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The choice for Barak is to adopt peace plan

Gershon Baskin -- The Philadelphia Inquirer -- December 3, 2000

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's call for early elections should lead him to put forth a bold new peace proposal. He should tell the Israeli public that the choice before them is difficult, but clear: a costly peace with many risks or a major regional war. Given this choice, I believe the Israeli public will choose peace and Barak will win.

After two months of fighting, we are approaching 260 Palestinian and 40 Israeli deaths and thousands of wounded. As stones and Molotov cocktails are replaced by live ammunition and missiles, more and more Israelis and Palestinians believe that peace is not possible because there is no partner for peace on the other side.

I have spoken frequently with Israeli and Palestinian leaders over the last two months. Neither side enjoys the current situation.

We must find a peaceful solution. Here are the outlines of such a settlement:

A sovereign Palestinian state must be established on the basis of the principle embodied in U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 - "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war." This means Israel would have to return to its June 4, 1967, borders, with minor changes.

Israel should vacate all settlements in the West Bank and Gaza that are not within the territories mutually agreed to be annexed to Israel.

Palestinians must be allowed sovereignty in East Jerusalem. This should include the Old City, with the exception of the Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall and the Israeli neighborhoods built in East Jerusalem since 1967.

East Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine, and West Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel. The city should be open, and high levels of cooperation should be established between the Israeli and Palestinian Jerusalem municipalities.

For their part, Palestinians must agree not to build on the Haram al Sharif (Temple Mount), and international troops should supervise public order there.

The pact must allow for widespread cooperation between the two sides to fight terrorism and extremism.

They will also have to agree on collaboration in the fields of economic development, environment, water management, science and research, education and culture. Such cooperation could gradually create a real culture of peace between the two peoples.

Yasir Arafat should embrace this package and feel comfortable that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians would accept it. And Barak should embrace it also. If he does not choose peace, he will surely lose the upcoming elections.

Peace is the only option for both parties.

Israel and Palestine, not like the movies

Bruce Ramsey – The Seattle Times – November 30, 2000

Between Israel and Palestine, Americans choose Israel. It is automatic. We don't even think about it.

Americans learn history from movies. Israel never had a better forum to state its case than "Exodus," with its uplifting score and its dashing young bomb thrower, played by Sal Mineo. Israel was the good guy; it is always the good guy. The only ostensibly pro-Arab movie I recall was "Lawrence of Arabia," and even then it made the Arabs look bad. The Lawrence Arabs are smart in the ways of the desert but dense in the art of nationalism.

"Lawrence of Arabia" ends in a muddle at the end World War I, when Palestine was put under British jurisdiction. In 1917 Britain had offered Palestine as a homeland for the Jews. Thirty years later, after World War II, the United Nations voted to create a Jewish state. Israel was born with the UN imprimatur and the moral weight of the Jewish Holocaust.

But think of it from the Palestinian view. What right did Britain have to offer Palestine? Certainly, the Jews who survived World War II were owed something. That something might be a homeland. It would seem, though, that the debt was owed by the Germans.

It was paid by the Palestinians. Under the UN partition, Palestinians, who were two-thirds of the population of Palestine, gave up 55 percent of the land. Palestine was divided into six checkerboard pieces. There was an immediate war. Israel won that war, enlarging its territory to the pre-1967 borders. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees.

Farhat Ziadeh, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, was one of those ejected. "I had an orange grove north of Tel Aviv," he said. "It was 120 acres. It was taken as enemy property, and there has been no compensation whatever."

Later, Israel took the Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. These became subjects of negotiation. The conquests of 1947 have been beyond negotiation; they have given Israel a contiguous territory for 50 years. Palestine remains cut in two, with Gaza a sort of East Prussia, filled with refugees. Today, both Gaza and the West Bank are further chopped up by Israeli settlements - what former President Jimmy Carter calls "islands or fortresses within Palestinian areas." And finally, 50 years after the creation of the Israeli state, there is no Palestinian state. The Palestinian rump is a kind of Vichy state, a Bantustan, a Tibet. The young men throwing stones can remember nothing else. When we see video clips of Israeli soldiers shooting at them in Ramallah or in Bethlehem, where are they? They are not in Israel. They are in occupied Palestine.

Look at the death toll: Roughly 10 Palestinians (including Israeli Palestinians) for every Israeli Jew. And that's what you'd expect. Israel has a modern army. Palestine has none.

Say this for Israel: It has made the desert bloom. It built a democracy. It has defended itself, with American taxpayer help but with its own blood, against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. These actions, and 50 years of nationhood, justify Israel's right to exist. But on how much land? At what cost to Palestinian dreams?

