[Peace-discuss] Three good articles in today's Tribune

[David Green]

A couple of weeks ago, the Tribune Sunday Perspective
carried two articles in favor of the wall, one by and
Israeli, one by a Jewish Tribune reporter. Whether
planned or perhaps as a response to those of us who
protested this one-sided treatment (no pun intended),
today's issue contains three excellent articles
opposing the wall, the last by the mayor of a
Palesinian town. Unfortunately, this morning's suicide
bombing will provide an excuse for some to dismiss
these arguments, although I fear they would be
dismissed by many even if every Palestinian were to
spend the next decade throwing roses at Israelis.

Build bridges, not walls
Israel's barrier is not about security but is about
hatred fueling a desire for Palestinian society to
wither, the authors argue, as the UN's highest court
prepares to weigh the rivals' contentions in

By Gary Fields, professor of communications at the
University of California, San Diego

February 22, 2004

In a 1923 polemic, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, pioneer of
revisionist Zionism, insisted upon the use of force to
break Arab resistance to Jewish settlement of
Palestine, an imperative he cast in metaphorical terms
as "The Iron Wall."

Rising upon the Palestinian landscape in a cloak of
concrete and concertina wire, the wall erected by
Jabotinsky's modern-day political progeny in Israel
admits to a conflict over territory and rights of
citizenship, communicating a stark asymmetry of power.

More than a physical barrier imposed by the powerful
upon the region's stateless and dispossessed, the wall
expresses a collective psychology of conquest
articulated most succinctly by one of its leading
proponents, Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli army chief of
staff.

He insists that "the Palestinians must be made to
understand in the deepest recesses of their
consciousness that they are a defeated people."

How did a wall converge with this sentiment, and what
is likely to transpire from such convergence?

As early as 1919, Julius Kahn, a Jewish congressman
from California, wrote a letter to President Woodrow
Wilson that was signed by 299 rabbis and Jewish
laypeople who opposed creation of a Jewish state in
Palestine because displacing Palestinians would be
"contrary to the principles of democracy." Others,
notably Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, crafted a
vision of Jewish emancipation based not on conquest,
but on cooperation between Jews and Palestinians.

Regrettably, the ideas of Kahn, Magnes and Buber did
not prevail when history collided with calamity in
1947-48. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the
cynically hostile response of allied governments to
Jewish efforts at resettling in Europe and the U.S.,
it was perhaps understandable for Jews to conclude
that only a Jewish state would resolve what appeared
to be the world's intractable anti-Semitism.

The fact is, however, Palestinians living in the
territory chosen for this experiment had nothing
whatever to do with the anti-Semitic scourge inflicted
upon European Jewry. Sadly, they were the ones forced
to pay compensation for this European crime. And pay
they did.

Mythical representations of Israeli state-building in
1948 depict a heroic, even miraculous struggle against
an implacable Arab adversary. Palestinians, in this
narrative, deserted their homes at the behest of
corrupt Arab leaders in the expectation of recouping
their losses through victory over a supposedly
beleaguered Jewish defense force.

Israeli historians themselves, from Anita Shapira to
Avi Shlaim, have discredited this founding myth. In
its place is a more sober account of Israeli military
superiority and a more honest acknowledgment of the
forcible expulsion of between 700,000 and 800,000
Palestinians.

Historian Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University,
indeed no friend of the Palestinians', has offered the
most detailed scholarly accounts of this population
transfer. "Without the uprooting of the Palestinians,"
concedes Morris in a January interview in Haaretz, "a
Jewish state would not have arisen. There was no
choice but to expel that population."

What the framers of the emerging state hastened to do
after this remaking of territory was to
institutionalize what Israeli geographer Oren
Yiftachel refers to as an "ethnocracy," in which
rights of citizenship are allocated not on the basis
of democratic principles but instead on demographic
ones. The clearest example of this commitment to
demography is the Law of Return by which Israel
facilitated Jewish immigration while denying
Palestinians with centuries on the same land their
legal right to return to their homes.

If 1948 represents the politics of dispossession,
occupation of further Palestinian territory reveals a
politics of immobilization, the cutting of the routes
whereby people, goods, and ideas circulate in
providing the means of communication at the core of
any economy and society.

While the occupation consists mostly of settlements
and the repopulation of Palestinian territory with
435,000 Israeli settlers, the essence of the
occupation lies in the notion of control.

