ITEMS IN FULL

"CELEBRATING YASSER ARAFAT"

[It is not the policy of this email list to ever give out email addresses, phone or fax details. Therefore I have removed these from the email below -- TG]

Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 18:20:10 +0000
From: "Chris Doyle (CAABU)"
Subject: Remembering Arafat: An evening to celebrate the life of Yasser Arafat: 7 December 2004
To: "Chris Doyle (CAABU)"

Remembering Arafat: An evening to celebrate the life of Yasser Arafat

Held in the presence of H.E Afif Safieh-Palestinian general delegate to the UK

Speakers Include:

Rajab Chamlakh
Head of The Association of Palestinian Community in the UK

Robin Kealy CMG
Former British Ambassador in Tunisia and former Consulate General in East Jerusalem

Rt Hon Sir Jeremy Hanley KCMG
Former Foreign Office Minister responsible for the Middle East and former Chair of Conservative Party

Rt Hon Lord David Steel KBE DL
Former leader of the Liberal Democrats & former President of Medical Aid for

Palestinians

Asad Abdul Rahman
Independent PLO-EC member formerly in charge of Refugees Affairs Department

H.E Afif Safieh
Palestinian Delegate to the UK and the Holy See

Hosted by the Joint Committee for Palestine
Tuesday 7th December, 7pm
Friends House, 173 - 177 Euston Road, London NW1
Nearest tube: Euston
For further details please contact CAABU at [Phone number]

The Joint Committee for Palestine is a loose coalition of British organizations (including Council for Arab-British Understanding, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Association of the Palestinian Community, AMOS Trust, Deir Yassin Remembered, Just Peace UK, Palestine Return Centre, LMEC and Jewish Socialist Group), concerned with achieving justice for the Palestinians.

Chris Doyle
Director
CAABU (Council for Arab-British Understanding)
1 Gough Square, London, EC4A 3DE
www.caabu.org
[Phone, fax, email details removed]

 

"RESISTING ISRAELI APARTHEID"

Resisting Israeli Apartheid conference
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
Sunday 5th December, 2004

Program

10.00-10.15 Welcoming Remarks Victoria Brittain, UK

10.15-10.45 Keynote address
Tom Paulin, Oxford University, UK
Partition and Literature: Reflections
Palestine/Israel and Northern Ireland
Chair: Steven Rose, Open University, UK

10.45-11.00 Coffee Break

11.00-13.00 Isolating Apartheid: Divestment, Sanctions, Boycott
Chair: Victoria Brittain, UK

11.00-11.15 Lisa Taraki, Palestine
The Cultural & Academic Boycott of Israel

11.15-11.30 Lawrence Davidson, USA
Divestment: Isolating Apartheid Financially

11.30-11.45 Betty Hunter, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, UK
The Boycott Israeli Goods (BIG) Campaign

11.45-12.00 Omar Barghouti, Palestine
Boycott as Resistance: The Moral Dimension

12.00-13.00 Discussion

13.00-14.00 Lunch

14.00-16.00 Isolating Apartheid: Scope & Principles
Chair: Nur Masalha, UK

14.00-14.15 Ilan Pappe, Israel
The Meaning & Objectives of Boycott

14.15-14.30 Ur Shlonsky, Israel and Switzerland
Resisting Apartheid and the Charge of Antisemitism

14.30-14.45 Mona Baker, UK
On the Distinction between Institutions & Individuals

14.45-15.00 John Docker, Australia
Settler Colonialism as Genocide. Implications for a Strategy of Solidarity with the Palestinians

15.00-16.00 Discussion

16.00-16.30 TEA BREAK

16.30-18.00 Isolating Apartheid: Strategies and Actions
Chair: Karma Nabulsi, UK

16.30-16.45 Hilary Rose, BRICUP, UK
Building the Academic Boycott in Britain

16.45-17.00 Haim Bresheeth, UK
Organising the Academics: Our Duty to Expose Israel, the Extra-Judicial Pariah State

17.00-17.15 Ben Young, Jewish Students for Justice for Palestinians, UK
The Role of Students: Lessons from South Africa

17.15-18.00 Discussion

18.00-18.15 Summary & Close
Jeremy Corbyn MP

ARTICLES IN FULL

MY NATION OF HEROES, MY CHOSEN PEOPLE...

My nation of heroes, my chosen people...
By Julie Burchill
Times of London
Cover story Times 2
November 24, 2004

Unreservedly pro-Israel, our correspondent reveals how her first visit to the country fulfilled a long emotional and political love affair

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1371499_1,00.html

When I told people that I was going to Israel this autumn, I noticed that a lot of them had the same reaction. They’d look dubious, then worried, then say: "Ooo. Is it a story?" The implication being that only professional interests could take one to such a hellhole. They also expressed fear for my safety, going as far on the part of one friend (Gentile, never been there) to actually weep, and on the part of my beloved former mother-in-law (Jewish, never been there) to write to me that she would pray every night for my intact return, even though she is an atheist!

I had had it coming, the Big Jew Thing; ever since as a nine-year-old girl in a working-class West Country Stalinist family, I learnt about the Shoah and the Six-Day War at the same time. It must have been that collision, that schism; death, life, struggle, NEVER AGAIN! – how could I ever not believe? Then I learnt the word for what I was; philo-Semite. That so few people have heard of philo-Semitism, whereas everyone has heard of anti-Semitism, says it all, really.

And the puzzle comes back to this – why do these people, above all others, inspire such ludicrous, ceaseless, surreal loathing? Why is it that one of my sweetest, youngest, most educated friends said to me one night, not even drunk: "Come on babe, admit it – don’t you ever EVER think that if the Jews had never existed how much easier life would be?"

Over the years I have pursued the Jewish Enigma and, it must be said, often got it wrong. My marriage to a non-observing Jew in the 1980s ended after a decade, most of which was spent either having very good sex (yay!) or rowing about the Palestinian question (oy!), with the shiksa on the side of the Jews and the Jew having a good old kvetch on behalf of the Palestinians. It was during such rows with my Jewish husband and his Jewish family, for the first time, that I wondered whether it was actually the Jews I really liked most... or the Israelis, those SuperJews, on whose behalf I seemed increasingly to be going into battle.

It didn't take a genius to see that the more Jews stood up for themselves, the less the world liked it, whereas other races were cheered on and drooled over as "freedom fighters", no matter how bloody their hands got, I reflected. Could it be that anti-Semitism in England in particular was based on the fact that we had gone in the opposite direction to the Jews – from powerful to powerless – and felt great resentment about this fact? After all, they’d had a good deal more than loss of empire to deal with in the 20th century – the loss of one third of world Jewry, for instance.

