The Roots of Enmity

Prophecy of retribution
The 1907 writings of one traveller to Palestine vividly describe the roots of the region's enmity
David Goldberg
The Guardian
Thursday May 29 2008

The 60th anniversary of the state of Israel provoked a slew of media coverage, predominantly focused on the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict. As a consequence of the 1948 war of independence (for Arabs the nakba, or catastrophe), up to 750,000 Palestinians were dispossessed. Their continuing homelessness, so the standard version goes, has been the cause of all subsequent wars, Arab terrorism, Israeli incursions and civilian casualties.

That is grim enough, but unfortunately the root of the enmity goes back even further, to the first small-scale Zionist immigration to Palestine in the 1880s. The fact is that never in history has one people willingly invited another into its territory. The unresolved dilemma at the heart of Zionism has been how to respond to that unpalatable truth and reach an accommodation with the native Arab population.

While Jewish pioneers were few, it could be evaded. Writing in 1907, when there were about 10,000 settlers, Isaac Epstein, a Russian-born teacher who had come to Palestine in 1886, called attitudes towards the Arabs "the hidden question". He criticised the leaders of the Zionist movement who engaged in politics while ignoring that "there resides in our treasured land an entire people which has clung to it for hundreds of years ... The Arab, like all other men, is strongly attached to his homeland".

Epstein, like so many of his background, was a disciple of Achad Ha'am - "One of the People", the pen name of Asher Ginsberg - the intellectual doyen of Russian Jewry and mentor to a galaxy of talented younger admirers. He was, wrote the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, the star around which the lesser planets revolved. He was also the bitter rival and implacable critic of Theodor Herzl, the feted crowd-pleaser who announced after his starring role at the first Zionist Congress in 1897: "At Basel I founded the Jewish state." Ha'am noted, "At Basel I sat solitary among my friends, like a mourner at a wedding feast."

In 1891, Ha'am had made his first visit to the Jewish settlements in Palestine. It resulted in an important essay, The Truth from the Land of Israel. What distinguished his report from the gushing accounts of other Jewish visitors was the sober realism with which he noted the many problems. High among them was the existence of an indigenous population. "We tend to believe abroad that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, an uncultivated wilderness, and anyone can come there and buy as much land as his heart desires. But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab land which lies fallow."

Ha'am makes short work of the argument that lesser breeds can be duped about Zionist intentions and bought off with the benefits of colonialism. "The Arab, like all Semites, has a sharp mind and is full of cunning ... [They] understand very well what we want and what we do in the country, but ... at present they do not see any danger for themselves or their future in what we are doing and therefore are trying to turn to their advantage these new guests ... But when the day will come in which the life of our people in the Land of Israel will develop to such a degree that they will push aside the local population by little or by much, then it will not easily give up its place."

In contrast, Herzl has the Arab spokesman in his utopian novel Altneuland (Old-new land) proclaim that Jewish settlement had been a blessing. Landowners have gained from higher prices, peasants from regular employment and welfare benefits. "The Jews have made us prosperous, why should we be angry with them? They live with us as brothers, why should we not love them?"

Ha'am has no truck with such wishful thinking. The behaviour of settlers disturbed him. They had not learned from experience as a minority, but, like a slave who has become king, "behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, infringe upon their boundaries, hit them shamefully without reason, and even brag about it". The Arab did indeed respect strength, but only when the other side used it justly. When his opponent's actions were unjust and oppressive, then "he may keep his anger to himself for a time ... but in the long run he will prove to be vengeful and full of retribution". Prophetic words.

In 1913, after a correspondent had complained of the contemptuous attitude of settlers and the Zionist Organisation's Palestine Office, Ha'am wrote back, "When I realise that our brethren may be morally capable of treating another people in this fashion and of crudely abusing what is sacred to them, then I cannot but reflect: if such is the situation now, how shall we treat others if one day we actually become the rulers of Palestine?"

·Dr David J Goldberg is emeritus rabbi of The Liberal Jewish Synagogue, London



http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/29/israelandthepalestinians

A Short History of Israel in Palestine

60 Years of Apartheid
By SHARON SMITH

South Africa’s white minority government was finally overthrown in 1993, after decades of black popular and working-class resistance. That year, the black majority democratically elected the African National Congress--previously derided as a “terrorist” organization by apartheid’s imperial supporters, including the U.S.--to lead its government. Freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, having spent 27 years in a South African prison and reviled as an international terrorist, was reinvented in the Western press as an elder statesman.

