[Note by Tom Gross]
In an extremely rare admission, a Saudi columnist not only says Palestinian Authority officials are liars, but writes that "The [guiding] principle [among journalists in the Arab world] is not to treat the public with candor and transparency, but to conceal information [from it]."
Saudi writer: PA no longer credible
Palestinian Authority 'bestowed upon us lies'
WorldNetDaily.com
February 26, 2002
www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26602
A columnist for the London-based Saudi daily newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat has apologized to his readers for reporting the Palestinian Authority's version of the Karine A weapons ship affair.
Columnist Ahmad Al-Rab'i called on his readers not to believe the Palestinian Authority's declarations any longer.
In early January, Israeli commandos seized a 4,000-ton Palestinian arms freighter, the Karine A, in the Red Sea. More than 50 tons of weapons in 83 crates turned up long-and short-range Katyusha rockets, with a maximum 20-km range, anti-tank Lao and Sagger missiles, 120-mm mortars and an abundance of heavy machine guns, rifles, mines, explosives and ammunition. Most of the hardware originated in Iran.
Here, as translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, are excerpts of Al-Rab'i's column:
"When Israel announced that it had seized the [Karine A] weapons ship, I doubted the Israeli account and espoused the PA's claim – that the whole thing was a fabrication. I did this out of a sense of obligation to support our Palestinian brothers, and out of trust in the veracity of their account. But it seems that the [Palestinian] leadership deceived us with its account, and we, in turn, unintentionally deceived our readers.
"I remember when my colleague Abd al Rahman Al-Rashed, editor [of Al-Sharq Al-Awsat] criticized the Palestinian version [of the incident]. All the conspiracy theory 'bulldozers' rose up against him; they charged him with 'serving' the enemy …
"Now, not only is Arafat confessing to the [Israeli] account, but he goes further still, and has sent [a letter] to the American secretary of state [from] which it can be interpreted that he takes responsibility for this incident.
"Therefore, I take responsibility before my readers; I and my readers were victims of our obligation to and trust in the Palestinian leadership. I assure the readers that since Arafat has confessed his responsibility to Colin Powell, I will no longer take the Palestinian leadership's declarations seriously.
"A journalist in our Arab world is confused, [caught] between his respect for himself and his readers and the Arab attitude towards the news. Fearing that he will be denied, the journalist misses the opportunity to analyze important news. If he writes about it [anyway], he … is stricken with anxiety, lest his commentary be published in the same issue that carries the denial of what he reports.
"The [guiding] principle [in the Arab world] is not to treat the public with candor and transparency, but to conceal information [from it], such that if [the news] is picked up by the foreign press, we can deny it. Sometimes we are forced to confirm an item after we have denied it, because it has turned out to be a proven fact.
"When we defended the [Palestinian] National Authority in the weapons ship incident, we faced two problems:
"First, some commentators and Palestinian leaders denied the story, claiming that it was a fabrication, a show, and an attempt to divert public opinion from the peace issue.
"Second, smuggling weapons in this way is [in itself] a naive act attesting to ignorance – primarily because these weapons will not shift the military balance in favor of the Palestinians. Likewise, smuggling weapons on a route controlled by the Israeli navy is an escapade no reasonable person would attempt.
"[However,] what matters here is that the PA 'bestowed' upon us lies, and we, on our part, pressed our readers to support the PA. We, and our readers, were victims of our commitment [to the Palestinians] and of the trust we placed in it – which is now lost."
Rachel Thaler, 16, of Karnei Shomron, died today from wounds she suffered in the Palestinian terror bombing at a crowded pizzeria 10 days ago, Israel Radio reported. She had been fighting for her life at the Schneider Children's Medical Center in Petah Tikva.
This brings to three the total number of teenagers killed in the attack in Karnei Shomron, 24 miles north east of Tel Aviv. One 15-year-old Israeli boy, and an Israeli girl, Keren Shatsky, who was out buying a pizza with friends to celebrate her 14th birthday, were killed outright when the suicide bomber detonated his bomb.
[Please see the article The Forgetten Rachels, which was written over two years later and concerns Rachel Thaler, among others.]
-- Tom Gross
POLICEWOMAN DIES OF WOUNDS
February 27, 2002
Galit Arviv, 21, wounded in Monday night's terrorist attack in Jerusalem's Neveh Ya'acov neighborhood, died early yesterday in Hadassah-University Hospital, Mount Scopus. Arviv was buried in her hometown of Nesher, outside of Haifa. Nine other Israelis shot in that attack remain hospitalized. Two are in very serious condition.
PALESTINIAN KILLS ISRAELI EMPLOYER NEAR JERUSALEM
February 27, 2002
A Palestinian man shot and killed his Israeli employer, Gad Rejwan, 34, early this morning in northern Jerusalem's Atarot industrial area. Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction took responsibility for the killing. The gunman escaped into PA-controlled Ramallah. Rejwan leaves behind a wife and daughter.
The owners of the factory said they intended to keep the plant open despite the killing, and invited the remaining Palestinian employees to return to work tomorrow.
[Tom Gross adds: This article appeared the day after the above dispatch.]
RACHEL THALER, 16
Karnei Shomron suicide bombing victim dies
By Margot Dudkevitch
The Jerusalem Post
February 28, 2002
Rachel Thaler, 16, died yesterday of wounds suffered in the Karnei Shomron suicide bombing 12 days ago, in which Keren Shatsky and Nehemia Amar were killed.
She will be buried this afternoon in Karnei Shomron.
Suffering from serious wounds to the head and back and burns on her face and hands, she never regained consciousness, Vered Cohen, a family friend and neighbor, said.
"We know that she called out for help minutes after the attack and then she fainted and never spoke again. Yesterday she was exactly 16 and one month," Cohen said.
The family donated her organs for transplants.
"Rachel was a happy child, always surrounded by friends. She often enjoyed meeting them at the local commercial center, a popular meeting place for the children and youths," Cohen said, adding she studied at the ulpana in Dolev.
Rachel's brother Lior, 14, was also seriously wounded, but his condition has improved greatly, Cohen said.
Following the bombing, they were taken to different Petah Tikva hospitals, Lior to the Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus and Rachel to the nearby Schneider Children's Medical Center for Israel, she said. Only after Lior's condition improved was he transferred to the same hospital as his sister.
Rachel was the oldest of the family's three children; the youngest is Zvi, 13. Her parents Ginette, from England, and Michael, from the US, moved to the Ginot Shomron neighborhood five years ago, and were divorced three years later, Cohen said.
"Michael moved back to the US, and Ginette remained here with the children. It hasn't been easy for her. Not long ago, Ginette discussed the possibility of moving to the US. Rachel came to me and asked me to persuade her mother to remain," Cohen said.
Since the attack, community residents took turns helping at the hospital or assisting the family wherever possible. Michael and Ginette's family also came to help out.
[Note by Tom Gross]
In the midst of today's many terror attacks on Israelis – including the killing of two Israeli civilians, the shooting of a pregnant Israeli woman and the shooting of a young Jewish girl south of Jerusalem, and the shooting of a crowd of passengers waiting at a bus stop in north Jerusalem, here is a story about how an Israeli doctor helped save a Palestinian baby.
The survival of tiny Salaam, whose name means "peace" in Arabic, has become a rare tale of the region's usually fractured and clashing peoples working together to save a life.
The area has been torn by 17 months of Palestinian-Israeli violence in which children and babies on both sides have suffered and died.
Salaam, a 10-month-old baby with a pink clip in her dark hair, was released from Jerusalem's Hadassah-University Hospital today. She was first found by Palestinians along a road north of the West Bank town of Ramallah and taken to a shelter run by Palestinian social services in the town of Tulkarm. A group of nuns in Bethlehem gave her a permanent home.
But the baby's health worsened. She was born with a large hole between her heart's two ventricles, or chambers, and her lungs were not receiving enough blood. Palestinian doctors noticed she was turning blue and losing weight, and the baby was taken to a Jerusalem hospital.
"She was bone and skin and that's it," said Israeli doctor Eli Milgalter, who did the surgery to repair Salaam's heart on January 24. The nuns raised nearly $11,000 to pay for the hospital costs, and Milgalter performed the surgery without accepting payment.
Salaam has made a full recovery, doctors said, a rare exception in a cruel conflict that has seen babies killed on both sides. Israeli children have been among the victims of Palestinian gunfire and bomb attacks, and Palestinian children and teenagers have been killed by Israeli army gunfire during demonstrations and riots.
SOME OF TODAY'S NEWS UPDATES
February 25, 2002
Two terrorists opened fire at passersby at Bus No. 25's last stop in Neve Ya'akov in Jerusalem. Reports are that at least 10 people were wounded. Jerusalem police commander Micky Levi said that three policemen overpowered the terrorists, seriously wounding one of them. The other terrorist fled in the direction of Dahiyat al-Barid. Three policemen were hurt in the exchanges of fire.
Additionally, another terrorist attack took place between Nokdim and Tekoa in which two Israeli civilians were killed and two others were wounded. One of the casualties is a pregnant woman in serious condition. The other casualty sustained medium wounds.
PREGNANT WOMAN AND YOUNG GIRL SHOT DEAD IN THEIR CAR
Palestinian terrorists kill two Israelis near Bethlehem
By the Jerusalem Post Internet staff
February 25, 2002 (16:30 news update)
Palestinian terrorists shot dead two Israeli civilians and wounded two others – a pregnant woman and a small girl - in a shooting attack south of Jerusalem about 4 p.m. today.
Magen David Adom emergency medical services reported two killed, one pregnant woman, in moderate to critical condition with gunshot wounds to the stomach, and a fourth girl in light condition.
Avraham Fisch, 60, of Nokdim, was killed in the attack. The name of the second victim, also a Nokdim resident, has not yet been released to the press.
The driver and front seat passenger were both killed and the woman and girl, both sitting in the rear of the car, were wounded in the hail of automatic rifle fire.