And Israel is a country the size of Wales, which within the first 25 years of its re-establishment (remember, the Jews were in the countries of the Middle East some seven centuries before the Muslims even existed) – from the Declaration of Independence in 1948 to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 – single-handedly fought off murderous attacks from such neighbouring dictatorships as Egypt, Jordan and Syria. (The US, surprisingly, did not begin to aid Israel in any major way until the mid-1970s; the country was founded with arms from the Communist bloc, and the first Government comprised a coalition of the majority Socialist Mapai Party with the Stalinist Mapam Party to the Left and religious and liberal groups to the Right. Beat that for pluralism!)

During the same period, it's worth noting, the might of the British Armed Forces couldn’t even keep the oddballs and bishop-bashers of the IRA under control, so tied were the hands of our soldiers. It became common in working-class English households during the Seventies to hear Dad, never a great fan of the Jews ("sneaky", "arrogant", "cliquey"), say grimly as the latest atrocity from Ulster made itself felt through the medium of the Six O’Clock News: "The Israelis would have that lot sorted out in no time!" In 30 years, the image of the archetype Jew had gone from that of a frail, bullied scholar walking meekly to his doom to that of a big blond brute in a tank bulldozing across the desert, scattering tyrannies before him, STANDING UP FOR HIMSELF!

If the English working class were seeing the Jews in a new and favourable light due to Israel’s military triumphs – small and scrappy, innee, yer Israeli? Bit like us! – it’s fair to say that both the right-wing ruling class and the liberal middle class were shocked senseless by developments. You could see the bafflement on the faces of the most well-meaning of liberals as the mild-mannered, ever-scapegoated People Of The Book morphed into the creators of the Uzi machine gun and the proud owners of a nuclear capacity. (Interestingly, when the Jews put their scientific brilliance to the service of the European powers, no one ever complained, as I remembered. No one ever said: "Ooo, Albert Einstein, don’t do that!")

What the Jews had done, unique of all the oppressed races of the world, was to come back better than ever.

This was a country founded on socialist principles, by idealists and intellectuals, which could shape-shift at the merest whiff of cordite into a lean, mean, fighting machine that did not allow soldiers to salute their "superiors" yet was deadly effective. It was the only Jewish country in the world, yet surrounded as it was by hate-filled theocracies who had wan-ted Hitler to kill the lot of them, it held secularism to be the most precious cornerstone of its democracy; only in Israel do you find that the most religious Jews, the Haredim, are the most opposed to the existence of the Jewish state – the most extreme of these, the Neturei Karta, even supported the PLO’s charter calling for its destruction. Ultra-religious Jews are not generally drafted into the Israeli Army, and those who are end up in the "Rabbinical Corps", checking that the kitchens are kosher.

Secular Israel regards them with its characteristic, ceaseless tolerance; but for their part, the men in their side-curls and suits walk alongside young Israeli hotties wearing less on the street than other girls wear on the beach with never a sneer or slur, let alone a stoning. Surrounded on all sides by countries where religion and politics are one, to the point that democracy is considered ungodly, and where the chosen religion spends so much time acting as a tireless curtain-twitching Mrs Grundy, determined above all to curtail the freedom of women, that it has no time to tackle the subjugation and impoverishment of its faithful by their filthy rich rulers, Israel's cool, clear-eyed take on matters of faith and secularism is a lesson to all of us. Imagine – a country in which the MOST religious are the LEAST nationalistic!

Anti-semitism can be as in-your-face as smashing up synagogues. But it can also be sly, sneaky, subtle and sometimes surreal. It must, in my opinion, go some way to explaining why Israeli human rights issues are so obsessively concentrated on, while many Arab and African countries are allowed to treat their citizens with as much subhuman sadism as they wish – the pregnant, raped women so frequently sentenced to death by stoning under Islamic regimes come immediately to mind, but the list is never-ending. In having one human rights rule for democratic Israel – which can be summed up as "Be perfect or we’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks" – and another for the dictatorships which surround it – "Do what you like to your people, it’s your culture!" – Whitey displays an interestingly sly bit of anti-Semitism which is also rather insulting to the said dictatorships and the people they lord it over.

The Jews are seen to be the one ethnic group who "pass" as white; their insistence on making their state a democracy is also seen as a sign of their stubborn refusal to act the savage to Whitey’s civilising influence. In short, the Lord forbid that any ethnic group should ignore the all-important world dominance hierarchy and dare to turn from victim into victor – and that is Israel’s ultimate crime.

So why did it never occur to me to actually go to Israel before? After all, since I broke my self-imposed travel embargo a decade ago (didn’t want to have sex with my various husbands, if you're interested) I’ve been a veritable globetrotter, nipping off to places as far away as the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean at the drop of a luggage tab. Why I would choose to make 12-hour flights to places I had absolutely no interest in while Israel is a mere four hours away, has a climate which makes the Bahamas look like Bradford and everything about it fascinates me, is a mystery to me, but a lot of it probably has to do with inertia, fear and a long-held belief that one should never meet one’s heroes.

This was the first time a whole country had been my hero – millions of the f******, all ready to let me down! – so naturally I held back.

Finally, the turn of events led me there. An avalanche of congratulatory e-mail from Jews around the world led to lunch with beautiful Michelle from the Israeli Tourist Board, which led to me and my best friend Nadia Petrovic – the only person I know whose philo-Semitism leaves mine in the shade – boarding an aircraft to Tel Aviv this October.

Even before your baggage goes through airport X-ray machines so huge that it would be possible for a standing adult, barely stooping, to walk through one, everything about going to Israel is larger than life, which is strange considering that it’s a country the size of Wales. Everything from the clothes you need to pack – not many, nothing warm, because it’s always hot and always informal unless you plan to hang around some neurotic, misogynistic Muslim/Catholic "Holy Place", in which case, COVER YOURSELF YOU FILTHY DAUGHTER OF A WHORE! – to the reaction you get from your friends – OH NO, YOU'RE GOING TO DIEEEEEE! – is Not Normal.

But that feeling ended, for me, the minute I was settled on the El Al aircraft. Looking around at my fellow passengers, in their various skullcaps, side-curls and crop-tops, I felt an eerie sense of calm, so different from the irritation, nerves and boredom that air travel usually provokes. My favourite bit of the Bible, verse 16, Chapter 1 of The Book of Ruth, came back to me, triumphantly this time after a lifetime of aloneness: "Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."

