likud slogan "Only Sharon will bring peace" as "insolent," considering Sharon has always acted hastily. She added that Israeli citizens must decide between "a prime minister searching for the path to peace, although he has not yet found it, and someone who is going to war."
END
Clinton: Then and Now on Refugees
By Sherri Muzher, Dec. 29, 2000
"We're proud of what we did because we think it's what America stands for, that no one ever, ever should be punished and discriminated against or killed or uprooted because of their religion or their ethnic heritage," said President Bill Clinton as he visited the Stankovic Camp in Macedonia in June.
Less than two weeks later, President Clinton said, "I would like it if the Palestinian people felt free and were free to live wherever they like, wherever they want to live." Some interpreted these comments to signify the president's support of the right of return of the 3.7 million Palestinian refugees, although within hours of the second remark U.S. assurances were made to the Israeli Embassy that U.S. policy had not changed in this regard. That policy, according to a U.S. State Department official, is that the issue of the Palestinian right of return is to be decided infinal status negotiations.
And here we are in 2000, and Clinton is pressuring the Palestinians into giving up their right of return to what is now Israel-- guaranteed by international laws.
In Kosovo, we saw the resolve of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to make life miserable for the Serbians in Yugoslavia and the message was simple: We'll stop the bombing when you stop driving theAlbanian Muslims out of Kosovo.
Whether the use of NATO military measures was necessary continues to be a topic for debate, but the decisiveness to reverse the flow of refugees from their homeland was nothing short of remarkable and exemplary. Within days, busloads of refugees, escorted by representatives of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) were heading back to the Kosovo capital of Pristina. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees have since returned to towns and villages allover Kosovo.
What was so strikingly different between the atrocities which befell the Kosovar refugees and those that befell the Palestinians of 1948? Consider this chilling testimony, which would bring a sense of déjà vu for any Kosovar refugee.
"Outside the gate the soldiers stopped us and ordered everyone to throw all valuables onto a blanket. One young man and his wife of six weeks, friends of our family, stood near me. He refused to give up his money. Almost casually, the soldier pulled up his rifle and shot the man. He fell, bleeding and dying while his bride screamed and cried. I felt nauseated and sick, my whole body numbed by shock waves. That night I cried, too, as I tried to sleep alongside thousands on the ground. Would I ever see my home again? Would the soldiers kill my loved ones, too" - Father Rantisi of Ramallah's Evangelical Home for Boys, author of Blessed Are the Peacemakers
Much of the world's shock and horror at Serb ethnic cleansing of Kosovars stemmed particularly from Serbian atrocities intended to frighten Kosovars away. Again, comparisons to the Palestinian nakba are haunting. The infamous massacre at Deir Yassin was cited by Israeli forces to instill fear in other Palestinians that if they did not flee, they would meet the same fate as the massacred men, women and children of that village, seized by Jewish militias in April 1948. 750,000 Palestinians fled. Essentially the massacre was perpetrated by design, as were the recent Serbian atrocities. Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who ordered the Deir Yassin massacre, once referred to it as one of the greatest victories of Zionism because its "political and economic significance can hardly be overestimated."
It's true that times were different back in 1948. The CNN cameras were missing, and the world was still experiencing the guilt of its complacency during the abhorrent tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust. That is all the more reason for the U.S. to end the suffering of Palestinian refugees in 2000.
The U.S. prides itself as a nation that not only is a militarysuperpower but also a moral superpower. To merit that label, then it?s time for President Clinton to stop pressuring Palestinians into accepting what he knows is wrong. Clinton should also note that 74% of Americans support the right of return for Palestinians, according to a Zogby poll.
In an era when human rights have become a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, President Clinton's penchant for a legacy, domestic politics and Israel's well-heeled lobbying groups should take a backseat. A true peace in the Middle East will have to provide for Palestinians to live with dignity. Otherwise, our rhetoric in Kosovo was meaningless.
END
Sham Summit Promised Little For The Palestinians
By Robert Fisk, The Independent ~ December 29, 2000
In the end, it was the same old story. The Israelis would make "one last step for peace". They would probably concede -- according to a number of inaccurate Western newspaper reports -- Palestinian "sovereignty" over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif mosques in Jerusalem. And Yasser Arafat would be blamed if he turned down the last chance he would ever get for a real peace in the Middle East.
Thus was yesterday's doomed summit at Sharm el-Sheikh promoted -- and upon these factual untruths it died before it was ever held. Of course, Ehud Barak pulled out. Of course, Mr Arafat could not accept the terms, because Israel was offering the Palestinians "control" of the surface of the mosques, it never offered "sovereignty". And by midday yesterday, Mr Barak's security adviser, Danny Yatom, was saying just that. Mr Barak, he announced, "will not sign an accord which transfers sovereignty [over the Temple Mount/ Haram al-Sharif] to the Palestinians".
The result? The world believes that Mr Arafat turned down what he had always demanded, and the cancellation of the Sharm el-Sheikh summit was entirely his fault. Having claimed in the past that Israel was offering 92 per cent of the West Bank -- and then 94 per cent -- to the Palestinians, the Americans insisted that the latest Clinton proposals would give Mr Arafat 95 per cent.
But a careful reading of the Clinton document proves this to be untrue. With the Dead Sea waters that would become Palestinian "territory", with the Israeli army "buffer zones", with the "rental" of the Kiryat Arba settlement land, with the exclusion of the West Bank land illegally annexed into Jerusalem by the Israelis (including the massive Male Adumim settlement), Arafat was still likely to get no more than 64 or 65 per cent. And the Palestinian Authority knows all too well what "control" would mean in Jerusalem. While Arafat's men collected garbage, supplied the traffic cops and kept their own people in order, the Israelis would continue to hold sovereign power over all Jerusalem.
Palestinian "control" of Palestinian "neighbourhoods" of Jerusalem would recreate the insanity of West Bank areas A, B and C where Israelis and Palestinians variously "control" all of an area or share parts of it. One Jerusalem street would have Palestinian policemen, the next Israelis. And the Israelis, of course, could besiege a street just as they can currently besiege a town on the West Bank.
Then there was the "swap" of Palestinian land on the West Bank that Israel would keep in return for "some land outside the Gaza Strip in the south of our country", as one Israeli journalist put it on Wednesday night. The only small detail about this piece of generosity that was not mentioned was that the "land" Israelis would hand over happens to be desert. In return for keeping settlements illegally built on occupied territory, Mr Arafat would be the recipient of a patch of sand.
For Mr Arafat's millions of refugees, there would be no more "right of return" -- goodbye to UN General Assembly resolution 194 -- merely a profound hope that some could go to the new "Palestine" where they never had their home, or go to Israel as part of a family "reunion" agreement. In reality -- and with tens of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon or settled in northern Europe and America -- this is probably what will, one day, happen.
But bundled in with the rest of the Clinton proposals, Mr Arafat and Mr Barak were never going to make a deal. That much is certain. Along with the fact that the ever-more humiliated Mr Arafat is going to be blamed yet again for turning down that infamous "last chance for peace".
END
Violence Shatters Palestinian Boom - But Mideast Flare-up Seen as Just 'Hiccup'
Stephanie Nolen, Globe and Mail, Canada ~ December 29, 2000
RAMALLAH, WEST BANK -- Sept. 28 was supposed to be a very good day for Sam Bahour. He spent it in Tel Aviv as part of the first-ever Palestinian delegation to Comdex, an annual international exhibition for the information technology sector.
He and his colleagues from the nascent Palestinian high-tech industry stole the show.
Their pavilion was mobbed by curious Israelis and international visitors.
The same day, another of Mr. Bahour's interests, Arab Palestinian Investment Co., a $100-million (U.S.) company with plans to build five shopping malls in the West Bank and Gaza, was publicly traded for the first time on the fledgling Palestine Securities Exchange.
But it was also the day that right-wing Israeli leader Ariel Sharon paid a visit to Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, a spark for the wave of violence that has now raged for three months and claimed more than 350 lives, at least 322 of them Palestinian.
Now, just when things were supposed to be brightest for Sam Bahour, the Palestinian economy is losing $8.5-million a day in wages and investment.
Unemployment has shot from 10 per cent in early September to 40 per cent. Construction and any movement of goods, including all trade with Israel and the outside world, are frozen. An $18-million high-tech industrial park in the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has been bombed into rubble.
"I woke up the morning [of Sept. 29] to find myself in a mini-war," he said.
But Mr. Bahour, like many Palestinian business players, clings to hope that enough of a foundation has been laid that when this flare-up of the conflict has been played out, they can return to building the new economy of Palestine.
"The last two months are only a hiccup in our development process -- not the end of it," Mr. Bahour said. "There is a resilience to the Palestinian private sector that will allow it to bounce back."
Yesterday, hopes of a breakthrough in the Middle East process dimmed after the abrupt cancellation of an Israeli-Palestinian summit on the latest U.S. peace proposal and two bomb attacks that killed two Israeli soldiers and injured another 16 people.
Since the Oslo peace deal was signed in 1993, there has been an economic transformation in the Palestinian territories -- with rapid growth in some unlikely sectors. Palestinians now have a state-of-the-art telecommunications network, 15 software houses and their own Internet domain suffix (dot-ps). There are also bottled water companies, medical supply firms, electronics manufacturers and some glitzy tourist developments -- not truly New Economy as defined in the West but a significant advancement from olive pressing.
No question, the past three months have been bad: Gross domestic product was growing at 6.1 per cent through the first half of 2000 and was projected to keep on at well above 5 per cent next year.
But since the violence began, Israel has sealed off the West Bank and Gaza, barring 120,000 workers from jobs in Israel or Jewish settlements and halting the movement of goods. Now, the World Bank says, annual GDP will fall by 42 per cent in 2000 -- or $1.7-billion in a $4-billion economy. A couple of weeks ago, the Bank deviated from its usual business of lending money, giving an emergency $12-million grant to the Palestinian Authority.
Before the Oslo deal, the Palestinian economy was built almost entirely on wages earned by labourers who travelled each day into Israel. Those who stayed at home worked in agriculture, the backbone of the Palestinian economy, and in some limited industrial production, largely building supplies, such as gravel, and food products.
But when the Palestinian Authority was established, Palestinians had several things going for them. For one, they are, as a people, unusually well educated, with one of the highest ratios of university degree holders per capita. "Palestinians have put a huge premium on education," explains sociologist Salim Tamari of the Institute of Jerusalem Studies, "because since 1948, they have had no other hope."
Second, perhaps surprisingly, there was a lot of capital to be had. While Palestinians in the territories are poor, with an average gross national product per capita of just $1,700 (10 per cent of Israeli's GNP per capita), many Palestinian refugees have prospered -- as engineers in the Gulf states, for example, or business owners in North America.
And the diaspora has all but lined up to invest in the homeland, leading to a weird fusion of financial and social mandates for new businesses. When the Palestine Electric Co. was listed, for example, it needed to raise $19-million -- and got $70-million.
"We concentrate on projects that will absorb unemployed labourers," said Farouq Zuaiter, general manager for the huge holding company Padico, whose holdings include tourism, real estate and the Palestine Electronics and Electrical Company. "There is a very thin line between our economic objectives and our social objectives. For the founders [of Padico], the main target was not financial return, although a certain level of return allows us to grow." For the last three years, the company has paid investors, the bulk of whom are international, a return of 10 per cent.
Technology emerged early on as a focus of this new economy: born, in part, by proximity to Israel's flourishing high-tech industry, and also by an early insight by a few entrepreneurs who sensed that Palestinians could leapfrog directly to new technology because there was no infrastructure to replace after years of underdevelopment.
The Information Technology Unit at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah estimates that there are about 22,000 Palestinian Internet users, not bad given that only 7 per cent of households have computers. There are about a dozen local Internet service providers.
Early in 1999, the group of high-tech companies banded together in a trade association called the Palestinian Information Technology Association (PITA). "We have no natural resources but we have great education, and there were a lot of Palestinians in the diaspora who were already working in high tech -- many came back and are doing fine," said Ibrahim Barham, PITA president. "The government and the local business community threw themselves behind the idea."
