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May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
April 29, 2002
Larry Hales
At the Church of the Nativity
Michael
Colby
The
Times Does Brockovich:
Ralph Nader with Cleavage?
CounterPunch Wire
Bank Robs Publisher,
Vows to Repeat
Gavin
Keeney
So
Long, Frank O. Gehry?
April 28, 2002
Michael Neumann
The Jewish Left and Palestine
April 27, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
Adelphia
Going Down:
Cover Ups, Censorship
and Naughty Accounting
Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School
Pyramid
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
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May
2, 2002
Before There Was Terrorism
By Kathleen Christison
Editors' Note: Kathleen Christison
worked for 16 years as a political analyst with the CIA, dealing
first with Vietnam and then with the Middle East for her last
seven years with the Agency before resigning in 1979. Since leaving
the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer, dealing primarily
with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her book, "Perceptions
of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy,"
was published by the University of California Press and reissued
in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second book, The
Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story,
was published in March 2002. She and her husband Bill, (a former
senior CIA analyst whose dissections
of the war on terror are featured on this website) live
in the Southwest. The following is a talk she gave in New Mexico
on May 2 under the auspices of Santa Fe Community Action Network,
the Santa Fe Green Party, and Tikkun.
We hear a lot about "moral clarity"
and "moral equivalence" these days-the idea being that,
if you have true "moral clarity," you can recognize
a terrorist when you see him, and you know with clarity that
there is no "moral equivalence" between Palestinians,
who are terrorists, and Israel, which is a moral, democratic
state fighting for its existence and using moral means to do
so. At a time when the United States is officially engaged in
a war on terrorism, which is officially defined as war against
evil and evil-doers, moral arguments have a great deal of resonance.
It's thus easy to place the Palestinians among the "evil
ones," within the "axis of evil," and thereby
almost automatically to place Israel in the category of innocent
victim. We Americans have already grown up with a strong image
of Israel as a heroic little nation fighting against hate-filled
Arabs, so the argument today that there is "no-moral-equivalence"
between Israel and the Palestinians-or indeed between Israel
and any Arabs-fits right in with the stereotypes and preconceived
notions that we already have in our heads.
The perceptions that come out of these
stereotypes-the perceptions that come out of the "no-moral-equivalence"
argument and the effort to lump Palestinians in with the terrorists
and other black hats around the world, while Israel is placed
on a pedestal next to "us," the good people-these perceptions
have a huge impact on the policy we pursue in the United States
toward every aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These
perceptions make it impossible for the United  States to play a meaningful
role in resolving the conflict; they make it impossible for us
to act as a neutral mediator or honest broker. In the end, they
render us unable to approach the conflict from a position of
equity. The only possible way for a mediator to resolve a conflict
is to take the concerns of both parties to the conflict into
account equally, but when one side is viewed as morally repugnant
and the other as morally unassailable, there is no possibility
of equitable treatment.
This difference in perceptions of the
essential morality-the "worthiness"-of those on each
side is and has always been fundamental to how policy is made
in this country. Marc Ellis, a Jewish-American political scholar
and professor at Baylor University, recently put it this way:
speaking of progressives in Israel and in the American Jewish
community who always used to be open to the Palestinian perspective
but distanced themselves from the Palestinians after the peace
process collapsed, he says that the underlying assumption of
virtually all of these progressives, when push comes to shove,
is that Palestinians are not quite equal to Israelis. "Any
political empowerment of Palestinians must be limited and monitored
by Israel," he said-because, ultimately, "Palestinian
history and destiny are secondary to Jewish history and destiny."
This has always been, and remains, the
fundamental assumption, and the fundamental inequity, of all
U.S. administrations and of all U.S. peacemaking efforts. And
ultimately, these perceptions and the misguided policy that has
resulted from them have caused the perpetuation of the conflict-the
decades-long perpetuation of a conflict that could have been
resolved years ago.
This notion that Jewish "history
and destiny" are superior to Palestinian "history and
destiny" has basically always governed popular thinking,
media commentary, and in the end the making of policy in the
United States. We understand Israeli fears; we feel Israeli
fears. But we generally don't feel, or even care about, Palestinian
fears. We have no conception of what it means for a Palestinian
to have his land confiscated, his olive grove bulldozed, his
underground water sucked up, so that Israel can build a settlement
for Jews only or a security road on which only Israelis are allowed
to drive. Gideon Levy, an Israeli commentator for the newspaper
Haaretz, who knows the Palestinians well and remains open
to Palestinian concerns and the Palestinian perspective, recently
quoted Palestinian militia leader Marwan Barghouti as having
asked him five years ago, "When will you [Israelis] finally
understand that nothing frightens the Palestinians the way settlements
do?"
Israeli settlements have been expanding
inexorably across the occupied territories, including, and indeed
particularly, during the peace process, and what this settlement
expansion meant was the gradual diminution of the area where
a free and independent Palestinian state could ever be established-the
gradual destruction of the nascent Palestinian state. But most
Americans have no conception that this has been occurring or
of the fears that this process aroused in the Palestinians. And
I include among those who didn't focus on or really care what
was happening to the Palestinians President Bill Clinton and
his advisers, who oversaw the so-called peace process for seven
years but failed to notice the steady expansion and consolidation
of Israel's control over the very territories supposed to be
relinquished to Palestinian control.
