An accusation with no substance

[Lestat]

Jane...take note!
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An accusation with no substance
Ghassan Khatib
Published December 1, 2004

-- The issue of incitement returned to the debate recently when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon downgraded Israeli conditions for resuming negotiations from stopping Palestinian attacks on Israelis to stopping Palestinian incitement.
This was not perceived as a dramatic development nor did it attract much attention from either the Israeli or the Palestinian media, both of whom seem to be judging Sharon on what he does rather than what he says, due to the rather large gap between the two. But it is also because incitement is an accusation leveled at the Palestinian Authority that has no substance.
The Palestinian public does not need incitement from the Palestinian Authority, media or school curricula. The reality we live - whether we choose to focus on the extensive killing especially of civilians, our increasing poverty or the daily humiliations we are exposed to - are causing enough hostility, anger and desire for revenge among Palestinians whatever words may be bandied about.
In fact, Palestinians living under a direct, foreign and belligerent military occupation feel it is a duty, indeed an honor, to fight for their liberty and independence. This is a well-trodden path that all peoples before them who have lost their freedom have pursued.
Nor do Palestinians feel that this hostility toward the Israeli occupation is in any way wrong. There is a clearly-stated objective to their struggle, an objective based on international legality: recognizing Israel within its legal borders and demanding an end to the illegal occupation.
It is also worth mentioning that much of the noise made on the issue of incitement has already proven to be pure propaganda lacking any basis in fact. One example is the vicious and unjustified campaign by Israel and friends of Israel in the United States and Europe that the Palestinian school curriculum is full of incitement against Israel. In fact, the curriculum contains no kind of incitement against Israel or the Jewish people. It is, in fact, so passive and neutral on the issue that it is not acceptable to many Palestinians.
It is true that in geography classes the Palestinian books do not show a map of Israel. Palestinian educators, however, have promised all and sundry that on the day Israel, in its school textbooks, includes a map of the Palestinian state, they will start showing a map of Israel to their students. Their position is straightforward: the two states, Israel and Palestine, are two faces of the same coin and the recognition of Israel and acceptance of Israel is tied to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel.
Every time the issue of incitement is raised Palestinians have extended an invitation to any neutral specialized agency to thoroughly and systematically investigate the way the official media and educational systems of Israel and Palestine portray the other. I fully expect the Palestinian side will be willing to look seriously into any changes suggested by such a commission provided the other side shows a reciprocal attitude. Until then, and as long as there is an oppressive occupation and the Palestinian people are denied their basic rights of freedom, independence and self-determination, people will inevitably do what they can to end this occupation.

Ghassan Khatib is minister of labor in the Palestinian Authority cabinet and has served for many years as a political analyst and media contact. Acknowledgement to Media Monitors Network

http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20041202-122125-5603r

 

[Lestat]

And in the name of balance, here is the Israeli POV.

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A matter of proportion
Yossi Alpher
Published December 1, 2004