The trade association now has 50 members, including firms such as the 25-person software house Bisan, which makes an accounting package now the local favourite. Two local venture capital firms have more software companies in development.
International players are being attracted by the local industry: Hewlett-Packard Co. has chosen Ramallah as its regional centre for the Levantine region, and serves Syria, Jordan and Lebanon from the West Bank. Cisco Systems Inc. is funding one of its training centres at Bir Zeit University, while Oracle Corp. is funding a training centre in the city. Several multinational tech companies are said to be considering the West Bank as a site for their Middle East support call centres.
"It's a lower rank of skill set," Mr. Bahour said, comparing Palestinians to the rash of startups in Israel. "We're more like India or Ireland [doing the grunt work of programming]. We don't have the polished skills or marketing for the U.S. market."
Mr. Bahour, the son of refugees, is also managing director of Applied Information Management, a communications and technology consulting firm in Ramallah. But he was first recruited from Ohio in 1995 to head up PalTel, the private telecommunications provider, after the PA took control of the telecom from Israel, then quickly realized there was no one in the territories with the skill to run the service. The company has now wired 95 per cent of towns and villages with phone lines, putting in fibre-optic lines and microwave towers in areas that often don't yet have electricity.
In 1999, PalTel introduced the Jawwal cellular network. Until then, 80,000 Palestinians subscribed to one of two Israeli providers. When PalTel got a licence, and awarded L.M. Ericsson Telephone Co. Inc. of Sweden a contract to build a global systems network, Israeli operators could no longer operate legally in PA areas -- and many Palestinians switched over for nationalist reasons. Jawwal now has more than 35,000 subscribers.
PalTel is now valued at 3.36 Jordanian dinars (71 cents U.S.), and has the highest trading volume on the Palestine Securities Exchange. (Trading on the PSE is in Jordanian dinars or U.S. dollars until a Palestinian currency can be developed.) PalTel's share price has risen from 1 JD to a high of 5.50 JD. In an indication of the level of diaspora willingness to invest, PalTel did an initial public offering before there was a stock market -- the IPO was almost five times oversubscribed.
There are 25 other firms listed on the Al-Quds [Jerusalem] index of the Nablus-based bourse.
The PSE ranked first among Arab financial markets in 1999 with a 53-per-cent increase in the Al-Quds index; trading volume rose 117 per cent that year over 1998 levels for a total of $150-million. Total market capitalization at the end of 1999 was $849-million, almost double the previous year.
Mr. Bahour's pet project is a group of shopping malls, the first in the territories. The first mall is under construction in Ramallah. In a town where some farmers still bring produce to market on donkeys, he is building a 10,000-square-metre North American-style mall with a supermarket, a cinema complex, clothing stores and fast-food outlets. The project will cost $10.2-million and is set to open in the spring.
The Palestinians also have a recent natural gas find, estimated to be worth as much as $6-billion at current prices, off the shores of Gaza. PA president Yasser Arafat lit the first test flares in October; BG Group of London has a concession to drill the deposit, a mile beneath the surface.
There have been concerns about the monopolistic role of the PA, which has a piece of all these companies. There is no question that many of Mr. Arafat's insiders have done well in the past seven years. Many of their family businesses have grown rich paving new roads, importing new products.
But Mr. Bahour notes that a Higher Council for Development was created last year in response to complaints about monopolies and is carefully scrutinizing the PA's role in all deals. Audits by the Legislative Council indicate the situation is improving.
Any development in the Palestinian economy depends on relations with Israel, which -- as the current travel and trade restrictions illustrate -- still in many ways controls the levers of the Palestinian economy.
"We must deal with the Israelis in a smart way," he said. "Beyond them, there is a world out there we can tap."
END
Talks With U.N. Should Respect Iraq's Principles
XINHUA ~ Dec. 29
BAGHDAD (Dec. 29) XINHUA - The upcoming talks between Iraq and the United Nations next month should respect Iraq's principles, a report carried by the official daily Al-Iraq said on Friday.
Under the four principles, the talks with the U.N. should be aimed at lifting the decade-old U.N. sanctions; the U.N. should recognize the "great" efforts Iraq has made in implementing the U. N. resolutions on the Iraqi issue; Iraq should be allowed to freely use its natural resources and no country can be allowed to interfere in Iraq's internal affairs.
Iraq is ready to have "constructive" talks with U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan or any U.N. organizations, the report said, stressing that the talks should respect the principles put forward by the Iraqi government.
Annan has expressed that the hope that the upcoming talks between U.N. and Iraq will be able to break the impasse over weapons inspection in the country. At a year-end press conference at the U.N. headquarters in New York on December 19, the U.N. chief said he and Iraqi officials planned to begin talks in New York in early January as the Iraqi issue remained a challenge for the world's leading body.
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz has said that Iraq was ready to hold "a comprehensive dialog" with the U.N. with no preconditions and that the dialog must not be conditioned on that Iraq accepts the U.N. Resolution 1284.
The U.N. resolution, adopted last December, offered to suspend the sanctions for renewable periods of 120 days if Iraq shows " full" cooperation with the U.N. arms inspectors.
Iraq has rejected the resolution and barred the return of the U. N. arms inspectors who left the country at the end of 1998 shortly before the United States and Britain launched air strikes against Iraq.
Iraq has been under U.N. sanctions ever since it invaded Kuwait in 1990, and the sanctions will not be lifted until the U.N. arms inspectors report that Iraq is clear of weapons of mass destruction.
END
Iraq Urges AL Intervention to Halt U.S., British Aggressions
XINHUA ~ Dec. 29
BAGHDAD (Dec. 29) XINHUA - Iraq Friday urged the Arab League (AL) to intervene to halt "the continuous aggressions" by the United States and Britain, the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported.
In a letter to AL Secretary-General Ahmed Esmat Abdel-Meguid on Friday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohamad Said Al-Sahaf elaborated the continuous aggressions by the U.S. and British warplanes on December 9-15.
The infringement were aimed at "harming Iraq's sovereignty, territorial integrity, infrastructure, civilians and civil installations," Sahaf said. Moreover, "We ask you to demand the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments to stop their logistic support to the aggressions," he added.
Sahaf accused Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as "full partners" in the U.S. and British aggressions against Iraq, the INA said. U.S. and British aircraft use bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to mount their patrols and bombings of the southern no-fly zone which was imposed after the 1991 Gulf War, with the so-called aim of protecting the region's Shi'ite Muslims from "the persecution of President Saddam Hussein."
A similar zone was imposed over northern Iraq with a claim to protect the Kurdish community there. Baghdad has never recognized the no-fly zones, saying their imposition has never been authorized by United Nations resolutions.
END
Iraq Ready To Resume UN Talks When Embargo Is Lifted
AFP ~ Dec. 29
BAGHDAD, Dec 29 (AFP) - Baghdad is ready to resume dialogue with the United Nations on condition that the crippling decade-old embargo imposed on it is lifted immediately, Al-Iraq newspaper said Friday.
"Iraq is not opposed to a constructive and fair dialogue with the United Nations and its secretary-general (Kofi Annan) as long as that involves no preconditions" on the part of the world body, the paper said.
"The United Nations must take into account fundamental issues to start this dialogue including the immediate lifting of the unjust embargo imposed on Iraq, " it said.
The paper said the organisation "must also recognise the great efforts undertaken by Iraq and the fact that the country has conformed to all UN Security Council resolutions" tied to Iraq's 1990 occupation of Kuwait. Baghdad and the United Nations are expected to reopen a dialogue in January, more than a year after a UN Security Council resolution, introduced in December 1999, offered a suspension of sanctions in return for Iraq's cooperation with a new arms control regime.
There have been no arms control inspections in Iraq since the UN evacuated its inspection team from the country in December 1998 shortly before air raids by the United States and Britain.
END
David Yerushalmi, Maaleh Adumim ~ December 28, 2000
I am forever amazed at your editorial duplicity. Time and time again you call for the rule of democracy and decry the impact of religious discrimination. Yet, you explicitly call for denying the Palestinians a right guaranteed to them under international law. Let's assume your point is that it is better to be pragmatic than righteous.
What will you do with the Arab Israelis who are citizens? First, let's promote them to the status of true citizens, granting them the economic and social benefits of Jewish citizens.
Now, that being done, and certainly that is the only fair thing to do, how do you justify a right of return for Jews who have absolutely no connection to the land, and not for Arabs who have lived here for generations? What will you do when their birth rate produces a greater and greater number relative to Jews?
At some point, as the population shift moves in their direction (there aren't many Iron Curtains left to fall, and indeed with globalization more and more of the best and brightest of Israel's high-tech elite are leaving for greener pastures), what policy will you use to prevent a "bi-national Arab majority"? It will by nature be discriminatory.
Indeed, your moral claims about the peace process notwithstanding, you argue quite well for the denial of the Palestinians internationally-recognized right of return in order to discriminate for a Jewish majority. Have you no moral misgivings?
Why should we not simply embrace democracy as the president of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Aharon Barak, dictates? What gives Jews some special rights to this land? The Bible? You must be kidding, in view of what we mostly hear from you and your opinion pundits, demanding separation of church and state.
That leaves only international law or brute force. You've abandoned brute force (i.e., nationalism as primitivism, recalling Shimon Peres's New Middle East) so you must rest your now shredded kippa (skull cap) on the rack of international jurisprudence.
That being done, you've been exposed as a racist, have you not? Why should the Palestinians who were chased or frightened from their homes be granted forced compensation and exile when their Israeli Arab brethren enjoy the fruits of the only "democracy" in the Middle East?
Why should we "democrats" be fearful of the New Middle East, just because it makes Jews a minority in Palestine? Is there some moral imperative upon which you draw your forceful argument to maintain Israel's racist policy of exclusion?
END
Iraq Calls For Dialogue With Kuwait, Saudi On Eve of Gulf Summit
AFP ~ Dec. 28
BAGHDAD, Dec 28 (AFP) - Iraq's ruling Baath party called Thursday ahead of a Gulf summit for dialogue with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait aimed at a reconciliation with its neighbours after a decade of enmity.
The Muslim and Christian holidays "could be an opportunity for ... a constructive dialogue to forget the pains of the past and reach a reconciliation ending division and humiliation," said the party's mouthpiece, Ath-Thawra.
In reference to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which were not named, Ath-Thawra said its invitation was addressed to "those whom Satan has deviated from the path of jihad," or holy war.
The two neighbours had "allied themselves with the US-Zionist enemy in thinking that they could thus break the determination of the Arab world to struggle for its rights," said Ath-Thawra.
It urged Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which provide air bases for US and British warplanes to overfly Iraq, to revise their policies.
END
Israeli Troops Injure 3 Attackers at Border, Lebanon Says
AP ~ December 28, 2000
MARJAYOUN, Lebanon (AP) -- Israeli troops shot and wounded a Lebanese man who was about to throw a hand grenade across the fence on the Lebanese-Israeli border Thursday, Lebanese security officials said.
Two other Lebanese who threw stones were wounded by Israeli fire earlier, the officials said, speaking on customary condition of anonymity.
The officials said Kawthar Nawfal, 25, was on the point of hurling a hand grenade across the border fence at Sheik Abbad hill when he was spotted by Israeli soldiers who shot him in his left leg.
A fellow Lebanese demonstrator quickly restored the safety pin while the grenade was still in Nawfal's hand, the officials said. Sheik Abbad hill is about 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) south of Marjayoun, a major town in south Lebanon.
About an hour earlier, some 90 Hezbollah supporters threw stones at Israeli troops stationed across a barbed fence, smashing a surveillance camera, the officials said.
Israeli soldiers opened fire, wounding two members of the crowd, the officials added. The wounded were identified as Assem Aramdash, 22, and Mohammed ali Kassem, 5.
They were rushed to a local hospital, witnesses and the security officials said.
There was no immediate word from the Israeli army on the two incidents.
Israel has frequently complained about stone throwing and other provocations along the Lebanese border since it withdrew its troops in May, ending an 18-year occupation of south Lebanon.
The Lebanese government has refused to deploy troops along the frontier, saying it does not want to serve as Israel's border guards.