Now the apartheid state of Israel fears it will meet the same fate from its own oppressed, and growing, Palestinian population. While Israel’s proponents continue to rhetorically claim that the Zionist state is the only bulwark against another Holocaust, its leaders also continue to openly express its true identification with South Africa’s racist regime. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert remarked recently in the New York Times, “We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us.” If international sanctions are imposed as they were against apartheid, “the state of Israel is finished.”

Indeed, stripped of rhetoric, the parallels are striking. The state of Israel was enshrined as a sovereign state in 1948, the same year the white supremacist National Party came to power in South Africa. Both the Zionism and apartheid had been decades in the making, with the backing of British imperialism. Both colonial projects were designed to violently disfranchise and subjugate the indigenous majority that occupied both countries.

Their methods, however, were different. While South Africa’s white supremacists imposed minority rule over its vast African population, Israel intended to distinguish itself as the only “democracy” in the Middle East. This was accomplished by driving out Palestine’s majority Arab population, thereby creating a Jewish majority. In 1947, Jews owned just 6 percent of Palestinian land and made up just one-third of its population. In 1948, the UN nevertheless relegated Jewish control over 55 percent of Palestinian land, overruling Palestinian demands for a democratic state. But this was not enough for the Zionist project.

Armed Zionist gangs, including the Irgun, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachin Begin, and the Stern Gang initially massacred 254 unarmed Palestinian men, women and children in the village of Dier Yassin. The terror spread to 40 other Palestinian villages as tens of thousands of Palestinians fled their homeland in desperation, with only their clothes on their backs. By 1949, Israel controlled 78 percent of Palestine and had driven approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. They have never been allowed to return.

Times have changed. The majority of Palestine’s Arab population is now hermetically sealed and relegated to sub-human status within Israel’s occupied post-1967 borders. But what Israel fears most is the imposition of one person/one vote—destroying any claim to the “democratic” model so carefully engineered to give Jews a majority—should those borders ever reopen. If Israel were to return to a democratic, secular state, Palestinians will soon outnumber Jews.

The parallels of these two racially segregated regimes remain stunning. When South African anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu visited the occupied territories in 2003, he described Palestinians’ existence "much like what happened to us black people in South Africa.”
----
Israel’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations were designed as a public relations exercise, intended to reinstate Israel’s victim status. But they failed miserably in this regard, starting with their keynote speakers. As George W. Bush’s approval ratings plummeted lower than any president since Gallup began polling 70 years ago—including those of Richard Nixon before his forced resignation—the idiot president traveled to the Israel to join in the pomp and circumstance. Bush knew that in Israel, if nowhere else, his presence would be greeted enthusiastically, for Israel’s colonial fate so closely overlaps with that of U.S. imperialism. On May 15th, Bush shared a Jerusalem stage with his scandal ridden Israeli counterpart, Olmert, in a bumbled effort to resurrect the moral authority of the increasingly discredited apartheid state of Israel.

The Israeli celebrations were marred by the tenacity of its occupied Palestinian population, who insisted on calling attention to their desperate existence at the receiving end of the Zionist project. Tens of thousands of Palestinians demonstrated in their largest numbers since the start of the second Intifada in 2000, inside and outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. As Bush spoke, he miraculously managed to ignore the plight of the Palestinian protesters assembled on the other side of the nearby separation wall, in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Indeed, as Israel celebrated, the Gaza Strip lay in darkness on Saturday, May 10th, with no fuel for its only power plant. Before Israel bombed this power plant two years ago, it was able to provide 100mW of electricity; today, it provides less than half that amount. Israel has exacerbated the shortage of electricity by withholding fuel allowed into Gaza.

Israel’s sweeping blockade of basic necessities has reduced Gaza’s population to a "subhuman existence," according to a senior UN official. The World Bank estimated that poverty rates in Gaza stood at 67 percent in April, with the UN suspending food aid for four days due to a lack of fuel for its delivery vehicles. By these means, Israel has reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza, according to a UN report, to just 61 percent of the average daily requirement. Lack of electricity has also drastically reduced drinkable water for the 70,000 Gazans who rely on wells using fuel pumps, while “60m liters of raw and partially treated sewage are being pumped straight into the sea every day,” according to the Guardian newspaper.

In the West Bank, where Palestinians are caged in by 8-meter high separation walls, pass laws, curfews and 600 separate military checkpoints prohibiting their ability to travel even within the Israeli-occupied territories, Jewish-only settlements and roads have expanded to control coveted water resources and dominate roughly 40 percent of the land within. B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the OPT stated recently, “the restrictions of movement that Israel has imposed on the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories over the past five years are unprecedented in the history of the Israeli occupation in their scope, durations and in the severity of damage that they have caused to the three and half million Palestinians who reside there.”