-- Incitement against Israel and Jews in the Palestinian media and educational system is one of a number of serious issues that divide the two sides and fuel hostility. The critical question is, how much weight should be assigned to incitement in Israeli policymaking.
Does it make sense, for example, for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to declare that the renewal of a political process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is no longer dependent on an end to violence, but rather on an end to Palestinian incitement? Is it then any more logical for Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala) to declare that first Israel has to stop its own incitement?
In the course of some 10 years since the Palestinian Authority was founded, committees have been established and studies commissioned to look into the issue of incitement. The PA has introduced new textbooks that contain less incitement toward Israel than their Egyptian and Jordanian predecessors. Controversies have blossomed over the meaning of jihad as a Palestinian educational value and the absence of Israel on maps in Palestinian geography textbooks. Palestinian official media have carried programs that appear to condone or encourage suicide bombings.
No doubt, Palestinians have indeed incited viciously against Israelis. But before we in Israel turn Palestinian incitement into a casus belli, we need to search our own public space, along with the history of our attempts at peacemaking with our other Arab neighbors, in an effort to establish a measure of proportionality. The paradoxes and contradictions are disturbing.
First of all, against the backdrop of Sharon's disengagement plan, there is currently no lack of incitement in our own society. Settler rabbis who receive government salaries make hateful proclamations and encourage violence against Arabs and Jews alike. To the chagrin of many Israelis, our legal establishment tells us that these hate-mongers generally enjoy the protection of Israel's freedom of speech laws. How, then, can we criticize the Palestinians at one and the same time for not developing a democracy and for condoning incitement?
Palestinians also point to Israeli settlement expansion and military actions that kill and maim noncombatants as the equivalent of incitement - or worse. In other words, they refuse to isolate incitement from the rest of the conflict. They note that it is virtually impossible to find the borders of the Palestinian Authority, not to mention the green line, in official Israeli publications. Just look at the weather maps on Israeli television and in our most serious newspapers to see how easily and hurtfully we make the Palestinian Authority disappear from our daily routines.
Turning to our other neighbors, the scope and depth of incitement in Egyptian and Jordanian textbooks and media is worse than in Palestine. Yet we negotiated peace treaties with these countries without demanding that they address these issues, and since then we suffice with ritual protests by Israeli diplomats and American Jewish organizations.
Syrian incitement is the worst. Yet Sharon doesn't mention incitement when he lays out the conditions that must be satisfied in order for Israel to agree to renew peace negotiations with Syria. Instead he demands that Syria dismantle the terrorist infrastructure (Hizbullah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad) under its auspices. Then he turns and presents conditions for renewing a peace process with the Palestinians that are the complete antithesis: we'll ignore your terrorist infrastructure for the moment, but stop the incitement!
We have every right - indeed, an obligation - to make an issue of Palestinian incitement. But where is the broader context? In looking at Egypt and Jordan we recognize that anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement will continue to fester among our neighbors long after peace, because it reflects both the way their societies see us and the standards of civility they apply to themselves. Yet this is not a reason to avoid or postpone making peace.
On the contrary, in the long term it is precisely in order to reduce this incitement that we must strive for peace with our neighbors, especially the Palestinians.

Yossi Alpher is a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and a former senior advisor to prime minister Barak. Acknowledgement to Media Monitors Network. {/italics}

http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20041202-121820-1330r

 

[Lestat]

Another good article I stumbled across.

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Palestinians' final choice
Youssef M. Ibrahim
Published December 1, 2004

DUBAI -- The late president of Egypt, Anwar Al Sadat, used to say Arabs were always willing to fight Israel until the last Egyptian. That is why, at some point in the 1980s, he disconnected from the Arab world, signing a peace treaty with Israel that returned every inch of Israeli-occupied Sinai.
For that it was worth being shunned by the Arabs for a while.
The same goes for Palestinians who most Arabs are willing to sacrifice to the last person as they shout at Israel across barbed wires.
Unfortunately, unlike the Egyptians, the Palestinians' choice is nowhere near as good, and getting worse, which is more reason why they can do without Arab opinions.
They have already lost 80 percent of historical Palestine. What they are now negotiating for is what is left of the remaining 20.
The talks are suffused with obstacles. Israeli colonists are sitting on illegal Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land. They are backed by a right-wing militant Israeli Likud government, which believes none of this land belongs to Palestinians anyway. An American government is in collusion with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who the state of Israel, to its credit, condemned after an official investigation. The Kahane Report found Sharon of being "indirectly responsible" for the massacre of several hundred women, children and men in Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon, Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
So, for the Palestinians, the Arab proverb applies: Those whose hands are in fire are not as those whose hands are in water.
Palestinians know all too well that the Americans, just as the Arabs, are more than willing to please Israel until the last Palestinian man, woman or child expires, and, alas, that Arabs are more than happy to shout at Israel across the fence until then.
So, as the torrent of "advice" being heaped upon the Palestinians gathers pace, please note the following: Unless you have been in Gaza in the past decade or two and have seen the living conditions of the Palestinians, you really have no grounds to tell Palestinians what to do.
See how the Palestinians live in tin-roofed ramshackle houses in which 10, 15 or even 20 Palestinian children, women and men have to live. Smell the foul odor of the sewers flooding the streets of most Palestinian refugee camps.
Witness the daily funerals as young people, infants and old men and women are buried with mutilated bodies after being hit by Israeli military munitions. Only then will you know the suffering of the Palestinians.
You would not know what the Palestinians are going through unless you have moved from city to city and sometimes from country to country as a homeless person.
Just think what it would be like to leave your home not once but twice, since the creation of Israel in 1948.
Imagine fleeing from home to escape the Israeli army soldiers, leaving behind homes, orchards, cemeteries and prized possessions and grabbing a suitcase or two of what is left.
Think of seeing with your own eyes how Israeli bulldozers flatten your home or your tent as Israelis pursue their calculated ethnic-cleansing strategies?
Is your West Bank stone house now lived in by a Jew from Brooklyn, New York, Johannesburg, Moscow or Kiev?
Unless your brother, father, cousin, daughter or wife has been taken in the middle of the night to an unknown jail without legal appeal or recourse, to be tortured under the protection of Israel's so-called supreme court's legal cover, it is better to be quiet.
Unless you are one of more than 1 million Palestinians living on $1.50 a day, keep your advice to yourself, especially as you walk into that fast-food outfit to buy your children sandwiches for what an entire Palestinian family lives on for a week.
Unless you are a Palestinian worker who has had to endure the pain and humiliation of building a Jewish colony for your enemies on your own land so as to earn enough money to put some food on your children's table, keep quiet.
Have you felt the pain of the pregnant woman or an old man, waiting with their head bowed at one of the 750 Israeli army checkpoints set up in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of Jordan as some foolish, arrogant and racist 19-year-old Israeli soldier decides whether he or she can get medical help?
Think again, before you decide to tell Palestinians what they should do.