To be among them, but not of them; to "pass", of all the outrageous things, when one of the stewardesses (minimal make-up, stern slacks; Israeli girls make the rest of us, even Oriental women, look like inappropriate drag queens, but somehow you can’t hate them because they’re beautiful as they don’t mean to be) speaks to me in Hebrew! I can’t get over this – it’s what I’ve been waiting for since I was nine years old! – but my face falls a little when snub-nosed, baby-blonde Nadia is similarly spoken to; no one could mistake her for one. Bitch. And this is the first of many sad lessons I learn in Israel – that because of the terrible fall-off in tourism since the intifada, Israelis presume that they have no friends abroad any more. They simply presume that every person on an Israeli plane, or in an Israeli hotel, is an Israeli. That was the first thing that broke my heart, there.

But it healed the moment we stepped out of the plane into the sunshine. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth’s self-loathing hero remarks of his first visit to Israel something like: "Look! – Jews – Jews everywhere – walking around as if they own the place! WHICH THEY DO!" What was striking to me, though, all through Israel, was the very absence of weight being thrown around. "Shalom." They say it, them Jews, every time. It’s their hello, their goodbye, their have-a-nice-day, and they mean it. You hear them say it, you see them do it, and sometimes, just a little bit, got to say it, it makes you hate them – makes you hate their endless belief in the goodness of Mankind, the very Mankind that came so very near to destroying them.

You see it in Jerusalem, where the mosques and churches gleam free. You see it in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, where the Avenue of the Righteous comes before everything else – the Righteous being un-Jews, that is. You see it from the car, being driven from Jerusalem to Eilat, when you ask your Israeli tour guide what is that place over there that looks... different? Oh, that’s the Bedouins. That’s the Palestinians. That’s where they cut off people ’s hands and stone women to death, because it’s their culture, and that’s what so much of the "civilised" world wants even more of Israel to be sacrificed unto.

You see it in Ariel Sharon, that alleged hawk of hawks, sending in the Israeli Defence Force to violently evict 8,000 Jews from the Gaza in order to go ONE STEP CLOSER towards peace with a people who want his own people dead. You see it in the beautiful English Jewish journalist Charlotte Halle from Haaretz, the "Tel Aviv Guardian", married to an Israeli, with a three-year-old son, who only comes near to losing her temper once with me – when I express too much antipathy towards the Palestinians who already want her baby son dead, because he will grow up to be a Jew, and she is prepared to go, as her ceaseless, blameless, shameless people are always prepared to go, for ever a bridge too far.

You see it in Nadia’s eyes when she says, so serenely, in the car after Yad Vashem: "I always knew that lots of people had suffered. But if ever, EVER, anyone says that anyone has ever suffered like the Jews did, you know now that they’re either one of two things. One, they're silly. Or two, they’re just a little bit WICKED."

You see it in Tel Aviv, on your balcony, your last night in Israel, with Nadia crying back in the room, and you really want to go home and see your husband and she does her son... but you really wonder how you will live now, back at home, beyond the wild blue yonder where these people, these F****** PEOPLE, did the thing they did – where they literally created the modern world.

Where they turned a place the size of Wales, which was just another regular barren Arab desert, into a Garden of Eden overnight, or at least over a decade. Where they came straight off the ships from Auschwitz and Belsen and Drancy and simply rolled up their sleeves and shook their heads and said, "Oyyyy..."

Where they created Tel Aviv – the first Jewish city in 2,000 years – by simply saying it was so, a few dozen ragged-ass Hebrew re-settlers, standing on some sand in 1909.

Where they don't even WANT your help, the obdurate, stubborn, stiff-necked f****** —
All seven million of them –
Seven million...
So we won, then...

Back in the room, Nadia is singing now as she packs.

I’ve been back from Israel less than a week as I start writing this, and my suntan is already fading as my mind and soul shrink back to the size they were before – the size that fits so snugly around The X Factor and Brit Art and Whither the Novel Now and all those cultural Hula Hoops we keep up so frantically to distract ourselves from the big hole in the middle that is us.

Don't get me wrong – I love my life. This isn't a cheesy old I-was-lost-and-now-I’m-found snow job – I find that such woe-is-me eulogies tend to come from your basic dust-in-the-wind types anyway, who have neither the guts nor the inclination to change their lives but can’t pass up the chance of a little extra whine-time. No, like I said – I love my life. I love my God, my husband, my son Jack, my job, my friends and reality TV. I’m a happy bunny with such a high level of optimism that I frequently wake up in the morning, at the age of 45, feeling almost excited about washing my face and drinking my coffee – a sure sign, according to my shrink friend, of a person in A Happy Place. (Or a cretin.)

And yet, and yet... while all other parts of my heart beat properly, I feel that, increasingly, I have a country-sized hole in it. I have always loved my country with a fierce cool pride, knowing our faults, and still thinking "Yeah, we may well be stiff-upper-lipped/stuffed-shirts/sex-maniacs/drunks/po-faced/frivolous/whatever – but what’s the option? Being French – BEING GERMAN? I don’t think so!" No country is perfect, but relatively, I have always felt blessed to be British; generally, when prejudiced push comes to murderous shove, we have always tended to be on the side of the angels.

But increasingly, I don't feel this. Because, in the face of all the evidence of history, and thus in the face of logic, Britain is slowly but surely ceasing to be Britain and becoming little more than an outpost of the "European Union" – the very name, I feel, echoes the join-us-in-friendship-or-else! promise/threat of an earlier European Unity dream-turned-nightmare. I have many minor gripes against the EU, such as its monstrous levels of corruption and waste.

But mainly I loathe the EU as I believe it to be a massive threat to what remains of the world Jewry which its leader, Germany, did so much to destroy. I cannot trust an organisation which has a belligerent Germany, aided and abetted by his vicious short sidekick, France, at its head – especially when that Germany is increasingly painting itself as the real "victim" of the Second World War. And it’s not just them, it’s us – in 2003 an EU survey claimed that six out of ten Britons believed Israel to be a threat to "world peace", whatever that is.

Israel is not without its problems – but they are problems which are a result of other countries’ ignorant and destructive instincts and actions rather than its own. Because of this, they will be easier to solve – and, crucially, they make "war-torn" Israel a far better place to be in than peaceful Britain. Israelis can at least see the bombs that go off in their country – whereas ours go off in our minds and hearts, day after day, destroying everything which was once precious to us. I’m bad at languages, but I do have a heartful of soul and pretty soon I’ll have a Hebrew teacher – a female teacher, thankyouverymuch! – who I’ll see once a week. And eventually, I’ll get there.

