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Issue: February, 1994—see note, below

Author's Note: I take the liberty of including this piece I wrote for publication elsewhere, even though it never appeared in the Sonoma County Free Press. At the time of the Oslo treaty, we were no longer doing regular Palestine Papers columns. However, because the Free Press articles take the reader from the beginning of the Intifada through to nearly the end, I felt the subject needed the "closure", so to speak. As many readers know, the Oslo treaty served to do no more than formalize the on-going theft of Palestinian land by Israel, destroy the Palestinian people's once-united struggle against brutal occupiers, and line the pockets of the already corrupt Arafat and company. The suffering of the Palestinians today is even greater, according to Palestinian sources, than it was during the Intifada, this time dished out by both the Israelis and Arafat's Palestine Authority police. The difference is that today, the media no longer watches, and the world believes some sort of "peace process" is in place. Our sadness is profound. M.T. 6/97

As the leading colonial and military powers wax euphoric about the agreement between Israel and Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, that put an official end to Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, American media coverage of the "Gaza-Jericho first" negotiations lays bare the base of the "myth-information" from which the American public derives its knowledge about the Middle East.

The agreement does not offer the possibility of economic development in that devastated land, as American media have portrayed it, nor does it represent an end to Palestinian suffering at the hands of a brutal occupation army. Rather this agreement represents the shattered hope of the Intifada. It may even destroy the unity of the Palestinian people, built so painstakingly and at such great cost. Most tragically, it probably means an end to the dream of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians have been told by Arafat that they will end the uprising in exchange for little more than limited police power and a promise of "further negotiations".

A San Francisco Chronicle editorial on Sept. 12, 1993 declared that "the worst aspect of the deal is that Israeli settlers will live on islands surrounded by Palestinian authority". The editors simply ignore the facts—that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will be surrounded by fundamentalist Israeli settlers who answer to no law, not even Israel's, and who shoot and harass Palestinians at will. There are no plans to remove the heavily armed settlers from the areas ceded to Palestinian "control". Indeed, the presence of the settlers and their need for "protection" gives Israel the excuse it needs to maintain a military presence throughout any and all parts of those "ceded" territories. The entire issue of withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and Jericho is addressed in deliberately vague terms, open to interpretation.

The same newspaper editorial considered that the "brilliance of the accord is a testament to the wiliness of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin". In a world turned upside down, where might does make right, Rabin's nation, with the help of tens of billions of dollars from the US, has been able to invade other countries, make deliberate war on their civilian populations, ignore every single UN resolution condemning its inhumane actions, and pursue the policy of "breaking the bones" of Palestinian children, with impunity.

Indeed, the American public knows next to nothing about the high level of Israeli aid, although one would be hard put to lay on the media total responsibility for the omission. Congress itself does not wish this information made too public, particularly as we lament the sad state of American education, poverty and violence beyond control, the lack of affordable health care, and the crumbling of our own infrastructure while we step over cold and hungry human beings as we walk to the voting booth!

One actually finds more honest information about Israel's plans in the Israeli press than in the American media. A recent issue of the Israeli bi-weekly Jerusalem Report exposed Israel's plan to move 2000 of the more "hard-line" (read Hamas) prisoners from the military prisons in the territories into prisons inside Israel, grievously violating international law in a way that, prior to lulling the world community's sense of concern and outrage with this "peace agreement", even Israel dared not do.

A "peace agreement" that gives one side everything and the other side next to nothing will not bring peace, regardless how it is characterized in print or broadcast media. Israel has wanted to be shed of Gaza for some time. This agreement rids them of a territory they have been imminently unable to control, and which, other than some small value as a resort area, provides little to the Israeli economy now that the borders have been closed. Israel gives up a nearly ungovernable piece of land, stripped of its native economy, poverty stricken beyond imagination, then gets an indigenous police force to keep order and enforce the law. Which law, we might ask. Israeli law? Occupation law? How disturbing the specter of the PLO, at long last and perhaps too late recognized as the "legitimate representative of the Palestinian people", cooperating with the Israeli military as they rout and imprison people who are the heart of Palestinian resistance.

Israel will retain control of the land and the water, and even control over their own economic development will remain beyond Palestinian reach. That facet of life in Gaza and Jericho will be in the hands of a joint Israeli-Palestinian Committee for Economic Cooperation. The need for cooperation in economic development is not questioned, but who can doubt that, if the past is any guide, any "joint agreement" between Israel and Palestine will be one that heavily favors Israel at Palestine's expense. Few, if any, of these issues will you find discussed in mainstream American media.

As a non-Palestinian, I cannot say what is best for that land, but I ache, I weep for the hundreds of thousands who, just in the past six years, have undergone nearly unbearable treatment—imprisonment without charges, torture, house demolition, orchard uprootings, confinement to homes for weeks at a time, gassing, shooting, expulsions—to find at this juncture of history that all they suffered was for naught. I am well aware of the dangers of criticizing another people's choices in a struggle for national liberation. It is abundantly clear to me that I have no way of understanding the agony of losing a child, or two children, or a husband, to the guns of a murderous occupation army, or the overwhelming desperation of living every day at an unendurable level of crisis and pain. To those people in Gaza and Jericho who support this agreement, what can we say except that we hope it means an end to some measure of your suffering? To those many more people in the rest of Palestine, in Lebanon, in the Diaspora, what is there left to say, except we will continue to support you here as you struggle to see justice done, half a century late?

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