Between February 27th and March 3rd, Israeli troops murdered 106 Palestinians, including 54 civilian bystanders and 25 children. This year’s death toll on May 12th numbered at least 312 Palestinians--197 who were unarmed civilians and least 44 children, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

Israel has justified its ongoing blockade and daily assassinations of Gazans as a legitimate response to the “violent takeover” of Gaza by Hamas. But Palestinians democratically elected Hamas to a majority in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006, verified by international observers. The violence ensued only after both Israel and the U.S. refused to recognize the results of this democratic election. This uncomfortable fact negates Bush’s claim to be bringing “democracy” to the recalcitrant Arab populations of the Middle East, so he did not mention it in his extensive speeches to Israeli revelers during his visit.

On the contrary, Bush called Israel a homeland for God's "chosen people,” while claiming that European Jews arrived “here in the desert" in 1948, as if it had been an empty, unoccupied land. That same day, addressing the Israeli Knesset, Bush praised former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as “one of Israel’s greatest leaders” and “a man of peace.”

* * *
By referencing Sharon (one of Israel’s most blood-thirsty ethnic cleansers, lying blissfully in a persistent vegetative state since 2006), Bush unwittingly forced attention on Israel’s conscious identification with South African apartheid since the 1970s. Following South Africa’s example of moving its African population into segregated cantons without citizenship rights, Sharon infamously argued that “the Bantustan plan was the most suitable solution to [Israel’s] conflict,” as reported in Haaretz on June 18, 2007.

The Zionist regime was not deterred by the fact that apartheid leaders, including South African’s violent Prime Minister John Vorster, were open Nazi enablers during the Second World War—because a similar system of racial segregation also suited the Israeli state. Like South Africa’s apartheid regime, Israel sought to relegate its majority indigenous population to the status of non-citizen in their own homeland, through a combination of armed terror and racist segregation laws.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin welcomed Vorster at a state banquet in 1976, noting the two countries’ common fight against "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.” South Africa was more blatant in its government yearbook published a few months later, noting, "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."

As the Guardian reported in 2006, Alon Liel, former Israeli ambassador to South Africa described the relations between Israel and South Africa in 1976 as “a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.” He continued, "We created the South African arms industry. They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money.”

* * *

U.S taxpayer dollars have funded Israel's war on Palestine since its inception 60 years ago. Since 1948, Israel has remained the largest recipient of foreign aid, with more than $108 billion from the U.S. government. Over the last ten years, U.S. military aid reached $17 billion—including $2.4 billion this year alone—while Congress endorsed Israel's most recent assault on Gaza by a vote of 404-1.
It would be wrong, however, to conclude as many do, that the “Israeli lobby” guides U.S. Middle East policy. On the contrary, Israel’s most powerful lobby resides inside the Pentagon. The U.S. funds Israel for its own reasons in the Middle East, because it needs this well-armed and hostile combatant state, however unpredictable, that shares a similar interest in quelling Arab rebellions wherever they occur.
Indeed, Egypt is the second largest recipient of U.S foreign aid, receiving roughly $1.3 billion a year in military aid since 1979, and an average of $815 million a year in economic assistance. Egypt will receive 1.3 billion in military aid and $415 million in civilian aid this year. This is money well spent, as witnessed in January, when Palestinians swarmed the Rafah border into Egypt to buy basic necessities—and Egyptian riot police turned water cannons on the starving Palestinians. Despite the desperation of Gazans fleeing occupation, Egypt closed its border as soon as possible.

Yet the populations of neighboring Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan identify with the Palestinian struggle, even if their despotic leaders do not. Regional solidarity provides the eventual solution to the struggle for Palestine.

Israel’s greatest fear, that Palestinians will outnumber Jews despite their careful engineering, will soon become a demographic reality. As former Knesset member Yossi Sarid, noted recently, comparing Israel to South African apartheid, “One essential difference remains between South Africa and Israel: There a small minority dominated a large majority, and here we have almost a tie. But the tiebreaker is already darkening on the horizon… “[T]he Zionist project will come to an end if we don’t choose to leave the slave house before being visited by a fatal demographic plague.”
As in South Africa, Israeli apartheid can only survive for so long before it is overthrown from below. Indeed, if Israel’s current starvation tactic toward Palestinians, currently locked down in their future “Palestinian state,” is any indication the Camp David solution is dead. Only a genuine democracy encompassed by one–person/one-vote, that Israel so fears, points the way for the future—in a single, secular state in which all citizens are equal, without regard to race or religion.

Sharon Smith is the author of Women and Socialism and Subterranean Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States.