Americans should ask these questions. As Palestinian academic Edward Said writes, to question Israel remains "literally the last taboo in American discourse." To raise it is to be charged with anti-Semitism. It is nothing of the kind. It is to question an idea fixed in the 1960s, when we all watched "Exodus" and thought Sal Mineo was fighting for only what was his.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on the editorial page of the Times.

Enmity Is Not Inborn

KIRK DOUGLAS – The New York Times – November 26, 2000

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — After my stroke, I didn't travel much. My first big trip was to Israel last July, to dedicate two children's playgrounds that my family and I had donated.

One was on a high, flat plateau in the Arab section of the Old City of Jerusalem. The other was in the Jewish Quarter, on a site that was much smaller, but sufficient to build a soccer field. In the Old City, it is rare to find an open spot. The streets are narrow stone alleys.

At the Arab playground, I was embarrassed to be driven up the steps in a little cart because of my bad knees, injured in a helicopter crash. At the entrance of the play area, I saw the inscription I had insisted on: "In Memory of Oklahoma Children." I wanted to remind people that often when grownups throw bombs, children are killed.

The children were a happy lot, dressed in neat uniforms. We kicked the ball around the field, and it didn't escape me that they were all very gentle when they kicked it to me. I hate those reminders of my age. Then my wife went flying across the field on a scooter. One of the children, practicing his English on me, said, "Your daughter is very good on a scooter." Another reminder. We took pictures together before we left.

In the Jewish Quarter, the children were much the same — uniformed and happy. A boy's choir sang, and a little fellow who couldn't quite reach the microphone recited a poem he had written.

My hope was that the Israeli and Arab youngsters might play together in intramural games, but now, with Israel inflamed, it looks more than ever as if that may never be.

When I was a kid in the 1920's, I came running home to my mother with a bloody nose.

"Ma, Yanak hit me with a rock!"

"Why?" asked my mother, wiping away the blood.

"He said I killed Jesus."

"What!"

"I don't even know who he is."

Each group of children, at the dinner table, will hear horror stories about the other. Hatred will be inculcated as they grow up.

We must not forget that the Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt, visited Jerusalem. Israel gave him back the Sinai in hope of peace. He returned to Cairo and was assassinated. Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's prime minister, tried to give peace a chance at the Oslo meeting with Yasir Arafat. On his return home, he was murdered.

Muslims and Jews believe in the same God. Arabs and Jews both venerate Abraham, and our chronicles teach us that they are all his descendants. The children deserve a chance to succeed where we failed. The kids I played with could do it, if only we stopped putting hatred into young minds, generation after generation.

Kirk Douglas is an actor.

The Pain Israel Must Accept

David Grossman -- November 8, 2000 -- The New York Times

JERUSALEM — "I am opposed to our violent demonstrations," a Palestinian friend told me last week. "We must switch to quiet demonstrations and peaceful methods, not only because of the terrible loss of life, but because our behavior threatens you, and then you respond with even greater violence and are not prepared to listen to us."

It is hard to imagine that many people in Israel today are prepared to listen to what the Palestinians have to say, especially when they accompany their words with brutal acts of terror, menacing behavior and blood- curdling threats. And yet, those who truly seek a solution must listen.

Anyone who talks today to Palestinians in important positions is forced to admit that much of what they say is true. According to the map that was supposed to have been made permanent by the Oslo accords, the Palestinians would have ended up not with a real state, but with only a few blots of land, ringed and bisected by the presence of the Israeli occupier — which, after the bloody battles, would have engendered a sense of humiliation in every Palestinian heart. All these truths and many more have created a situation in which Israel must resort to the most convoluted logic (not to mention moral acrobatics) in order to defend itself.

If one takes a hard look at the major obstacles that stand in the way of any kind of agreement between Israel and Palestinians, and one assumes that the problem of the Palestinian right of return can be resolved in the spirit of the understandings reached at Camp David, it becomes impossible to ignore the centrality of the settlements.

Is it so ridiculous to hope that once the winds have died down, Israel will address this question? Is there any possibility that we will finally realize that even in a matter as emotionally charged as this, we cannot impose a solution on the Palestinians? That maybe, in its own best interests, Israel should inflict pain on itself in the short term, pain that is almost intolerable, to reach, in the long run, the goals that are genuinely vital to it?

Today, Palestinians, both official and semi-official, say that settlers who want to remain in the territories under Palestinian sovereignty are welcome to do so. The rest would return to Israel. Yet realizing that they have no other choice, the Palestinians accept the possibility that certain blocs of settlements will be annexed to Israel in a symmetrical land-exchange agreement.