But, in a separate development, the government was forced to send more troops into south Lebanon on Thursday after a traffic incident threatened to inflame inter-religious tension.
Troops in armored personnel carriers drove through the southern towns and villages of Blida, Blatt, Dibbin, Qlaia, Khiam, Kfarkila and Marjayoun, while others manned roadblocks and checked cars entering or leaving the area Thursday.
Security officials said the trouble began with a traffic accident Wednesday between a car carrying two government workers from the predominately Christian town of Qlaia and another vehicle driven by a man believed to be a member of the Shiite Muslim Amal guerrilla movement, which fought to oust Israeli troops from south Lebanon.
The accident led to a scuffle and shots being fired into the air. The Qlaia men were forced into the other car and were driven away, the officials said.
The abducted men were later released unharmed, but police took them into custody for questioning. In the meantime, security forces searched for the kidnappers.
Many of the male residents of Qlaia had belonged to the now defunct South Lebanon Army, a militia that fought alongside the Israeli occupation forces. Most of Qlaia's population fled to Israel in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal, but many of the former SLA members have since returned to face trial before a military court on charges of collaborating with the enemy.
Interior Minister Elias Murr, who is responsible for the security forces in south Lebanon, met security chiefs early Thursday in Marjayoun. By noon, security forces had detained seven people, the officials said.
Copyright 2000 The Associated Press.
END
By Jaffer Ali ~ Dec. 28, 2000
Amidst the polemics that rage on and off line, sometimes it is helpful to take a step back to understand the human dimension of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. If you please, indulge the following reminisces for I believe that they reveal why Israel must necessarily abandon Occupation.
My father was born in the small West Bank village of Beitunia in 1930. His family owned an orange grove in Lydda and after 1948 neither he, nor his siblings ever saw the grove again. He came to the US for good in 1949. He was a "man's man" with shoulders that appeared Atlas-like to me while growing up.
When he was alive, I only saw my father cry three times in my life. The first time transformed me forever. I was eleven years old and the year was 1968. My father received a package in the mail. Apparently he had donated some money and he received a book. I do not remember what kind of book, but inside when he opened it, I will never forget what I saw. It was a small Palestinian flag.
My father took it out and with his head bowed...he wept. I distinctly remember a sense of bewilderment. I had never seen this hulk of a man cry before. I quizzically asked, "Yaba, what's wrong?" But he never told me. His was a generation that found these emotional outbursts confusing and embarrassing. But somehow I "instinctively" knew what had happened. And something happened to me. That day I became a Palestinian.
It was the next year in school that I had my first speech class. Most of the boys gave speeches on football and baseball and the girls on dolls and make up. My speech was on thedisastrous consequences of the Balfour declaration.
Fast forwarding to the year 2000, history has somehow come full circle. This time, I am the father. One evening my wife, three boys and I decided to break the Ramadan fast at a restaurant. The waitress came over to ask what beverage we wanted. I answered for the table, "Bring three Cokes for the boys and two glasses of water."
My ten-year-old looked at me with surprise and said, "Yaba, should we be drinking Coca Cola? We should order something else because Coke is helping the Israelis." With this statement, my ten-year old became a Palestinian. Now, if you think that our home is a den of indoctrination, you would be dead wrong. He overheard me speaking about a Middle Eastern boycott of American goods, which included Coke. I believe my son "instinctively" knew that we should not lend ourselves to helping Israel brutalize our brothers and sisters, even indirectly.
These two incidents, separated by more than thirty years, reveal something fundamental, almost metaphysical. What connects ALL Palestinians in the world is a shared psychicexperience. And this experience solidifies a Palestinian identity, no matter where one lives. Diaspora has not eradicated this identity. Time has not eradicated it. Neither prosperity nor privation has eradicated it. Being a Palestinian transcends geography and time. It is an eternal thought that lies dormant, waiting for a chance to express itself.
In the refugee camps of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon every Palestinian dreams of freedom and living in dignity without despair. In the villages of the West Bank and Gaza every Palestinian dreams of a life without identity cards, without Israeli snipers shooting the eyes out of children in dubious self defense. Every Palestinian living in countries from Australia to the US is connected to every other Palestinian. We will not go away.
Israel has falsely assumed that time was on its side. Their belief was that successive generations of Palestinians would assimilate into neighboring Arab countries. Israel believed that creating conditions of deprivation would cause a mass exodus without a longing to return. They have forgotten their own history. Israeli brutality has solidified Palestinian identity and demands its expression.
My father died almost twenty years ago and before he became ill, he looked me in the eye and said, "Son, I may not live to see Palestine, but Insha'Allah you will." While it is true that Palestinians clutch the past to preserve our identity, we are ready to embrace the future. My father's hope still rings in my ears.
Jaffer Ali is a Palestinian-American businessman who writes on business Ethics, management theory and political topics.
END
Media Spin Remains in Sync With Israeli Occupation
By Norman Solomon ~ Dec. 28
The formula for American media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is simple: Report on the latest developments in the fragile "peace process." Depict U.S. officials as honest brokers in the negotiations. Emphasize the need for restraint and compromise instead of instability and bloodshed. In the world according to news media, the U.S. government is situated on high moral ground -- in contrast to some of the intractable adversaries. "The conflict that had been so elaborately dressed in the civilizing cloak of a peace effort has been stripped to its barest essence: Jew against Arab, Arab against Jew," a New York Times dispatch from Jerusalem declared as fierce clashes in occupied territory neared the end of their second week. Soon afterwards, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright proclaimed: "The cycle of violence has to be stopped." Such pronouncements from Washington get a lot of respectful media play in our country.
Rarely do American journalists explore the ample reasons to believe that the United States is part of the oft-decried cycle of violence. Nor, in the past couple of weeks, has there been much media analysis of the fact that the violence was overwhelmingly inflicted on Palestinian people. Within days, several dozen Palestinians were killed by heavily armed men in uniform -- often described by CNN and other news outlets as "Israeli security forces." Under the circumstances, it's a notably benign-sounding term for an army that shoots down protesters.
As for the rock-throwing Palestinians, I have never seen or heard a single American news account describing them as "pro-democracy demonstrators." Yet that would be an appropriate way to refer to people who -- after more than three decades of living under occupation -- are in the streets to demand self-determination. While Israeli soldiers and police, with their vastly superior firepower, do most of the killing, Israel's public-relations engines keep whirling like well-oiled tops. Days ago, tilted by the usual spin, American news stories highlighted the specious ultimatums issued by Prime Minister Ehud Barak as he demanded that Palestinians end the violence -- while uniformed Israelis under his authority continued to kill them.
Beneath the Israeli "peace process" rhetoric echoed by American media, an implicit message isn't hard to discern: If only Palestinians would stop resisting the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, it would no longer be necessary for Israeli forces to shoot them. "Israel Extends Time For Peace," said the lead headline on the Oct. 10 front page of USA Today. "Israel early today extended a deadline for Palestinians to end rioting," the article began. At this rate, we may someday see a headline that reads: "Israel Demands Palestinians Stop Attacking Bullets With Their Bodies."
Of course, amid all the nifty Orwellian touches, the proper behavior of people whose homeland remains under occupation has never quite been spelled out. But U.S. media coverage has reflexively mimicked the themes coming out of the White House and State Department. It all makes sense -- as long as we set aside basic concepts of human rights -- as long as we refuse to acknowledge that without justice there can be no real peace. For American journalists on mainstream career ladders, it's prudent to avoid making a big deal about Israel's human rights violations, which persist without letup in tandem with Israel's occupation of land it captured in the 1967 war.
Many pundits are fond of cloaking the occupiers in mantles of righteousness. And we hear few questions raised about the fact that the occupiers enjoy the powerful backing of the United States. The silence is usually deafening, even among journalists who write opinion columns on a regular basis. The U.S. government's economic and military assistance to Israel adds up to a few billion dollars per year. Among media professionals, that aid is widely seen as an untouchable "third rail." To challenge U.S. support for Israel is to invite a torrent of denunciations -- first and foremost, the accusation of "anti-Semitism."
Occasionally, I've written columns criticizing U.S. media for strong pro-Israel bias in news reporting and spectrums of commentary. Every time, I can count on a flurry of angry letters that accuse me of being anti-Semitic. It's a timeworn, knee-jerk tactic: Whenever someone makes a coherent critique of Israel's policies, immediately go on the attack with charges of anti-Jewish bigotry. Numerous American supporters of Israel resort to this tactic. Perhaps the difficulties of defending the Israeli occupation on its merits have encouraged substitution of the "anti-Semitic" epithet for reasoned debate. Like quite a few other Jewish Americans, I'm appalled by what Israel is doing with U.S. tax dollars. Meanwhile, as journalists go along to get along, they diminish the humanity of us all. "Ask not for whom the bell tolls."
END
By Nizar Qabbani ~ Dec. 28
The face of Qana
Pale, like that of Jesus
and the sea breeze of Nisan ...
Rains of blood .. and tears ..
* * * * *
They entered Qana stepping on our [charred] bodies
Raising a Nazi flag in the lands of the South ...
and rehearsing its stormy chapters ..
Hitler cremated them in the gaschambers ..
and they came after him to burn us ..
Hitler kicked them out of Eastern Europe
and they kicked us out of our lands
Hitler did not find the time to destroy them
and relief earth of their mischief ...
They came after him ..
to destroy us
* * * * *
They entered Qana
Like hungry wolves
Putting to fire the house of the Messiah..
Stepping on the Thob of Hussain..
and the dear land of the South
* * * * *
Blasted Wheat, Olive-trees and Tobacco
and the melodies of the nightingale
Blasted Cadmus in his bark
Blasted sea and the gulls
Blasted hospitals
nursing moms
and schoolboys ..
Blasted the beauty of the Southern women
and murdered the gardens of the honeyed eyes
* * * * *
We saw the tears in Ali's eyes
We heard his voice as he prayed
under the rain of bloody skies ..
* * * * * *
Who ever will write about the history of Qana
Will inscribe in his parchments
This was the second Karbala
* * * * *
Qana unveiled what was hidden
We saw Amrika
Wearing the old coat of a Jewish Rabbi
Leading the slaughter
Blasting our children for no reason
[Blasting] our wives for no reason
[Blasting] our trees for no reason
[Blasting] our thoughts for no reason
Has it been decreed in her constitution,
She, [Amrika], mistress of the world,
In Hebrew .. that she should humble [us] al-Arab?
* * * * *
Has it been decreed that each time a ruler in Amrika
wants to win the presidency that he should kill us ..
We al-Arab?
* * * * *
We waited for one Arab to come
pull this thorny prick from our necks
We waited for single Qureishite
A single Hashemite
A single Don Quixote
A single Qabadaya, for whom they did not shave the moustache
We waited for a Khalid .. A Tariq .. or Antara ..
We were eaten Tharthara (while engaged in vain talk)
They sent a fax
We read its text
[Way] after paying tribute
and the end of the Majzara (slaughter) ..
* * * * *
What does Yisrael fear from our cries?
What does she fear from our faxes?
The Jihad of the fax is the weakest of Jihads ..
It is a single text we write
for all the martyrs who left ..
and all the martyrs those who will come
* * * * *
What does Yisrael fear from Ibn al-Muqaffa'?
Jarir and .. Farazdaq?
And Khansa throwing her poems at the gates of the Maqbara (cemetery)
What does she fear if we burn tires
Sign communiques
And destroy shops
And she knows that we have never been kings of Harb (war)
But were kings of Tharthara (wild belching)
* * * * *
What does Yisrael fear
from the beating of the drums
the tearing of clothes
and the scratching of Khudud (cheeks as in mourning, as in Ancient Arabia)
What does she fear [when she hears]
the stories of `Ad and Thamud?
* * * * *
We are in national ivresse
We did not receive
Since the times of conquest ..
the Barid (*)
(*) letters from the Umara al-Fath -- Amirs of Conquest -- that such and
such land has been conquered.