MDA armored ambulances evacuated the critically and lightly wounded casualties to Jerusalem's Hadassah-University Hospital, Ein Kerem.
The attack took place on an Israeli civilian convoy traveling between Tekoa and Nokdim, located southeast of Palestinian Authority-controlled Bethlehem. The site of the attack – 200 meters north of Tekoa – is located under Israeli security control.
Palestinian terrorists waiting in ambush opened fire on the civilian vehicles as they drove past.
The perpetrators subsequently fled on foot northwards into PA-controlled Bethlehem, Israel Radio reported.
The Tanzim's Aksa Brigades, affiliated with PA Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, have claimed responsibility for the killings.
The wounded woman, Fisch's daughter, Tamara Lifschitz, 33, in her ninth month of pregnanacy, subsequently underwent surgery and gave birth to a girl less than two hours after the attack.
Hadassah doctors reportedly do not fear for Lifschitz's life.
In related news, two pregnant Palestinian woman were shot by IDF soldiers over the past two days while attempting to cross through West Bank roadblocks.
Both women subsequently gave birth to healthy children.
PASSENGERS FIRED UPON AT ISRAELI BUS STOP
Terrorist opens fire on Jerusalem bus stop
By the Jerusalem Post Internet staff
February 25, 2002 (18:45 news update)
A Palestinian terrorist opened fire early this evening on Israeli pedestrians at a crowded bus stop in Neveh Ya'akov, located in the northern section of Jerusalem near Pisgat Ze'ev.
At least ten people were wounded in the attack on Egged bus No. 25's final stop.
Three of the wounded are in critical condition, four in moderate condition, and the remainder were lightly wounded in the terror attack. Three of the wounded are reportedly police officers, including one woman.
Magen David Adom emergency medical crews evacuated casualties towards Hadassah-University Hospital, Ein Kerem, Hadassah-University Hospital, Mount Scopus, and Shaare Zedek Hospital.
A gunbattle broke out between the terrorist and security forces on the scene. Jerusalem police officers from the adjacent station opened fire and charged the Palestinian, Jerusalem police chief Cmdr. Mickey Levy said.
The terrorist was then taken down by civilians on the scene. He was seriously wounded and is now hospitalized in Hadassah-University Hospital, Ein Kerem.
Gunfire also hit nearby residential buildings during the battle between the terrorists and police officers.
IDF, police, and Border Police officers began chasing a suspected second terrorist into the nearby Arab neighborhood of Dahit el-Barid, placed under curfew by security forces.
However, a police investigation and interrogation of the hospitalized terrorist later in the evening revealed just one man carried out the attack.
"We cannot close the area hermetically, but we will do everything we have to do," Levy told Israel Radio.
The Tanzim's Aksa Brigades, affiliated with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, have claimed responsibility for the Neveh Ya'akov terror attack.
In a statement released to the press, the Aksa Brigades noted the attack was carried out to mark 40 days since the killing by Israel of Raed Karmi, one of the organization's leaders.
The attack also marks eight years since the massacre of Palestinian worshipers in Hebron by Kiryat Arba resident Baruch Goldstein, the statement said.
[Note by Tom Gross]
In this op-ed, Gary Younge, a leading British black intellectual and Guardian columnist, calls on his fellow leftists to start taking anti-Semitism seriously.
Terms of abuse
If the left wants to win over the pro-Israeli lobby, it will have to start taking anti-semitism seriously, writes Gary Younge
The Guardian
February 25, 2002
About every three months I am accused of being an anti-semite. It is not difficult to predict when it will happen. A single, critical mention of Israel's treatment of Palestinians will do it, as will an article that does not portray Louis Farrakhan as Satan's representative on earth. Of the many and varied responses I get to my work – that it is anti-white (insane), anti-American (inane) and anti-Welsh (intriguing) – anti-semitism is one charge that I take more seriously than most.
This is not because I believe I consciously espouse anti-semitic views, but because I do not consider myself immune to them. There is no reason why I should not be prone to a centuries-old virus that is deeply rooted in western society. That does not mean that I accept the charges uncritically. I judge them on their merits and so far have found them wanting. But I do not summarily dismiss them either; to become desensitised to the accusation would be to become insensitive to the issue. It is a common view on the left that political will alone can insulate you from prejudice. It stems, among some, from a mixture of optimism and arrogance which aspires to elevate oneself above the society one is trying to transform.
Last month's New Statesman front page of a shimmering golden Star of David impaling a union flag, with the words "A kosher conspiracy?" was a case in point. Some put it down to an editorial lapse of judgment. But many Jews saw it not as an aberration but part of a trend – one more broadside in an attack on Jews, not from the hard right but the liberal left. The New Statesman's editor apologised, but the response of some progressives has been defensive and confused, because they fail to that the more they accommodate, excuse or ignore anti-semitism, the less they are qualified to preach about Israel.
Anti-semitism existed long before Israel did and played the decisive role in winning over the vast majority of Jews to the Zionist cause. But Judaism is not Israel. And while it is difficult, in the current climate, to understand the Jewish community's concerns without reference to Israel, it is vital not to confuse the two. To do so opens the door for both anti-semites and apologists for Israeli aggression in the Middle East.
"Signs of leftist and Islamist anti-semitism are rife in Britain these days and Jews are worried," claimed an article in Israel's most leftwing mainstream newspaper, Ha'aretz, a few weeks ago. Sadly, the facts which might verify these claims were, for the most part, lacking. Research conducted by the Community Security Trust, an organisation which aims to provide advice and security for British Jews, showed a "sharp increase" in anti-semitic attacks over the past four years. But the groups which are by far the most vulnerable to racist attack remain Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, who are overwhelmingly Muslim.
Since there is no suggestion that the left is responsible for these anti-semitic attacks, the evidence of an anti-semitic revival among its numbers remains anecdotal. The British left has a strong record of fighting anti-semitism, but there can be little doubt that today anti-semitism does find a specific expression among the left. Believing that wealth disqualifies Jews from being among the oppressed, leftwingers fail to take anti-semitism as seriously as other forms of discrimination. Based on the stereotype of "the wealthy Jew", such a view is not just insulting but ignores the nature and history of anti-semitism and the considerable pockets of poverty within the Jewish community. Moreover, Jews on the left complain of feeling themselves under suspicion for their private attachment to Israel, and their presumed support for all that it does.
Such presumptions and prejudices are morally wrong. And because they are wrong in principle they remain a liability in politics. In the same way that the racism and historical amnesia of the right weaken its arguments against Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe, every example of anti-semitism devalues whatever opinions are given about Israel's role in the Middle East. It does not invalidate the arguments – Mugabe is a despot and Israel's occupation an outrage – but the question mark hanging over the motivation of the proponent inevitably taints the pronouncement.
The conflation of Judaism and Israel – as though they are interchangeable – prompts a spiral of mutual recrimination. Israeli hawks and Zionist hardliners brand any criticism of Israel anti- semitic, regardless of its merits. Their accusations become so frequent that the term becomes devalued. Then Israel's detractors dismiss every allegation of anti semitism, regardless of its merits, as a cynical attempt to stifle legitimate dissent. And so it goes on, until what should be a complex debate descends into polarised positions – "Zionism is racism" on the one hand, "anti-Zionism is anti-semitism" on the other.
Zionism is a political position, not a genetic given. It did not always command majority support among Jews. The minority of Jews who are anti-Zionist today might be accused of being psychologically unstable "self-haters", but the Board of Deputies of British Jews did not have a Zionist majority until 1939. Nor has Zionism ever held a monopoly on Jewish thought here. According to a poll by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, about 20% of British Jews surveyed in 1995 said they had negative feelings towards Israel (3%) or none at all (16%). But Israel nonetheless commands the affection of the vast majority of Jews in Britain.
That doesn't mean that gentiles have to support Zionism or Israel just because most Jews do. But it does mean that they cannot simply dismiss Zionism if they are at all interested in entering into any meaningful dialogue with the Jewish community. And it means that they have to be sensitive to why Jews support Israel in order to influence their views. To deny this is to maintain that it is irrelevant what Jews think. It is to move to a political place where Jews do not matter – a direction which they will understandably not follow, because they were herded there before and almost extinguished as a people. To declare "Zionism is racism" offers little in terms of understanding racism, anti-semitism or the Middle East. It is not a route map to debate, liberation or resistance but a cul-de-sac.
The same can be said for its opposite: "Anti-Zionism is anti-semitism". Anti-Zionism, up to and including opposition to the existence of the state of Israel, is a legitimate political position, with roots in the Jewish and non-Jewish communities. That does not mean that Jews have to support it. But to equate it with bigotry is unsustainable. "It is easy to forget that Zionism and the possibility of a sovereign Jewish state were once deeply divisive issues in Jewish life in this country," according to a 1997 Institute of Jewish Policy Research document on the attachment of British Jews to Israel.
Such engagement will not be easy, for the semantic differences reflect fundamental disagreements. But if it cannot be achieved in Britain, what hope is there for the Middle East?
AN “INVETERATE LIAR, TRUSTED BY NO ARAB”
[Note by Tom Gross]
In this essay from today’s Guardian, Benny Morris, the leading pro-Palestinian revisionist historian, says he now feels like “western fellow travellers rudely awakened by the trundle of Russian tanks crashing through Budapest in 1956.”
Morris says it is now clear that Arafat is an “inveterate liar, trusted by no Arab, Israeli or American leader (though there appear to be many Europeans who are taken in).”
He blames CNN and other media for giving a distorted picture of the conflict, and says that “every official in the Palestinian Authority, from President Arafat down, spends his days lying to a succession of western journalists” and “The reporters routinely give these lies credence equal to or greater than what they hear from straight, or far less mendacious, Israeli officials.”
This is an update to a previous dispatch on this list Israel’s leading new historian appears to change his mind (December 11, 2001).