Once I couldn't imagine not living – or dying – in England, but as I get older the more I feel the need to walk in the sun; in the blatant, blameless light of confidence, of communal effort, of a cause greater than keeping the European gravy train/hate machine on track. It's not exactly next year in Jerusalem – but, God willing, five years from now in Tel Aviv will do me just fine.

DEBATE

Is Julie Burchill right about Israel. What do you think?

E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk

 

WRITER TAKES ISSUE WITH JULIE BURCHILL

'Ugly reality' of Israel's atrocities
Times of London
November 24 2004

This writer takes issue with Julie Burchill

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1371498,00.html

To defend Israel today is to be either callous or wilfully ignorant. Had Julie Burchill bothered during her visit there to cross the few miles from Israel to Gaza or the West Bank, she would have seen such human suffering as to disturb even her frenetic adulation of Israel. She might have seen the daily lot of nearly three million Palestinians as they battle with army checkpoints, curfews, random shootings, arbitrary arrests and air raids. She might have found that the "superJews" she so admires humiliate and oppress Palestinians at a whim: last year, at the Nablus checkpoint, a middle-aged man was made to strip, get down on all fours and bark like a dog before he could enter his city. Women in labour routinely wait at checkpoints until some give birth there and see their babies die.

Those that survive live a blighted childhood. Since September 2000, Israel has killed more than 660 Palestinian children and wounded 9,000 – such as little Iman, sprayed with bullets when walking to school in Rafah last month, even after she died. Thousands of children are traumatised by the daily horrors they witness. For a Palestinian child, life under Israeli occupation means turning 15 and seeing the army come to arrest you if you are male, or seeing your friends bleed to death because no ambulance is allowed to rescue them.

It is difficult to convey the scale and effect of Israel's abuses of Palestinian lives through statistics alone. But these are horrifying enough: since 2000, nearly 4,000 Palestinians killed, and 30,000 injured; 400 were assassinated; and 25,000 homes were demolished. In addition, hundreds of acres of farmland were destroyed. No state on earth, except Israel, could get away with these atrocities, now routinely justified as "defence" against Palestinian "terrorism".

The truth is that the West, which created Israel, cannot bear to see what it has done. In trying to solve the problem of Jewish persecution in Europe, which culminated in the Holocaust, Western powers helped to establish the Jewish state as a refuge for the Jews and their own consciences. A compelling argument at the time, it became unassailable when Old Testament stories about the ancient Israelites and their exploits in the Holy Land were thrown in.

But these were European sensitivities arising from European events that had nothing to do with the people who paid the price for Israel's establishment. Most Palestinians are Muslims who do not accept the Biblical version of events. So why were they sacrificed to assuage European guilt and fulfil Zionist ambitions? And who cares to compute the cost to the Palestinians of creating Israel 56 years ago? Far easier to ignore all that and cling to the romantic illusion of an Israel of fearless pioneers and liberal upholders of civilised, Western values. But the ugly reality behind this myth is showing and people like Julie Burchill will have to take note some day.

(Ghada Karmi is a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter)

FULL ARTICLES

CLIMATE OF HATE ROCKS COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Hate 101. Climate of hate rocks Columbia University
By Douglas Feiden
New York Daily News
November 21, 2004

Many students say Columbia Prof. Hamid Dabashi, a department chairman, has bullied and threatened them for defending Israel.

It's a capital of "thuggery" – a "ghastly state of racism and apartheid" – and it "must be dismantled." A voice from America's crackpot fringe? Actually, Dabashi is a tenured professor and department chairman at Columbia University. And his views have resonated and been echoed in other areas of the university.

Columbia is at risk of becoming a poison Ivy, some critics claim, and tensions are high.

In classrooms, teach-ins, interviews and published works, dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.

In three weeks of interviews, numerous students told the Daily News they face harassment, threats and ridicule merely for defending the right of Israel to survive.

And the university itself is holding investigations into the alleged intimidation.

Dabashi has achieved academic stardom: professor of Iranian studies; chairman of the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department; past head of a panel that administers Columbia's core curriculum.

The 53-year-old, Iranian-born scholar has said CNN should be held accountable for "war crimes" for one-sided coverage of Sept. 11, 2001. He doubts the existence of Al Qaeda and questions the role of Osama Bin Laden in the attacks.

Dabashi did not return calls.

In September in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, he wrote, "What they call Israel is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their soul."

After the showing of a student-made documentary about faculty bias and bullying that targets Jewish students, six or seven swastikas were found carved in a Butler Library bathroom last month.

Then after a screening of the film, "Columbia Unbecoming," produced by the David Project, a pro-Israel group in Boston, one student denounced another as a "Zionist fascist scum," witnesses said.

On Oct. 27, Columbia announced it would probe alleged intimidation and improve procedures for students to file grievances.

"Is the climate hostile to free expression?" asked Alan Brinkley, the university provost. "I don't believe it is, but we're investigating to find out."

But one student on College Walk described the campus as a "republic of fear." Another branded the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department the "department of dishonesty."

A third described how she was once "humiliated in front of an entire class."

Deena Shanker, a Mideast and Asian studies major, remains an admirer of the department. But she says she will never forget the day she asked Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics, if Israel gives warnings before bombing certain buildings so residents could flee.

"Instead of answering my question, Massad exploded," she said. "He told me if I was going to 'deny the atrocities' committed against the Palestinians, I could get out of his class."

"Professorial power is being abused," said Ariel Beery, a senior who is student president in the School of General Studies, but stresses he's speaking only for himself.

"Students are being bullied because of their identities, ideologies, religions and national origins," Beery said.

Added Noah Liben, another senior, "Debate is being stifled. Students are being silenced in their own classrooms."

Said Brinkley: If a professor taught the "Earth was flat or there was no Holocaust," Columbia might intervene in the classroom. "But we don't tell faculty they can't express strong, or even offensive opinions."

Yet even some faculty members say they fear social ostracism and career consequences if they're viewed as too pro-Israel, and that many have been cowed or shamed into silence.

One apparently unafraid is Dan Miron, a professor of Hebrew literature and holder of a prestigious endowed chair.

He said scores of Jewish students – about one a week – have trooped into his office to complain about bias in the classroom.

"Students tell me they've been browbeaten, humiliated and treated disrespectfully for daring to challenge the idea that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish nation," he said.

"They say they've been told Israeli soldiers routinely rape Palestinian women and commit other atrocities, and that Zionism is racism and the root of all evil."

One yardstick of the anti-Israel sentiment among professors, critics say, is the 106 faculty signatures on a petition last year that called for Columbia to sell its holdings in all firms that conduct business with Israel's military.

Noting that the divestment campaign compared Israel to South Africa during the apartheid era, Columbia President Lee Bollinger termed it "grotesque and offensive."