* * * * *
We are a people of made of dough
The more Yisrael increases in her killing and terrorism
the more we increase in idleness and Burud (coldness)
* * * * *
A Smothering Dominion
A regional dialect that increases in ugliness
and a green union that grows in isolation
Summer trees, growing barren
And borders .. whenever the whim strikes
erase other borders
* * * * *
Yisrael should slaughter us, and why not?
She should erase Hisham, Ziyad and ar-Rashid, and why not?
[Why not?] and the Banu Taghlab lusting after their women
[Why not?] and Banu Mazen lusting after their ghilman (slave boys)
[Why not?] and Banu Adnan dropping their trousers to their knees
debating .. necking and .. the lips!
* * * * *
What should Yisrael fear from some of al-Arab
When they became Yehuda???
END
A View From the Other Side. . .The 100,000 Are Already Here
By Avraham Tal, Ha'aretz ~ Dec. 28
The Palestinians argue that recognition of a right of return would not entail flooding Israel with four million refugees: Facing a choice between a return or compromises stipulated by UN Resolution 194, few refugees will opt to go back to a country in which they haven't lived for 52 years, or have never known at all, these Palestinian spokesmen contend. How many refugees are they talking about? A senior Palestinian Authority minister was quoted in Ha'aretz as saying that a majority of the Palestinian public supports a solution based on the return of 22 percent of (the land of) historic Palestine. "This same minimum," the minister said, "should apply to the refugees question." Did he mean 22 percent of four million refugees?
Do Israelis grasp the intensity of the Palestinian desire to carry out a right of return? The strength of their desire can be understood after considering a series of statements made on the issue by Palestinians, by both high-ranking PA officials and ordinary members of the Palestinian public. Speaking in interviews conducted during 1998 and 1999, Abu Mazen, a senior figure in the PA, stated his view in crystal clear national and personal terms: "A right of return to their homeland and all places they left is reserved for 1948 and 1967 refugees," he declared. "We demand their return to Jaffa, Haifa and other places they left. "Anyone expelled in 1948, including myself, a refugee from Safed, has a right to return and to receive compensations... I personally want to return to Safed," he added (taken from Dan Shiftan's study, "The Imperative to Separate"). Furthermore, children in PA schools are systematically educated about their right to Acre, Hafia, Jaffa, Ramle and Lod.
Since the start of the 1950s, Israel had rejected the refugee clause in Resolution 194, but under the Oslo accords it agreed that refugees should constitute one of the issues to be negotiated in final status talks. Palestinians could view this as an achievement: for them, the very fact that the refugees were recognized as a problem about whose resolution Israel must negotiate constituted a toehold in a door which had previously been locked. The Palestinians have seen, and continue to see, that Israel has grown soft and retreated from once intractable positions: Israelis negotiate with the PLO, assent to the establishment of a Palestinian state and partition areas in Jerusalem. Why, then, the Palestinians reason, shouldn't Israel become pliant and compromising about refugees?
This assumption is strengthened by the fact that the first cracks in Israel's position on refugees have already appeared. The Beilin-Abu Mazen document (which the Palestinian politician consistently denounces, for reasons that are not hard to deduce) holds that most refugees will be settled in the Palestinian state, apart from a small number which will return to Israel in accord with humanitarian criteria. A proposal akin to this formulation has apparently resurfaced in U.S. President Bill Clinton's current plan - according to the outgoing president's proposal, only a small number of refugees will be entitled to return to the State of Israel.
Since the brunt of negotiations on the refugee question is still ahead of us, the Palestinians can be expected to do their utmost (on this and other issues as well) to expand the cracks that have appeared in Israel's once uncompromising position. Possibly their effort will come as a proposal pertaining to "family reunification." This is a term that appears in the Beilin-Abu Mazen document and has been mentioned several times as an Israeli proposal. An official policy of "family reunification" was carried out after Israel's founding, and up to the end of the 1960s this policy permitted the return of 40,000 persons. How many more families can be "reunited" after 50 years? When one takes into account the clan network structure of Palestinian society, the potential apparently is unlimited.
How many more are to return under this reunification formula, or some other framework? In 1949, David Ben-Gurion agreed to accept 100,000 refugees. The proposal was rejected and removed from the national agenda; yet recently it has been mentioned anew. In actual fact, since 1967, Israel has "absorbed" close to this number. According to data compiled by Professor Arnon Sofer, about 50,000 Palestinians returned illegally to Galilee and Triangle areas and mixed in with local population groups there. Another 20,000 Palestinians, he says, settled in Jerusalem (not counting those who came under the reunification policy), and about 1,000 Palestinian women married Israeli Bedouin men. Israel doesn't enforce immigration laws (and other laws) in Arab communities.
The natural growth rate for Muslims in Israel is 3.5 percent (not counting Bedouin) and the Jewish rate is 1 percent; 2 percent when the growth figure includes Jewish immigration. Israel's demographic future is, in its own right, enveloped by dark clouds. Any addition of a Palestinian population moves this demographic balance toward the breaking point. There can be no doubt about the conclusion: Israel should not agree to any return, not of any number or in any form.
END
A Palestinian View of Clinton's Mideast Proposals
by Rashid L. Khaladi, The New York Times ~ December 28
President Clinton has now presented the Israelis and the Palestinians with a set of proposals relating to Jerusalem, refugees and sovereignty over territory in hopes of achieving a peace accord in the next three weeks. Regardless of whether agreement can be reached in this short time, it's clear that much has changed among both Palestinians and Israelis as a result of the Al Aqsa intifada, which is now three months old. This popular uprising broke out because Palestinian willingness to tolerate the suffocating restrictions imposed by Israel since the Oslo accords was exhausted. Palestinians associate Oslo with the expansion of Jewish settlements on land that had been Palestinian, the building of settler-only bypass roads on Arab land, myriad restrictions on movement, the doubling since 1991 of the number of settlers, and the containment of Palestinian communities to a fraction of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian tolerance will not be extended to another unsatisfactory agreement, or to those who negotiate it.
Israelis who ignored the humiliating restrictions their government imposed on the Palestinians, and who failed to listen to Palestinian complaints, may have been shocked by the intensity of the resistance. Some Israelis have fallen for the canard that the Palestinians do not want peace. In fact, most want simply to live in dignity, and to end the situation in which 15 Palestinian cantons in 17.2 percent of the West Bank and 60 percent of the Gaza Strip are surrounded by a sea of Israeli occupation and settlement.
The recent intifada itself has had a profound impact on Palestinians. They have been deeply affected by the nearly 350 killed and the 10,000 wounded in the past three months. They have been traumatized by Israel's helicopter and tank fire into Palestinian communities, and suffered collective punishment in the form of a 13-week economic stranglehold on 3 million people under the pretext of security. These acts of war, mainly inside Palestinian cities, towns and villages, have scarred the psyche of a whole people and have reinforced their unwillingness to compromise on their basic demands. The latest intifada may have had an effect in Israel as well. It has shattered the belief that Palestinians would accept Israeli sovereignty over the Islamic and Christian holy places in Jerusalem and over nearby Arab neighborhoods.
The Israeli discourse of the past 33 years about exclusive sovereignty over Jerusalem may be giving way to a realization that Israel cannot rule over an Arab city of nearly a quarter million people while expecting Palestinians to accept this situation passively. Similarly, the Israeli belief that the Palestinians would accept a "state" encompassing several disconnected islands, and without land connections to Egypt and Jordan, may be disappearing under the weight of the intifada's low grade war against the settlements. Large numbers of Israelis are beginning to understand that they can have settlements or peace, but not both.
Finally, the hope that the Palestinians would be satisfied with third-party compensation for the refugees, with no Israeli apology for the harm done to the Palestinians in 1948, no restitution of their property and little or no return of refugees is losing force. History is the root of the conflict. And however difficult it may be for Israelis to accept, they have a profound responsibility for the refugee problem, which must be fully borne if ever there is to be a reconciliation between the two peoples. Whether Israel can accept these realities, and deal decisively with the settlements established by Labor and Likud in Gaza and the West Bank over the past 33 years, is an open question. But they must be confronted.
Both peoples will also have to accept the need to share Jerusalem as the capital of two states, and to arrive at a just and mutually acceptable settlement of a refugee problem that has festered for over five decades. This is a tall order for even the most courageous leaders on both sides. We may soon see whether those in place today are up to it. The writer, director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago, advised the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace talks from 1991 to 1993. He contributed this comment to The New York Times.
END
Sweating the Details in The Middle East
By Cameron W. Barr, The Christian Science Monitor ~ Dec. 28
Almost everyone seems to agree that Israelis and Palestinians have never been closer to a peace deal. But are they close enough? Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has signaled that he is more or less ready to go along with the outlines of the deal President Clinton sketched out over the weekend. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat hasn't shown his hand, but is asking for more information on the Clinton plan. "This holiday is decisive," Mr. Arafat said yesterday, the beginning of the Muslim celebration called Eid al-Fitr, which concludes the fasting month of Ramadan. "With God's help, it will lead to a Palestinian boy or a Palestinian girl raising the flag of Palestine over the walls of Jerusalem," he said.
The holiday triple crown - Christians and Jews are also celebrating holy days this December - is already paying a peace dividend: No one has died as a result of Israeli-Palestinian violence since Dec. 23. Arafat and Mr. Barak were expected to meet today with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at a seaside resort in Egypt, and perhaps sit down one-on-one - the first such summit since violence broke out between Israelis and Palestinians in late September. More that 350 people have died in 90 days, the most recent victims of a conflict that has lasted a century.
US officials expect the two leaders to reply to Clinton by tomorrow. A joint decision to go ahead would lead to intensive negotiations to finalize a peace deal, perhaps by the end of the Clinton presidency, but in all likelihood before Mr. Barak has to contest an election on Feb. 6. Israelis - particularly those of the left-wing, dovish variety - say that a long-awaited historic compromise is at hand. "There's really a sense that this could be it," says Gershon Baskin, a longtime peace proponent who is the co-director of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information in Jerusalem. Conservative, right-wing Israelis also sense the imminence of a deal, and they are outraged. Leaders of Israeli settlements are calling Barak a "traitor," loudly noting that the punishment for treason is death, according to Israeli media reports yesterday. Many Israelis find such rhetoric troubling, since it also preceded the assassination of Prime MinisterYitzhak Rabin in 1995.
On the Palestinian side, there is a sense of dread about the unpleasant compromises that reaching a peace agreement will entail. "Maybe we are closer than before but that doesn't mean we are close," says Ghassan Khatib, director of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, a private organization that represents Palestinian views. Clinton's ideas for structuring a compromise - reportedly unwritten, but nonetheless appearing in newspapers around the globe - are very vague, says Mr.Khatib. "There is one aspect which is clear and to which the Palestinians can say 'no' without any hesitation and that is the refugees section: that is the Israeli maximalist position," he adds.
Where disagreement over the future status of Jerusalem prevented a peace deal at US-brokered talks held at Camp David this summer, these days the future status of several million Palestinian refugees is the toughnut to crack. Ever since the state of Israel was founded in 1948 - after a war that caused the flight or deportation of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes - Palestinian leaders have insisted on their "right of return." These Palestinians now number some 4 million by UN count; Israelis says the number is closer to 2million. Either way, the idea of allowing them to return to their homes is anathema to Israelis.
For one thing, the real estate - and in some cases the buildings - in question is occupied by Israelis. For another, absorbing millions of Arabs would quickly alter the character of the Jewish state. In the view of most Israelis, Israel would cease to be Israel. The Clinton proposal, according to media reports, largely dismisses the idea of a return for Palestinians. A small number of refugees would be allowed into Israel under a family reunification scheme, but the vast majority would have to settle in the new state of Palestine or third countries, albeit with some financial compensation.
But insisting on the right of return has been a tenet of the Palestinian cause for decades. In the grim, entrenched refugee camps of Lebanon, it is the centralhope for the future. The sacredness of the idea makes it hard for Arafat to give ground, particularly at a time when many Palestinians have sacrificed loved ones in the cause of confronting Israeli forces. The most important thing may be for Israel to acknowledge what happened in 1948 - pro-Israeli histories emphasize Arab flight, while other historians highlight the efforts of Jews to clear the land of its inhabitants - by formally recognizing the right of return.