She can be reached at: sharon@internationalsocialist.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/sharon05222008.html

James Wall on Talking with the Enemy

Impressions (The Christian Century magazine)
May 20, 2008


Carter's Middle East mission


by James M. Wall

An editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz (April 15) sharply criticized Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert for Israel's "boycott" of Jimmy Carter during the former president's recent trip to the Middle East. Olmert refused to meet with Carter; Israeli security personnel were not available to assist Carter's Secret Service detail. Editors of Ha'aretz wrote, "The boycott will not be remembered as a glorious moment in this government's history."

From the moment he took office as president in 1977, Carter was determined to achieve peace between Israel and Egypt. Working "incessantly toward that goal," Carter concluded the 1979 peace agreement for which, Ha'aretz concludes, he deserves "the respect reserved for royalty for the rest of his life."

Such high praise rarely appears in U.S. media. Most Americans have forgotten, if they ever knew, that 30 years ago, in a peace agreement with Egypt, Israel agreed to full autonomy for the occupied territories, and also agreed not to permit Jewish settlements there. These promises have been forgotten by Israel, which continues to build and expand settlements in the West Bank.

But Carter hasn't forgotten, and his memory may be a factor in the hostility toward him—a man who remembers prods the conscience of those who want to forget.

Israel is deeply indebted to Carter for its peace accord with Egypt. Not only did the agreement remove a major threat to Israel's security, but it also started the flow of billions of U.S. tax dollars into the Israeli economy, a subsidy now militantly defended annually by Israel's supporters in the U.S. Congress.

But this is also the man who wrote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and whose references to apartheid and critical view of Israeli policies have outraged many. Reflecting on the controversy evoked by the book, the Ha'aretz editorial states:
Israel is not ready for such comparisons, even though the situation begs it. It is doubtful whether it is possible to complain when an outside observer, especially a former U.S. president who is well versed in international affairs, sees in the system of separate roads for Jews and Arabs, the lack of freedom of movement, Israel's control over Palestinian lands and their confiscation, and especially the continued settlement activity, which contravenes all promises Israel made and signed, a matter that cannot be accepted.

Jewish journalist Tony Karon, who lived with apartheid in South Africa before moving to New York, writes on his blog, Rootless Cosmopolitan, that Carter may have been "tempting fate" by meeting with Hamas. After all, says Karon,
his entirely appropriate evocation of apartheid in reference to the regime Israel has created on the West Bank earned him the label "Holocaust-denier" from the more demented end of the American Zionist spectrum. But Carter . . . [is] making the rather straightforward adult argument that has eluded so much of the U.S. political mainstream that the only way to achieve peace is to talk to all of those whose consent it requires.

Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar wrote in the Washington Post: "President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end."

In the same issue, however, the Post repudiated its guest columnist, saying that the article by al-Zahar "drips with hatred for Israel, and with praise for former president Jimmy Carter."

Carter maintains that Hamas is worthy to be included in peace talks not because its leaders are paragons of virtue, but for the obvious reason that there can be no peace between Israel and the Palestinians that does not include all of the involved political parties. It is that reality that led Ha'aretz to conclude that "Carter's method, which says that it is necessary to talk with every one, has still not proven to be any less successful than the method that calls for boycotts and air strikes. In terms of results, at the end of the day, Carter beats out any of those who ostracize him."

James M. Wall is senior contributing editor at the Century.

Christian Leaders' Declaration on the 60th Anniversary of Israel's Declaration of Independence

The Declaration
We, the undersigned, church leaders and representatives of our different denominations and organisations, join together on the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state to offer a contribution to that which makes for peace.

We recognise that today, millions of Israelis and Jews around the world will joyfully mark the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel (Yom Ha'atzmaut). For many, this landmark powerfully symbolises the Jewish people’s ability to defy the power of hatred so destructively embodied in the Nazi Holocaust. Additionally, it is an opportunity to celebrate the wealth of cultural, economic and scientific achievements of Israeli society, in all its vitality and diversity.

We also recognise that this same day, millions of Palestinians living inside Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the worldwide diaspora, will mourn 60 years since over 700,000 of them were uprooted from their homes and forbidden from returning, while more than 400 villages were destroyed (al-Nakba). For them, this day is not just about the remembrance of a past catastrophic dispossession, dispersal, and loss; it is also a reminder that their struggle for self-determination and restitution is ongoing.

To hold both of these responses together in balanced tension is not easy. But it is vital if a peaceful way forward is to be forged, and is central to the Biblical call to “seek peace and pursue it” (Ps. 34:14). We acknowledge with sorrow that for the last 60 years, while extending empathy and support to the Israeli narrative of independence and struggle, many of us in the church worldwide have denied the same solidarity to the Palestinians, deaf to their cries of pain and distress.