That didn't stop 12 Mideast and Asian studies professors – almost half the department – and 21 anthropology teachers from signing on, a review of the petition shows.

To identify the Columbia faculty with the most strongly anti-Israel views, The News spoke to numerous teachers and students, including some who took their courses; reviewed interviews and published works, and examined Web sites that report their public speeches and statements, including the online archives of the Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper.

Their views could be dismissed as academic fodder if they weren't so incendiary.

Columbia's firebrands

In the world of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are "warmongers" and "Gestapo apparatchiks."

The Jewish homeland is "nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States."

Nicholas De Genova, who teaches anthropology and Latino studies. The Chronicle of Higher Education calls him "the most hated professor in America."

At an anti-war teach-in last year, he said he wished for a "million Mogadishus," referring to the slaughter of U.S. troops in Somalia in 1993.

"U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white supremacy," he added.

De Genova has also said, "The heritage of the victims of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. ... Israel has no claim to the heritage of the Holocaust."

De Genova didn't return calls.

Bruce Robbins, a professor of English and comparative literature.

In a speech backing divestment, he said, "The Israeli government has no right to the sufferings of the Holocaust."

Elaborating, Robbins told The News he believes Israel has a right to exist, but he thinks the country has "betrayed the memory of the Holocaust."

Joseph Massad, who is a tenure-track professor of Arab politics. Students and faculty interviewed by The News consistently claimed that the Jordanian-born Palestinian is the most controversial, and vitriolic, professor on campus.

"How many Palestinians have you killed?" he allegedly asked one student, Tomy Schoenfeld, an Israeli military veteran, and then refused to answer his questions.

To Massad, CNN star Wolf Blitzer is "Ze'ev Blitzer," which is the byline Blitzer used in the 1980s, when he wrote for Hebrew papers but hasn't used since.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon can be likened to Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, he once declared.

"The Jews are not a nation," he said in one speech. "The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist."

Massad didn't return several calls. On his Web site, he says he's a victim of a "witch hunt" by "pro-Israel groups" and their "propaganda machine."

George Saliba, a professor of Arabic and Islamic science. His classroom rants against the West are legendary, students have claimed.

One student says his "Islam & Western Science" class could be called "Why the West is Evil." Another writes that his "Intro to Islamic Civilization" often serves as a forum to "rail against evil America."

A recent graduate, Lindsay Shrier, said Saliba told her, "You have no claim to the land of Israel ... no voice in this debate. You have green eyes, you're not a true Semite. I have brown eyes, I'm a true Semite."

Saliba did not return calls.

Rashid Khalidi, who is the Edward Said professor of Arab studies. He's the academic heir to the late Said, a professor who famously threw a stone from Lebanon at an Israeli guard booth.

Columbia initially refused to say how the chair was funded. But The United Arab Emirates, which denies the Holocaust on state TV channels, is reported to have provided $200,000.

When Palestinians in a Ramallah police station lynched two Israeli reservists in 2000 – throwing one body out a window and proudly displaying bloodstained hands – the professor attacked the media, not the killers.

He complained about "inflammatory headlines" in a Chicago Sun-Times story and called the paper's then-owner, Conrad Black, who also owned the Jerusalem Post, "the most extreme Zionist in public life."

Reached at Columbia, Khalidi declined to comment on specifics.

"As somebody who has a body of work, written six books and won many awards, the only fair thing to do is look at the entire body of work, not take quotes out of context," he said.

Lila Abu-Lughod, a professor of anthropology, romanticizes Birzeit University in the West Bank as a "liberal arts college dedicated to teaching and research in the same spirit as U.S. colleges."

But it is well-established that Birzeit also is the campus where Hamas openly recruits suicide bombers, stone-throwers and gunmen.

As in her published works, Abu-Lughod gave a carefully nuanced response when reached Friday by The News:

"The CIA has historically recruited at Columbia, but that's not the mission of Columbia. The mission of Birzeit is to educate students, and they're working under very difficult circumstances to do that."

 

THE BOLLINGER WHITEWASH

The Bollinger Whitewash
Editorial
New York Sun
November 19, 2004

The president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, has been quietly making the rounds in town, reassuring key figures in the Jewish community – and in other communities – that he deems unacceptable the kind of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel behavior recently uncovered by documentary filmmakers on the Columbia campus. He assigned the university's provost, Alan Brinkley, to look into the matter. But Mr. Brinkley's early statements are already sending a ripple of concern through the key parties watching this dispute that what is going to be done will be a whitewash of a serious situation.

The provost has blundered at the outset by saying, as our Jacob Gershman reported Wednesday, that he was primarily concerned with incidents inside the classroom, as opposed to what professors say or write beyond their teaching. This comes amid pressure from guilt-ridden professors who do not want standards enforced in their department or professors disciplined and who know that much of the harassment that has taken place has been outside the classroom or, in some reported instances, off campus. The approach Mr. Brinkley is taking ignores the content of the scholars' research. In other words, Mr. Brinkley is avoiding the heart of Columbia's problem.

Treating this problem as one of harassment of students is all well and good, but only up to a point. The fact is that mistreatment of students is but a simple matter that could be taken care of by federal civil rights prosecutors or investigators, either from the Justice Department or the Department of Education in Washington. The Education Department recently indicated it will expand its enforcement activities in respect of campus anti-Semitism. Our reporting suggests that eventually federal authorities will have to get involved at Columbia. But a more fundamental problem exists, one articulated by a professor of Yiddish at Harvard, Ruth Wisse, in an interview with The New York Sun last spring: "This is not a question of comfort of students. The real question is what is the status of Middle East studies at Columbia University."

In other words, if Mr. Bollinger thinks the problem at Columbia can be dealt with by establishing new grievance policies for students or by creating a professorship of Israel studies, as Columbia is setting out to do, it's time for the Trustees to get involved. For such measures will only palliate the university's crisis. There will be much quoting of Columbia's code of academic freedom and tenure, which states that faculty members "may not be penalized by the University for expressions of opinion or associations in their private or civic capacity." But it also calls on them to "bear in mind the special obligations arising from their position in the academic community." The fact is that Columbia has been infected with a contingent of faculty members whose hatred for Israel has eclipsed any academic mission that makes sense in a crown jewel of education in the city of New York.

This point is well understood by the courageous critics who have been seeking to expose the problems at Columbia, including Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum and Campus Watch, and the David Project, which produced the film that forced Columbia to mount the investigation that Mr. Brinkey is now heading. Writing in the Columbia Spectator this week, Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser of the David Project conclude with a call for an intellectually diverse Middle East department "that deals with the major challenges in the Middle East, including the oppression of women, gays, and minorities, and the challenges of democracy, human rights, civil society, and modernity," all matters that the anti-Jewish crowd fears will cast a harsh light on the enemies of Israel.

