A RESPONSE TO *** ***** and *** *****, FROM ONE PERSON OF GOOD WILL TO TWO OTHERS, IN HOPES OF OPENING PATHWAYS OF DIALOGUE AND UNDERSTANDING.

My recent article in PJALS' May 2002 newsletter, Handful of Salt generated a letter of strong concern from former PJALS members [names deleted] I asked Rusty and Nancy Nelson of PJALS if I might answer those concerns, as a number of questions were asked in the letter. Mr. ____ and Ms ____, I believe the grave nature of the situation and our respective personal involvement calls upon us to engage in dialogue, rather than write one another off as "wrong". I hope you agree.

If your concern is Israel, remember that that nation needs supporters who will act as a good friend or good parent acts: when you see it act in ways that will harm it, ways that will cause the rest of the world to hesitate in it's support, it is incumbent on those supporters to call Israel to account. Indeed, my husband, who is Jewish and staunchly anti-Zionist, believes it is incumbent on all Jews, whether or not they support the actions of the State of Israel, to call for an end to the occupation as a starting point, for that occupation is done in his name (not to mention with his, and our, tax dollars).

It is difficult to know where to begin, so perhaps it might be best to simply work paragraph by paragraph. For reference, I will include the entire paragraphs from the concerned responders.

"Where did Ms Torres find her 'information' for this article? It's so full of falsehoods. 'The Israeli dream of expanding its territory' and 'Israel laid plans for a bloody invasion of the occupied territories [in the summer of 2000]' are two that are in the beginning of the article. Did all of her data come from the Palestinian Campaign website, well known for being slick, compelling and packed with lies?"

In fact, when I write for American readers, I use primarily Israeli or American sources, not because of a lack of good information from Arab sources, but because the media bias in the United States has done such an effective job of demonizing any information that comes from non-American or non-Israeli sources. I do not, however, depend on the Pentagon, the State Department or the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) to clarify any area of this tragic struggle, for obvious reasons.

The information for the article came primarily from newspapers: Guardian /UK, Ha'aretz /Israel, Jerusalem Post/Israel, Yediot Aharnot/Israel, the Independent/UK, New York Times; magazines: The Nation, Z Magazine, Tikkun; websites: IndyMedia, the religious Israeli website Ahavat Eretz Israel; Israeli and/or Jewish writers and/or professors Uri Avnery, Gideon Levy, General Moshe Dayan, Tanya Reinhart, Amira Hass, Michael Lerner, David Hirst; and one Palestinian-American &endash; a man of great stature, Edward W. Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. I also depended on eye-witness accounts from the Guardian's Justin Huggler and Phil Reeves, and Israeli observer Neta Golan in Palestine, including in Jenin, while the recent assault raged.

"The Israeli dream of expanding its territory": I'm rather surprised that anyone who has paid attention to Israel since its establishment in 1948 could express disbelief of this concept. The concept of Eretz Israel, Greater Israel, is part of the blood and bone of the nation, at the very core of its founding. Israel's founders considered the Land of Israel to stretch "from the Nile to the Euphrates", and while it varies from biblical reference to biblical reference, it basically includes Lebanon, the entire Arabian Peninsula, Jordan, most of Iraq, Syria and Egypt. The sentiment is held strongly to this day, both as a religious belief and an ideological one, and you will find routine references to "Greater Israel" in the Israeli dailies. Today it usually means an Israel that minimally includes the West Bank (known in Israel as Judea and Samaria) and Gaza. For fundamentalist Settlers, a far larger definition applies.

The "bloody invasion" plan was named "Fields of Thorns" by the Israeli military, prepared in 1996 and updated during Intifada II (see Amir Oren, Ha'aretz", 11/23/01 and Tanya Reinhart at znet.org 12/19/01). There are numerous references to these plans in many other articles about Palestine &endash; I offer but two.

"Did she really intend to support the 9-11 terrorists who she describes as 'men whose weapons were some rifles, some box cutters, and in some instances, "religious" beliefs that bore little relation to the religion to which they were attributed"? We doubt that the families and friends of the thousands of victims of 9-11 would buy that statement. Maybe she forgot about the fully fueled jet airliners that those men also used as weapons on that infamous day.

Nothing I said in the article or anywhere else can be interpreted as supporting those terrible acts. Talking about them does not imply support, and recognizing the disparity of power or the racist assumptions about Islam to which the American media subscribes do not imply support. But since you mention the families of 9-11 victims, are you aware that a very large contingent of them have marched against and acted to stop Bush's 'hysterical response' to 9-11 in which even more innocent women and children were targeted and killed?