-- Tom Gross
Benny Morris was the radical Israeli historian who forced his country to confront its role in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Later he was jailed for refusing to do military service in the West Bank. But now he has changed his tune. As the cycle of violence in the Middle East intensifies, he launches a vicious attack on the 'inveterate liar' Yasser Arafat – and explains why he believes a peaceful coexistence is impossible
By Benny Morris
The Guardian
February 21, 2002
The rumour that I have undergone a brain transplant is (as far as I can remember) unfounded – or at least premature. But my thinking about the current Middle East crisis and its protagonists has in fact radically changed during the past two years. I imagine that I feel a bit like one of those western fellow travellers rudely awakened by the trundle of Russian tanks crashing through Budapest in 1956.
Back in 1993, when I began work on Righteous Victims, a revisionist history of the Zionist-Arab conflict from 1881 until the present, I was cautiously optimistic about the prospects for Middle East peace. I was never a wild optimist; and my gradual study during the mid-1990s of the pre-1948 history of Palestinian-Zionist relations brought home to me the depth and breadth of the problems and antagonisms. But at least the Israelis and Palestinians were talking peace; had agreed to mutual recognition; and had signed the Oslo agreement, a first step that promised gradual Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, the emergence of a Palestinian state, and a peace treaty between the two peoples. The Palestinians appeared to have given up their decades-old dream and objective of destroying and supplanting the Jewish state, and the Israelis had given up their dream of a "Greater Israel", stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river. And, given the centrality of Palestinian-Israeli relations in the Arab-Israeli conflict, a final, comprehensive peace settlement between Israel and all of its Arab neighbours seemed within reach.
But by the time I had completed the book, my restrained optimism had given way to grave doubts – and within a year had crumbled into a cosmic pessimism. One reason was the Syrians' rejection of the deal offered by the prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1993-96 and Ehud Barak in 1999-2000, involving Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for a full-fledged bilateral peace treaty. What appears to have stayed the hands of President Hafez Assad and subsequently his son and successor, Bashar Assad, was not quibbles about a few hundred yards here or there but a basic refusal to make peace with the Jewish state. What counted, in the end, was the presence, on a wall in the Assads' office, of a portrait of Saladin, the legendary 12th-century Kurdish Muslim warrior who had beaten the crusaders, to whom the Arabs often compared the Zionists. I can see the father, on his deathbed, telling his son: "Whatever you do, don't make peace with the Jews; like the crusaders, they too will vanish."
But my main reason, around which my pessimism gathered and crystallised, was the figure of Yasser Arafat, who has led the Palestinian national movement since the late 1960s and, by virtue of the Oslo accords, governs the cities of the West Bank (Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm and Qalqilya) and their environs, and the bulk of the Gaza Strip. Arafat is the symbol of the movement, accurately reflecting his people's miseries and collective aspirations. Unfortunately, he has proven himself a worthy successor to Haj Muhammad Amin al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who led the Palestinians during the 1930s into their (abortive) rebellion against the British mandate government and during the 1940s into their (again abortive) attempt to prevent the emergence of the Jewish state in 1948, resulting in their catastrophic defeat and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. Husseini had been implacable and incompetent (a dangerous mix) – but also a trickster and liar. Nobody had trusted him, neither his Arab colleagues nor the British nor the Zionists. Above all, Husseini had embodied rejectionism – a rejection of any compromise with the Zionist movement. He had rejected two international proposals to partition the country into Jewish and Arab polities, by the British Peel commission in 1937 and by the UN general assembly in November 1947. In between, he spent the war years (1941-45) in Berlin, working for the Nazi foreign ministry and recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Wehrmacht.
Abba Eban, Israel's legendary foreign minister, once quipped that the Palestinians had never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But no one can fault them for consistency. After Husseini came Arafat, another implacable nationalist and inveterate liar, trusted by no Arab, Israeli or American leader (though there appear to be many Europeans who are taken in). In 1978-79, he failed to join the Israeli-Egyptian Camp David framework, which might have led to Palestinian statehood a decade ago. In 2000, turning his back on the Oslo process, Arafat rejected yet another historic compromise, that offered by Barak at Camp David in July and subsequently improved upon in President Bill Clinton's proposals (endorsed by Barak) in December. Instead, the Palestinians, in September, resorted to arms and launched the current mini-war or intifada, which has so far resulted in some 790 Arab and 270 Israeli deaths, and a deepening of hatred on both sides to the point that the idea of a territorial-political compromise seems to be a pipe dream.
Palestinians and their sympathisers have blamed the Israelis and Clinton for what happened: the daily humiliations and restrictions of the continuing Israeli semi-occupation; the wily but transparent Binyamin Netanyahu's foot-dragging during 1996-99; Barak's continued expansion of the settlements in the occupied territories and his standoffish manner toward Arafat; and Clinton's insistence on summoning the Camp David meeting despite Palestinian protestations that they were not quite ready. But all this is really and truly beside the point: Barak, a sincere and courageous leader, offered Arafat a reasonable peace agreement that included Israeli withdrawal from 85-91% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip; the uprooting of most of the settlements; Palestinian sovereignty over the Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem; and the establishment of a Palestinian state. As to the Temple Mount (Haram ash-Sharif) in Jerusalem's Old City, Barak proposed Israeli-Palestinian condominium or UN security council control or "divine sovereignty" with actual Arab control. Regarding the Palestinian refugees, Barak offered a token return to Israel and massive financial compensation to facilitate their rehabilitation in the Arab states and the Palestinian state-to-be.
Arafat rejected the offer, insisting on 100% Israeli withdrawal from the territories, sole Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and the refugees' "right of return" to Israel proper. Instead of continuing to negotiate, the Palestinians – with the agile Arafat both riding the tiger and pulling the strings behind the scenes – launched the intifada. Clinton (and Barak) responded by upping the ante to 94-96% of the West Bank (with some territorial compensation from Israel proper) and sovereignty over the surface area of the Temple Mount, with some sort of Israeli control regarding the area below ground, where the Palestinians have recently carried out excavation work without proper archaeological supervision. Again, the Palestinians rejected the proposals, insisting on sole Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount (surely an unjust demand: after all, the Temple Mount and the temples' remains at its core are the most important historical and religious symbol and site of the Jewish people. It is worth mentioning that "Jerusalem" or its Arab variants do not even appear once in the Koran).
Since these rejections – which led directly to Barak's defeat and hardliner Ariel Sharon's election as prime minister – the Israelis and Palestinians have been at each other's throats, and the semi-occupation has continued. The intifada is a strange, sad sort of war, with the underdog, who rejected peace, simultaneously in the role of aggressor and, when the western TV cameras are on, victim. The semi-occupier, with his giant but largely useless army, merely responds, usually with great restraint, given the moral and international political shackles under which he labours. And he loses on CNN because F-16s bombing empty police buildings appear far more savage than Palestinian suicide bombers who take out 10 or 20 Israeli civilians at a go.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has emerged as a virtual kingdom of mendacity, where every official, from President Arafat down, spends his days lying to a succession of western journalists. The reporters routinely give the lies credence equal to or greater than what they hear from straight, or far less mendacious, Israeli officials. One day Arafat charges that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) uses uranium-tipped shells against Palestinian civilians. The next day it's poison gas. Then, for lack of independent corroboration, the charges simply vanish – and the Palestinians go on to the next lie, again garnering headlines in western and Arab newspapers.
Daily, Palestinian officials bewail Israeli "massacres" and "bombings" of Palestinian civilians – when in fact there have been no massacres and the bombings have invariably been directed at empty PA buildings. The only civilians deliberately targeted and killed in large numbers, indeed massacred, are Israeli – by Palestinian suicide bombers. In response, the army and Shin Bet (the Israeli security service) have tried to hit the guilty with "targeted killings" of bomb-makers, terrorists and their dispatchers, to me an eminently moral form of reprisal, deterrence and prevention: these are (barbaric) "soldiers" in a mini-war and, as such, legitimate military targets. Would the critics prefer Israel to respond in kind to a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv? Palestinian leaders routinely laud the suicide bombers as national heroes. In a recent spate of articles, Palestinian journalists, politicians and clerics praised Wafa Idris, a female suicide bomber who detonated her device in Jerusalem's main Jaffa Street, killing an 81-year-old man and injuring about 100. A controversy ensued – not over the morality or political efficacy of the deed but about whether Islam allows women to play such a role.
Instead of being informed, accurately, about the Israeli peace offers, the Palestinians have been subjected to a nonstop barrage of anti-Israeli incitement and lies in the PA-controlled media. Arafat has honed the practice of saying one thing to western audiences and quite another to his own Palestinian constituency to a fine art. Lately, with Arab audiences, he has begun to use the term "the Zionist army" (for the IDF), a throwback to the 1950s and 1960s when Arab leaders routinely spoke of "the Zionist entity" instead of saying "Israel", which, they felt, implied some form of recognition of the Jewish state and its legitimacy.
At the end of the day, this question of legitimacy – seemingly put to rest by the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian peace treaties – is at the root of current Israeli despair and my own "conversion". For decades, Israeli leaders – notably Golda Meir in 1969 – denied the existence of a "Palestinian people" and the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations for sovereignty. But during the 1930s and 1940s, the Zionist movement agreed to give up its dream of a "Greater Israel" and to divide Palestine with the Arabs. During the 1990s, the movement went further – agreeing to partition and recognising the existence of the Palestinian people as its partner in partition.
Unfortunately, the Palestinian national movement, from its inception, has denied the Zionist movement any legitimacy and stuck fast to the vision of a "Greater Palestine", meaning a Muslim-Arab-populated and Arab-controlled state in all of Palestine, perhaps with some Jews being allowed to stay on as a religious minority. In 1988-93, in a brief flicker on the graph, Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation seemed to have acquiesced in the idea of a compromise. But since 2000 the dominant vision of a "Greater Palestine" has surged back to the fore (and one wonders whether the pacific asseverations of 1988-1993 were not merely diplomatic camouflage).