To acknowledge and respect these dual histories is not, by itself, sufficient, but does offer a paradigm for building a peaceful future. Many lives have been lost, and there has been much suffering. The weak are exploited by the strong, while fear and bitterness stunt the imagination and cripple the capacity for forgiveness.

We therefore urge all those working for peace and justice in Israel/Palestine to consider that any lasting solution must be built on the foundation of justice, which is rooted in the very character of God. After all, it is justice that “will produce lasting peace and security” (Isaiah 32:17). Let us commit ourselves in prophetic word and practical deed to a courageous settlement whose details will honour both peoples’ shared love for the land, and protect the individual and collective rights of Jews and Palestinians in the Holy Land.
“Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid” (Micah 4:4)


What they are saying...
“A just peace between Israelis and Palestinians is both vital and possible. So is global solidarity to that end. This declaration joins human and Christian compassion for two wounded people's with the political passion to see right prevail. It is timely and essential.” Simon Barrow, Co-director of Ekklesia

“The Lord our God has always valued love and justice more than land and prosperity. ‘But I will be merciful only if you stop your evil thoughts and deeds and start treating each other with justice; only if you stop exploiting foreigners, orphans, and widows…’ As His people, we must agree with Him and stand for justice for all in the Middle East.” Lynn Green, International Chairman of YWAM


“A necessary and timely reminder that for 60 years Israel's ‘celebration’ of statehood has come at a high price for millions of refugees and occupied residents of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel's ‘60th anniversary’ could become a moment for profound introspection and self-examination for a state that wishes to be known for democracy and justice in the Middle East. It is not without reason that Palestinians call 1948 – Israel’s birth – the ‘catastrophe.’” Gary Burge


Background to the Declaration
As Israel marks its 60th anniversary this May, for Israelis and Palestinians the conflict and the suffering continues. We believe that this landmark is an important opportunity for Christian leaders around the world to add their voices to a special call for a justice-based peace.

The statement acknowledges the pain of both peoples – and the rights of both peoples to security and dignity. Grounded in biblical truth and supported by pastors, professors, heads of organizations and editors across denominational, national and political lines, this historic statement will be a prophetic cry and a powerful witness.

On May 8, Israeli Independence Day, the joint statement and a full list of signatories will be published on this blog and sent to the national press in the US and UK. To add your name to the list of signatories, or to get a copy of the statement as a Word document, email Philip or Ben at the address below.

Spread the word - the more people who get behind this call for justice and peace, the more powerful an impact it will be able to make.

Blessings and peace.

Ben White & Philip Rizk, 18 March 2008
www.justpeace60@gmail.com

Jimmy Carter Speaks Out

A human rights crime
The world must stop standing idle while the people of Gaza are treated with such cruelty
Jimmy Carter
The Guardian
Thursday May 8 2008

The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world. An entire population is being brutally punished.

This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.

Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who lived in the West Bank have been imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional 10 who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.

Regardless of one's choice in the partisan struggle between Fatah and Hamas within occupied Palestine, we must remember that economic sanctions and restrictions on the supply of water, food, electricity and fuel are causing extreme hardship among the innocent people in Gaza, about one million of whom are refugees.

Israeli bombs and missiles periodically strike the area, causing high casualties among both militants and innocent women and children. Prior to the highly publicised killing of a woman and her four children last week, this pattern had been illustrated by a report from B'Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organisation, which stated that 106 Palestinians were killed between February 27 and March 3. Fifty-four of them were civilians, and 25 were under 18 years of age.

On a recent trip through the Middle East, I attempted to gain a better understanding of the crisis. One of my visits was to Sderot, a community of about 20,000 in southern Israel that is frequently struck by rockets fired from nearby Gaza. I condemned these attacks as abominable acts of terrorism, since most of the 13 victims during the past seven years have been non-combatants.

Subsequently, I met with leaders of Hamas - a delegation from Gaza and the top officials in Damascus. I made the same condemnation to them, and urged that they declare a unilateral ceasefire or orchestrate with Israel a mutual agreement to terminate all military action in and around Gaza for an extended period.

They responded that such action by them in the past had not been reciprocated, and they reminded me that Hamas had previously insisted on a ceasefire throughout Palestine, including Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel had refused. Hamas then made a public proposal of a mutual ceasefire restricted to Gaza, which the Israelis also rejected.

There are fervent arguments heard on both sides concerning blame for a lack of peace in the Holy Land. Israel has occupied and colonised the Palestinian West Bank, which is approximately a quarter the size of the nation of Israel as recognised by the international community. Some Israeli religious factions claim a right to the land on both sides of the Jordan river, others that their 205 settlements of some 500,000 people are necessary for "security".