It is hard to imagine that many Israelis would rely on the good will of the Palestinian authorities and place their security in Palestinian hands. But one needn't be a great expert to understand that no state in the world would accept the presence of fortified, heavily armed enclaves in its midst, defended by the soldiers of another country and bound to that country in dozens of mutually exclusive ways.

There is no choice anymore. Bitter as it may be, we must say what many Israelis have been thinking in their hearts for years: To achieve a just and lasting peace, a large number of settlements will have to be uprooted. Not just small settlements like Ganim, Netzarim and Kadim in the West Bank, but any settlement — no matter how large and well-established — whose location may hinder a future peace agreement. That means Ofra, Qiryat Arba and Beit El, which are also in the West Bank, and settlements in the Jordan Valley and the Hebron hills.

Let's not pretend: The overwhelming majority of settlements were established for the express purpose of preventing an agreement, or at least blocking any territorial continuum that would allow for a Palestinian state. Now, when these tactics have proven "successful," creating a tangled web that has made the situation complicated beyond belief, the settlers are saying: You see! Peace is impossible under such conditions!

And so the time has come when all Israelis must ask themselves honestly whether they are prepared to die for the sake of tens of thousands of settlers who live in isolated, armed enclaves in the heart of an Arab population. Are they prepared to have their children put their lives in danger to defend these settlements?

As the friction between Israel and the Palestinians continues, Israel is often pushed into hunkering down, even when it is clear that its position is hard to defend. Time after time, Israel finds itself adopting a harder line, which is only to its detriment, and then retreating after a painful bloodletting.

For that reason, it is time to ask ourselves again whether the statement, "We won the Six-Day War" must lead to the conclusion that "we will stay there forever, in the heart of a conquered people." Will our great victory boil down to that?

For years, the peace camp has stuttered about the need to evacuate the settlements, put off by the idea of uprooting families and the children who were born there and afraid of the national trauma that such an act would entail. But the time for stuttering is over. Common sense tells us that we cannot defend the settlements and that they endanger the fragile prospects for peace. They will have to be dismantled.

Supporters of peace must reach a conscious decision, with all the pain it brings, and take the final step. The events of the last month, even if they generate worry and doubt, reinforce the importance of such a step and show that there is great danger if Israel lacks the courage to make such a decision.

David Grossman is author, most recently, of "The ZigZag Kid," a novel.

 

Reporters must navigate a minefield of public opinion when reporting on Mideast

Lillian Swanson -- November 7, 2000 – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Helene Giansante of Collegeville recently sent an e-mail praising "the courage and determination" of The Inquirer's Middle East correspondent, Barbara Demick.

"Each morning I look forward to reading your balanced and well-written accounts of events that I know must be difficult to write about," Giansante wrote.

Her e-mail stood out because it is the exception, not the rule: a bouquet, instead of the deluge of brickbats.

Angry readers on both sides have written to accuse the paper of bias, of valuing Israeli blood more than Palestinian blood - or the other way around.

The Inquirer is not alone as a lightning rod for impassioned criticism. In the last few weeks, Arab Americans and other Palestinian supporters have demonstrated outside the offices of the New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Demick, 43, a veteran correspondent who has witnessed wars in Bosnia, Chechnya and Iraq, says it is increasingly difficult to discern the truth when covering the clashes between the Palestinians and the Israelis. She says she has learned the adage is true: In war, truth is the first casualty.

To cover the news, she relies on her own reporting from the scene. She also listens to English-language radio broadcasts, receives e-mail from both sides and talks to contacts she has built in the 31/2 years she has been in the Middle East.

"Because of readers' passions, we are extremely careful about what we report," she said. "We double-check everything with as many sources as possible. It is very frustrating to figure things out because there is no common point of view of reality. That's what makes it hard to cover."

She offered a recent example of how each side gives its own account of events.

A Palestinian man in his mid- to late 30s is dead. The Israelis said he had been killed in an auto accident. The Palestinians said he had been tortured and murdered. To try to find the truth, Demick went to the morgue right after the body arrived.

"I stood at that body, two feet away. I was as close as I could be. I couldn't tell how he died. I'm not a doctor," she said.

So how did she write the story?

"I described the body. Then I wrote this is what the Israelis said happened, and this is what the Palestinians said."

Demick said each side's account of events goes well beyond spinning: "People on both sides are lying so much that it's really challenging for the press."

There is no doubt that television images from the fighting have played a critical role in creating world opinion about the conflict. And conditions for the press have gotten worse since the renewed violence erupted Sept. 28.