Youssef M. Ibrahim is managing director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group. Acknowledgement to Gulf News

http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20041202-112744-8112r

 

[Qsaint]

Instead of posting this in a new thread, I will post it here. The interesting things for both sides, is that for any lasting peace clearly they will have to be an increase in 'humanising' the other side.


Israel shocked by image of soldiers forcing violinist to play at roadblock

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Monday November 29, 2004
The Guardian

Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin.
The incident was not as shocking as the recording of an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old.

Nor was it as nauseating as the pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man's head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth.

But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians.

The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to "play something sad" while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass.

It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint.

But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs.

The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. "What about Majdanek?" he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.

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The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem.

Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial "not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust".

"Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust," he wrote.

"If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps."

Others took a broader view by drawing a link between the routine dehumanising treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the desecration of dead bodies and what looks very much like the murder of a terrified 13-year-old Palestinian girl by an army officer in Gaza.

Israelis put great store in a belief that their army is "the most moral in the world" because it says it adheres to a code of "the purity of arms". There is rarely much public questioning of the army's routine explanation that Palestinian civilians who have been killed had been "caught in crossfire", or that children are shot because they are used as cover by fighters.

But the public's confidence has been shaken by the revelations of the past week. The audio recording of the shooting of the 13-year-old, Iman al-Hams, prompted much soul searching, although the revulsion appears to be as much at the Israeli officer firing a stream of bullets into her lifeless body as the killing itself. Some soldiers told Israeli papers that their mothers had sought assurances that they did not do that kind of thing.

One Israeli peace group, the Arik Institute, took out large newspaper adverts to plead for "Jewish patriots" to "open your eyes and look around" at the suffering of Palestinians.

The incidents prompted the army to call in all commanders from the rank of lieutenant-colonel to emphasise the importance of maintaining the "purity of arms" code.

The army's critics say the real problem is not the behaviour of soldiers on the ground but the climate of impunity that emanates from the top.

While the officer responsible for killing Iman al-Hams has been charged with relatively minor offences, and the soldiers who forced the violinist to play were ticked off for being "insensitive", the only troops who were swiftly punished for violating regulations last week were some who posed naked in the snow for a photograph. They were dismissed from their unit.

Last week the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem criticised what it described as a "culture of impunity" within the army. The group says at least 1,656 Palestinian non-combatants have been killed during the intifada, including 529 children.

"To date, one soldier has been convicted of causing the death of a Palestinian," it said.

"The combination of rules of engagement that encourage a trigger-happy attitude among soldiers together with the climate of impunity results in a clear and very troubling message about the value the Israeli military places on Palestinian life."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1361755,00.html