[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Important Article in today's Tribune

[Al Kagan]

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>Subject: Important Article in today's Tribune
>Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2002 14:54:03 -0600
>X-Priority: 3
>Status:  
>
>Dear friends:
>
>This is an important article from today's Chicago Tribune that, 
>along with Yassir Arafat's commentary in the New York Times, makes 
>this an interesting day in newspaper coverage of the Middle East:
>
>BEYOND GOVERNMENTS
>Release Middle East from the professionals
>
>By Marda Dunsky. Marda Dunsky is an assistant professor at the 
>Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
>
>Published February 3, 2002
>
>It is difficult to imagine how the current state of affairs between 
>Israelis and Palestinians could be worse.
>
>On a near daily basis, we open our newspapers and turn on our 
>televisions to find news of another calamity. People are blown apart 
>on buses and in the streets. People's homes are demolished. They 
>live in a state of siege. Sections of towns in the West Bank and 
>Gaza Strip are systematically reduced to rubble by sophisticated 
>weapons of war.
>
>Much is made of the notion of a "cycle of violence" in which the two 
>combatants are said to be locked in a death grip that knows only 
>pauses but no end, because they hate each other more than they love 
>peace.
>
>Is there a way out?
>
>It seems clear that a resolution of the conflict is beyond the means 
>and reach of the parties themselves. But it is equally clear that 
>U.S. Middle East policy, despite the democratic cycling of 
>officeholders through the White House and Congress over decades, has 
>not been able to crack the nut of the most intractable modern 
>conflict.
>
>This is so because U.S. Middle East policy has ceased to be--if 
>indeed it ever was--conducted in the interests of the Palestinian 
>and Israeli peoples themselves, or with regard to the sentiments of 
>the American people as a whole.
>
>Instead the policy is driven by a militaristic Cold War approach to 
>U.S. hegemony in this most strategic of regions, by the interests of 
>Big Capital--particularly the oil and defense industries--and by the 
>interests of faith-based lobby groups.
>
>Delegations and diplomats
>
>The State Department continues to fiddle while Rome burns. It sends 
>delegations and diplomats to the region who have little if any 
>chance of succeeding in crisis management as long as the structural 
>underpinnings of the conflict--which originate in Washington, not 
>Tel Aviv or Ramallah--do not change.
>
>The result is that the knot of conflict is pulled ever tighter.
>
>For decades the United States has supplied inordinate quantities of 
>advanced weaponry and other types of aid to the stronger party to 
>the conflict. The U.S. has exercised a policy of strong-arm, 
>exclusionary diplomacy in order to shield the stronger party from 
>international censure over its political and military actions toward 
>the weaker.
>
>Almost as frequently as acts of abominable violence against 
>innocents are played out on the streets of Gaza and Jerusalem, acts 
>of intellectual inquiry into the conflict are played out in this 
>country. Panel discussions, lectures and conferences on the 
>Israeli-Palestinian conflict regularly fill church basements, 
>community halls and college auditoriums.
>
>Perhaps within civil society lies the key.
>
>It is incumbent on American women and men of secular goodwill and 
>religious faith to come together to rescue the peace process from 
>the compromised values of U.S. Mideast policy. The stakes in the 
>Israeli-Palestinian conflict have become so high that policymaking 
>cannot be left solely to the so-called professionals.
>
>American civil society must not succumb to the numbness induced by 
>yet another image of bloodied Israeli bodies hoisted into ambulances 
>on the streets of Hadera or of Palestinian corpses lofted high above 
>funeral throngs on the streets of Nablus.
>
>Members of churches, synagogues and mosques; leaders and supporters 
>of non-governmental organizations dedicated to human-rights and 
>relief efforts; scholars of international law, human rights and 
>diplomacy; and members of relevant student groups and professional 
>associations must unite to build a coalition determined to set right 
>the course of a hijacked Middle East peace policy.
>
>They must move from the safety of academic discussions to a plan of 
>political action.
>
>As Jews, Muslims and Christians, as secular humanitarians and 
>scholars--but first and foremost as taxpaying American 
>citizens--people from all quarters of civil society must unite to 
>proclaim "Not in our name!" will we allow a deliberately skewed and 
>deceptive policy to prolong the hemorrhage of the conflict and to 
>misrepresent or ignore our sentiments about how to stanch it.
>
>Citizen groups
>
>Across the country are scores of citizen-funded advocacy groups 
>devoted to Middle East peace. Some have professional, salaried 
>leadership and government-bestowed tax-exempt status; others are 
>voluntary and less formal. At least a dozen such non-governmental 
>organizations, which devote all or part of their efforts to Middle 
>East peace and represent a variety of denominational and secular 
>views, exist in the Chicago area alone.
>
>What is needed among them is a new vision that will yield a 
>de-Balkanization of the Mideast advocacy process, fueled by an 
>understanding that only collective action can reconfigure the 
>superstructure to achieve political change.
>
>The fundamental mission of such an initiative--let's call it Civil 
>Society for Middle East Peace, or CISMEP for short--would be to 
>democratize U.S. Mideast policymaking and hold it accountable to 
>public sentiment on a much broader basis than it is now.
>
>A critical mass achieved by the coming together of peace advocates 
>would not only empower concerned citizens. It also would liberate 
>their elected representatives from the fear that they will lose 
>their mandates and seats of power by daring to question the status 
>quo on this most delicate of political issues.
>
>Without trying to impose a specific formula for peace--which must be 
>determined through negotiations by the parties to the conflict 
>themselves--CISMEP would demand transparency in the U.S. role in 
>brokering that peace.
>
>Given the dire realities playing out on Middle East ground, CISMEP 
>should call first for the immediate deployment of an international 
>peacekeeping and observer force in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 
>parallel to that advocated by the U.S. and being established in 
>Afghanistan.
>
>Next CISMEP should focus its attention on the relationship between 
>U.S. Mideast policy and U.S. commitment to its law and to 
>international law.
>
>It should repeat and reinforce the call issued by Rep. John Conyers 
>(D-Mich.) in June for congressional hearings into whether Israel's 
>use of U.S.-supplied weaponry against Palestinian targets is legally 
>consistent with the U.S. Arms Export Control Act.
>
>Congressional hearings
>
>Similarly, it also should call for congressional hearings into the 
>legality of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip 
>as well as the Jewish "neighborhoods" built in East Jerusalem since 
>1967 according to the relevant instruments of international law and 
>UN resolutions to which the U.S. is a signatory.
>
>In recognition of the link between public opinion and foreign policy 
>at home, CISMEP should call on U.S. news media to practice a policy 
>of inclusion and diversity in their reporting of the conflict.
>
>And when Israeli-Palestinian negotiations resume, CISMEP should call 
>on the State Department to release to the media detailed maps of all 
>territorial proposals endorsed by the United States. Then the 
>American public could judge for itself.
>
>Finally, in recognition that the U.S. monopoly over stewardship of 
>the peace process will continue to fail, CISMEP should sponsor 
>forums featuring European Union officials and representatives of 
>non-governmental organizations from EU countries. Then the American 
>public could see that allied minds think differently on how to 
>achieve Mideast peace.
>
>Sound grandiose? American civil society has a history of success in 
>tackling other important political issues, both foreign and domestic.
>
>A page can be taken from the book of the progressive globalization 
>movement, which has learned that even a juggernaut can be made to 
>yield by a critical mass of citizen voices.
>
>Whose peace process is it, anyway?

-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu