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MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #02-01 Elusive Peace: The Israel-Palestinian Conflict
January 10, 2001

Program description, guest contact information and audio files at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2001/0201.html

Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact....

Male Voice: It is an occupation force inside Palestinian territory where the Palestinians are resisting military occupation, and the Israelis are prolonging the occupation and making the civilian population pay the price of resistance.

Female Voice: A group of about 50 settlers stormed the area where we were and threatened actually to kill people and began beating people up. A very, very standard occurrence for anybody who's Palestinian in Hebron.

Phillip Babich: On September 29, 2000 a new wave of intense protests erupted in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel. On this program, we take a look at some of the root causes of conflict in that region of the world, and we'll provide perspectives on this issue not often heard in the U.S. mass media--those of Jewish Americans and Palestinian Americans urging Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.

I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information. From the vantage point of the U.S. public, it's often difficult to discern exactly what's behind the violence in what are termed the Occupied Territories of Israel or Palestine. When we see images of rock throwing Palestinians in our newspapers and television screens, we're lead to believe that unruly mobs are threatening Israel's national security. According to some scholars, activists and others who are familiar with the historical roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, descriptions of those protests might include terms like "resistance" "pro-democracy" or "anti-colonial."

Edward Said, a Columbia University professor, was born in Jerusalem in 1935. He's an internationally renowned scholar and one of the few advocates for Palestinian rights in U.S. academia. In an interview with National Radio Project's David Barsamian, Said said that one can't understand the resurgent Intafada (Arabic for "uprising") without understanding what happened to the Palestinians in 1948.

Edward Said: A society made up principally of Arabs in Palestine was uprooted and destroyed and two-thirds of the Arab population of the country (870,000 people) were driven out by design. The Zionist archives are quite clear about this, and several Israeli historians have talked about it. Of course, Arabs have said it all along. But the dispersal of the people meant the destruction of the society and the dispossession of the people. So that by the end of the conflict in 1948, Palestinians were a minority in their own country. Most of them had become refugees--two-thirds of them had become refugees whose descendants today number about four and a half million people scattered throughout the Arab world, Europe, Australia, North America. And the balance of the people became subjects to Israeli military occupation in 1967 when the West Bank which had been under Jordan at that time was occupied and taken over by Israel, along with Jerusalem.

David Barsamian: Talk about the framework of the public discourse. Let's go down some of these phrases: "peace" and "the peace process."

Edward Said: Well, the peace process began in 1993 when a secret agreement had been made between the PLO and the Israeli government to undertake, to give the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yassar Arafat some territory and authority over that territory in the West Bank and Gaza. However, given the tremendous disparity of power between the Israelis and the Palestinians, in effect the peace process has simply been a re-packaging of the Israeli occupation. So that even as we speak today in November of 2000, Israel still controls 60% of the West Bank and 40% of Gaza, has annexed Jerusalem, has filled the territory with settlers. If you include the ones in Jerusalem, it's about 350,000 Israelis who are there illegally. These are settlements and a military occupation that is now the second longest in the twentieth and twenty-first century. The longest being the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. So this is 33 years old and pushing the record.

And essentially the peace process has simply involved the Palestinian leadership in accepting Israeli terms. Small re-deployments of Israeli troops. The settlements continue. Jerusalem also is still under Israeli sovereignty and settlement. The borders are controlled by Israel. The water is controlled by Israel. The exits and entrances are controlled by Israel. Security is controlled by Israel. So that, in effect, what the Americans and Israelis were doing was to get Palestinian consent to this re-packaging of the occupation. And it's been presented to the public as moving towards peace, whereas in fact it's been a gigantic fraud. And only that could possibly explain the extent and the depth of the Palestinian rebellion that has taken place since September the 29th, 2000.

David Barsamian: Ariel Sharon went to al-Haram al-Sharif the sight of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on September 28th. He was escorted by some 1000 Israeli security personnel. The visit of the former Israeli general and cabinet minister is cited as the match that ignited the new Intifada. Two questions: What does Sharon represent to Palestinians and two, what does it say about Barak in allowing Sharon to make the visit?

Edward Said: Well, Sharon in Israeli popular mythology is something of a hero. I mean, his exploits began in the 50s. He was responsible for the invasion of the town of Qibya where they killed about 65 people, basically in their homes--innocents, men women and children--in retaliation for a raid on an Israeli military patrol in which three soldiers were killed the day before. And thereafter, he went from one exploit of this sort to another. He's basically a bully who specializes in the oppression of civilians and enemies who are far less well equipped than he is. He was the pacifier of Gaza, after the Israelis occupied it in '67. And during the early 70's he destroyed many homes, relocated Palestinians, in order to uproot what the Israelis call terrorist cells but were in fact, in effect, resistance cells inside Gaza against the Israelis.

Of course, above all he was the architect of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, where he misled his own cabinet into believing that they were going to just go in for a few miles, whereas in fact they went into Beirut--into West Beirut--killing in the process 17,000 people. And he was cited thereafter, at a commission of inquiry--the Kahana Commission--as being indirectly responsible for the massacres in the refugees camps of Sabrat al-kila which were done in an area controlled by the Israelis, although the actual action was perpetrated by Lebanese Maronite militias, acting under the supervision of the Israelis.

So in effect, I think, by any standards at all, Ariel Sharon is a war criminal. He's made no secret of the fact he intends--he would like--to invade...to drive the rest of the Palestinians out and put them in Jordan. He said the solution of Palestine is what he calls a "Jordanian option," which is to turn Jordan, which is a sovereign country, into a Palestinian state.

His appearance on the al-Aqsa mosque--which is of course held by Israel and has been annexed since 1967 in full contravention of international law and many U.N. resolutions despite the ones vetoed by the United States--was a provocation not so much because of his appearance, but because the next day (he appeared on Thursday the 28th) on Friday, right after prayers there was a demonstration against his having been there the day before. And the Israeli police opened fire on the demonstrators and killed eight, basically civilians. He appeared there the day before, on the 28th, with a 1000 policemen supplied to him by Barak. So it was quite clear that Barak was behind...or at least approved of the move, not so much only as a provocation (I don't know whether it was meant to be a provocation to bring forth the horrors that ensued. I don't think his limited brains could foresee this) but I think it was a way of asserting Israeli sovereignty on a Muslim holy place. It was designed--not so much to be provocative--designed to be offensive. To show that an Israeli military figure, who has a long history of brutality and war crimes, can appear in one of the holiest places of Islam with impunity.

Phillip Babich: Columbia University professor, Edward Said, speaking with David Barsamian, executive producer and host of Alternative Radio. A full version of that interview was originally aired on Alternative Radio in November, 2000.

In October, 2000 the U.S. House of Representatives voted 365 to 30 to call on Yassar Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization to stop the violence in the Occupied Territories. The House also passed a new foreign aid bill giving Israel $2.8 billion in the next fiscal year, the largest amount received by any country.

Numerous demonstrations have been held across the United States to protest what a United Nations human rights body called Israel's "disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force" against mostly unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. Many of these demonstrations have been organized by Palestinians, but a surprising number have been organized by American Jews, who have traditionally been reluctant to criticize the Israel government.

One such demonstration took place in New York City, December, 2000 just as a U.S. appointed commission of inquiry arrived in Jerusalem. The following report was produced by correspondent Susan Wood in New York City and is narrated by Stephanie Welch.

Stephanie Welch: Dozens of people, mainly Jews, demonstrated December 11th outside the Israeli Consulate in New York City to mark the 52nd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Israel, they said, is systematically violating the basic tenets of that document which reaffirms the right of everyone to life, liberty and security. Gayle Kirshenbaum of the Not in Our Name Coalition read a petition she said was being signed by Jews around the world.

Gayle Kirshenbaum: We urge Israel to uphold the human rights of Palestinians by an immediate, total and unconditional withdrawal from all the territories taken by force in '67, recognition of the Palestinian rights of nationals to self-determination, to return and to compensation and the implementation of steps toward the realization of this right, abolition of all discriminatory laws and the introduction of full, legal equality between Jews and non-Jews, redistribution of resources and a massive program of aid to rehabilitate Palestinian communities.

Stephanie Welch: The demonstrators took turns reading the names of the nearly 300 people killed since the start of the uprising, the vast majority of them Palestinians, a quarter of them aged 17 or under. They lit memorial candles and recited a Hebrew blessing. {Prayers in Hebrew}

Kirshenbaum admits only a minority of American Jews think Israeli policies are to blame for the current violence. She says that's because the U.S. media uncritically reflect the Israeli government's position that it has made major concessions to the Palestinians since the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. But, she says, the Oslo Accords have been little consolation to most Palestinians. In the past seven years, the Palestinians have seen further erosion of their territory.

Gayle Kirshenbaum: Whether it's been a Labor government or a Likkud government, since Oslo, the expansion of settlements has continued and under Barak it accelerated. And this has meant that while the rest of the world thinks the Palestinians should be patient and wait for peace to come into place, what they've seen is that their land has been slowly confiscated while everybody's talking about peace. And that's their reality and they have no reason to have faith that Israel is bargaining in good faith.

Stephanie Welch: The Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, occupied by Israel after the 1967 war, are the flash points of the current uprising. According to the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a non-profit organization dedicated to informing the U.S. public about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the settler population in these Palestinian areas has doubled 200,000 since 1993.

Yifat Susskind is an Israeli-American human rights activist who grew up on a Kibbutz in northern Israel. She says little has been reported in the U.S. press about one of the most disturbing aspects of the current crisis-- violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers who are often armed with military weapons.