In the long run, a failure by Columbia to address the scandal in its midst, or hide behind an academic code of conduct, will not only invite intervention by the federal authorities but will also bring market pressures to bear. Our own view is that it is long past time for the community of big givers to Columbia to call a halt to further financial support of the university until such time as it is clear that a whitewash is not going to be Mr. Bollinger's approach to the current scandal. There are other universities in New York City, both private and public, where great philanthropic opportunities await that do not confront donors with the risk that their funds will be hijacked by haters of Jews and Israel. And where, if such a problem does occur, it will be addressed by the university leadership both inside the classroom and without.

 

FILM ON ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS ON CAMPUS

Film on anti-Israel bias on campus
Columbia abuzz over underground film
By Jacob Gershman
New York Sun
October 20, 2004

At a history class, a professor mockingly tells a female Jewish student she cannot possibly have ancestral ties to Israel because her eyes are green.

During a lecture, a professor of Arab politics refuses to answer a question from an Israeli student and military veteran but instead asks the student, "How many Palestinians have you killed?"

At a student meeting on the topic of divestment from Israel, a Jewish student is singled out as responsible for death of Palestinian Arabs.

Those scenes are described by current and former students interviewed for an underground documentary that is causing a frisson of concern to ripple through the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University, where the incidents took place.

The film, about anti-Israel sentiment at the school, has not yet been released to the public, but it has been screened for a number of top officials of Columbia, and talk of its impact is spreading rapidly on a campus where some students have complained of anti-Israel bias among faculty members.

"The movie is shocking," one Columbia senior, Ariel Beery, said.

"It is shocking to see blatant use of racial stereotypes by professors and intimidation tactics by professors in order to push a distinct ideological line on the curriculum," Mr. Beery, who was interviewed for the film, said.

The film is the creation of the David Project, a 2-year-old group based in Boston that advocates for Israel and is led by the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, Charles Jacobs. The David Project, which is refusing to make the film public, has screened it for Barnard College's president, Judith Shapiro, and Columbia's provost, Alan Brinkley, according to sources.

Neither Ms. Shapiro nor Mr. Brinkley would return calls seeking comment about the film, though at a meeting in Washington this week with women active in Jewish charitable work the Barnard president is said to have spoken of how emotionally affected she was by the film.

With versions at 11 minutes and 25 minutes in playing time, the film consists of interviews with several students who contend that they have felt threatened academically for expressing a pro-Israel point of view in classrooms.

One of the scholars discussed most in the film, according to a person who has seen the film, is Joseph Massad, a non-tenured professor of modern Arab politics, who is teaching a course about Middle East nationalism this fall. Mr. Massad, a professor at Columbia's department of Middle East and Asian languages and cultures, has likened Israel to Nazi Germany and has said Israel doesn't have the right to exist as a Jewish state.

In the film, a former Columbia undergraduate, Tomy Schoenfeld, recalls attending a lecture about the Middle East conflict given by Mr. Massad in spring 2001. At the end of the lecture, Mr. Schoenfeld prefaced a question to the professor by informing Mr. Massad that he was Israeli, Mr. Schoenfeld told The New York Sun. "Before I could continue, he stopped me and said, 'Did you serve in the military?'" Mr. Schoenfeld, who served in the Israeli Air Force between 1996 and 1999, recalled. He said that he told Mr. Massad he had served in the military and that Mr. Massad asked him how many Palestinians he had killed. When Mr. Schoenfeld refused to answer, Mr. Massad said he wouldn't allow him to ask his question.

Mr. Massad did not return phone calls for comment yesterday. Mr. Schoenfeld told the Sun that his encounter with Mr. Massad was not representative of his dealings with Columbia professors and that the Middle East-Asian department is "usually balanced."

Mr. Beery, the senior at the school, told the Sun that anti-Israel bias is prevalent in the department and said the documentary film demonstrates how many students at Columbia have been affected by it.

"You would be surprised," Mr. Beery said, "to find the number of students who were willing to stand up and be counted as members of the student body who oppose the intimidation of students in the classroom, especially on topics related to the Middle East."

In 2003, Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, convened a committee of six Columbia professors to investigate the possibility of the school's declaring stricter boundaries between academic expression and political activism. But the credibility of the investigation came into doubt among those following the issue seriously when Mr. Bollinger told the New York Daily News that the committee found no claims or evidence of bias or intimidation in the classroom.

Mr. Beery said the committee did not look hard enough for bias and said Jewish students at Columbia have no avenue for pressing complaints about anti-Israel prejudice among faculty members.

"Because Jews are seen as this overrepresented ethnic group and not prone to protests, they sweep it under the rug," he said.

Columbia is looking to raise money for an endowed professorship in Israeli studies to make up for what Mr. Bollinger has said is lack of contemporary Israel scholarship at the school.

That effort comes at a time when the university is under a cloud for having accepted money from the United Arab Emirates, one of the worst human rights violators in the Middle East and a country hostile to Jews and Israel, to help finance a chair named for the late professor Edward Said, who was a writer and anti-Israel Palestinian activist. Harvard University returned money from the UAE after complaints were raised about the propriety of taking money from that source.

The situation of Jewish students on anti-Israel campuses like Columbia is an issue that is coming into focus only slowly among a Jewish communal leadership whose attention has been elsewhere. The isolation of Jews on campuses has been recognized for decades.

One of the most famous letters ever written by a Jewish figure was penned in 1918 by the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky and sent to a South African university student. Jabotinsky had heard that in the face of campus anti-Semitism the student was contemplating suicide. Jabotinsky advised him that it would be cowardly for the student to take his own life and that, instead, he should take heart from the Zionist stirrings, which were then just beginning.

The letter, which is reproduced in facsimile form in the "Encyclopedia Judaica," says: "I think, in a very conservative estimate, that the next ten years will see the Jewish state of Palestine ... a reality; probably less than ten." He said it would be "foolish to forego all of this" because of anti-Semites at the university.

Jewish students interviewed by this reporter at Columbia suggest that they perceive their situation in a different light than the student to whom Jabotinsky wrote. The Columbia students do not charge that they are facing anti-Semitism on campus. They attach an importance to what they see as a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiments.

"They teach everything in the context of one special, small struggle, when there are 23 countries out there where minorities are being oppressed, where women are bound to their homes, where homosexuals are being put in jail. They're ignoring the rest of the Middle East in favor of a small dimension of it," Mr. Beery said.