The Palestinian leadership, and with them most Palestinians, deny Israel's right to exist, deny that Zionism was/is a just enterprise. (I have yet to see even a peace-minded Palestinian leader, as Sari Nusseibeh seems to be, stand up and say: "Zionism is a legitimate national liberation movement, like our own. And the Jews have a just claim to Palestine, like we do.") Israel may exist, and be too powerful, at present, to destroy; one may recognise its reality. But this is not to endow it with legitimacy. Hence Arafat's repeated denial in recent months of any connection between the Jewish people and the Temple Mount, and, by extension, between the Jewish people and the land of Israel/Palestine. "What Temple?" he asks. The Jews are simply robbers who came from Europe and decided, for some unfathomable reason, to steal Palestine and displace the Palestinians. He refuses to recognise the history and reality of the 3,000-year-old Jewish connection to the land of Israel.
On some symbolic plane, the Temple Mount is a crucial issue. But more practically, the real issue, the real litmus test of Palestinian intentions, is the fate of the refugees, some 3.5-4m strong, encompassing those who fled or were driven out during the 1948 war and were never allowed back to their homes in Israel, as well as their descendants.
I spent the mid-1980s investigating what led to the creation of the refugee problem, publishing The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 in 1988. My conclusion, which angered many Israelis and undermined Zionist historiography, was that most of the refugees were a product of Zionist military action and, in smaller measure, of Israeli expulsion orders and Arab local leaders' urgings or orders to move out. Critics of Israel subsequently latched on to those findings that highlighted Israeli responsibility while ignoring the fact that the problem was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians – and, in their wake, the surrounding Arab states – had launched. And few noted that, in my concluding remarks, I had explained that the creation of the problem was "almost inevitable", given the Zionist aim of creating a Jewish state in a land largely populated by Arabs and given Arab resistance to the Zionist enterprise. The refugees were the inevitable by-product of an attempt to fit an ungainly square peg into an inhospitable round hole.
But whatever my findings, we are now 50 years on – and Israel exists. Like every people, the Jews deserve a state, and justice will not be served by throwing them into the sea. And if the refugees are allowed back, there will be godawful chaos and, in the end, no Israel. Israel is currently populated by 5m Jews and more than 1m Arabs (an increasingly vociferous, pro-Palestinian irredentist time bomb). If the refugees return, an unviable binational entity will emerge and, given the Arabs' far higher birth rates, Israel will quickly cease to be a Jewish state. Add to that the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and you have, almost instantly, an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish minority.
Jews lived as a minority in Muslim countries from the 7th century – and, contrary to Arab propaganda, never much enjoyed the experience. They were always second-class citizens and always discriminated-against infidels; they were often persecuted and not infrequently murdered. Giant pogroms occurred over the centuries. And as late as the 1940s Arab mobs murdered hundreds of Jews in Baghdad, and hundreds more in Libya, Egypt and Morocco. The Jews were expelled from or fled the Arab world during the 1950s and 60s. There is no reason to believe that Jews will want to live (again) as a minority in a (Palestinian) Arab state, especially given the tragic history of Jewish-Palestinian relations. They will either be expelled or emigrate to the west.
It is the Palestinian leadership's rejection of the Barak-Clinton peace proposals of July-December 2000, the launching of the intifada, and the demand ever since that Israel accept the "right of return" that has persuaded me that the Palestinians, at least in this generation, do not intend peace: they do not want, merely, an end to the occupation – that is what was offered back in July-December 2000, and they rejected the deal. They want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to prise open the Jewish state. Demography - the far higher Arab birth rate – will, over time, do the rest, if Iranian or Iraqi nuclear weapons don't do the trick first.
And don't get me wrong. I favour an Israeli withdrawal from the territories – the semi-occupation is corrupting and immoral, and alienates Israel's friends abroad – as part of a bilateral peace agreement; or, if an agreement is unobtainable, a unilateral withdrawal to strategically defensible borders. In fact in 1988 I served time in a military prison for refusing to serve in the West Bank town of Nablus. But I don't believe that the resultant status quo will survive for long. The Palestinians – either the PA itself or various armed factions, with the PA looking on – will continue to harry Israel, with Katyusha rockets and suicide bombers, across the new lines, be they agreed or self-imposed. Ultimately, they will force Israel to reconquer the West Bank and Gaza Strip, probably plunging the Middle East into a new, wide conflagration.
I don't believe that Arafat and his colleagues mean or want peace – only a staggered chipping away at the Jewish state – and I don't believe that a permanent two-state solution will emerge. I don't believe that Arafat is constitutionally capable of agreeing, really agreeing, to a solution in which the Palestinians get 22-25% of the land (a West Bank-Gaza state) and Israel the remaining 75-78%, or of signing away the "right of return". He is incapable of looking his refugee constituencies in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Gaza in the eye and telling them: "I have signed away your birthright, your hope, your dream."
And he probably doesn't want to. Ultimately, I believe, the balance of military force or the demography of Palestine, meaning the discrepant national birth rates, will determine the country's future, and either Palestine will become a Jewish state, without a substantial Arab minority, or it will become an Arab state, with a gradually diminishing Jewish minority. Or it will become a nuclear wasteland, a home to neither people.
(Professor Benny Morris teaches Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel. His next book, The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, the Jews and Palestine, is published by IB Tauris.)
[Note by Tom Gross]
Below are some serious allegations about the objectivity of one of the New York Times's present correspondents in Jerusalem, Joel Greenberg.
Greenberg is an American-Israeli reporter in the Times's Jerusalem bureau, a one-time "resister" to the Israeli army, who served a jail term in 1983 for refusing to serve with his army unit in southern Lebanon.
Below, I attach two items, from The Wall Street Journal online, and from The Jerusalem Post, and after that a follow-up note in Greenberg’s defense.
"DOMINATING, EXPELLING, STARVING AND HUMILIATING AN ENTIRE PEOPLE"
Allegations on objectivity of NY Times Israel reporter
The Wall Street Journal online
February 8, 2002
The Jerusalem Post's Uri Dan seems to have uncovered a genuine journalistic scandal at the New York Times. Saturday's Times carried a front-page story from Jerusalem on a small group of Israel military reservists who say they are refusing to serve in the West Bank and Gaza because "Israel's policies there involved 'dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people.'"
Dan says the piece amounts to a "grave indictment against Israel, its government, and army, particularly when, mainly in Western Europe, anti-Semites are in a hurry to accuse them of war crimes." The trouble is that the man who wrote the article is anything but a disinterested observer:
The Times article was written by Joel Greenberg, an American-Israeli reporter in its Jerusalem bureau. Greenberg is himself a one-time "resister." An Associated Press article of November 25, 1984, about the refusal of Israeli soldiers to serve in Lebanon stated: "And the worst thing is, we're still there (in Lebanon)," said Sgt. Joel Greenberg, 28, a Philadelphia-born Israeli who lost his position as squad leader when he refused to go to Lebanon. Like the other conscientious objectors, he isn't sure he will refuse again."
A news release of the Zionist Organization of America (August 6, 1999) quoted: "Greenberg served a jail term in 1983 for refusing to serve with his army unit in southern Lebanon [Moment, May 1984]". Greenberg subsequently became a journalist, and was a staff reporter (1986-90) for The Jerusalem Post.
Did the editors of The New York Times, who criticize Israel at every opportunity, know that Greenberg is a one-time resister?
And if the editors of The New York Times were simply unaware of their Israeli reporter's involvement in Lebanon as a resister, they only had to go to their own archives to find an article written by Thomas Friedman on January 20, 1985, in which he wrote: "You saw Lebanese license plates in Israel, and that was a big deal," remembers Joel Greenberg, a graduate student in Middle East studies who after his first tour of duty in Lebanon became a conscientious objector to the war and went to jail for refusing to carry out reserve duty there."
It's actually even worse than Dan makes it out to be, for Greenberg's piece includes a paragraph on the Lebanon resistance movement without any disclosure of his involvement in it:
"Protests by army reservists after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which Mr. Sharon, as defense minister, took all the way to Beirut, are widely considered to have contributed to a subsequent military pullback to southern Lebanon, from which Israel withdrew two years ago."
Note that "are widely considered" – a classic passive-voice dodge by which reporters slip their own opinions into purportedly objective stories. But the problem here isn't just that Greenberg is biased; it's that he has failed to disclose his own involvement in the story on which he's reporting.
On its front page last Saturday, The New York Times prominently and extensively covered the refusal of "more than 100 Israeli Army reservists" to continue to serve in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
A foreign reader of the article is liable to receive the impression that these Israelis are refusing to serve there for moral reasons, as though the Jewish army were officially perpetrating illegal acts against the Palestinians.
A soldier is quoted as telling Yediot Aharonot about his service in the Gaza Strip: "The gunfire penetrates thin walls and windows, and you don't know who you're killing."
Reservist lieutenant David Zonshain is quoted as saying: "Suddenly you are required to do things that you can't be asked to do: to shoot at people, stop ambulances, destroy houses when no one knows who lives in them."
These descriptions in The New York Times form a grave indictment against Israel, its government, and army, particularly when, mainly in Western Europe, anti-Semites are in a hurry to accuse them of war crimes.
This is also being done in Israel by members of the extreme Left as part of their political pressure to force the government to withdraw from Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, and not for moral reasons.
Most Israelis are aware that this group of officers and men is very small, even if they eventually manage to obtain the signatures of more than 500 reservists. The apparatchiks of the extreme Left and their numerous friends in the Israeli media have been espousing the cause of the refuseniks as a political weapon. Even Ha'aretz, which, for decades, has been calling in vain for a withdrawal from Judea, Samaria and Gaza, has admitted that this group of reservists has no public backing.
This is what Ha'aretz said in a full-width headline this week: "The majority of the Jewish public in Israel does not regard the officers' letter as a legitimate act of protest."
According to the January 2002 peace poll it held, the newspaper claims: "We found that the vast majority of the Jewish public (79%) are quite or very opposed to the refusal to serve as an act of protest against the government's policy regarding peace. Only 15% support the legitimacy of such an act."
Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz, when appearing before the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in the Knesset, rejected the accusations of the reservists: "If they had complaints about this matter, they should have complained in real time, and the complaints would of course have been investigated. I can state, based on inquiries made with two of the reserve officers, that they said explicitly that their refusal to serve in Judea, Samaria and Gaza was due to their wish to pressure the government into withdrawing from Judea, Samaria and Gaza."
In other words, according to Mofaz, political motives lie behind the dissent. "There is no room for such happenings in a democratic country in a state of war."
It appears that the apparently illegal acts performed by the Israeli army, as described in The New York Times when quoting Israeli reservists, appear to be just a pretext for an ideological struggle.
The Times article was written by Joel Greenberg, an American-Israeli reporter in its Jerusalem bureau. Greenberg is himself a one-time "resister." An Associated Press article of November 25, 1984, about the refusal of Israeli soldiers to serve in Lebanon stated: "And the worst thing is, we're still there (in Lebanon)," said Sgt. Joel Greenberg, 28, a Philadelphia-born Israeli who lost his position as squad leader when he refused to go to Lebanon. Like the other conscientious objectors, he isn't sure he will refuse again."
A news release of the Zionist Organization of America (August 6, 1999) quoted: "Greenberg served a jail term in 1983 for refusing to serve with his army unit in southern Lebanon [Moment, May 1984]". Greenberg subsequently became a journalist, and was a staff reporter (1986-90) for The Jerusalem Post.
Did the editors of The New York Times, who criticize Israel at every opportunity, know that Greenberg is a one-time resister?
And if the editors of The New York Times were simply unaware of their Israeli reporter's involvement in Lebanon as a resister, they only had to go to their own archives to find an article written by Thomas Friedman on January 20, 1985, in which he wrote: "You saw Lebanese license plates in Israel, and that was a big deal," remembers Joel Greenberg, a graduate student in Middle East studies who after his first tour of duty in Lebanon became a conscientious objector to the war and went to jail for refusing to carry out reserve duty there."
Which leads me to suspect that perhaps The New York Times hired Greenberg precisely because he is a one-time resister.
STANDING UP FOR JOEL GREENBERG
[Follow-up note by Tom Gross]
Several readers, including two senior New York Times foreign correspondents, wrote to me the day after this dispatch (above) was sent objecting to the Post’s and the Journal's "unfair attacks" on Joel Greenberg’s integrity.
One respected senior journalist wrote: "I have known Joel Greenberg for the better part of 35 years and have followed his career from UPI to the Jerusalem Post to the New York Times. In my judgment, Joel has been careful to not allow his personal political philosophy with his reportage. The attacks on Joel's political beliefs are therefore inappropriate and not justified. Joel's articles should therefore be critiqued on their merit, without regard to his politics.
"For what's it worth, Tom, I have always thought that your own Mideast coverage has been both first-rate and fair, which is not an easy thing to achieve when covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
For an article written over three years later concerning Rachel Thaler, one of the victims of this attack, please see "The Forgotten Rachels." www.tomgrossmedia.com/TheForgottenRachels.html
-- Tom Gross
SUICIDE BOMBER EXPLODES IN PIZZERIA
At least 3 dead in Pizzeria Suicide bombing, 27 hospitalized
News agencies
February 16, 2002
A suicide bomber exploded himself in a pizzeria crowded with teens and young people in a shopping center in the West Bank community of Karnei Shomron Saturday night at 7:45. Initial reports indicate at least two young Israelis are dead and 27 people hospitalized, 1 in very serious condition, 10 in serious condition. The explosive device was large, at least 10 kilograms (22 pounds). Al Jazeera Television reported that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the attack.
The seriously injured, mostly teenagers, were evacuated to Meir Hospital in Kfar Sava for treatment and the others were taken to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva.
CONTENTS
1. Former U.S. Consul Abington and an Israeli wrote Arafat's New York Times op-ed
2. Israeli women die every day since Arafat’s last murderous speech
This is a follow-up to (1) Arafat interviewed (2) Red Crescent ambulance delivers terrorist (February 6, 2002).
-- Tom Gross
(1) ARAFAT DID NOT WRITE NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED
Ha'aretz Correspondent Amir Oren reported in his weekly column in yesterday's Hebrew edition of Ha'aretz that Edward Abington, who was the United States consul general in Jerusalem until 1997 and is now Arafat's top paid lobbyist in Washington, drafted Yasser Arafat's op-ed piece that appeared in last Sunday's New York Times along with "one of the Israeli 'guardians of Oslo'".
(2) ARAFAT'S INCITEMENT – THE KILLING OF RANDOM ISRAELI WOMEN CIVILIANS CONTINUES
On Thursday February 7, 2002, at a rally in Ramallah, Yasser Arafat repeated his call for millions of Arab martyrs to kill Israelis.
That evening, three Israelis including a woman and her 11 year old daughter were shot dead in cold blood in the Jordan valley.
On the afternoon of Friday February 8, 2002, masked terrorists killed another woman, Moran Amit, a 25-year-old student at Haifa University.
On the evening of Saturday February 9, 2002, another Israeli woman, Atala Lipovsky, a 79-year-old grandmother was killed by Palestinian gunmen north of Jerusalem.
Shimon Peres, who is serving as acting prime minister and defense minister with both Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer out of the country, told Israel Radio that several other attempts to carry out terror attacks against Israel in the past three days had been foiled. The Palestinian Authority, he pointed out, did not condemn the attack on Hamra.
ANOTHER TWO YOUNG WOMEN KILLED BY TERRORISTS
Tom Gross adds:
The day after this dispatch was sent, February 10, 2002, two more women, in Beersheba, aged 18 and 20 were killed. Sadly prophetic.
FINALLY, A MAJOR NEWS AGENCY DEEMS ARAB ANTI-SEMITISM WORTHY OF A REPORT
[Note by Tom Gross]
Finally, a major news agency has deemed Arab anti-Semitism worthy of a report – even though the particular example given in the AP headline, saying "Thanks to Hitler" is almost a year old. Better late than never in reporting what happens in Egypt.
EGYPTIAN DAILY – AL AKHBAR HEADLINE: "THANKS TO HITLER"
Egypt's Al-Akhbar: 'Thanks to Hitler'
By Jasper Mortimer
The Associated Press
February 8, 2002
CAIRO, Egypt – For one writer in the Egyptian press, the identities of the perpetrators of September 11 were obvious – and they were not Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida fighters.
"The Jews and the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad are behind this vicious attack on the United States," Gamal Ali Zahran wrote in Egypt's most respected newspaper, Al-Ahram, on October 7. He offered no source.
Zahran, who teaches politics at Suez Canal University, Ismailiya, was repeating a rumor that had been circulating among Arabs since terrorists slammed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
He claimed several thousand Jews had worked at the World Trade Center, but none went to work on September 11 and not one Jew was killed that day. In fact, many Jews were killed in the September 11 attacks, including four Israelis. Zahran declined to comment to The Associated Press.
Zahran's article was one in a series of anti-Semitic pieces published in the Egyptian press since the Israeli-Palestinian fighting began in September 2000.
The Israeli Embassy has complained to the government many times about such articles. Before finishing his term last year, Ambassador Zvi Mazel said the Egyptian press is sowing the "seeds of hatred for the next 50 years."
President Hosni Mubarak says he cannot control the Egyptian press. However, his government appoints the editors of the three biggest circulation dailies – Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar and Al-Gomhuriya – and it owns the newspaper printing houses.
Egypt was the first Arab country to make peace with Israel, and has stood by the 1979 treaty despite Palestinian-Israeli clashes it often blames on Israel.
But many ordinary Egyptians oppose "normalizing" – forging cultural and business links in addition to the political agreement. Allowing anti-Semitic comment in the media may be the government's way of letting its citizens release frustrations that might otherwise be directed at Egyptian authorities.
Al-Akhbar published one of the most anti-Semitic tracts, headlined "Thanks to Hitler."
"Thanks to the late Hitler, who took revenge in advance for the Palestinians on the most vile criminals on earth, though we blame Hitler because his revenge was not quite enough," Ahmed Ragab wrote last spring.
Jewish groups quoted the column in full-page ads in Western newspapers, and Secretary of State Colin Powell was asked in Congress why the United States was giving $2 billion a year to Egypt, where "government-sponsored newspapers support Adolf Hitler and incite violence against Jews and Israel."
Ragab also refused to be interviewed, but his editor, Galal Dewidar, said the column was not eulogizing Hitler but vilifying Israel for the hundreds of Palestinians killed in the current fighting.
"You mustn't take it word by word. You must take it by the feeling, the spirit. [Ragab] would like to say somebody should tell Israel to stop," Dewidar said.
But why, critics ask, is such anger not directed at the Israeli government rather than Jews all over the world?
One editor who makes the distinction is Hani Shukrallah, the managing editor of Al-Ahram Weekly – the English-language sister of Al-Ahram.
Shukrallah described the anti-Semitic rhetoric as "vulgar populism," but said it sprang from Egyptian empathy with the Palestinians.
"We're seeing our brothers being killed and murdered and we're unable to do anything," Shukrallah said.
A professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo, Abdullah Schleifer, said that if there was peace between Israelis and Palestinians, "this stuff would just disappear."
Here is a piece by myself on Saudi Arabia, which was published today, as a follow-up to President Bush's Axis of Evil speech.
-- Tom Gross
"THE SAUDI REGIME BEARS A MAJOR SHARE OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM"
Time to face Mecca
By Tom Gross
The National Review
February 8, 2002
www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross020802.shtml
In his State of the Union address last week, President Bush indicated where his war on terror is heading. Iraq, Iran and North Korea "and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil," he declared. (North Korea, no doubt, was only included as non-Islamic window dressing to appease the Arab League. It exports about as much international terror as it does Internet start-up firms, which is to say, not very much).