"Characterizing Israel as the aggressor and oppressor of the Palestinian people is mean-spirited and flat-out wrong. The Palestinian people have been pawns in the hands of their own corrupt leadership as well as the Arab states that say they support them (and will financially back their terrorist activities), but in reality want nothing to do with them. Characterizing what Israel did (and needed to do) in Jenin as an 'intense military attack on a tiny town with hundreds, perhaps thousands dead and missing people' means to us that you bought the lies propagated by the articulate Palestinian Authority spokespersons. News groups and peace groups that have toured the carnage' have found no evidence of a massacre. Furthermore, aerial photographs of Jenin demonstrate that the area of destruction was in a small portion of the refugee camp (where the fighting was heaviest) and not in the village at all. If the Israel Defense Force wanted to devastate Jenin it could have done it from the air, just like the U.S. did in Afghanistan. But to spare civilian lives they went door to door, risking their own lives because the Palestinian fighters in Jenin had booby trapped many houses."

I did not use the term "massacre" in the article. It is clear that many civilians died in Jenin (and even Israeli army sources indicate at least half the people whose bodies were recovered were civilian), but whether a massacre occurred may never be known, thanks to the massive cover-up on the part of the Israeli government (Justin Huggler's "Once Upon a Time in Jenin", Independent, 25 April '02 and Uri Avnery's "Something Stinks" , www.zmag.org/znet.htm, April 22, '02, among many others). The government will not allow an investigation of the attack, or of the many credible charges that they removed or buried bodies. They will not even allow equipment in to help the Palestinians dig out bodies themselves &endash; shocking, in light of our understanding from 9-11 of how important it is for families to be able to do just that.

Ironically, your paragraph containing a defense of Israel's actions in Jenin is nearly verbatim what the IDF issued as part of a massive publicity campaign immediately following the attack on Jenin (and was picked up by the compliant American media and never questioned), when the government of Israel realized the effect the Jenin attack would have on world opinion. A "hasbara" or "propaganda" campaign was instituted immediately, in conjunction with the refusal by the military to allow any outside assistance in the way of food, water or medical assistance, for help in digging people out from the rubble before they died or to recover corpses, or to allow investigators to come in (again see Huggler and Avnery). One has to ask, what were they afraid of?

I quote Amira Hass in Ha'aretz, April 16, '02: "Last week, Israel spoke about moral and humanitarian steps taken in the war in the Jenin refugee camp, in order not to harm civilians. The proof: soldiers who fell in Jenin would not have fallen had the IDF dropped one or two bombs on the camp, and ended the story. This statement contains within it another assumption about the Palestinians: They aren't killed by ordinary missiles launched from helicopters, and ordinary tank shells, and ordinary shooting from submachine guns, and they aren't afraid of them. They are only killed by, and afraid of, bombs dropped from fighter planes, and the IDF didn't drop such bombs." More information about this campaign is also available from most European media.

But most disturbing is the inference that because the "area of destruction" might have been in the refugee camp and not in the village, it was somehow less of an atrocity. I find it difficult to understand how it matters whether civilians who were buried alive under bulldozed homes or shot when they attempted to get medical assistance were located in the center of a town or on the outskirts. War crimes are not defined by whether they were committed in a camp as opposed to a village, by their occurrence inside or outside the city limits!

Why doesn't Ms. Torres's article point out that former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, offered Palestinian Authority President, Yassir Arafat, 95% of all Mr. Arafat demanded to establish a Palestinian state during the Camp David negotiations mediated by former U.S. President, Bill Clinton, and was rejected? And why the rejection? Because the PA wants it all , not two states for two people side-by-side with peace and security for each one.

Again, your own source is apparently the Israeli government, as this is exactly the line they (and the parroting American media) have used to turn on its head the reality of that unacceptable "offer". It is important to examine the content of statements from any official source, particularly when, again and again, they fly in the face of logic. When I want to learn about the actions of the American military during the Vietnam war, the effects of sanctions on Iraq, or the American/British bombing of Afghanistan, the very last place I look for accurate information is the Pentagon or the State Department. Why would one take at face value the word of the Israeli government about their actions in the Occupied Territories?

Without even looking further than the "offer" itself, I suggest you check such sources as Robert Malley, a member of the Camp David American peace team writing in the New York Times July 8, 2001, "Fictions About the Failure at Camp David" or Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian 4/14/01, "The Real Deal". MacAskill points out "The Israelis portrayed it as the Palestinians receiving 96% of the West Bank. But the figure is misleading. The Israelis did not include parts of the West Bank they had already appropriated."