All Arab nations have agreed to recognise Israel fully if it will comply with key United Nations resolutions. Hamas has agreed to accept any negotiated peace settlement between the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, provided it is approved in a referendum of the Palestinian people.

This holds promise of progress, but despite the brief fanfare and positive statements at the peace conference last November in Annapolis, the process has gone backwards. Nine thousand new Israeli housing units have been announced in Palestine; the number of roadblocks within the West Bank has increased; and the stranglehold on Gaza has been tightened.

It is one thing for other leaders to defer to the US in the crucial peace negotiations, but the world must not stand idle while innocent people are treated cruelly. It is time for strong voices in Europe, the US, Israel and elsewhere to speak out and condemn the human rights tragedy that has befallen the Palestinian people.

· Jimmy Carter, a former president of the United States, is founder of The Carter Center project-syndicate.org

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/08/israelandthepalestinians

Behind the Violence, the "Real" History

One home, two histories
The past of one property in Jerusalem symbolises today's divisions between Palestinians and Israelis
Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
The Guardian
Tuesday May 6 2008

The two-storey house is built from hefty blocks of golden stone. Tall palm trees tower over the front garden, giving shade from the burning summer sun. There is a green, metal double gate, guarded on each side by stone pillars adorned with handsome metal lanterns. It is known as the Hallak house and it sits in a smart district of west Jerusalem known as Talbieh.

This is a house of competing histories: a story of flight and dispossession and a story of immigration and achievement; the unresolved tragedy of the Palestinian refugee crisis and the remarkable rise of the Israeli state built on the ruins of the second world war.

On Thursday, Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary with speeches, military parades, exhibitions and sports competitions. The true story of the rival legacies of what happened in 1948 lies in the history of buildings such as the Hallak house and in the lives of people such as Wilhelmine Baramki and Reuven Tsur, a Palestinian and an Israeli, born within two years of each other, whose families have both called this house their home.

In 1948, Baramki was 13 years old, a child in a respectable Christian Palestinian family from Jerusalem. In the early 1930s the family built the house, and named it after her grandfather Hanna Hallak. As today, it was divided into apartments. Her grandparents lived downstairs to the right and at least three uncles and two aunts lived in the other apartments. Other rooms were rented out to tenants.

Baramki, now 73, lived with her parents a few minutes away in another Christian Palestinian district of the city, Baqa, but she has memories of summers spent idly with her grandmother Farideh and her uncles and aunts in Hallak house.

"There were fruit trees, a nice apple tree. There was a swing where we used to play. There was an open veranda where we used to sit with all flowers around," she said. "Those memories were something for us. On Palm Sunday they used to pick all the nice flowers they had to make our palms. We used to love going there."

Then came the brewing conflict in the months after the UN's failed attempt to partition British Mandate Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. One spring day, Jewish officials drove through Talbieh with a loudspeaker instructing the Palestinians to leave their homes immediately - there had been a shooting nearby.
Baramki's widowed grandmother and her uncles and aunts grabbed a bag and left quickly, seeking refuge in the family's other home in Baqa. They briefly returned but the shootings and bombings continued. Once they were shot at on a bus.

"Every night there were bombings, every day it was almost the same. My father told my mother: 'We can't keep going. We'll be shot one day,'" she said. They left to stay with another aunt who lived in the Old City, in east Jerusalem. "Just for a few days we thought."

The war raged on and eventually they took refuge from the fighting by crossing into Lebanon. Before they left, her mother went back to the house in Baqa and with a maid she washed and ironed the laundry and tidied it away for their return. They locked the doors, carefully marking which key fitted which lock. It was the last time the family houses were theirs.

In Lebanon they rented a house in the mountains and as the war escalated, weeks turned into months. A year and a half later they finally returned to Jerusalem, at least to the Jordanian-held east of the city. The west, including both Talbieh and Baqa, was cut off by a ceasefire line and was in the hands of the nascent Israeli state.

They were forbidden to enter. The Israeli state deemed them "absentee" property owners and their houses, like the houses of nearly all the other 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced out in 1948, were given to Jewish Israeli families, often to newly arrived immigrants, survivors of the horror of the camps in Europe.

And so it remained until 1967. On June 4 that year, Wilhelmine Khoury, as she was then, married another Christian Palestinian, George Baramki, the son of a well-known architect who had also lost properties and land in Jerusalem, Jaffa and elsewhere in 1948.

The following morning, June 5, the couple were sitting aboard a plane on the runway at Amman airport in Jordan waiting to head off on honeymoon. They chose a bad day. Before dawn Israel's air force launched a devastating pre-emptive strike on Egypt, the start of the Six Day War that was to reshape the Middle East. The pilot ordered the passengers off the plane and out of the airport and the Baramkis left their luggage and raced home.