Bush received considerable praise from the pundits. Charles Krauthammer, for example, congratulated him on an "astonishingly bold address" which was "about preventing the next Sept. 11." The prime target, it was generally agreed, would be Iraq.
Yet, it has been clear since Sept. 11 – and actually since well before then – that if America wants to prevent a major terrorist onslaught there is one government above all others that must be reformed or replaced. And it is not that of Saddam, but the House of Saud.
The Saudi regime – not merely its exiled son, Osama Bin laden – bears a major share of the responsibility for international terrorism. Further acts of terror against Americans of the kind seen in Africa, Yemen, New York and Washington, will likely follow unless some serious pressure is placed on Riyadh, both to stop sponsoring Islamic extremists, and to allow moderates some significant role in government.
The Saudis aid terrorism both directly and indirectly. On the direct level, they fund (at government and at private levels) Islamic terrorist groups throughout the world. For example, evidence uncovered in Afghanistan by British and American intelligence officers clearly implicates a number of leading Saudis, some of them members of the royal family, in the funding of al-Qaeda.
The Saudi government is also the chief financial backer of the Palestinian terror group Hamas. It was members of Hamas who taught shoe bomber Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up an American Airlines jet, how to dry the explosive triacetone triperoxide, and mold it into shoes and belts. He received this instruction when he visited Gaza last June.
In addition to providing support for terrorist groups, the Saudis have helped to shape those groups' ideology by exporting an extreme form of Islamist philosophy.
The Saudis are also responsible for terror on an indirect level. By refusing to permit any opposition to the regime other than that of the extremist imams, who support Bin Ladenism, they have virtually forced young Saudis who want to express their opposition to the ruling family's brutal, corrupt ways into the arms of those imams. The result – al Qaeda – merely mirrors their own lack of respect for life and humanity.
These extremists will eventually overthrow the regime if it doesn't reform. Signs of dissent are growing. Just before Christmas, for example, 1,000 young men were reported to have rioted in Jeddah.
The Saudi regime regularly dishonors the moderate Islamic tradition with its beheadings, amputations and floggings. Its appalling treatment of women (the religious police patrol the streets with electric camel prods looking for women exposing a little too much under their chadors), the vile anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial that permeate the state-controlled media, and the general lack of tolerance for Christians and Jews – in all these respects, the Saudis are worse than Iran and Iraq.
When it comes to inciting Islamic extremism, too, the Saudi record is in many respects worse than Iraq or Iran. It is no accident that the Saudis enjoyed warm relations with the Taliban long after Teheran broke ties. As Abdullah Al Refaie, editor-in-chief, of the Saudi paper Al Muslimoon, put it: "The Iranian claim that the Taliban have discredited Islam is simply not true. The Taliban, in fact, have a good record of behaving as faithful and moderate Muslims."
The Saudi regime's brutal record of torture is ignored by the West — even when Britons, Belgians, and Canadians are the victims, as was the case last year. As the British media revealed last month, during a 67-day period of torture, Saudi police hung from the ceiling a middle-aged British man who was being held on trumped-up charges, beat him with a pickaxe handle, and threatened to have his wife repeatedly gang-raped until he confessed.
And yet the Saudi government is often described by American media and politicians as "moderate" and "our partners," and is subject to much flattery from American and British halls of government. As is the case with the Palestinian Authority, reports about the true extent of the awfulness of the Saudi regime are largely ignored in the western media, creating a dangerously misleading impression. Last week, for example, the New York Times sub-headlined its news interview with Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, "Dispensing wisdom, receiving praise."
Western governments have spent far too long propping up the regime in Riyadh, as they have the one in Gaza, on the principle that the alternative would be worse. But in fact there are plenty of moderate voices, among both the Saudis and the Palestinians, who are desperate to find Western support but are too terrified to speak out against their native regimes.
To say that the Saudis have been less than fully cooperative in the war on terrorism would be an understatement. The lack of meaningful criticism or rebuke from the US to Riyadh for the fact that 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers were Saudis (and at least one entered the US on a Saudi diplomatic passport) – a fact that the Saudis only acknowledged this week – that over 100 of the 158 detainees being held in US custody at Guantanamo Bay are Saudis, that 240 of the 250 al-Qaeda prisoners Pakistan is holding are Saudis -- this is surely one of the main reasons why the Saudi ruling class are continuing to fund al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups.
Citing Western intelligence sources, Turkish, German and British newspapers all last month reported that Saudi intelligence is currently financing the relocation of thousands of Al Qaeda insurgents to Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. The German daily Die Welt reported last Wednesday that Saudi officials have helped place many of them in the Ein Hilwe Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, and plan to finance their relocation to territory controlled by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. (Not unrelated, Die Welt also reported that it was Saudi intelligence that paid Iran $10 million to buy the weapons for the Palestinian Authority that were captured by Israel in the Red Sea on January 3.)
Indeed it is the Saudis, not the Iraqis, who one way or another leave their fingerprints on virtually every major development among Muslim terrorists. Take, for example, the recent use of women suicide bombers against Israeli civilians. The Islamic authorities in Gaza have so far ordered only men, not women, to blow up Israeli teenagers. The Palestinians behind these recent female attacks (only one of which was "successful") cite as their inspiration last August's fatwa issued by the Saudi High Islamic Council exhorting women to become suicide bombers.
Even with the Taliban's collapse, the ideological justification for the September 11 attacks (and of similar future acts) continues among Saudis. For example, Saudi Sheikh Safar Abd Al-Rahman Al-Hawali, as quoted in Al-Hayat, a London-based Arabic daily, on January 13, 2002, said: "Since when is the Pentagon 'innocent'? The famous American intellectual Gore Vidal himself called it 'Hell and a nest of Satans'... [It is] a den of spies and a Mafia nest." He went on to describe the World Trade Center as "the center of usury and money laundering."
And here is Sheikh Ali bin Khdheir (a Yemenite who is funded from Saudi sources), again speaking after Sept. 11: "It is permissible to kill the combatants among them, as well as those who are non-combatants, for example the aged man, the blind man, and the dhimmi, as the clerics agree."
Former CIA Director James Woolsey is virtually alone among American officials in stating what should be obvious to everybody: Saudi Arabia, he said last month, "deserves a very large part of the blame for Sept. 11."
It is constantly argued that if the Saudi monarchy were to fall, the successor regime would merely be more extreme and anti-Western. Such thinking also led Bush Sr. to try and keep the Soviet regime in power in the dying days of communism. Yet there are moderate Saudis. Some come from within the regime, such as King Fahd's half-brother, Prince Talal, now 73, who spent many years in exile for trying to persuade his fellow royals to shed their despotic ways, and only last week renewed his call for the modernization of Saudi institutions.
Others are from the middle classes, such as Dr. Sahr Muhammad Hatem of Riyadh. Unable to voice her criticism inside the country, she wrote a letter to a London-based Arabic newspaper on December 12, 2001. Under the title "Our Culture of Demagogy Has Engendered bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, and Their Ilk," she wrote: "The mentality of each one of us was programmed upon entering school as a child, [to believe] that … anyone who is not a Muslim is our enemy, and that the West means enfeeblement, licentiousness, lack of values, and even Jahiliya [a term used to describe the backward pre-Islamic era] itself. Anyone who escapes this programming in school encounters it at the mosque, or through the media or from the preachers lurking in every corner."
Dr Hatem has received much praise from other Saudis. In the future, is the US going to support those who agree with her, or is it going to continue to prop up the unsavory regime that continues to govern Riyadh? The regime can be pressured. It needs to sell oil more than the US needs to buy it. Nor is it just oil that they send abroad. They also export hate – the hatred of America.
[Note by Tom Gross]
Here is a book review I wrote, published yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, which those of you interested in Holocaust deception may like to read.
Review of Blake Eskin's “A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski” (Published Feb. 2002)
Books
Real Horrors, Phony Claims
By Tom Gross
The Wall Street Journal
February 6, 2002
online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1012868708264288840,00.html
The tale of the man who called himself Binjamin Wilkomirski is as extraordinary as it is disturbing. It began with his memoir called "Fragments," in which he presented himself as a Jewish Holocaust survivor who had been subjected to Dr. Josef Mengele's horrendous medical experiments as a child. Wilkomirski described his terrible experiences at Majdanek, a concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, and at Auschwitz, including seeing his father beaten to death.
"Fragments," published in Switzerland in 1995, was almost immediately acclaimed a masterpiece, and it soon became an international bestseller. Wilkomirski won the National Jewish Book Award for autobiography, the Prix Memoire de la Shoah in France and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in Britain. He even received a cash award from the American Orthopsychiatric Association. As his fame grew, Wilkomirski received standing ovations throughout America, at lectures organized by the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Newspapers cited him as an authority on the Holocaust. Some compared him to Primo Levi. Historians assigned "Fragments" to their students.
And then he was exposed. The author of the harrowing Holocaust memoir turned out to be an impostor. He was a gentile who had spent the war in a comfortable Protestant home in Switzerland.
Blake Eskin's "A Life in Pieces" (Norton, 251 pages, $25.95) is a conscientious account of the "Fragments" hoax. By setting the story out in detail, Mr. Eskin has given us a chance to revisit this disturbing episode in our recent cultural history and to ponder how and why it happened – not that the answers are easy to come by.
Amazingly, the first public doubts about "Fragments" (aired as late as March 1998) came not from some esteemed professor at one of the conferences that Wilkomirski regularly addressed but from a reader who posted a review on Amazon.com. Michael Mills, a junior Australian government bureaucrat living in Canberra, found certain dates in "Fragments" to be wrong and noted that some of Wilkomirski's "memories" of Majdanek appeared remarkably similar to testimony already published by child survivors of Buchenwald. (Mr. Mills, it alarmingly turned out, was a Holocaust revisionist who had caught out the experts.) Other skeptics emerged.