When communication is strangled and society is
immobilized, life itself becomes untenable. In such
circumstances, human populations either wither or
migrate. It is this eventuality, a land emptied of
Palestinians, to which the occupation aspires--which
brings us back to Jabotinsky and the wall.

The wall is an escalation of immobilization. Indeed,
what Israeli leaders are doing with the wall inside
occupied territory reveals their true aims. One need
only go to Abu Dis outside Jerusalem to observe such
politics of immobility.

Here on a stretch where the wall reaches 6 1/2 feet
and cuts the town in two, Palestinians, in order to go
from one side of town to the other, confront concrete.
They can often be seen scaling the wall and passing
children over the barrier in full view of Israeli
soldiers stationed there to prevent such "incursions"
but too ashamed to stop individuals from trying to
conduct their lives in conditions made humiliating and
burdensome.

In Qalqilya, the wall performs a more onerous mission
of immobilization, literally keeping human beings
caged.

"There is a big difference between a prison and what
the wall has done to us," insists Abdul-latif Khaled,
an engineer with the Palestinian Hydrology Group in
Jayous, near Qalqilya. "In prison, the authorities try
to keep you in. Here, the Israeli authorities are
trying to make us go out."

In these circumstances, the wall is creating a
landscape of unintended consequences. In seeking to
separate Jews and Palestinian, the wall is working
paradoxically toward creation of a single territory.
By seizing additional Palestinian land and
obliterating any remaining geographical contiguity in
the West Bank, it is undermining the territorial basis
of Palestinian statehood and redefining the political
choices open to Palestinians for resolution of the
conflict.

While a separate state remains perhaps the option of
choice among most Palestinians, what was once
considered a utopian idea--a secular binational state
in which Jews and Palestinian Arabs would share
historic Palestine on the basis of one person, one
vote--is gaining currency as the wall expands and
further shrinks Palestinian territory, and as
settlements become irrevocable historical facts.

"The two-state solution is no longer in a coma,"
observed Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian political
analyst, commenting on the wall at a January
conference of academics in Jerusalem. "It is truly
dead." Even Ahmed Qureia, prime minister of the
Palestinian Authority whose entire political fortunes
rest on creation of a Palestinian state, has conceded
that the wall may force Palestinian society into
seeking a single, secular, binational state as a
solution to the conflict.

Legality aside, the wall stands as an affront to human
dignity and Jewish memory itself. In the spirit of
rediscovering a lost tradition associated with Kahn,
Magnes and Buber, dismantling this oppressive symbol
opens an opportunity to frame a vision in which Jews
and Palestinians have equally legitimate claims upon
the territory with equal rights of return in a truly
democratic path to peace.

----------

Gary Fields is a professor of communications at the
University of California, San Diego, who recently
returned from Israel and the West Bank as part of a
delegation sponsored by Faculty for
Israeli-Palestinian Peace.


Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune 
Build bridges, not walls
Israel's barrier is not about security but is about
hatred fueling a desire for Palestinian society to
wither, the authors argue, as the UN's highest court
prepares to weigh the rivals' contentions in

By Marda Dunsky, assistant professor at the Medill
School of Journalism at Northwestern University

February 22, 2004

A precedent in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will
be set in the Netherlands on Monday. The International
Court of Justice will convene in The Hague, and its 15
judges will open the case captioned "Legal
Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the
Occupied Palestinian Territory."

For the first time in the nearly 37-year-old Israeli
occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East
Jerusalem, Palestinian and Israeli claims will be
heard and judged by the world court, the UN's highest
judicial body.

The court's ruling will not be binding. But its very
consideration of the case is remarkable, as the
hearing puts a central fixture of the occupation on
trial.

At issue is the barrier--a combination of walls,
fences, barbed wire and trenches expected to stretch
for more than 400 miles--that Israel is building in
the West Bank, with about one-fourth of the route
completed.

Israel calls the barrier a fence and claims it is
necessary to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers and
protect the lives of Israeli civilians.

The Palestinians call the barrier a land grab that
will unilaterally impose a border between Israel and a
stunted future Palestinian state.

Beyond the counterclaims, though, some facts are
known. The UN has documented that the barrier, if
completed as originally planned, would disrupt the
lives of 400,000 of the 2.3 million Palestinians
living in the West Bank.