On Oct. 1, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was seeking protection against a wall in the Gaza Strip. That image filmed for French television created enormous sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

Then, on Oct. 12, an Italian television crew filmed another gruesome scene, a Palestinian man with bloody hands who had taken part in the killing of Israeli soldiers in a Ramallah police station. That scene spawned revulsion around the world.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit group, issued a report last week saying that "because the media has such enormous power to shape international perceptions, both sides have used crude means to control and inhibit the work of journalists covering the clashes." The report cites incidents of film being confiscated and journalists being beaten.

Demick said the rules involving the press have changed in the last month. In theory, journalists are allowed everywhere, but in practice, there are plenty of restrictions.

"Things have been pretty hostile toward the foreign press lately. The Israelis blamed the press for showing the 12-year-old shot on camera. From the Palestinian side, reporters were kicked and punched" outside the Ramallah police station.

From years of living in the Middle East, Demick understands the depth of feeling.

"I can really see both sides of the story. Both are really impassioned about their point of view," she said.

As for reporting, she follows a simple rule: "You report what you see. You don't get into the blame game."

While covering events in the Mideast, journalists dodging bullets to get the news

Lillian Swanson – November 6, 2000 – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Inquirer reporter Michael Matza packed his bags in a hurry.

Foreign editor Paul Nussbaum had called that morning in early October, asking if Matza could catch a plane later that day to Tel Aviv. The editor said the fighting between the Palestinians and Israelis near Jerusalem was escalating, and the paper needed another reporter on the scene.

Amid the rush at home to get ready, Matza's wife, Linda, suggested that he stop by their children's schools to say good-bye to their son and daughter.

"I gave my kids a hug and a kiss," he said. "I told them I would call and e-mail them as often as I could."

Matza says he took the time partly because he is a family man who was about to disappear from home for a while, and partly because of, well, what happened the last time he was there.

Matza, 49, a former national correspondent based in Boston, normally covers criminal justice issues for the paper. But in April, The Inquirer's Middle East correspondent, Barbara Demick, was expecting a baby, so he was asked to cover for her while she was on leave. It's a practice journalists call "parachuting in," and it's a job for resourceful and intrepid souls.

We send reporters into the world's hot spots because it's the best way to give readers firsthand accounts of what's going on. Nussbaum tells a reporter about to go on a risky assignment to "use common sense and don't take any unnecessary risks."

In Israel, at least six journalists, most of them cameramen, have been injured in the crossfire since violence erupted Sept. 28.

During Matza's first tour, on May 15, he learned that Palestinians would be demonstrating at Ayosh Junction, a bridge that is a common site of clashes in Ramallah.

To see the action, he needed to pick a side to observe from. His editors had warned him never to watch from the middle. But sometimes, he learned, the middle shifts.

That afternoon, he drove with Los Angeles Times reporter Becky Trounson and Palestinian journalist Maher Abukahater, who would translate for both papers, from Jerusalem to Ayosh Junction. They chose a spot about 40 yards behind the Israeli soldiers.

More than 1,000 Palestinians on the other side of the bridge began tossing stones and Molotov cocktails. From their side, the Israeli soldiers fired rubber bullets.

"All of a sudden we heard a different sound of gunfire," Matza said. "It had a different pitch."

Just as the journalists realized they needed to back up, Matza looked over at the translator, standing five feet away.

"I see that he's been shot. On the back of his light-colored shirt, I see a spot of blood. First it's a pencil point, then the size of a cherry, and then as big as an apple.

"He staggers a couple of steps, and crashes to the ground. He falls on his back. I see the huge exit wound on his chest."

"I couldn't believe it. I looked at Becky, and she has a horror mask on her face," he said. "At first, we are really scared. More shots are coming. We just start to run."

But then Matza turned and ran back to help his colleague on the ground. He leaned over, trying to figure out how to pick him up.

Moments later Israeli combat medics arrived to carry the wounded translator away. Matza and the L.A. Times reporter ran for cover in the nearby City Inn Hotel.

They and other journalists were trapped inside the lobby for four hours as thousands of rounds of live ammunition were fired. Israeli soldiers ran into the hotel and used the upper floors for sniper perches.

The American reporters, desperate to learn what happened to the translator, first heard a radio report that he was dead. Then, by calling out on cell phones, they heard he was alive in a Jerusalem hospital.

When the shooting halted, the soldiers withdrew from the hotel and the journalists cautiously ventured out. After counting the bullet holes in their cars, they drove back to Jerusalem to file their stories.

Later, he learned the translator had been shot by a bullet from the Palestinian side.

Matza returned safely in August from his stint in the Middle East, and from his second trip in October. Last week, he was helping his kids get ready for Halloween.

But the narrow brush with a bullet was still fresh in his mind.

"I don't take unnecessary risks. You can promise everybody from your editor to your wife, but sometimes, the risks, you can't know where they are," he said.
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