The first comprehensive case against Wilkomirski was put together by Daniel Ganzfried, an Israeli-born Swiss writer whose own father was a genuine Auschwitz survivor. Mr. Ganzfried delved deep into Wilkomirski's past, going through his school records, tracking down his former girlfriends and even finding family photographs of the "Holocaust survivor" from as far back as 1946, taken in Switzerland, when Wilkomirski claimed to be still in Poland.
As Mr. Ganzfried discovered, Binjamin Wilkomirski wasn't his name at all: It was Bruno Grosjean, born to a single mother, a Christian, and brought up by his wealthy adoptive family, the Doessekkers, near Zurich. Bruno Doessekker, as those around "Wilkomirski" knew him before he published "Fragments," was a clarinetist from Zurich, born not in 1939 but on Feb. 12, 1941, in Biel, Switzerland. Mr. Ganzfried showed that the adult Doessekker was fully aware of his real childhood circumstances – indeed, he had fought for and secured a share of his birth mother's estate in 1981.
"Wilkomirski" dismissed Mr. Ganzfried's claims and said that he was the victim of an "anti-Semitic plot" involving Swiss government officials. But other investigative reporters followed in Mr. Ganzfried's footsteps, unearthing yet more damning evidence of the deception. Mr. Doessekker now faces fraud charges in Switzerland.
With such material it is not surprising that "A Life in Pieces" is an absorbing book. Mr. Eskin tells the story well, at times giving it the pace and excitement of a detective story. He is also adept at describing the intrigues that have marred the work of child Holocaust survivor groups, which too often dissolve into quarrels over tactics and feuds over the nature of victimhood.
The book has some weaknesses, however. In particular, Mr. Eskin fails to come to any conclusions about Mr. Doessekker's motives. Is he the mastermind behind a "coldly planned fraud," as Mr. Ganzfried believes, or is he simply a deranged man who actually believes the myths he has constructed for himself?
And then there is the troubling question of just how those who believed him came to be so easily fooled. Why were so many researchers, publishers, editors, agents, scholars and critics taken in? You would think, given the intensity of historical interest in the Holocaust, that someone might have spotted the fraud early on.
It would be interesting, for example, to know how Holocaust historians such as Daniel Goldhagen, who so lavishly praised the book, now feel. What does Deborah Lipstadt, author of “Denying the Holocaust,” think of the fact Doessekker has become (against his wishes) a hero for Holocaust deniers? (Prof. Lipstadt assigned Fragments to her class reading list, and spent a whole day with “Wilkomirski” when he came to Atlanta as part of his speaking tour.)
And what does the director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum think of his having made "Wilkomirski" a guest of honor at a $150-per-plate luncheon at New York's Hotel Carlyle? Mr. Eskin might have insisted on asking such questions of a host of people who should have known better. It is a pity that he didn't.
He does, however, choose to write at length on the history of his own family, which has been living in the U.S. for at least four generations. The ostensible reason is that his great-great-grandfather was called Wilkomirski, and at one stage it seemed that the bogus Binjamin might be a distant relative. In the event, of course, the supposed connection turned out to be a red herring. It seems as if this chimera distracted him, at times, from the main story.
Mr. Gross, who has worked as a journalist in Israel for the past six years, is a co-author of "Out of Tune: David Helfgott and the Myth of Shine" (Warner Books).
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
The London Daily Mirror today publishes an interview with Yasser Arafat, which was conducted yesterday.
Arafat refuses to label Hamas a terrorist group – even though he did so only last Sunday in his infamous op-ed in The New York Times (an op-ed that was reprinted in the London Guardian and other newspapers on Monday).
The stand expressed by Arafat in his op-ed also contrasts starkly to other public statements he has made both before and since then.
For example, in his speech on January 26 to visiting Arab leaders, which was broadcast on that evening's official PA Television news, Arafat said "Yes, brothers, with our souls and blood we redeem you, O Palestine… Allah is great! Glory to Allah and his prophet! Jihad, jihad, jihad, jihad, jihad!"
The Daily Mirror interview, and the paper's editorial on it are to be found at:
www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=11594659&method=full&siteid=50143
www.mirror.co.uk/voiceofthemirror/
For more information on Yasser Arafat’s op-ed in The New York Times please see the dispatch titled Former U.S. Consul Abington and an Israeli "wrote Arafat’s New York Times op-ed" (Feb. 9, 2002).
SUMMARY OF DAILY MIRROR INTERVIEW WITH ARAFAT
In The Daily Mirror interview itself, Alexandra Williams described Arafat's response to the pertinent question, "are Hamas and other extremist Arab groups, terrorists?":
He smiles at me across his desk and mumbles almost inaudibly. He shifts a little in his chair. "All those groups who are working against our decisions have been outlawed. We have arrested those in the military wings," he responds.
But do you consider them to be terrorist groups, I repeat. His eyes fix me and he snaps back. "You will have to ask the Israelis because the Israelis are the ones who established Hamas."
I am asking you, I say. The voice is even but firm. "Ask the Israelis."
Asking the question whether Arafat really wants peace, the Mirror notes that Arafat says he wants it, but that Sharon is not the only one who "is not interested in the Palestinian leader's honeyed words. He demands action [and] the world wants to see that too".
The paper argues that, "in the current situation, there will be no step forward unless Yasser Arafat makes the first move. As long as he remains the Palestinians' leader, he is in an unrivalled position of power and influence. On how he uses it depends the future of the Middle East. Yasser Arafat could be the architect of peace or the destroyer of his people's hopes."
ARAFAT JOINS TOM FRIEDMAN AS NEW YORK TIMES COMMENT WRITER
The Daily Mirror interview comes only three days after Arafat's New York Times editorial on Sunday, which was carried under the headline "The Palestinian Vision of Peace."
The article managed to go on at some length about the Palestinian Arab "vision of peace" without making any reference to or mention of the ship owned by the Palestinian Authority and staffed by its naval officers that was recently seized while smuggling tons of Iranian arms into the supposedly demilitarized Palestinian Authority.
The article also claims that "The 1993 Oslo Accord, signed on the White House lawn, promised the Palestinians freedom by May 1999." The 1993 Oslo Accord "promised" the Palestinian Arabs nothing of the sort. The word "freedom" appears nowhere in its text.
As Malcolm Hoenlein, a subscriber to this email list, told Tim Sebastian on the BBC's Hardtalk program: "Arafat says in Arabic to his people jihad, jihad, jihad and then writes [about] peace in the New York Times."
Below is another item on Arafat's op-ed.
-- Tom Gross
FULL ARTICLES
ARAFAT'S NY TIMES OP-ED DISMISSED AS "PUBLICITY STUNT"
Arafat's NY Times op-ed dismissed as "publicity stunt"
Arutz Sheva News Service
February 3, 2002
www.IsraelNationalNews.com
Yasser Arafat's op-ed in today's New York Times has been dismissed by Prime Minister's Office as a "worthless publicity stunt." The terrorist leader's article began, "For the past 16 months, Israelis and Palestinians have been locked in a catastrophic cycle of violence..." - a formulation designed to distract readers' attention from the fact that the violence was initiated at the express orders of Yasser Arafat himself. Israeli security leaders have quoted much evidence to this effect over the past months.
Arafat wrote, "I condemn that attacks carried out by terrorist groups against Israeli civilians. These groups do not represent the Palestinian people... I am determined to put an end to their activities." This stands in stark contrast to many public statements uttered by the PA chairman very recently. For instance, speaking to a delegation of Arab leaders that was broadcast on official PA Television this past January 26, Arafat said, "Yes, brothers, with our souls and blood we redeem you, O Palestine. This is the decision of the people of exceeding strength. This is a sacred bond. We are up to this duty. You know I am saying this because I know our people. I know what it means that in the midst of this economic crisis, yet none of them complained. However, they said: Allah is great! Glory to Allah and his prophet! Jihad, jihad, jihad, jihad, jihad!"
WAFA IDRIS CARRIED SUICIDE BOMB IN RED CRESCENT AMBULANCE
Red Crescent ambulance believed to have brought woman bomber to Jerusalem
By Amos Harel
Ha'aretz
February 6, 2002
Wafa Idris, the Ramallah woman killed when a bomb she carried into downtown Jerusalem exploded last month, reached the capital by a Red Crescent ambulance, according to senior IDF officers.
One Israeli was killed and more than 100 wounded in the bombing. The investigation so far indicates she did not intend to deploy the bomb in a suicide attack, but may have been planning to pass it on to another person.
Idris was a volunteer in the Red Crescent society, part of an ambulance team that has treated hundreds of Palestinian casualties during the intifada. A senior security source said last night that according to information in his possession, the woman made her way from Ramallah to Jerusalem in an ambulance that passed through the Kalaniya checkpoint north of the capital.
Shin Bet officers say they have similar information, but have not yet been able to confirm it.
“DEMOCRACY IS NO MATCH FOR TERRORISM”
[Note by Tom Gross]
Here's the very defeatist and depressing view of someone who believes that democracy is no match for terrorism, and therefore Israel will not be able to survive. I disagree with much of this article's logic, but it makes interesting reading.
THE QUESTION OF ISRAEL'S LONG TERM SURVIVAL
Israel's Future: The odds.
By John Derbyshire
National Review
January 31, 2002
In his splendid (translation of the word "splendid": full of things to argue and write web columns about) new book The Death of the West, Pat Buchanan relates a story about his days working with President Nixon – who was, as Pat quotes Golda Meir saying, one of the best friends Israel ever had. In the story, Nixon had just hung up after receiving a phone call from Yitzhak Rabin. Pat's wife Shelley asked the president what he thought of Israel's prospects. "The long run?" Nixon responded. He extended his right fist, thumb up, in the manner of a Roman emperor passing sentence on a gladiator, and slowly turned his thumb over and down.
In this opinion, as in many others, the 37th president was ahead of his time. The question of Israel's long-term survival is now on many minds. Pat's book gives the dismal demographic news: 25 million Palestinian Arabs living alongside 7 million Palestinian Jews by mid-century. Many of us are starting to wonder if Israel has a future.