Further, the barrier's intended route does not adhere
to what is called the green line, which resulted from
the armistice agreement between Israel and the
surrounding Arab countries in 1949. It separates
Israel from the West Bank. The barrier dips deeply
into the West Bank in various locales--and slices
through the northern, eastern and southern perimeters
of East Jerusalem--to embrace the majority of 430,000
Israelis living in settlements built on occupied
territory since 1967.

If completed as planned, the barrier would accomplish
a de facto annexation of about 45 percent of the West
Bank, effectively cutting it in two. Such an outcome
would be consistent with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's
repeated assertion that Israel will agree to a
Palestinian state on no more than 42 percent of West
Bank territory.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz this month reported that
the barrier, which already is separating Palestinians
from their families, fields, businesses, schools and
hospitals, "has destroyed and is destroying wells that
are essential to agriculture, is uprooting tens of
thousands of olive trees and is wiping out hundreds of
greenhouses in which thousands of people have invested
the savings of years."

Further, the report stated, the barrier will create 81
enclaves and shut a quarter-million Palestinians
"behind barbed wire fences and guard towers and
excavations and double fences and
bureaucratic-military systems of permits to go in and
out."

The meaning of the barrier is that the occupation,
which has no political solution on the horizon, has
metastasized.

It has converted Palestinian towns and villages into
prisons.

It has transformed Israeli buses and other public
venues into cantons of fear and devastation.

It has claimed a tremendous loss of life. Since
September 2000, approximately 2,600 Palestinians have
been killed, according to an Associated Press tally,
with an estimated three-quarters of them civilians.
The Israeli military reports just over 900 Israelis
killed, with 70 percent of them civilians; just under
half died in suicide bombings.

Essentially, the international court will have to
weigh Israel's right to protect the security of its
citizens, which the occupation itself endangers,
against the Palestinians' right not to suffer
collective punishment for the deadly actions of a few
that the crippled, in-name-only Palestinian Authority
has not thwarted.

The court will have to weigh the applicability of the
4th Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying
power's use of collective punishment and de facto
annexation, against a situation of non-traditional
combat on both sides.

The ruling could yield important consequences if the
court finds that the barrier has legal implications.
This would be a significant departure from the
decades-old, failed approach to managing the conflict
as a solely political matter.

Advocated by Israel and supported by the United
States, this approach views Palestinian rights as
negotiable. They are subject, unlike Israeli rights to
statehood and security, to the vagaries of a political
process marked by a lack of parity between the two
parties and the U.S. largely backing Israel.

Since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, the
process has overshadowed the fact that Palestinian
rights are not only articulated in numerous UN
resolutions, but they are also supported in the canons
of international law that address the rights of
occupied peoples and refugees.

But these expressions of international will have been
muted, deemed irrelevant and, at times, overrun.

A clear example of this pattern unfolded Wednesday,
when the International Committee of the Red Cross said
the barrier violates international humanitarian law
because it cuts across Palestinian land.

On the same day, the United States, Britain and
several other European countries announced that they
would boycott court hearings, contending the barrier
is not a legal matter but a political one.

Israel, for its part, had previously rejected the
court's authority to adjudicate the matter and said it
will not appear at the hearings, limiting its pleading
instead to an affidavit.

In October the U.S. cast the lone veto of a UN
Security Council resolution condemning Israel for
building the barrier. Ten member nations of the
council voted for the resolution; four abstained. The
matter has reached the court via a resolution that the
UN General Assembly passed in December.

Outside the international arena, however, Washington
has made its objections known to Israel about the
barrier's route and the hardships it has caused
Palestinians. The Bush administration has levied a
negligible penalty, reducing a three-year, $9 billion
loan-guarantee package so that Israel may incur $4
million a year in higher interest costs.

Meanwhile, Israel has asked the State Department to
delay publication of its annual global human-rights
report, which is expected to be critical of the
barrier, so the release does not coincide with the
proceedings.

At a Feb. 1 news briefing, State Department spokesman
Richard Boucher reiterated that the Bush
administration objects to The Hague hearings because
it believes the issue of the barrier should be
"negotiated between the two parties."

That, however, will not happen at the world court
deliberations, a process that the United States and
Israel have tried to diminish but will not be able to
control. At The Hague, with worldwide attention
focused on it, the coming weeks will tell whether a
different way of seeing the conflict will have its day
in court.

----------

Marda Dunsky is an assistant professor at the Medill
School of Journalism at Northwestern University who
writes frequently about the Middle East.


Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune 


Build bridges, not walls
Israel's barrier is not about security but is about
hatred fueling a desire for Palestinian society to
wither, the authors argue, as the UN's highest court
prepares to weigh the rivals' contentions in

By Marouf Zahran
mayor of Qalqilya

February 22, 2004

My town and its people are slowly suffocating. The
government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is
building a grotesque wall. He is building it on land
that belongs to Palestinians, land occupied by Israel
and held in violation of international law. He is
building it, like a tightening noose, around my town,
Qalqilya.

Qalqilya is a lovely town, an ancient Canaanite town,
home to 45,000 Palestinian men, women and children. We
are a town of farmers and, as is traditional in
Palestinian society, our farmland surrounds the town
center. For centuries, Qalqilya's citizens have arisen
each morning to work their fields, returning in the
evening to their families, friends and neighbors.

Qalqilya is on what is known as the green line, the
border between what became Israeli in 1948 and the
Palestinian territory Israel occupied in 1967. In
1948, Israel took nearly 80 percent of our farmland.
Since then, we have made do with the rest.

We had a decent life; we prospered. We were a rare
oasis of co-existence where Israelis came to buy our
fruit, eat in our restaurants and visit our zoo. More
than 40 Palestinian-Israeli business ventures were
based in our town. Almost all of us speak Hebrew and
see Israelis as our neighbors, not our enemies.

Then came Sharon's wall--a wall of concrete coupled
with a regime of razor wire, sniper towers, trenches
and electric fences. The wall tightly encircles our
town and cuts us off from our farmland and our
livelihood. Armed Israeli soldiers control one narrow
gateway through which we are allowed to enter and
leave--if we are lucky enough to have a permit.

On the rare occasions when our farmers are able to
visit their fields, they are met by withered, untended
crops, dying in the shadow of an ugly concrete wall.
In the process of building its wall, Israel
confiscated our land, demolished greenhouses and
uprooted orchards. One-third of Qalqilya's water
supply is inaccessible; the wells now lie outside the
wall.

Israel allows very few people to enter Qalqilya,
thereby cutting us off from family and friends in 32
neighboring villages and devastating our local
businesses. More than 75 percent of our citizens are
unemployed and our tax revenues are a mere trickle.

Meanwhile, the Israel Electric Co., which provides our
electricity, has threatened to cut off electric power
to Qalqilya if I cannot come up with $1.5 million to
pay our municipal electric bill. As mayor, I am
responsible for Qalqilya's well-being. But I can only
watch helplessly as Israel squeezes the very life out
of my town.

Sharon claims he is building his wall to protect
Israelis. If that were true, he would have built the
wall on the green line. But Sharon's wall has nothing
to do with security and everything to do with his
final plan for the "Palestinian problem."

Sharon's vision is to confiscate as much Palestinian
land as possible, leaving millions of Palestinians to
live in ghettos--decaying, impoverished towns, caged
by concrete walls, electrified fences and razor wire,
breeding only hopelessness and despair. If Sharon gets
his way, today's Qalqilya will be the prototype for
tomorrow's Palestinian state.

For nearly three years before the uprising, not a
single Israeli civilian was killed inside Israel by an
act of terrorism. There was no wall then, but there
was a peace process and a genuine Palestinian belief
that Israel would end its occupation and allow the
Palestinians to live in the same freedom and security
it demands for Israelis.

Instead of reinstilling that belief, Israel is only
creating more animosity. Since the wall's
construction, the number of Qalqilya residents
supporting Palestinian extremist groups has risen
sharply.

Sharon's wall is not about peace. It is not about
security. It is about hate--the hatred that Sharon has
for my people as non-Jews in what he wants as his
Jewish state, the hatred he has for our quest for
freedom and independence based on equality.

On Monday, the International Court of Justice in The
Hague will begin hearings on the legal consequences of
Sharon's wall. The residents of Qalqilya are praying
that the court and the international community will
finally take action. At what point in the
implementation of Sharon's final plan for the
Palestinians will Israel be held legally and morally
accountable for its actions?

I believe that President Bush, as part of the war
against terrorism, genuinely wants to win the hearts
and minds of the Arab and Muslim worlds. When he next
meets with Israelis, he will have a wonderful
opportunity to do so.

Just as President Ronald Reagan changed the world by
challenging Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear
down the Berlin Wall, so too can Bush change the world
by calling on Sharon to tear down his wall.

It is time to start building bridges instead.

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune 





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