 

CANADIAN PROF WON'T BE DISCIPLINED FOR CALLING ALL ISRAELIS 'TARGETS'

Canadian prof won't be disciplined for calling all Israelis 'targets'
The Associated Press
November 18, 2004

A Canadian university professor who is also president of the country's Islamic Congress won't be disciplined for saying that all Israelis over the age of 18 are legitimate targets of suicide bombers, the University of Waterloo announced Wednesday.

Mohamed Elmasry was a panelist on Ontario current affairs television program Michael Coren Live last month when he said Israeli adults can be attacked because they all are members of the country's military.

Elmasry has said he was trying to express the view of many Palestinians, not his personal opinion.

"Although the statements made are indeed abhorrent and unacceptable, I have taken into account the contents of the apology and retraction and your long years of distinguished service as a faculty member at this university as well as your assurance that there will be no repetition of any such statements in the future," dean of science George Dixon said.

Officials with B'nai Brith Canada said in a statement that the university's decision not to discipline Elmasry is "unacceptable." "Surely, Israeli students cannot feel comforted in knowing that a professor considers them to be fair game – legitimate targets for murder," said executive vice president Frank Dimant.

Despite Elmasry's remorse over the incident, local police have launched an investigation into his comments as a possible hate crime.

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CROSSING BORDER IS ENDURANCE TEST

Crossing border is endurance test
By Susan Taylor Martin Times Senior Correspondent
St. Petersburg Times
November 22, 2004

www.sptimes.com/2004/11/23/Worldandnation/Crossing_border_is_en.shtml

Erez crossing, Israeli-Gaza border – No matter how you feel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's hard to deny the Gaza Strip is like a big detention camp. Palestinians can't leave without Israeli permission – and it's becoming harder for others to get out, too.

Until recently, the process was fairly quick and simple: You showed your passport to soldiers on the Palestinian side of the Erez Crossing and got in a taxi that took you to the Israeli side.

But after several people died in suicide attacks, security was dramatically tightened.

That's understandable. What's harder to fathom are the unexplained delays.

After finishing our work in Gaza, photographer John Pendygraft and I reached the border at 4 p.m. Sunday. Under the new policy, Palestinian soldiers now take your passport, phone the details to the other side and wait to hear back from the Israelis.

While the soldiers wait, you wait. And wait. And wait.

The first hint this might take a long time came around 4:45 p.m. when word spread that the border had been closed since 11 a.m. for "technical reasons" but would reopen "soon."

A wave of hope surged through the crowd, which included families with small kids, an amorous European couple and a smartly dressed diplomat. As the minutes ticked by with no sign of movement, friendships blossomed from the sharing of cigarettes and the latest rumors:

"It'll reopen in five minutes."

"It'll reopen at 6."

We struck up a conversation with Sami, an Israeli Arab engineer working on a construction project in Gaza. He goes home to Jerusalem every other week, and he said delays at Erez have become routine: "Two hours, sometimes three hours, I wait."

By 5:30 darkness had fallen, and the scene took on a desolate, Road Warrior air. Gunfire echoed in the distance and half-starved dogs slunk in the moon shadows.

When the 6 p.m. reopening failed to materialize, I was all for heading back to Gaza City. But a friendly CNN cameraman said his "man in Tel Aviv" was pressuring the Israel Defense Forces to let journalists cross. "Ten minutes, we'll be through" he assured us.

An hour later, we were still there. Someone came up with a number for the soldiers on the Israeli side, so we took turns calling to see when the border would reopen. Depending on who answered, the reply was A) "soon"; B) "more than two hours"; or C) "I don't know."

We implored the two young Palestinian soldiers still on duty to get a straight answer from the Israelis.

"The phone's dead – we have to recharge it," one said, and went back to his crossword puzzle.

It was now 8 p.m. – four hours after we arrived. It seemed obvious there would be no crossing tonight. We returned to our hotel, where we had dinner overlooking the Mediterranean. I told John that a least we'd lucked into a beautiful evening, without rain.

Shortly after midnight, I was awakened by a ferocious rattling of windows. Rain was coming down in sheets, and the sea had been whipped to foam by gale-force winds.

It was still pouring at 8 a.m. Monday when we arrived at Erez to try again. Sami, our new friend, and several others huddled in the only relatively dry place to wait, a vacant building open to the elements.

8:30. 9:30. 10 – again, the Israelis had apparently closed the border with no explanation. "Now that Abu Mazen is here," a soldier said, referring to the new Palestinian leader, "maybe this situation will improve."

At 11 a.m., the same soldier warned, "It'll be hours" and suggested everyone leave for lunch. No sooner had he spoken than a colleague appeared with a handful of passports – ours as well as those of four Spaniards and an elderly Arab woman. Of the 20 or so people waiting, the Israelis had cleared just a few to cross.

John and I grabbed our gear and headed down the long concrete tunnel that links the Palestinian and Israeli checkpoints. No more taxis; regardless of age or fitness, you now cross the border under your own steam.

At the Israeli end we came to a formidable-looking gate with turnstile.
"COME," boomed a disembodied voice, like that from behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.

One of the Spaniards went through first, squeezing himself and his luggage through the narrow turnstile.

"TURN AROUND," the voice ordered. The Spaniard took off his jacket, held up his arms and did a clumsy pirouette to show he didn't have a gun or bomb belt strapped beneath his shirt.

"NEXT," the voice commanded.

Ten minutes later, all seven of us were in a large, cell-like enclosure. Finally, a human appeared – a young Israeli soldier who handed John a glove through the bars and ordered him to run it over himself and the other men for traces of explosives. He gave me a second glove; I patted down the Arab woman, then myself.

Tests negative, the soldier released us from the holding pen. From there it was routine: luggage through an X-ray machine; people through a metal detector; a review of passports. After waiting nine hours over two days, we were on Israeli soil.

One possible reason for our delay, we later learned, was that the Israelis are installing equipment that shows an exact outline of the body so screeners can detect hidden weapons. Given such high technology, you'd think it would be simple to let those waiting on the other side know when and for how long the border will be closed.

Sami, the engineer, may still be there – along with all the others waiting in the cold, wind and rain.

"I heard they're shutting the border for two days," our driver said as – free at last – we headed for Jerusalem.

 

LACK OF PEACE DUE TO U.S., ISRAEL

Lack of peace due to U.S., Israel
By Ziad Amra
Minneapolis Star Tribune
November 22, 2004

www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5095735.html

With the passing of Yasser Arafat, a mantra is being established by commentators and U.S. government officials that a "new" opportunity for peace between Palestinians and Israelis exists.