Back in October, Norman Podhoretz published a piece in the magazine Commentary putting as brave a face on things as can be put. After pooh-poohing the Oslo "peace process," comparing Shimon Peres with Neville Chamberlain and acknowledging that the current leadership of the Palestinian Arabs has no real wish to make peace with Israel, Podhoretz looks to the future. There is, he says, "no glimmer of light at the end of this dark and gloomy tunnel." He counsels Israeli Jews to hunker down and wait for the day when "the Arab world will make its own peace with the existence of a Jewish state."
That article naturally generated a lot of mail to Commentary. Amongst it was a letter from Ron Unz, the west-coast entrepreneur and policy intellectual who campaigned successfully against bilingual education in California. Unz (who, like Podhoretz, is Jewish) puts the pessimistic case with great force:
I expect Israel's trajectory to follow that of the temporary Crusader kingdoms, surviving for seventy or eighty years following its 1948 establishment, then collapsing under continual Muslim pressure and flagging ideological commitment.
So who's right? The Podhoretz party, which believes Israel just has to hold on until the Arabs see sense? Or the Unzes, who believe that Israel is one of those grafts that just won't "take" – like white Rhodesia or the Crusader kingdoms?
The answer probably lies with the Jews of Israel, with whether or not they have the will and nerve to sit things out until the Arab world enters the modern age, assuming it ever does. Here the signs are not good. In a recent poll of Israeli Jews aged 25-34, a third want to leave the country. With suicide bombings now almost a daily occurrence, it's hard to blame them. Jews live free, comfortable, secure lives all over the Western world. So who needs Israel?
A Zionist might point out, quite truthfully, that 100 years ago you could have asked the same question. Anywhere in Europe west of Russia (of which at that time, Poland was a part), Jews were confident that they had gained, or were close to gaining, acceptance, and that the horrors of the Middle Ages were all behind them. Zionists were regarded by most European Jews as crackpots. Theodor Herzl, the prime mover of modern Zionism, himself felt that way until 1894. Then, as a newspaper reporter, he witnessed the dishonoring of the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus on the parade ground of the École Militaire in Paris, Dreyfus shouting out his innocence while beyond the wall a mob bayed: "Death to the Jews!" We shall never be secure until we have a nation of our own, was the entirely natural conclusion Herzl came to, and set about building the modern Zionist movement.
It took the rise of Hitler to make any large number of Jews agree with him, though. The arc of European-Jewish feeling about Zionism can be traced by imagining the reaction of an "average" west European Jew to the statement that there could be no security for the Jews without a national home.
* In 1892: "Nonsense. We are perfectly secure. It's people like you who make trouble for us."
* In 1952: "Of course! Anyone can see that!"
* In 2002: "Do you think so? I feel a lot more secure in Paris than I do in Tel Aviv!"
In the U.S.A. the matter is more complicated. There have been very few full-blown anti-Semitic pogroms in this country: The one in New York City in August 1991 is the only one I know of. Because of the peculiar circumstances in that case – it occurred in just about the only neighborhood anywhere in the U.S.A. that Jews share with blacks – most American Jews were not much bothered by it. They feel quite secure; and I think, with some slight qualifications, they are right to feel that way. At the same time, the Jews of America include many thousands of Holocaust survivors, who are naturally wary of slipping back into the complacency of their own parents 70 years ago. It has often been said that black Americans and white Americans will never be at ease with each other until the generation that remembers Jim Crow has died out. It may similarly be true that Jews will never feel truly secure, even in the U.S.A., until the Holocaust generation has passed on. But when that happens – and the very youngest Holocaust survivors are now in their sixties – the question will be asked with even more force: Who needs Israel?
I had better step out front and center here and admit that I am a pessimist, of the Unz party. I think Israel will go down. The reason I think this is that I am British, and have been watching all my life, occasionally at very close quarters, the long struggle between the two constitutional nations of the British Isles and the terrorists of Sin Féin/IRA. I do not see how anyone who has followed that conflict can come to any conclusion other than the one I have come to, which is, that democracy is no match for terrorism.
This may be a universal truth, I don't know. At any rate, it is certainly true of the modern Anglo-Saxon style democracies (among which I would include the Republic of Ireland).
Dedicated irredentist terrorists with a single clear goal – Unite Ireland! Destroy Israel! – will get what they want in the end. They have too many things going for them that their opponents, the modern constitutional democracies, do not have. They have stamina – the iron determination to press on for decades, for generations, brushing aside all reverses, weathering all storms, expelling all doubters, holding steadfast to the golden vision. They have the luxury of perfect ruthlessness as regards method. I have been told many times by supporters of Irish terrorism – I was told it once in the "letters" column of the Wall Street Journal – that anything, anything at all, is justified in the name of "the cause." While their enemies debate the morality of this weapon or that, and the best way to avoid "collateral" casualties, and whether their terrorist prisoners should have air conditioning, the terrorists themselves are planting bombs in busy shopping streets, shooting up 12-year-old girls at a bat mitzvah, or leading away the single mother of ten children to be executed for the "crime" of comforting a dying enemy soldier.
And the terrorists have the moral condition of the modern democracies working for them, too. We are open societies, in which all voices can be heard. The terrorists can make their case in public; and of course they have a case. Sinn Féin has a case; the PLO has a case; as George Orwell pointed out in the middle of WWII, even Hitler had a case – one to which, until he started invading other people's countries, the world was much more receptive than we now care to remember. The intellectual, litigational, over-educated elites who run modern democracies are much more interested in hearing a case argued than in organizing the grueling, deadly, morally ambiguous work of counterterrorism. And the loathing that so many of our elites nurse in their innermost hearts for the culture into which they were born, naturally helps the enemies of that culture
Indeed, if you pursue the Irish parallel, the prospects are even more depressing than Ron Unz tells us. Taken to its full length, that parallel would suggest that even if democracy comes to the Palestinians, and even if they get a viable state, and even if the great majority of the Palestinian people are content with that state and give up, or postpone indefinitely, the old dream of driving the Jews into the sea: even if all that, there would still be tiny groups of fanatics who would reject the whole deal and continue their war "by all means necessary"... and that the people whose duty it was to fight those fanatics would eventually tire of the task, and give in to everything the terrorists were demanding. Even more than they were demanding, perhaps: The IRA now has offices in the House of Commons!
So my answer to the title question is a glum: "No, probably not." Sick of terror, longing for a normal bourgeois life, those who can – those who have education, talents, marketable skills – will slip away. The dumbed-down remainder, outnumbered and outwitted, will sink into a defeatist lassitude punctuated by crude, insensate acts of rearguard violence. The only great nation at all inclined to act as protector will tire of doing so, making all sorts of excuses as she backs away from her obligations: "Oh, you know, they're not exactly model constitutionalists are they? Look how they treat their minorities! Because of them, all our foreign policy is bent out of shape! Bombs are going off in our own cities! And the expense! I'm sorry, but I've seen it all, in another place. The result is too predictable. This is how civilization yields ground to barbarism.
THE FIRST PALESTINIAN WOMAN SUICIDE BOMBER
[Note by Tom Gross]
The following communiqué deals with extensive press interest in the first Palestinian woman suicide bomber to "successfully" murder Israelis. If only the western press would devote just a little of the ample space they regularly give to profiling Palestinian terrorists and their families, and tell us a little about who their victims are instead.
HonestReporting.com communiqué
January 30, 2002
Wada Idris worked as a paramedic volunteer with the Red Crescent dedicated to saving Palestinian lives. But when she blew herself up in Jerusalem on January 27, she was trying to kill and maim as many lives as possible.
This week, almost every major media outlet profiled the woman suicide terrorist. Reporters interviewed her proud mother, pondered the anger and pain she bore, described her hero's status, wrote of her Palestinian patriotism, and proffered their pop psychology. Some reported on her failed marriage, her barrenness, her poor academic record (her college degree was erroneously reported; she was a junior high dropout), and her providing emergency aid to wounded Palestinian rioters.
Something, however, is terribly amiss in the world of journalism.
Idris is portrayed as some sort of new, liberated woman: The First Palestinian Woman "Martyr." Young Palestinian women are interviewed by American networks and vow that they support and may emulate Idris' murderous act. Reporters speak of how Idris "adored children" (New York Times).
What is wrong? Intentionally or not, the press is reinforcing the positive image of a terrorist.
Eight years ago, when an Israeli-American doctor, a man who was in despair after treating so many Jewish terror victims, opened fire on praying Moslems in Hebron, there were no eulogies or psychoanalytical rationalizations. Indeed, Baruch Goldstein's act was roundly condemned by Israeli leaders, press, and rabbis. He was a sick man in a healthy society that honored human life and condemned his horrific act.
Idris, on the other hand, was a sick woman in a malevolent society that hailed her act. She was poisoned by a mother who could take pride in death. Idris was made feverish by brothers who are Fatah members. She was infected by a society whose textbooks, media, preachers, and political leaders glorify death and martyrdom.
Posters went up in the PA-administered territories glorifying Idris as a Palestinian hero.
The coverage of Wada Idris' terrorist act deserves discussion with editors and publishers. We encourage you to express your opinions and engage your local editors and news producers.
Here are some of the media that profiled Idris:
BBC – "Female bomber's mother speaks out"
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1791800.stm
The New York Times – "An Unusual New Palestinian 'Martyr': A Woman"
query.nytimes.com/gst/health/article-page.html?res=9800EFDA1F3AF932A05752C0A9649C8B63
The Washington Post – "Palestinians Hail A Heroine"
www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A64775-2002Jan30¬Found=true
The Guardian (UK) – "From an angel of mercy to angel of death"
www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0%2C2763%2C642059%2C00.html
The Baltimore Sun – "She volunteered as a medic, became Palestinian bomber"
www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.mideast31jan31.story?coll=bal%2Dnews%2Dnation