Yifat Susskind: Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza have been responsible for somewhere in the neighborhood of eight or nine murders since this violence began at the end of September. You know, everybody remembers these media images which were totally horrific of these two Israeli soldiers being lynched and killed outside the police station in Ramalah. But the fact is that very, very similar kinds of attacks, including extreme torture and killing, have been carried out by Israeli settlers.

Stephanie Welch: Susskind says such violence predates the current uprising and cannot be seen as retaliation for killings of Israeli civilians by Palestinians. While living in Jerusalem in 1993, she and other Israelis formed a solidarity committee. They delivered food and medical supplies to Palestinian civilians trapped in their homes by Israeli military curfews.

Yifat Susskind: There was one occasion where we organized about a hundred Israelis on a Saturday to come out to a settlement just on the outskirts of Hebron and to do a building project, to work together with Palestinians from the community to build a fence around the homes of four Palestinian families who were under attack by settlers; who had bottles and bricks and molotov cocktails hurled at their houses everyday; whose children were cursed and beaten every time they tried to leave the house to go to school; whose mothers and wives and sisters were threatened with rape and other kinds of assaults by Jewish-Israeli settlers any time they showed their face in the street, and these families asked if we could help them to build a fence so that they could at least have their homes and their yards a little bit buffered.

Stephanie Welch: The fence building began. Then says Susskind...

Yifat Susskind: A group of about 50 settlers sort of stormed the area where we were and threatened actually to kill people and began beating people up. I, myself, was punched in the face and had a tooth knocked loose, which was--you know--extremely unpleasant but a very, very standard occurrence for anybody who's Palestinian in Hebron.

Stephanie Welch: Israeli soldiers witnessed the attack and did nothing to stop it, says Susskind. In fact, she says, two members of her group were arrested while trying to file a complaint and no one was ever prosecuted for the attack. Such violence, she says, is not random. It's part of the calculated Israeli government policy, justified in the name of security. A policy, she says, has made tens of thousands of people homeless.

Another dimension to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the U.S. role. Israel has been the number one recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world. The United States has blocked dozens of United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories and hundreds of General Assembly resolutions condemning the Israeli occupation.

Speaking at the New York City demonstration, Rabbi Michael Feinberg said he hoped there would be greater public pressure on the U.S. government to take a more evenhanded approach to the issues.

Michael Feinberg: I think it's important that the U.S. government acts as a fair and evenhanded mediator, and in many instances that has not been the case. We have seen time and time again where the U.S. government has uncritically backed the actions of the Israeli government. That's changed somewhat recently but still not enough. I hope that this fact-finding mission will really be successful and will really go some way to sorting out how this recent round of violence began and suggesting some creative solutions to it that will put the peace process back on track. That's one role the U.S. clearly can have.

Stephanie Welch: Feinberg called on American Jews to be more critical of Israeli government policies. For Making Contact, this is Stephanie Welch.

Phillip Babich: That segment was produced by Susan Wood in New York City.

You are listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you want more information about the topic of this week's show or how to get in touch with any of our guests, we'll be giving out our toll-free number at the end of this broadcast.

For Palestinians, continued Israeli occupation of their territories means a variety of things. For Khalil Barhoum, a Palestinian writer and activist who is a professor at Stanford University, occupation means further humiliation that dates back to 1948. Barhoum says that the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords gave him hope, but instead, he says, those accords have actually seemed to legitimate Israeli occupation and aggression in Palestine:

Khalil Barhoum: It means that the continued humiliation that the dismantlement of their land, confiscation, expansion of settlements and building of new Israeli settlements on confiscated Palestinian land. It means that the restriction on movement from one area to the other, from one Palestinian village to another, including, of course, no entry for most Palestinians into East Jerusalem which as you well know houses the holy places for most Muslims, especially in Ramadan when they like to go and pray on Fridays. This is not something that they can exercise under Israeli occupation. Despite the fact that there were was a sequence of agreements, Oslo I and Oslo II and Oslo III between the Palestinian authority and Israelis.

The impact of the Israeli occupation on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank has not changed. As a matter of fact, in the eyes of many Palestinians, the situation now is even much harder and much worse than it used to be under Israeli occupation before Oslo, and what most Palestinians describe is a legitimization of the Israeli occupation with these accords between Israeli and the Palestinian authority. So the Israeli occupation continues with its military as well as, you know, non-human practices against the Palestinians. And it's unfortunate it's kind of protected by the fact that there is a so-called peace process going on. Now in Palestinian eyes, the peace process has produced a lot of promises but very little peace that they can kind of point out to. And their economic conditions have considerably worsened under Oslo. And they continue to see the Israeli practices that they used to witness under full Israeli occupation before '93 going on, but this time they are in one way or another validated and legitimized by the fact that Palestinian authority is engaged in an on-going process of negotiations with Israel.