Palestinians "need the 'right' to be recognized, then some should return and some should find other ways to get compensation," says Khatib. Amid the violence of recent months, Palestinian leaders have done virtually nothing to prepare their people for a deal. "Now that [the leaders] are contemplating what are clearly compromises," says Joseph Alther, an independent Israeli political analyst who advised Barak at Camp David, "it's too late to prepare [the people]; you just have to dump this on them and assume that Arafat's authority is sufficient."
But in the event of a deal, Arafat will not be the only one with disgruntled constituents. The Israeli leader must contend with the opposition of Israel's settlers, who have built Jewish communities in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip. Under the Clinton plan many of their settlements would be dismantled, although several such areas would be annexed to Israel. "Barak is almost certain to be facing widespread civil unrest sparked by the settlers even before the election," Mr. Alther says.
END
Bahija Réghaï - a Letter to Jean Chrétien, Prime Minister of Canada - Israeli Palestinian Peace Negotiations
By Bahija Reghai ~ Dec. 28
December 27th, 2000
The Right Honorable Jean Chrétien
Prime Minister of Canada
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Dear Mr. Chrétien:
I am writing to you with great concern about the latest round of peace negotiations initiated by President Clinton that Canada should be actively involved. Canada played a role, through the Right Honorable Lester Bowles Pearson, at the onset of the Palestinian problem, and has been involved since then It does not seems right that Canada should then be left out of what we all hope are the last stages of the resolution of this tragedy. Palestinians' lives were changed forever by a UN resolution that was elaborated by the UNGA's Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) under the chairmanship of Mr. Pearson.
Under the terms of Resolution 181 (II), which was endorsed on November 29, 1947 Palestine was to be divided into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and the city of Jerusalem with freedom of transit between areas and economic union between the states. After the self-proclamation of the State of Israel ("Our only chance now, as in the past, was to create facts, to confront the world with these facts, and to build on their foundation", said Mr. Weisman, a strategy that Israel has maintained to this day), and the official British withdrawal from the region the day after, Israeli forces took control of territory beyond the borders which had been agreed by the UN. Efforts by the UN Security Council and General Assembly led to an uneasy armistice, but not to a permanent settlement.
When the British and French invaded the Suez canal, Mr. Pearson was able to skillfully end the crisis through the United Nations and confirm Canada's, and his own, international reputation as a peace-maker. In his Reith lectures (BBC 1969), the Nobel prize winner Mr. Pearson spoke of his strong beliefs in global peace and the role of the UN in achieving it, and stressed that excessive nationalism was the strongest obstacle to building a peaceful community. Canada has maintained her interest in the region to this day through the Refugee Working Group (RWG), as a member of the Steering Group, and through the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, which coordinates international assistance to the Palestinian Authority. Prime Minister, it is with Mr. Pearson's legacy in mind and Canada's own position towards Palestinian refugee rights that I call on you. It is important that these last minute negotiations do not turn into a concerted attack on Chairman Arafat to pressure him to trade Palestinian rights for a Palestinian state.
The right of return is universal. The natural and inalienable right of Palestinians to return to their homes is recognized by resolution 194 (III), which the General Assembly has reaffirmed almost every year since its adoption in 1948. This right was also unanimously recognized by the Security Council in its resolution 237 (1967). Recently, Bosnians and Kossovars were allowed, indeed encouraged by European countries, to exercise their right of return, as not doing so was considered condoning ethnic cleansing. Palestinians should not once again be an exception to an internationally accepted rule.
History has taught us that imposing an unfair peace is very short-sighted. Imposing it through threats and violence is challenging the very essence of freedom and individual security, both dear to us Canadians. In these negotiations, Israel is "offering against the wishes of the Israeli public" land that was forcibly annexed and that the international community, including Canada, considers as "occupied". As Oslo II was being signed, Yossi Beilin, one of the chief architects of the Oslo process, was reassuring the Israeli public that "The most ridiculous accusation is that of abandoning the settlers. The agreement was delayed for months in order to guarantee that all of the settlements would remain intact and that the settlers would have maximum security, entailing an immense financial outlay. The situation in the settlements was never better than that which has been created following the Oslo agreement" (Ma'ariv, 27 September). The Israeli government was then - and still is - very busy illegally expropriating Palestinian land, building and reinforcing colonies and roads for Israelis only.
As a Canadian, I truly believe with Mr. Pearson that "a peace that rests on power alone, I repeat, can never be enduring or stable" (Victor Gollancz Humanity Award address, London, June 13, 1972). Canada should ensure that the peace that is negotiated is fair for the Palestinians. "The legitimate and inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to return to their homes and property and to achieve self-determination, national independence and sovereignty are endorsed by the [UN] Committee in the conviction that the full implementation of these rights will contribute decisively to a comprehensive and final settlement of the Middle East crisis."
Anything short of this UN recommendation would be tantamount to rewarding a state's bullying practices and non-respect of international law. It would also confirm the moral abdication of the international community in the face of aggression, sending the message that might makes right. We should never remain silent when confronted by injustice. That is the lesson left to us by the Veterans of two World Wars. That is what we have taught our children in our homes and in classrooms.
I thank you for your attention and hope that Canada can once again intervene and exercise its mediation skills so that the rights of Palestinians to return to their property, to not be "ethnically cleansed", are not ignored or traded for a state that should have come to existence a long time ago.
Sincerely,
Bahija Réghaï, 138 Ivy Cr., Ottawa
END
An Intifada in Search of a Leadership
By Amira Hass, Haaretz ~ December 27
A late-night urgent phone call from a village in the Salfit region of the Palestinian Authority: "My nephew has been arrested. It happened a week ago. He is only 15. We do not even know where he is being held in custody. To whom should we turn?"A phone call from the same caller, a few weeks earlier, a little after midnight: "Jewish settlers, with the assistance of the Israeli army, are in our orchards now and are uprooting trees. What can we do? To whom should we turn?" Yet another phone call from this caller, a week ago: "The road to our village has been obstructed since the start of the Intifada.
Twice we have cleared away one obstruction, so that we could travel along this road freely. We got into arguments with the Israeli soldiers. We said to them, 'We aren't a bunch of animals that you can put in a cage.' 'Yes, you are!' they replied. Twice, the Israeli soldiers restored the obstruction. The third time we removed the large concrete blocks, the mayor of the town was with us. 'I'll argue it out with the soldiers,' he said. Whether or not he argued with them, a week went by and the huge concrete blocks were not brought in again. Thank God, now we can travel in our cars along this road."
These three telephone messages indicate a blatant side-effect of the second Intifada: The absence of the Palestinian Authority as an agency capable of offering support to the residents under its authority in the face of measures undertaken by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) or as an agency capable of initiating activities that could be defined as a civil uprising. Palestinians whose loved ones have been arrested are continuing to turn to non-government organizations (NGOs), Israeli and Palestinian alike, or to seek the assistance of lawyers. No emergency organization has been set up in the PA to coordinate the monitoring of the arrests and to offer legal and financial aid to the families of arrested persons.
The PA has not initiated a thorough investigation of even some of the shooting incidents or even some of the cases in which Palestinians were killed by IDF personnel. Most of the updated and more precise information can be obtained from NGOs, especially from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which is based in Gaza. The IDF set up hundreds of road obstructions throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Except for a small number of cases, the PA's regime, which is the official leadership of the Palestinians, made no practical attempt to challenge the IDF by sending in bulldozers, by filling in ditches that Israeli soldiers dug across roads to prevent vehicular traffic from using those roadways, or by removing obstructions consisting of huge concrete blocks or earth ramparts - even in places that were not continually patroled by the IDF. Instead, the PA's regime focused on issuing press releases and publicizing its grievances to world audiences.
Palestinian experts have sadly stated that only the Palestinian ministries of education and health acted quickly in order to adapt their operations to the state of emergency and in order to serve jointly as an agency offering support to the residents of the PA. Local resident committees were set up in some communities to provide mutual assistance and to provide help to needy persons. The establishment of these communities was the initiative of either local community figures or NGOs.
During the first few weeks of the present Intifada, veterans of the first Intifada and members of NGOs, who (and this is no coincidence) belong to the Palestinian left, said that this Intifada should be an unarmed popular struggle, as was the case with the first Intifada. These individuals failed in this attempt. There is a need to study the connection between this failure and the different nature of the Israeli occupation today: Tight, stifling rings of encirclement around Palestinian enclaves, instead of an occupation army that confronts the populace at every corner, on every street and in every government agency. There is a need for investigating to what extent the failure was due to the effectiveness of the splitting up of the PA into separate territories and to the effectiveness of the severing of the natural ties between various parts of the PA (this situation did not exist prior to the signing of the Oslo agreement). The PA has been so fragmented that the regime cannot function as a centralized, unified agency. That fact in itself, incidentally, can serve as proof that the PA's leadership did not plan this uprising.
The new character of the Israeli occupation is not the only reason for the absence of the PA as a supportive agency capable of initiating actions. Another reason is the breakdown in interpersonal contact between the PA's top leaders and the Palestinian public as a whole over the past seven years. From the very start of the Oslo process, the Palestinian leadership has exhibited a split personality. As the leadership of a public still under the control of a foreign occupying power, it issued declarations left and right in its capacity as the spearhead of a national liberation movement. However, as a leadership capable of exerting only partial control in accordance with permits issued by the occupying army operating under the guidance of American, British and German espionage services, the PA's regime functioned as a body that safeguarded the special privileges of its own members. In the course of this very brief Intifada, the PA's regime did not display sufficient insight - or sufficient capacity - for adapting itself to the spirit of rebellion that took hold of the Palestinian public at large.
Members of the Fatah movement - the backbone of a regime that, in the course of seven years, has been unable to improve the living standards of the residents of the PA - tried to restore its past legitimization as a national liberation movement. However, they preferred to do so by focusing on the "militarization" of the Intifada - the opening up of safety valves and the use of firearms, which immediately erased the popular-civic character of this uprising.
At this point in time, an official leadership, whose presence during its nation's most difficult hour was simply not felt, must now act decisively: Can it waive its claim to the right of return, and, if so, how can that decision be implemented practically? Can it agree to the West Bank being split down the middle by blocs of Jewish settlements, and, if so, how can that decision be implemented practically? Can it agree to one street in East Jerusalem being Palestinian, while the street running parallel to it is Israeli, and if so, how can that decision be implemented practically?
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Peace Can't Be Built on These Fictions
by Ali Abunimah ~ December 27
If Yasir Arafat went on Israeli television today and declared that, yes indeed, his intention is to destroy Israel and throw the Jews in the sea, it is possible to speculate that American and Israeli officials would over the next few weeks still find a way to spin this positively and declare that an historic deal between Israelis and Palestinians is 'within reach.' The simple reason is that Ehud Barak wants to be reelected and President Clinton wants to leave office, if not with a triumph, at least with a fig leaf which will allow him to say his efforts did not fail completely. The deeper reason may be that Barak and his cohort believe that this is the best opportunity to give international legitimacy to Israel's gains with the most compliant White House in history ready to act as front man.
At this point, the impression that a deal is possible may be more valuable to Barak than an actual agreement. Opinion polls are showing that a slim majority of Israelis are still opposed to the outlined Clinton plan reported in the New York Times and other media yesterday. Rather than go to Israeli voters with nothing, or with a controversial and unpopular agreement which would give Sharon a hook to hang his opposition on, it may be preferable for Barak to go to the Israeli public with the following message: 'There is a deal to be clinched. We did not clinch it yet, but we can get there. Who do you think will do it, me or Sharon? Give me a mandate and I will bring a deal home." Ironically, the only member of Barak's "peace cabinet" who reportedly thinks the plan asks too many concessions from Israel is the "dovish" Shimon Peres, indicating that the man's hope of becoming prime minister still triumphs over bitter experience.
So far Palestinian protests that there are still very wide gaps have been drowned out by assurances from the US and Israel that peace is at hand. Yesterday and today, Haaretz reported statements of rosy optimism from US officials which take absolutely no account of the fact that Palestinian negotiators have cast deep doubt on the prospects for success, have said that the proposals are very close to those rejected at Camp David, and in some cases represent retreats, and the fact that there is deep disquiet among Palestinians all over the world. Yet the strategy of forging ahead regardless depends on the convincing salesmanship of several fictions in order for the story to unfold as its authors desire.