Despite the fighting, they stayed on in east Jerusalem desperate not to lose another property to another war. Israel was quickly victorious, fatefully beginning the occupation that continues today of Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. In Jerusalem, Israel seized and later annexed the east.

That meant two things to the Baramkis: they could now, for the first time, go back to visit their family homes from 1948, including Hallak house. It also left them refugees in their own city, for they had no right to claim back what was lost. "We always had hope, but nothing doing," she said. "Now we are present-absent. We are present here to pay taxes and everything, but absent to get back our property. This is the rule that they have," she said.

They still occasionally drive over to the west and look at their former homes. "It was difficult the first time," said Wilhelmine. "Then you get used to it. But it doesn't mean we have forgotten our claim to our houses and our land, too."

Ghetto
The second half of the story of the house began 75 years ago and 1,200 miles away. Reuven Tsur grew up in a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family in what was then Transylvania and is today the Romanian city of Oradea. During the war, the family managed to escape the ghetto into which they had been corralled and they fled eventually to Budapest after his father, a prominent and successful baker, had survived 16 months in one labour camp and a brief arrest by the Gestapo.

His parents had for years been planning to emigrate, with their hearts set on Australia. Eventually, and in large part down to the cajoling of their son Reuven, they flew to Haifa, new immigrants to a new Israel.

"We saw Haifa at night. We saw the lights," said Tsur. "We were driving through the empty streets of Haifa and my father saw the signs on the closed shops and the signs were in Hebrew. For my father Hebrew was associated with the synagogue and he told my mother: 'Look how many synagogues.'"

The family were taken to a camp for newly arrived immigrants and soon Tsur, who was just 16, was sent to a kibbutz, an ambition he'd harboured for years.

His father set up a bakery and Tsur went to study English and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He became a teacher in the city and eventually a professor of Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University, where he was a leader in the field of cognitive poetics.

In 1957 he married Ilana, who was born near Tel Aviv. The couple began to look for a house, somewhere with large rooms where Ilana could run her physical education classes. One day an agent showed them a small apartment on the ground floor of a large and impressive Arab house in a street now called Hovevei Zion (the Lovers of Zion). It was the Hallak house.

"I only saw the palm trees from the outside and I said: 'This must be a mistake. It couldn't be that beautiful,'" said Tsur. "It was empty and nobody wanted it."

They got a good deal, buying the apartment for 12,000 Israeli lirot, worth the approximate equivalent of £25,000 today, from two Jewish landlords. The three-room apartment they had bought was part of the larger flat in which Baramki's grandparents had been living a decade earlier.

The Tsurs admit that they didn't think of its former occupants. Their neighbours were other Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Arab world who had poured into the new, fast-growing state of Israel. The Palestinians were long gone.

Then came the 1967 war, and Israel's capture of east Jerusalem. "Sure enough after a few weeks comes a very prominent gentlemen wearing an English suit and he said: 'OK, my parents lived here and I would like to see the apartment,'" said Ilana. The gentleman was almost certainly Wilhelmine's late uncle, Victor Khoury. Ilana showed him around, answering his questions about how much they had paid for the flat and what had happened to the grapefruit tree in the back garden.

"Emotionally I felt awkward. I had no time, I was working at that moment and I couldn't say I was very nice," she said. After the visit, she had the front door lock changed but she has to this day kept the original key still attached to her key ring. There were more visits from the Khoury family in the months and years ahead, all well-mannered and the two families, Israeli and Palestinian, sat and drank tea in the house they both called home.

When the Baramkis and the Tsurs talk of the future they share a striking pessimism about the prospects of peace. The Tsurs argue, like many Israelis, that the Palestinians would not stick to any peace agreement that is made. The Baramkis argue, like many Palestinians, that Israel is more interested in colonising the land with settlements than in striking a genuine peace deal.

The Tsurs say they would give up their apartment in Hallak house if it truly meant peace would come and if they were given a comparable apartment in return, an offer rarely heard in today's Israel and perhaps shaped by their own so far fruitless attempts to claim compensation from the Romanian government for Tsur's family house in Oradea, which was confiscated by the Communist regime. They strongly believe that financial compensation alone is enough and that allowing the Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948 to reclaim them is unacceptable.

"There seems to be a big difference between them and us because we don't want to go back and we don't want to have anything of it," said Reuven. "We want to disconnect and they don't want to disconnect."