Phillip Babich: Now Israel is the number one recipient of U.S. foreign aid. How does that weigh in or factor in to this situation in Israel-Palestine?

Khalil Barhoum: Oh, I think it weighs in very heavily in the sense that when Americans...when average Americans say: Well why should we care; there are a lot of troubled spots around the world? The answer is very easy, I mean morally we should care. But also morally we are obliged to care because of our financial and military involvement on the side of Israel. And in the Arab world and even in the Islamic world at large, the American foreign policy in the Middle East is seen as nothing more than an expansion of Israeli policy.

Unfortunately the bias toward Israel is well-documented in deed as well as in words. And as you outlined, Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. It's a country that receives officially $3 billion every year from the West. And it's a country of 6 million people which has a per capita income of, as a matter of fact, that rivals that of the United States. I mean, the latest statistics are like $18,000. By contrast, Egypt has 65 million people and it receives $2 billion which is still a lot better and more than the rest of the world does because Israel and Egypt combined receive almost 40% of the U.S. foreign aid package. So per capita, places like Africa get a pittance compared to what a small country like Israel does. And if for nothing, this is one very good reason why the average American should care about what Israel does to the Palestinians because it's doing it with our foreign aid. It's doing it with our money, and it's doing it with our military aid as well.

There have been tens of U.N. Security Council resolutions not to mention over 400 U.N. General Assembly resolutions pertaining to the Palestinian problem, including those calling on Israel to terminate occupation of Palestinian and Arab land. But the U.S. had shown no inclination or desire to do that. And that is a cause for anger and frustration in the Arab streets. That's why you see the demonstrations on behalf of the Palestinians throughout the Arab world and even beyond in the Muslim world as well.

Phillip Babich: I've been speaking with Dr. Khalil Barhoum. He's a professor at Stanford. He's also a Palestinian writer and activist. Dr. Barhoum, thank you so much for joining us at Making Contact.

Khalil Barhoum: It's my pleasure.

Phillip Babich: On November 29, 2000, the Center for Political Education and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee launched a Divestment from Israel Movement. Organizers say that the campaign is based on the successful divestment movement aimed at South Africa's apartheid regime. Eyad Kishawi is with the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee:

Eyad Kishawi: Today there are about $6 billion that flow out of the U.S. taxpayer money to Israel. And we have tried to lobby and fight really hard in order to raise awareness around this issue, and people are very aware. But, unfortunately, the U.S. government has been extremely unresponsive. So we're asking people to take the matter into their own hands and truly start working on imposing individually-based sanctions on Israel, until Israel recognizes international, human, political and civil rights of Palestinians that are inalienable. And the way we're trying to do that is to educate people that 5 million of us have been displaced off of our land, so that a Jewish-only ethnocracy would be established there. And that Jewish-only ethnocracy has routinzed the form of displacement of Palestinians and the killing of Palestinians. So we're asking on all people of conscience--and particularly people of color, white people, Jewish-Americans who don't want this to happen in their own name--to, first of all, not buy any "made in Israel" products. Number 2, to divest from all Israeli government bonds--and a good place to start that is on universities. And number 3 is to sell stocks in Israeli companies--and again on universities and retirement accounts. These are very, very accessible investment venues for people to be able to influence socially responsible investments. And number 4 to continue working on ending U.S. aid to Israel until Israel recognizes the rights of the indigenous people of Palestine and really observes international law.

Phillip Babich: How would one find out whether they have investments in Israeli companies or Israeli bonds?

Eyad Kishawi: If you're at a university, it's quite easy to look up the investment portfolio of the university. Most public universities make this information public under Freedom of Information Act. And you can go to the respective web sites or go to the libraries or to the finance office and look up that information at universities. And retirement accounts, what you can do is look at the prospectus of the different companies under the different investment groups that the retirement accounts are investing in and look up these companies, and under Standard and Poor's Index, they can tell you where the headquarters of these companies are. And if these headquarters are in Israel, you in effect would be investing in excluding the Palestinian indigenous people from their own land.

Phillip Babich: Eyad Kishawi is with the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee.

And that's it for this edition of Making Contact: A Look at the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Thanks for listening and special thanks this week to Orla Rapple for production assistance. Laura Livoti is our managing director. Peggy Law, executive director. Associate producer, Stephanie Welch and Shereen Meraji. Senior advisor, Norman Solomon. National producer, David Barsamian. Women's desk coordinator, Lisa Rudman. Prison desk coordinator, Eli Rosenblatt. And I'm your host and managing producer Phillip Babich.

If you want more information about the topic of this week's program or how to get in touch with any of our guests, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts, that's 800-529-5736. You can also go to our web site at radiopoject.org. That's radioproject.org.

Making Contact is an independent production. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs, we'd like to hear from you. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. Bye for now.