This mantra assumes the lack of peace in the region is due to the intransigence of one man – Arafat – and not the existence of millions of Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Israel and an illegal 37-year Israeli military occupation of the Occupied Territories (West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem).

If such a new opportunity exists, it is for the Bush administration and the Israeli government to seize.

The reality is that Israel has failed to negotiate a final peace agreement with the Palestinians since negotiations began in 1991.

While Arafat was not perfect, it is worth noting Israel failed to achieve an agreement with a person who was a Nobel Peace Prize winner (1995) and the only democratically elected leader (1996) in the Arab world.

Instead, throughout the years of peace negotiations, successive Israeli governments have continued with impunity murdering Palestinians, confiscating their land and doubling to 400,000 the number of illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank – not the good-faith actions of a country committed to withdrawing from the Occupied Territories.

To put this destructiveness into perspective, in just the last three years, Israel has murdered more than 3,000 Palestinians (one-third of them children) and injured more than 20,000 – proportionately this would compare to 336,000 Americans killed and more than 2.2 million wounded.

Yet, in spite of this violence on their lives, Palestinians have continued to seek peace – because as the weakest, most victimized people in the region, nobody needs it more than they do.

Though the perception in this country is that Arafat rejected a "generous" peace proposal at Camp David in the summer of 2000, negotiations actually continued through January 2001 at Taba, Egypt, with serious progress made on bridging differences. Only with the election of current Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did negotiations end.

Despite what they say, both Israel and the Bush administration have worked against a peaceful two-state resolution to the conflict. The Bush administration has rejected the traditional U.S. role as a mediator and instead placed itself at the disposal of Israel – aiding and abetting Israel's murderous policies and limitless breaches of international law.

Both Israel and the Bush administration failed to seize upon the March 2002 Arab League offer that all Arab countries would sign a peace agreement with Israel – if Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank and a just settlement was found for the millions of refugees.

Instead, this past April President Bush endorsed Israel's goal of keeping large portions of the West Bank, maintaining a majority of illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank and negating the rights of Palestinian refugees. This negated the entire basis of peace since negotiations began – Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories and two states at peace.

Moreover, the Bush administration has supported Israel's building of the Wall that will surround and annex more than 40 percent of West Bank land.

Ostensibly to protect Israel, the Wall's route belies Israel's intentions – to usurp as much Palestinian land as possible. Why else does this Wall zigzag throughout the West Bank, rather than along Israel's border? The International Court of Justice in the Netherlands understood this and in July 2004 declared the Wall illegal under international law.

Finally, the Bush administration has insisted that Palestinians establish a democracy. Although it is an oxymoron to require an oppressed and militarily occupied nation to have "free and fair elections" and become a full-fledged democracy, the Palestinians had elections in 1996 and have been seeking new elections in spite of U.S. and Israeli obstacles. However, any new democratically elected Palestinian leader will likely be ignored by the United States and Israel if he pursues Palestinian national interests rather than those of Israel.

Peace will not be had at the barrel of an Israeli gun or with continued U.S.-endorsed Israeli theft of Palestinian land. Nor will peace depend on which Palestinian leader is elected. Peace will depend on whether the United States encourages Israel to end its 37-year occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, remove its illegal settlements from Occupied Territory and provide justice to the refugees it created.

(Ziad Amra, Minneapolis, is a board member of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.)

 

MR. SHARON, YOU'RE UP AT BAT

Mr. Sharon, you're up at bat
Editorial
The New York Times
November 19, 2004

www.nytimes.com/2004/11/19/opinion/19fri2.html?oref=login&oref=login

After four years of gloom and doom for those who seek peace in the Middle East, the last few days, with the baby steps toward some modicum of civility between Israelis and Palestinians, have been downright heady. First, the new Palestinian leaders offered Israel a burial site it could accept for Yasir Arafat. Then President Bush, prodded by the British prime minister, Tony Blair, actually said he was willing to "spend the capital of the United States" on creating an independent Palestinian state. And finally, Mahmoud Abbas, the new head of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the likely front-runner to replace Mr. Arafat, set a date for elections: Jan. 9. What's more, Mr. Abbas has thus far resisted any urge to toughen up his image with Palestinian hard-liners through unnecessary anti-Israel speeches. If this were baseball, President Bush would have hit a single, and Mr. Abbas a double. Now it's time for Ariel Sharon to step up to the plate.

Mr. Sharon has long claimed that he's been waiting for a moderate Palestinian leader, someone he can actually deal with, as opposed to Mr. Arafat, whom he viewed as duplicitous. So we shall take Mr. Sharon at his word, and encourage him to board the peace train with Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and Mr. Abbas.

The first order of business is to give the moderate Mr. Abbas something tangible to help him shore up his credibility with the Palestinian people. Mr. Sharon should immediately announce a complete freeze on settlement activity in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. That should take priority over releasing Palestinians held in Israeli jails, as many of those prisoners have blood on their hands.

Next, Mr. Sharon has got to do all he can to expedite free, full and fair elections involving all Palestinians – including those in East Jerusalem. Right now many are practically under lock and key, with their movements zealously restricted by Israeli roadblocks and closures. Added to that are regular Israeli Army incursions into Gaza and all the towns in the West Bank, which will also discourage election turnout. Obviously, Israel has the right to protect its citizens from Palestinian suicide bombers bent on upending any attempt at a peace settlement. But Mr. Sharon and the Israeli Army need to find ways to allow Palestinians to maneuver more easily around roadblocks and closures - especially when it's time to get to polling sites.

A peace deal will be possible only if a new Palestinian leader can establish enough authority to prepare the Palestinian people for what they must accept if they ever want an independent state: a Jerusalem shared between the two countries, final borders based on 1967 lines and a recognition that for all but a symbolic handful of refugees, the right of return will be to a new Palestinian state, not to Israel. Such a deal was difficult enough for Mr. Arafat to accept; it will be even harder for a new leader who comes to the table with only a fraction of Mr. Arafat's authority with his people.

Over the years, there have miraculously been a few moments of possibility that have punctured the gloom that is the peace process in the Middle East: the talks at Oslo and at Camp David come to mind. Now we seem to have stumbled, through the death of Mr. Arafat, into another moment of opportunity. It would be criminally negligent if any of the principal leaders involved didn't step up to the plate. Mr. Sharon, we await you, and we beg that you swing for the fences.

FULL ARTICLES

DATABASE ENSHRINES HOLOCAUST VICTIMS

Database enshrines Holocaust victims
By Joseph Berger
The New York Times
November 21, 2004

What is known of their lives has always been dwarfed by a single, almost