Israeli academic Tanya Reinhart wrote in July 2001 in Yedhiot Aharonot, "The only clear element of Barak's plan in Camp David was the immediate annexation by Israel of about 10 percent of the West Bank land. These include the settlement blocks which are close to the center of Israel and in which there are already over 150,000 Israeli settlers. But the bigger fraud of Barak's plan, which has not received any attention in the public debate, is the fate of the rest of the 90 percent which were supposedly designated to belong to the "Palestinian state". The situation in these areas is easily visible today: These lands are cut up by 37 isolated settlements which were purposely built in the midst of the Palestinian population to enable future Israeli control of these areas."

The 90 percent offer to Palestine was simply this: four parcels of non-contiguous land entirely surrounded and controlled by Israel, divested of prime agricultural real estate, diminished in water supply and with only limited control over its own water resources, surrounded by settlements with armed settlers and Israeli troops, totally sealed off from its current international borders, laden with toxic waste dumps, without Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory as required by international law, and the continued presence of fortified Israeli settlements and Jewish-only roads in the heart of the Palestinian state. Israel sought to annex almost 9% of the Occupied Territories in exchange for only 1% of Israeli territory, and it sought control over an additional 10% in the form of a "long-term lease". This was a re-packaging of, not an end to, military occupation. What national leader could have accepted that?

Tikkun editor Michael Lerner also acknowledges that the failure of Camp David II was unfairly blamed on the Palestinians, and calls for an end to the illegal Occupation as a first step to peace ( Tikkun May-June, 2002).

And Malley says "Many have come to believe that the Palestinians' rejection of the Camp David ideas exposed an underlying rejection of Israel's right to exist. But consider the facts: the Palestinians were arguing for the creation of a Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967 borders, living alongside Israel." Israel never reciprocated. Israel has never given the Palestinians what it has always insisted it receive from the Palestinians; acknowledgement of their right to exist, or their right to security in their own land. Yet Palestinians are responsible for Israeli security! In no other struggle has an occupied people been expected to guarantee the safety of its occupiers!

Because of the length to which this piece has grown, I will address just one last paragraph in your letter: "How many of Spokane's citizens would be content to have U.S. authorities turn the other cheek if it were our families and our friends being murdered at a Pizza Hut, Sunday Sabbath service, or a Thanksgiving dinner? We suspect that even the pacifists among us would be perturbed. Yet we expect Israel to 'show restraint'. It often seems that the world would prefer to attend our memorial services rather than support the existence of a Jewish state.

None of my critique of the situation in Israel/Palestine diminishes the pain of the victims of indiscriminate terror, whether that terror comes from an explosion in a restaurant, collapsing towers, or the barrel of a sniper's rifle; from a Palestinian fighter, al-Queda member, Israeli soldier or settler. And we must find a way to end that terror, for all people involved. Were it my family, I would hope I could respond as did so many of the 9-11 families, demanding justice and compassion in place of anger and vengeance.

Why have we allowed perception of the situation to be turned on its head? It is not Palestinians who refuse to contemplate a Jewish state, but rather Israel that refuses to contemplate a Palestinian state. The Palestinians, through their representatives, in their negotiations and in their own discussions with visiting internationals in Palestine, in documents, in publications and on the lecture circuit, have been calling for at least the past ten years for the establishment of a Palestinian state to live "side-by-side with Israel". That's as clear a recognition of the reality and permanence of Israel as you can ask for.

Yes, the onus at this point is exactly on Israel - what Israel must do is end the occupation, for it is illegal, and it is inhumane, and it is the source of the despair that leads to suicide bombings. Both sides must come to the table &endash; again. Both sides must forswear violence. Both sides. And I repeat the call for Two States, for two peoples, side-by-side, with secure and recognized pre-1967 borders.

I hope that you might consider responding, for it is through dialogue, through communication, through humanizing one another that we make the world a safer and more just place. And I would hope you would understand that my article expressed my own views of the situation &endash; not just of the Occupation, but of the unreliability of American media - not that of PJALS.

I enclose a copy of an article I wrote in 1987, about my "Rude Introduction to Palestine", when I was a staunch Zionist myself. I hope you find it worth reading.

Regards
Marianne Torres
Spokane WA 99216
mtorres@icehouse.net
(509) 891-8545

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