And on the other side of the city, the feeling is completely the reverse. "It's our land," said Wilhelmine. "We have a right to come back to our home."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/06/israelandthepalestinians2

An Accurate Overview and Bracing Challenge

Rosner's Guest: Ziad Asali
By Shmuel Rosner
In Haaretz (Israel), Interview
May 2, 2008
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/rosnerGuest.jhtml?itemNo=978686

Ziad J. Asali, M.D., is the president and founder of the American Task Force on Palestine, a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in Washington, D.C.

Asali is a long-time activist on Middle East issues. He has been a member of the Chairman's Council of American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) since 1982, and has served as ADC's president from 2001-2003. He served as president of the Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG) from 1993-1995, and was Chairman of the American Committee on Jerusalem (ACJ), which he co-founded, from 1995-2003.

Dr. Asali was born in Jerusalem, where he completed his elementary and secondary education. He received an M.D. from the American University of Beirut (AUB) Medical School in 1967. He completed his residency in Salt Lake City, Utah, and then practiced medicine in Jerusalem before returning to the US in 1973. (More bio here).
We will discuss the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Readers may submit questions to rosnersdomain@haaretz.co.il.

Dear Ziad,
In a couple of days Israel will celebrate its 60th Independence, and this is an opportunity for me to ask not a specific question, but for a more general expression of your thoughts at this time. What would you say to the celebrating Israelis had you have a chance to speak to them as a group?
Thank you for this dialogue,

Shmuel

Peace is not easy. Achieving it requires summoning the deepest forms of courage. It means examining one's darkest prejudices that dehumanize and demonize the other. The quest for mutual recognition of humanity and dignity is an arduous task.

The question facing both Israelis and Palestinians is, do they prefer to cling to the pain of past injuries and the suffering of their forefathers, or will they determine to move forward and build a better future for their children?

While there have been all too many shrill voices lamenting the grievances of decades and centuries between Israel and the Palestinians, there is a harmony that strums through us all. When we fight for peace, we fight not against each other, but together and for all of us. This means accepting that there are like-minded people on the other side, and identifying, making common cause, and building peace with them.

Israelis and Palestinians live in the same land with divergent national narratives, and both want and need sovereignty and self-determination. The only means to reach a reasonable accommodation is to have two states, Israel and Palestine, living side-by-side in peace. No other solution has any serious prospect of ending the conflict and creating a modus vivendi between the parties. The two-state solution for all its faults is the only way out of the cycle of violence and hatred that has plagued Israel and the Palestinians since 1948.

This idea enjoys the support of solid majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians, and of the international community. In many ways we have never been closer to realizing this all-important goal. And yet, as I write, the only realistic hope for the future is in serious jeopardy due to the actions of extremists, driven by nationalist fantasies or religious zealotry, among both Israelis and Palestinians.

Extremists on both sides feel that time is on their side. Some Israelis delude themselves that Palestinians over time will become exhausted or new generations will forget their national identity. They believe they will win complete control of the entire area between the river and the sea. Meanwhile, some radical Palestinians are under the illusion that Israel is an artificial foreign imposition akin to the Crusader states that cannot last and will eventually collapse. They too believe that time is their greatest weapon, and that the best strategy therefore is to never compromise.

We cannot afford to sacrifice generation upon generation in order to test the validity of these competing metaphysical visions and certainties about the trajectory of history.
These dangerous delusions are most damagingly expressed in the expansion of Israeli settlements and by the use of terror by Palestinian extremist groups. Settlements threaten a peace based on two states by strengthening rather than loosening Israel's grip on the occupied territories and greatly complicating the process of creating a Palestinian state. They also profoundly erode Palestinian confidence that Israel is interested in allowing a viable, contiguous state of Palestine to be born. Similarly, the use of terror by Palestinian extremist groups makes Israelis question whether Palestinians would ever accept Israel and agree to live with it in peace and security.

It is up to both peoples to decide whether they will allow themselves to be driven by extremist agendas, or to pursue what is plainly in their national interests. Their past trespasses against each other, both real and imagined, have to give way to the recognition that Israelis and Palestinians clearly now need exactly the same thing: an end of conflict based on two states.

I do not believe that the conflict should be seen any longer as pitting Israelis against Palestinians, but must be re-conceptualized as a struggle between those who are committed to ending the conflict based on two states against those on both sides who persist in clinging to hostility. Those who are prepared to recognize each other's dignity and self determination in two sovereign states share a common purpose, and have more in common with each other than with their compatriots who are bent on conflict for generations to come.

At 60, Israel is a technologically and politically sophisticated state with a diverse population and a vibrant economy. Israelis deserve a peaceful country with security and economic progress. Palestinians deserve no less.

Entered by "Friends of Palestinians and Israelis"