First of all, we are to believe that Clinton's plan is really Clinton's plan. If past experience is a guide--particularly from Camp David--the ideas reportedly put forward by Clinton have been previewed and preapproved by the Israelis and then presented to the Palestinians as if they represent bold new thinking by the Americans. Clinton would not in any circumstances advance ideas which he knew Barak could not accept. Unfortunately the same courtesy is not extended to the Palestinians. Israel's role is then to pretend that the proposals it has preapproved represent painful concessions and then to say 'we don't like it, but if the Palestinians can accept them, then so can we.'
Already, apparently, Israel has overcome its difficulties with the 'American' proposals and is enthusiastically selling them around the world. Israel's foreign minister, Shlomo Ben Ami, for example, told his Japanese counterpart today "The proposal contains difficult provisions for us to accept, but we would like to move forward in achieving a peace deal based upon the idea." Ben-Ami continued, "We want Japan to tell Palestinian leaders to accept the proposal." This strategy puts the Palestinian side in the familiar position of being faced with the choice of appearing to be the unreasonable spoilers, or of accepting proposals which take no account of Palestinian rights, the most central of which is the right of return.
This bring us to the second major fiction on which the storyline depends: that the 'concessions' contained in the "Clinton plan" are somehow equivalent and 'equally painful' for both sides. For Israel, the big concession is to give up the claim to total sovereignty over occupied east Jerusalem. For the Palestinians it is to give up the right of return for the refugees ethnically cleansed in 1948. In reality there is not the remotest equivalence. In Jerusalem, Israel is not giving up something real. It is simply admitting that the strategy of attempting forcibly to swallow what does not belong to it has in large part--but not completely--failed. Other means must now be employed.
Haaretz put this reality best in its editorial yesterday: "The proposed solution for Jerusalem is determined by the current reality in the situation on the ground in the city. From this point of view, Jerusalem is no different from all the rest of the territories that Israel brought under its control during the Six-Day War in 1967. The accumulated experience of the last 33 years leads one to an unequivocal conclusion: Aside from the ethical quandary in which Israel found itself as a result of the experience of occupation, it simply failed to turn the conquered territories into Israeli ones. Demographics, diplomatic conditions and psychological reasons resulted in the failure of Israel's ambition to annex - if not legally, then practically - the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The occupied territories remained Palestinian for the most part, and this fundamental fact dictates the need for an agreement, and also its nature." (Haaretz, December 26, 2000)
The 'American' ideas for Jerusalem, however unsatisfactory they may be for Israel, do preserve what Israel wants most: access to Jerusalem's Jewish holy sites, and a recognized presence within the walls of the Old City. The biggest gain is that the vast settlements housing nearly 200,000 Israeli settlers, which Israel illegally built on confiscated land in and around east Jerusalem since 1967 would remain in place, most likely under full Israeli sovereignty. This is a substantial gain which Haaretz does not fully acknowledge, and represents a major success for Israel's policy of creating 'facts on the ground.' So the pain of Israel's 'concessions,' such as they are is almost purely psychological and political. Practically, Israel will retain most of what it seized in 1967. The genius is to label these conquests as concessions.
But for the Palestinians, giving up the right of return--if it could be done--would be an enormous, real concession with catastrophic implications for millions of people who constitute half the Palestinian nation. I say 'if it could be done' because international jurisprudence is very clear that the right of return is an individual human right, just like the right to freedom of religion and the safety and sanctity of the human person. No political authority or government can purport to sign away its subjects' human rights.
This brings us to the third and final fiction on which the plot depends: that despite the fact that the Palestinians overwhelmingly reject efforts to cancel the right of return, somehow an agreement can be reached along the lines proposed, that it will be accepted, recognized and enforced. Here, the American and Israeli strategy appears to still depend on putting maximum pressure on Yasir Arafat. His dwindling and discredited rule is the crumbling pedestal on which all their hopes rest. This is what they tried at Camp David, and it backfired with disastrous consequences. Nothing, apparently has been learned. Arafat is if anything in an even weaker position to make the demanded concessions than he was before the Intifada began. Palestinians are less likely to accept a sell out of their rights now that three hundred more martyrs have been added to the rolls of the thousands who have died resisting the occupation.
How will this be handled? Most likely in the same familiar and discredited ways of the past: a summit in Sharm Al-Sheikh is already planned. President Mubarak will be there to put pressure on Arafat to be 'reasonable.' The Jordanians may be invited along as stage decoration. And if the media is a guide, the strategy will continue to be to ignore the Palestinian refugees as an inconvenience, and as spoilers, rather than as human beings against whom an enormous injustice has been committed and whose rights must be restored in order for there to be peace and reconciliation. Take for example this sentence from the Associated Press which typically sums up the attitude: "Now, the nearly 4 million Palestinian refugees -- whose families fled or were driven from their homes during Israel's 1948 war of independence and subsequent fighting -- may prove the single biggest obstacle to a U.S.-proposed peace accord being weighed by leaders on both sides."
(December 27) "Peace" is not to be made FOR these people--the principal victims of the conflict--but DESPITE them and AGAINST them. They are in the end just an "obstacle."Or how about The New York Times which says of the refugees: "Mr. Arafat has always promised these people, unrealistically, that they would be able to return to their ancestral homes after a peace agreement. Israeli leaders understandably oppose the demographic shift this would entail, which would threaten Israel's character as a Jewish state." (December 27).
Of course it is not Mr. Arafat who has made the "unrealistic promises." It is international law, the United Nations and decades of declarations by world leaders that have assured the refugees of their right to return not to their 'ancestral homes' as the New York Times disingenuously puts it but to their own homes. But these are mere details which must be swept away in the rush to get an agreement. If these views are reflective of official US thinking (usually a safe assumption), then the signs are not good. As long as Israel's illegal and unreasonable demands are treated as equal to Palestinians' fundamental rights, the prospects of peace are slim indeed--and receding fast.
But perhaps on second thoughts the Palestinian people are the "obstacle." Yes, they are an obstacle to peace just like the bride at a forced wedding is an obstacle to the happy marriage that everyone else has decreed for her and are impatiently waiting to celebrate despite her tears and protests.
Ali Abunimah web site: http://www.abunimah.org
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Saudis, Egyptians tell Arafat to Wait for Bush
Reuters ~ Dec. 27
A Saudi newspaper reported on Wednesday that the kingdom and Egypt had advised Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat against signing a peace deal with Israel before the new U.S. administration takes office in January. Publication of the report coincided with news that Arafat would meet Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt on Thursday to discuss ideas put forward by U.S. President Bill Clinton, who is trying to cap his presidency with a Middle East deal.
The Arabic-language Okaz quoted Palestinian and Egyptian sources as saying Saudi Arabia and Egypt had told the Palestinian Authority that they "prefer the signing to take place under the new U.S. administration to ensure better results". It said Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, had arranged telephone contact between Palestinian officials and General Colin Powell, who has been nominated as secretary of state in the new U.S. administration. A senior Saudi source in Riyadh declined to confirm or deny the report, Okaz said. In contrast to the Saudi report, Ha'aretz reported Wednesday that, according to a senior Palestinian aide, President Mubarak has already told Arafat that he will never get a better deal by peaceful means. "By war, maybe, but through peaceful methods, no," the source quoted Mubarak as saying.
END
By Greg Myre, Associated Press ~ Dec. 27
Israel accepted U.S. proposals for an accord with the Palestinians as a basis for new peace talks early Thursday, even as Egypt announced that a summit aimed at dealing with the American plan had been called off. Earlier, Palestinians expressed deep reservations about President Clinton (news - web sites)'s ideas for solving the touchiest issues remaining in the road to Mideast peace. Following that response, Egypt announced that an Israeli-Palestinian meeting set for later Thursday has been canceled, but the Israelis held out hope that it might take place.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (news - web sites), Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (news - web sites) were to meet at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh Thursday. An announcement from the Egyptian Information Ministry said Barak would not travel to Egypt, and Arafat would meet Mubarak in Cairo. But Israeli Cabinet Secretary Isaac Herzog said a final decision on the Egypt meeting would be made later Thursday. "It's possible that there will be no summit,'' he told The Associated Press. Barak's office said Barak and Mubarak would speak by telephone and decide.
A cancellation would deal a blow to hopes for a quick end to an upsurge in Mideast violence and to Clinton's efforts to achieve a peace agreement before he leaves office. There was no immediate comment from the Palestinians to the summit report, but the Clinton administration held out hope. "We always knew this would be hard,'' a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity. "We're still waiting to hear from Arafat. The president has reached out to leaders in the region. Let's wait and see.''
After a late-night session, Israel's Cabinet released a statement saying that it accepts Clinton's proposals as the basis for renewing "intensive negotiations for a permanent agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.'' The Israelis said they would ask for clarifications on some issues. The Palestinians were highly critical of the plan in comments Wednesday. A senior Palestinian official who declined to be named said the U.S. proposal was not acceptable. "This decision by the PLO executive means a rejection of the ideas in the American proposal which did not comply with the Palestinian requirement in any agreement,'' the official said.
The main sticking point for the Palestinians appeared to be Clinton's proposal that they dramatically scale back their long-standing demand that millions of Palestinian refugees be able to return to their former homes in what is now Israel. "The American ideas did not comply with the Palestinian principles and the Palestinian principles are clear and obvious,'' said Dr. Samir Gusha, a member of Palestinian decision-making body that met Wednesday night. Some of the Palestinian reaction was even stronger. "The offer we have is not an opportunity but a trap,'' Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior Palestinian negotiator, said before cancelation of the summit. "The Palestinians will pay an expensive price for it in the future.''
In Washington on Wednesday, Clinton insisted the two sides "are closer than they have ever been before.'' At the State Department, spokesman Philip Reeker said a letter was received Wednesday from the Palestinians "but it really doesn't discuss the ideas raised in Washington, so we are still waiting for the Palestinian response.'' Clinton has called on both Israelis and Palestinians to make concessions on the most explosive issues, and opposition to his plan was on display Wednesday at the most contentious religious shrine in Jerusalem.
About 200 right-wing Jewish demonstrators, opposed to a proposal that would require Israel to give up sovereignty claims to the Temple Mount - holy to both Jews and Muslims - scuffled with Israeli police in riot gear just outside the complex. Many Jews, religious and secular alike, strongly object to the proposal. Jerusalem's conservative Mayor Ehud Olmert accused the prime minister of "tearing Jerusalem into pieces ... doing a horrible, horrible thing.'' Opposition leader Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) has also criticized the peace plan and said he has no intention of honoring any deal that endangers Israel. Opinion polls indicate Sharon has a substantial lead over Barak to win a Feb. 6 election for prime minister.
With Clinton down to his final days in office, he had requested that Israel and the Palestinians respond to his plan by the middle of the week. Since Mideast violence erupted at the end of September, Barak and Arafat have been together only twice. They held one stormy meeting in Paris, and both attended an October summit in Egypt that was mediated by Clinton, though they did not meet face-to-face. The two leaders had a cool relationship before the violence broke out, and have traded recriminations during the fighting that has left nearly 350 people dead, most of them Palestinians. Arab countries were also critical of the American proposal. "The United States is, unfortunately, still far away from understanding the realities of the Middle East conflict,'' al-Baath, the newspaper of Syria's ruling party, said in criticism of the refugee plan.
END
Palestinian Refugees Could Pose an Obstacle
Bahija Réghaï, Philadelphia Inquirer/Letter to Editor ~ Dec. 27
Philadelphia Inquirer
Dear Editor,
As last minute negotiations are under way, it is good of Ms. King to present to us the views of some people at the core of the conflict, namely the Palestinian refugees. Their massive exodus was caused by a deliberate policy to displace Palestinian Arabs to make room for Jewish immigrants, as Mr. Joseph Weitz stated in his Diary (cited in Hirst, David: The Gun and the Olive Branch, p. 142.): "We shall not achieve our goal of being an independent people with the Arabs in this small country. The only solution is a Palestine, at least western Palestine (west of the Jordan river) without Arabs ... And there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe, should be left ... Only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb the millions of our own brethren. There is no other way out..."
