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TWO STATES FOR TWO PEOPLES - AGAIN
A Dream Beyond our Grasp?
by Marianne Torres
April 19, 2002
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PJALS has paid a price for their support for justice in Palestine. As one example, accompanying this article is my response to a letter received from two former members, who resigned in anger after PJALS published this article. The letter is partially reproduced with the response. |
The tragic situation in Palestine/Israel did not begin with suicide bombings. It did not begin with stone-throwing. We cannot return to where it began. We can only go to where it can end &endash; the pre-1967 borders between Israel and the Occupied Territories, once again called Palestine. For the only way either Israelis or Palestinians can live in peace and security is to agree that both peoples are in that land and will stay in that land, and to establish two states with security guarantees on both sides. Arab hopes of getting rid of Israel died long, long ago. The Israeli dream of expanding its territory, of fulfilling the biblical Eretz Israel - Greater Israel without Arabs - is still strong in the hearts of many Israelis, both religious and non-religious. That dream, too, must end.
A political solution holds the only hope for the beleaguered people of that region. But rather than seek a political solution - and the power to do that lies primarily in Israel's hands - Israel laid plans for a bloody invasion of the occupied territories last August, before 9/11, before suicide bombers. Those invasion plans were put on hold by the United States, at that time still nominally engaged in the so-called Middle East "peace process". After 9/11, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took full advantage of the Bush administration's hysterical response and its determination to begin a war not against oppression, but against the oppressed, and which Bush calls a "war on terror".
We know, of course, that it was never a "war", for the targets were a civilian population unrelated to the men who were named "the evil ones", the 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.
The Butcher of Beirut Returns
Turn back now to Palestine. Look now at the man leading a mad and bloody attack on yet another civilian population. Look now at a man who is nurturing the seeds of despair that he himself planted in Lebanon in 1982. Ariel Sharon, known as the Butcher of Beirut, has a new sobriquet &endash; he will be known forever as the Butcher of Jenin, a tiny town in the West Bank. 15,000 people in that town. Smaller than a neighborhood in Spokane, under intense military attack by one of the strongest and heavily-armed armies on earth, with hundreds, possibly thousands, dead and missing, no water, no food, ambulances not allowed to move, bodies left to rot in the rubble of bulldozed homes.
I won't horrify you with the awful details of Jenin, or the other towns suffering under the murderer Sharon's current onslaught, at least not the worst of them. You can read of them in nearly any non-American media, or on any of a number of independent web sites. Sadly, we will not get much detail from American newspapers, television or radio, and what detail we do get will be so skewed, so biased that we will waste not a moment of sympathy for the children who have been shot, whole families plowed under their bulldozed homes, old men run through the streets, hands above their heads and held outside all night and all day without food, water or clothing, hundreds of young men simply disappeared, children crying for water, women crying for medical help and mothers and fathers crying for their children, for you will know that somehow they brought this on themselves, are to blame for their own oppression. For this is the message of American media. We will be given few facts and little context, but plenty of opinion.
What We Won't Learn from American Media
We will not learn from the American media that the PLO conceded in 1988 the acceptability of the partition of historical Palestine into two states, or that this was reaffirmed by them again and again, including in the Oslo accords. But as Edward Said reminds us, only the Palestinians explicitly recognized the notion of partition. Israel never has.
We will not learn from the American media that this is a colonial war, or that Palestinians are expected to accept the presence of over 400,000 settlers in areas Israel occupied in 1967, or that these settlements were installed after confiscating Arab land without compensation in order to build what are now called "Jewish neighborhoods" but are in truth, by International Law, illegal invasions and theft of Palestinian land.
We will not learn from the American media of the years of relative "peace" between the signing of the disastrous Oslo agreement and the current Intifada, during which the Palestinians invested their hopes in the awful, self-serving and corrupt Yassir Arafat, while the Israelis continued to confiscate land, build illegal settlements, bulldoze Arab homes and orchards, close borders, and jail Palestinian activists.
We will not learn from the American media that when the Palestinians went to Madrid, Oslo, Camp David and Taba, they "extended the greatest concession ever voluntarily made by an indigenous people &endash; to relinquish 78 percent of their ancestral homeland so Jews around the world could fulfill their own dream of a homeland", (S. Bahour and M. Dahan, Providence Journal, 4/15/02) and received nothing in return except increased aggression.
We will not hear from the American media that the two sides are NOT now equivalent. One is occupied, the other occupies. One has carried out an official policy of assassination and invasion, while the Palestinian Authority, its infrastructure virtually destroyed, has never really been able to control the radicals and now has no means left to do this.
International Law is with Palestine
We will learn that as Richard Falk points out in "Ending the Death Dance", The Nation 4/29/02, ". . . on virtually every issue in contention, the Palestinians have international law on their side, including the Israeli duty to withdraw from land taken during a war, the illegality of the settlements under the Geneva Conventions, the right of refugees to a safe return to the country that wrongfully expelled them and the generalized support for a Jerusalem that belongs to everyone and no one."
Israel's friends and Palestine's friends must demand of America's Congress that the U.S. engage in honest, constructive dialogue, demanding an end to occupation as the premise upon which talks can begin, and following that demand with an end to aid to Israel until the withdrawal is complete. That is the ONLY tool that will produce an effective result. It is the exact opposite of the weak mewlings of the American administration as Colin Powell was sent on a leisurely stroll to an area on fire. Ariel Sharon knew that our Congress would not allow the issue of Aid to be raised as a stick to force Israeli withdrawal, or even to force an end to what were clearly massive war crimes and atrocities.
Israel's friends must ask Israel how its suicidal (and murderous) policies can possibly gain it peace, acceptance and security. As Americans, we must educate ourselves beyond mainstream media, and that specifically includes beyond NPR. I submit a short list of recommended Web sites and magazines that will provide a view of this tragic situation from the often invisible other side. Perhaps then we can shout with one voice, once again, "End the Occupation &endash; Two States for Two Peoples, Within Secure and Recognized pre-1967 Borders!"
See Countering an Angry Response
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