In the nineteen nineties, this was called ethnic cleansing in ex-Yougoslavia. It is time for the North American public to recognize what a terrible injustice has been inflicted on Palestinians. President Clinton seems to be proposing that Palestinians trade refugee rights for a state. The natural and inalienable right of Palestinians to return to their homes is recognized by UN resolution 194 (III), which the General Assembly has reaffirmed almost every year since its adoption in 1948. This right was also unanimously recognized by the Security Council in its resolution 237 (1967). Only refugees themselves can decide whether to exercise their right or be compensated. Thank you for publishing Ms. King's article.
Bahija Réghaï Ottawa
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Clinton Peace Plan Opposed: Only a Third of Israelis, Palestinians Support His Proposals
By Matthew Kalman, The Globe and Mail ~ Dec. 27
As U.S. President Bill Clinton waits for Israeli and Palestinian leaders to respond to his latest proposals to end the century-old conflict in the Middle East, residents of the troubled region remain skeptical about his chances of overseeing a peace treaty before he leaves the White House next month. Opinion polls carried out in recent days on both sides of the Green Line, which divides Israelis from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, suggest that a majority in both communities oppose Mr. Clinton's proposals. "It won't work," said Adel Elayan, a resident of the village of Beit Safafa in South Jerusalem. "These are all games being played by the politicians on both sides."
But Israeli and Palestinian leaders have their own reasons for continuing the U.S.-sponsored talks, despite the slim chances of reaching an agreement. Mr. Clinton has asked the two sides to respond today as to whether they're willing to get back to the table. Mr. Clinton's proposals are reportedly quite similar to the ones he put forward at the failed summit in July at Camp David, Md. For Israelis, the key concession would be to agree to give the Palestinians control over the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, as well as parts of the ancient walled city itself.
For Palestinians, the sticking point is the Israeli demand that the estimated 3.5 million Palestinian refugees give up their right to return to their former homes in what is now Israel. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed in a telephone conversation last night to meet tomorrow in Egypt with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to discuss the proposals, according to Israeli radio. Both Mr. Arafat and Mr. Barak are under pressure to avoid what their people consider far-reaching concessions.
Mr. Arafat is being told he has no right to concede the refugees' right of return. "There will never be a real and everlasting peace unless all Palestinian refugees are allowed to return to their homes," said Marwan Barghouti,the West Bank leader. Meanwhile, Mr. Barak is being accused of rushing to clinch a deal at any price as a means to winning the February election for the prime minister's post. "Mr. Barak is offering parts of Israel for sale simply so he can reach a deal with Arafat and boost his chances of winning the election," said Tzahi Hanegbi, a member of the opposition Likud party. "The land of Israel is not for sale."
A Gallup poll published in the Israeli Ma'ariv newspaper last Friday found the Israeli public deeply torn. Seventy-one per cent said they supported continuing the peace process with the Palestinians, with 25 per cent opposed. But only 39 per cent were in favour of Mr. Barak's efforts to reach a final agreement with the Palestinians before the elections, and only 32 per cent supported a package along the lines of Mr. Clinton's proposals.
Opinion surveys in the Palestinian areas, where media are strictly controlled by Mr. Arafat, are more difficult to come by. However, results of a poll faxed to journalists last night by the Palestinian Centre for Public Opinion showed opinions hardening among Palestinians. According to that poll, 52 per cent of Palestinians opposed any negotiations with Israel, while only 39 per cent were in favour. Fifty-seven per cent rejected Mr. Clinton's compromise over Jerusalem, with 36 per cent in favour. And 79 per cent rejected any concessions over the right of return.
Recent discussions have centred on Jerusalem, a city holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians. Yesterday, both Jews and Arabs expressed concern about redividing the city, which was split down the middle from 1949 to 1967. Since the 1967 Six-Day War, Jerusalem has been enlarged and united under Israeli control, without international approval. About 200,000 Palestinians live in the Arab sectors of the city, formerly controlled by Jordan, and about 480,000 Israelis live on both sides of the old border.
Both communities fear Mr. Clinton's proposals will harm the city's delicate modus vivendi, damage the economy and make everyday life in the city almost impossible to bear. There are few genuinely mixed areas of the city, but most Jews and Arabs cannot imagine a wall or fence keeping them apart from one another. Mohammed Idrif, a 61-year-old retired waiter from the mixed neighbourhood of Abu Tor, said he believes the talk about dividing the city is nonsense. "In times of peace, cities should be united, not divided," he said. "That's what happened in Berlin. If they divide Jerusalem, we will be back to square one and this will lead to another war."
Mr. Idrif's Jewish neighbour, Shmuel Finni, a 62-year-old building contractor, agreed. "Until 1967, the border ran through my back garden," he said. "My first wife was killed by a Jordanian shell fired from East Jerusalem. Life was intolerable. I have no problems with my Arab neighbours and I don't see why a wall should separate us.We will never allow anyone to separate our families again," said Mohammed Issa, 68, as he emerged from a mosque after noon prayers yesterday. "I want to be able to see my children, my brothers and my cousins whenever I want."
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A Flawed Peace Plan - Editorial
Times Union ~ December 27, 2000
President Clinton's proposals to end violence in the Mideast are one-sided and inadequate
With an eye firmly fixed on his legacy, President Clinton is pushing hard for Israelis and Palestinians to sign off on a peace plan that he believes will bring stability to the region. But the President is mistaken, and so is Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who appears be more concerned with his election prospects next month than with the grim consequences of his peace-at-any-price policies.
On the surface, Mr. Clinton's plan is appealing. He would balance the claims and concerns of both sides by requiring each to make major concessions in exchange for a secure peace. Israel would have to cede sovereignty over the Temple Mount, a site revered by Muslims and Jews. Palestinians would have to forgo the right of refugees to return to Israel.
On closer inspection, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat has more to gain under the Clinton plan than Mr. Barak does. Far more. Differences over the Temple Mount prompted Mr. Arafat to walk away from a string of concessions made by Mr. Barak when the two leaders met with President Clinton at Camp David last July. Mr. Arafat adamantly insisted on Palestinian control -- a demand also made by Islamic militant groups who would surely make Mr. Arafat pay with his life at the first sign of compromise.
The Temple Mount has become the context for months of violent confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli troops. Many outside observers blame Ariel Sharon, the right-wing Israeli leader who is now running against Mr. Barak in the February election, for instigating the violence by visiting Temple Mount in September in a pointed reminder of the failed Camp David talks. But no matter how offensive his visit might have been to Palestinians, it cannot justify the violence that has ensued. Approximately 350 people have been killed in clashes in Gaza and the West Bank. The majority of the casualties have been Palestinians, and many victims have been children. But that is largely because Palestinian children have been sacrificed by their elders for the sake of turning world opinion against Israel.
Now comes Mr. Clinton's plan, which, if accepted by Mr. Barak, would reward violence. Palestinians would get what they have always wanted -- sovereignty over Temple Mount. The message would be clear: It pays to abandon the peace table and take to the streets with rocks and guns. It would be the worst kind of message.
The refugee provision is designed to allay Israeli fears a flood of Palestinian settlers would skew the country's demographics and politics. But until there are clear boundaries for the proposed Palestinian state, it is impossible to gauge just what the impact might, or might not, be. Mr. Barak thus has the responsibility to demand more specifics, and to move cautiously in the interim.
Even at that, if the Clinton plan were to guarantee a lasting Mideast peace, Mr. Barak would be justified in signing it. But the opposite is true. By rewarding violence, this plan is a formula for more violence to come -- guaranteed.
END
Option Of Reaching Agreement With Bush Prior To Israeli Elections Being Examined
by Ben Caspit and Eli Kamir ~ Dec. 27
(Ma'ariv - 27 December): The Palestinian Authority and the U.S. are examining the possibility of postponing the peace process timetable until February 1. In this case, the new U.S. president will have begun his term of office, and the Clinton term will have ended. However, Clinton will receive a special appointment from the new president, George Bush, to continue the negotiations as a special American envoy. The arrangement will be signed at the end of January or the beginning of February, on the eve of the elections in Israel.
George Bush will have the honor of being the American hosting president (and financier), Clinton will get the Nobel Prize, Barak will get an agreement on the eve of the elections, and Arafat will get the Temple Mount and the country he has dreamed of for the past 52 years.
Israeli and Palestinian representatives are busy firming up the final details of the agreement being formed. It is clear already that in order to uphold the arrangement, a multi-national force, which will include a dominant American element, will be formed. The forces will be placed along the Jordan River and the border between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and will oversee border crossings. The agreement will say plainly that the multi-national force will have an independent mandate that cannot be undone without the mutual agreement of both Israel and Palestine.
The Jerusalem issue is also at the stage of getting its final touches. It seems President Clinton has proposed three options for resolving the question of Jerusalem. Israel can live with the one that says the Palestinians will have sovereignty over the Temple Mount and Israel will have sovereignty over the Western Wall and the "things sacred to Judaism." This definition includes also the remains of the Temple, which are below ground under the Temple Mount. Senior political sources assessed yesterday that Barak is very close to agreeing to Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount itself. Differences of opinion remain at this point regarding the City of David and the Mount of Olives.
It appears that the agreement will include complete freedom of movement and passage to Israelis in that area. It is still not clear who will have sovereignty over the area. People close to Ehud Barak said yesterday that Barak does not intend to relinquish the Mount of Olives.
According to Israeli figures who are close to the negotiations, the Palestinians will not have a right of return to Israel. In the most recent talks in Washington, a minor drama took place in this regard. During the first meeting with Clinton, the U.S. president proposed a formula, which the members of the Israeli team opposed vigorously. For the next two days, severe pressure was put on the Americans, and they changed the wording. The Palestinian refugees would get a "menu" of options for absorption. The absorbing countries would include Israel. However, Israel would retain decisions as to the absorption itself and its timetable, if it is to happen at all. In that way, Israel would maintain control over the number of refugees it would absorb in the framework of family reunification.
The agreement with the Palestinians will include a detailed security appendix, which would allow the IDF to deploy its forces over the Jordan River in a "time of emergency." A time of emergency will be defined by the agreements as "Any time in which there is an immediate proven threat to the safety of Israel." The interpretation would be Israeli. The IDF, whose units and regular divisions would be deployed in the settlements blocs a short travelling distance from the Jordan Valley, could thus, with a short alert, deploy in the security zones. The IDF would remain deployed on the Jordan River for six years after signing the agreement: after three years, sovereignty would pass to the Palestinians, after another three years, the IDF would be confined to its bases.
Prime Minister Ehud Barak will present the cabinet this morning with the American plan for the agreement with the Palestinians and ask the ministers to support it. Barak had intended to respond affirmatively to the American president today, but he will not do so till he receives a clear answer from Arafat. [...]
Senior figures involved in the negotiations revealed yesterday that the Palestinians say off the record that Yasser Arafat has decided absolutely to reach an agreement, and that he intends to move the contacts forward on the basis of Bill Clinton's plan. These same sources confirmed that the main issue in contention is the right of return.
Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti publicly declared yesterday that there is only one way to reach a peace agreement: Israeli recognition of the right of return. Sources in the refugee camps also stressed that they would not accept anything less on Arafat's part.
Arafat, said sources who spoke with the Palestinian leadership, will drag out the agreement and talks on the right of return until the last moment. Ultimately, he will get a formula from Israel that will allow him to declare on the one hand, that he has received the right of return, but in practice this right would only apply to 100,000 refugees, exactly as President Clinton has suggested.
END
INS Must Stop Using Secret Evidence
By Niels W. Frenzen, Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2000
Over the past five years, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has allowed the Immigration and Naturalization Service the unfettered discretion to use secret evidence in immigration courts to seek to deport noncitizens. The targets of secret evidence almost always are Arabs and Muslims.
When secret evidence is used, the INS has an almost perfect track record in convincing the judges who hear immigration cases that the targeted individual is a terrorist or poses some other risk to the national security. Yet all of the secret evidence cases tracked by advocacy groups in the past several years have unraveled the moment the targeted individual either gets a glimpse of the government's evidence or is granted a retrial in which the government cannot rely on secret witnesses or documents.
Mazen Al-Najjar, a Palestinian and a former adjunct professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, is the latest victim to be set free. Al-Najjar spent more than three years in INS custody before his release Dec. 15. The INS has not revealed any of the evidence in his case but has insinuated that Al-Najjar belonged to political groups the INS claimed are fronts for terrorist groups. Publicly, the INS said only that Al-Najjar's brother-in-law, also of Florida, had yelled "death to Israel" at a political meeting and that Al-Najjar refused to denounce him. The attempt to establish guilt by association is a common INS tactic in secret evidence cases.
Were it not for the tragedy of unjustly accused and jailed individuals, one could scoff at the INS' dismal track record of prosecuting secret evidence cases. Yet these cases involve real people who face unjust prosecution. Here are some of them:
* Mehdia Al-Zubaidy: The INS detained Al-Zubaidy in Los Angeles in 1997 and sought to deport her to Iraq. When Al-Zubaidy finally figured out that the case against her was based on her former husband's alleged intelligence activities in Syria, she pointed out that her husband was present in the U.S. with the consent of the U.S. State Department and with the knowledge of INS officials. How could she be held based on his alleged activities while the State Department allowed him to come to the United States? The case against her was dismissed.
* Hashim Hawlery: An Iraqi Kurd, Hawlery, who was held in a Los Angeles detention facility for 10 months, was released in 1998 when it was revealed that the secret and suspect organization to which the FBI and INS claimed he belonged did not in fact exist. It turned out that an interpreter used by the FBI during an interrogation of Hawlery had created an acronym as a short-hand way of referring to the several Iraqi Kurdish opposition groups with which Hawlery had been affiliated over the years. The false acronym was cross-referenced by the FBI with CIA records. When the CIA had no record of the group, the FBI suggested that Hawlery posed a high level of dangerousness because of his membership in this "secret" (i.e., unknown) organization.
When this stupid error became evident, the INS' case against Hawlery was quickly dropped. While laughable, the misunderstanding cost Hawlery nearly a year of imprisonment, separated from his wife and children.
* Nasser Ahmed: Ahmed, an Egyptian citizen living in New York, was released last year after more than three years in detention, much of it in solitary confinement, when a judge characterized the government's secret evidence as double and triple hearsay. Much of the evidence came from the Egyptian government, which viewed Ahmed as a political opponent. Most disturbing was the testimony of an unidentified FBI agent who, speaking in opposition to releasing Ahmed, said Ahmed's release would make him a martyr. "He would be more well-known, lending to his credibility in the community, both inside . . . and outside the United States," the agent testified.
* Hany Kiareldeen: A Palestinian resident of New Jersey, Kiareldeen was jailed for 19 months after being accused by the FBI and INS of hosting a meeting in his apartment with one of the World Trade Center bombers shortly before the center was bombed. When Kiareldeen was finally allowed to see the government's key allegations, he easily established that he had not lived in the apartment building in question at the time of the alleged meeting. The source of the allegations against Kiareldeen is classified, but it is widely believed to be his former wife, with whom he was engaged in a child custody dispute.
The use of secret evidence violates one of the most fundamental tenets of the U.S. legal system: the right to confront one's accuser. There are times when the accused may get lucky and guess what the allegations are. But someone like Kiareldeen would never have guessed that he needed to present evidence about meetings that never occurred in a place in which he did not reside; Hawlery would never have known to present evidence about a group that he had never heard of and that, indeed, didn't exist.
In 1953, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote, in a dissenting opinion criticizing the use of secret evidence, that "due process of law is not for the sole benefit of an accused. It is the best insurance for the government itself against those blunders which leave lasting stains on a system of justice."
The INS track record over the past five years is filled with such blunders. But it is worth noting that a still-pending secret evidence case was commenced during the Reagan administration in 1987 and has continued to wind its way through the courts under the Bush and Clinton administrations.
It remains to be seen what the new Bush administration will do. During the campaign, President-elect Bush questioned the use of secret evidence in immigration proceedings. A survey conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found strong support for Bush on behalf of American Muslim voters and attributed this support in part to Bush's views on such evidence.
The incoming Bush administration's decision whether to continue with the Reagan-era case against two Los Angeles-area residents, Palestinians Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, will be an early sign whether the new administration is willing to halt the use of secret evidence.
END
by Toine van Teeffelen, Pax Christi International in Bethlehem ~ October 23-30
Once again Beit Jala has been bombed, in the night from Friday to Saturday. The bombing was accompanied by shooting sprees across the area. Mary, Jara and I slept deeply but most of Beit Jala, Bethlehem and Beit Sahour were terrified, the whole night. Next morning, students from Beit Jala arrived at the Freres School with pale faces. They told stories of bullets breaking into living rooms or flying over the head of a family member, or of a rocket that went straight through a three-storey house to end up in the kitchen. Miraculously, no people were killed.
In Beit Jala, there is now little ordinary life. A student told he studies under his bed. One boy said to refuse to take out his clothes and shoes when going asleep, as he does not want to loose time in case he would need to run away. The local TV mentions that at the beginning of last week, a girl wanted to return to her family house after it was bombed. When asked why, she said that she wanted to rescue her dolls from the fire. "I don't want them to die." Some people go on top of the roof to watch the bombing. In Dheisha refugeecamp south of Bethlehem some of them were in fact injured by flying bullets. Mary is angry at them. "The Israelis go to their bunkers, we go to the roofs."
It is not clear how long the bombing raids will continue. People expect that they will be a weekly phenomena. After Israeli warnings, the Palestinian Authority asked some families in houses not far from Rachel's Tomb to leave, butthe inhabitants refused. How can the city cope with all this? In front of a TV camera, Bethlehem's municipal secretary wonders how prepared Bethlehem and the adjacent towns really are when coping with an emergency situation like this. It is not just the bombing but also the loss of jobs of those who cannot go to Jerusalem and Israel, or -in case they are able to sneak along checkpoints - whofound out that their jobs were taken over by other, usually foreign workers.
Under the circumstances it is not a surprise that families leave. Bishop Sabbah,who last week visited Christian and Moslem sites that were bombed, tells local TV about the pain he observes on the faces. He advises the local Christians not to leave. Despite the difficulties, "their place is here." The question of staying and leaving keeps everybody busy. A Dutch couple working voluntarily at the Freres School as drama and music teachers seriously consider to leave. They like to stay but the woman is pregnant and understandably worried about the influence of the tensions upon her child.
Daily life goes on. During an evening, Mary asks me to bring diapers for Jara. Shooting starts but soon subsides. I'll go out but there is again shooting, a few hundred meters further down near Paradise Hotel ( now renamed by some as "Hell Hotel"). I'll quickly go to my parents-in-law. When I proudly return with the diapers, Mary is not impressed. With an inviting gesture - "Come my hero" - she sets me cleaning the dishes. Other concerns keep her more busy. Her father is now a few days in hospital. He is 82 years old but still works in his garage opposite Rachel's Tomb, selling car accessories. After the closure of Jerusalem in the beginning 1990s, he lost many of his customers.
Nowadays his work serves as much to keep him in a daily routine as to get a little income. Lately he complained that walking doesn't go as fast as it used to be. His close friends opposite his shop, a family from Beit Jala, left last week. Recently, he was forced to stay at home - Rachel's Tomb is the scene of daily clashes. His health is now his worry. After a cold his cough did not leave, and he went two days agofor observation to a private hospital south of Bethlehem. Yesterday, the doctorsgave Mary a sample of fluid from his lung for examination at Moqassed Hospital in Jerusalem. The doctor gestured to me, "he is an 'ajnabi' (foreigner), he can pass the checkpoint." Mary thought it was better that she would go herself, she knows that visiting hospitals - both Israeli or Palestinian - usually involves along search, and I am not able to read the Arabic signs well. As it turned out, the soldiers let her pass. Initially she was ordered to get out of the van. She was so angry that she barely could speak. It was likely the presence of two international TV crews that brought the soldiers to wave her back into the car.
Work at the Arab Educational Institute in Bethlehem also moves on, though haltingly. One of the projects involves an exchange between three Dutch schools and three Bethlehem schools. The 16-17 year old students write each other stories about "social violence." No lack of such stories now. But the problem isto bring the students at the institute, where they can use the Internet. For three weeks now, Suzy Atallah tries to bring her St Joseph students to the Institute. It has to be done on their free weekend day, the Friday. During the week students have to do their homework and cannot come back late in the afternoon. Certainly now, parents want them to be at home before dark. But each new Friday another incident happens which keep the students from the street.
This Friday, finally, it seems that they are able to come. Together with Karishma Budhdev, a Kenyan from Indian origin who works on various projects of the Institute, we prepare the lesson. But the email and Internet connection fails. It seems that there are so many Palestinians using the server to whom we are connected, that the main computer cannot absorb all incoming information. Wespeculate that there must be a hugh increase in email exchanges and Internet usethese days. Many Palestinians have friends and family members all over the world. Mary and I, too, regularly receive emails from family members abroad withexpressions of concerns, articles, analyses, and jokes. The girls are waiting outside the classroom. We pray. After a few attempts, there is still no connection. The girls again have come for nothing...
I like to vanish. Karishma and Suzy, still composed, explain the students what happened. The girls look not too much affected and blow chewing gum. Suzy warns them that it is an English class and that they have to speak English. That remark usually keeps them silent, at least for a while, she explains to me. The next class, scheduled an hour later, is cancelled but some girls, living in the villages, cannot be informed in time. They had to leave early from home. Traveling from nearby villages to Bethlehem can now take more than one and a half hour. The students have to circumvent checkpoints within the West Bank itself. Fortunately, these girls at least did not come for nothing. After a while, another telephone number happened to work. At last, a semblance of normal study.
While supervising, Suzy gives me a letter written by one of her students:
To Whom It May Concern
"I think that we have reached a time in which God, the creator of this world, islooking at us and crying. If we see the world from outside, we realize that it is burning. I am a Palestinian and I'm not talking for myself. I am talking for every other Palestinian person, man, woman, boy and girl. What we are dealing with is not new: we stayed fifty-two years under the occupation waiting for peace. We don't want anything impossible. We just want to live peacefully like any other human being in this world. If we are dealing with human beings, things would have changed earlier. But it is as if we are not dealing with human beings. It is as if they don't have feelings, it is as if they want us all to be dead. I really don't want you to feel sorry for us, we don't want tears, we want actions.
Help our helpless people. We cried enough and we suffered enough. Israel is killing hundreds of children and young teenagers with all the weapons it has, and Palestinians are defending their lands and bodies with stones. Why can't the world just stop these crimes? I blame the United States for all these victims because they see the truth but their interests are more important than our lives. Don't look at us as Palestinians, look at us as human beings who haverights as anyone else. In the US, there are rights even for animals. When Madeleine Albright said that the Arabs must end the violence, which violence is she talking about, for God's sake? The Palestinians must stop the violence that the Israelis started. Who has the weapons, who kills the innocent people? What is their faith, their fear of God, their conscience? I don't want anything from the Americans, I just want them to wake up. Let them forget for a moment their interests, and remember that there is God and justice in this world.
When Mohammed Al-Dura was killed, he shook everyone's feelings not because he was a child - many other children were killed. It was the way how he was killed,the way he was screaming, trying to hide his body from the bullets behind his father's weak arm. What damage would he have done if he had stayed alive? What were they thinking when they killed im? We cried and cried with his family and I feel now that I am the sister of all these children, these innocent angels. They should have lived the best life, having a perfect education, live like any other children in this world, play, laugh and enjoy. But where are they now, under the ground, dead. And "we have to stop the violence"! I believe that even though we are alone, God is always with us. So I ask everyone to wake up, realize what is really happening, according to their conscience, their faith. At last. I want you to know the truth, the real case of Palestine. Be sure that we Christians and Moslems are one forever."
END
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