As Americans, we are, of course, vitally
concerned to guarantee Israel's security and existence; we actively
fear, and we talk all the time about, the danger that Israel
will be destroyed. It's been one of the pillars of our Middle
East policy since 1948 to guarantee Israel's existence. But we
don't care at all about guaranteeing Palestinian existence, and
even more significantly, we don't care, or even seem to notice,
that Ariel Sharon is actively attempting to destroy the Palestinian
nation. If you doubt this, let me quote Avi Shlaim, an Israeli
historian at Oxford University who wrote recently that one of
the hallmarks of Sharon's career has been "savage brutality"
toward Arab civilians and that "his real agenda is to subvert
what remains of the Oslo accords, to smash the Palestinians into
the ground, and to extinguish hope for independence and statehood."
If you doubt that, listen to what Sharon himself has written
in his autobiography. Although he was raised, he said, to believe
that Arabs and Jews could live side by side, his parents believed
and taught him that "without question" only Jews had
rights over the land. "When the land belongs to you physicallythat
is when you have power, not just physical power but spiritual
power." Everything Sharon has ever done in his career, and
in his year as prime minister, has clearly been directed at guaranteeing
this continued Israeli physical and spiritual control of all
the land of Palestine.
You can perhaps dismiss Sharon as an
extreme example of this notion of the superiority of Jewish claims
to all the land of Palestine, but his viewpoint increasingly
represents the thinking and the actions of Israel as a nation-his
popularity is very high at the moment in Israel-and in fact his
policy is only a more blatant and brutal version of the policy
pursued by every Israeli government since the occupation began
in 1967. What possible reason, other than ensuring continued
Israeli physical and political domination over the occupied territories,
could there have been for the steady increase under both left-wing
and right-wing governments of settlement building, road building,
land confiscation, expulsion of Palestinians, segmentation of
Palestinian population areas, etcetera, etcetera?
What possible reason, other than an intention
to keep the occupied territories, could there be for the fact
that it has always been hard to find a map in Israel that does
not place the West Bank inside Israel? (This was true even during
the late 1990s, at the height of the peace process, when the
modalities for Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories
were supposed to be the principal topic of discussion.) What
possible reason, other than a deep-seated reluctance to cede
dominion over the occupied territories, could there have been
for the constant delays in implementation of the Oslo accords
that marked the entire seven years of the Oslo peace process?
Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has wryly labeled Ehud Barak's
penchant for backing off whenever he came near to consummating
an agreement, either with the Palestinians or with Syria, "politicus
interruptus."
Yes, Ehud Barak did during the Camp David
negotiations in July 2000 offer to permit the Palestinians to
have a state, but the state he offered could not have been viable
or sovereign or truly independent. I'll explain this more fully
a little later, but for now suffice it to say that this so-called
state would actually have been a colony, over which Israel would
have maintained full physical and political domination. This
has been Israel's intent since the beginning of the occupation
35 years ago.
Let me get back to this question of comparative
morality. The major issue that we hear about constantly at the
moment is terrorism-Palestinian terrorism. Of course there is
no excuse whatsoever for terrorism-no excuse for any action by
any individual or group or state that knowingly kills innocent
civilians. Nor is there any excuse for Israeli actions that deliberately
kill innocent civilians-and there is voluminous evidence, including
testimony from Israeli soldiers themselves, that Israelis do
deliberately shoot Palestinian children and adult civilians,
deliberately bomb and shell civilian residential areas, deliberately
fire on ambulances and relief workers.
Palestinian terrorism is not the essence
of the conflict. Terrorism is a tactic-an ugly tactic, but it
is only a tactic. The tendency of Americans is always to start
the clock over again with the last big event-not to look behind
that last event at what provoked it or at what actually lies
at the root of the problem. What we've all concentrated on in
the last few months have been the hideous images of Palestinian
suicide bombings-horrific acts that have killed innocent people
at religious ceremonies, out shopping, riding buses, eating in
restaurants.
But both Israel and the U.S. act as though
nothing went before this terrorism, as though it is mindless
and unreasoned, based on nothing but blind hatred of Jews. This
perception has allowed us to excuse Israel's siege of the civilian
population of the West Bank and destruction of the entire infrastructure
of Palestinian government and society as merely legitimate retaliation;
it has blinded us to the moral quality of Israel's acts; it has
allowed us unquestioningly to accept Israel's definition of all
Palestinian violence, even legitimate resistance to the occupation,
as terrorism (President Bush recently brushed aside a British
interviewer's question about precisely this difference with a
dismissive, "Look, my job isn't to try to nuance. My job
is to tell people what I think"); and it has blinded us
to everything that went before: to the 35 years in which Israel
has occupied Palestinian territories and ruled over the Palestinian
population. Terrorism is a symptom of the problem; it is not
the real problem.
Before there was terrorism, there was
the occupation. Before there was terrorism, there were settlements.
Israel has established over 250 settlements throughout the occupied
territories and populated them with over 400,000 Israeli settlers.
The number of settlers almost doubled in the seven years of the
peace process between the 1993 signing of the Oslo agreement
and July 2000 when the peace process collapsed at Camp David,
and Sharon has added 34 new settlements during his year in office.
Before there was terrorism, there were the roads. Israel has
established a 300-mile road network throughout the West Bank
connecting the settlements. These are high-security roads-three
football fields wide with their surrounding security perimeters-and
they are accessible only to Israelis. They separate Palestinian
population areas from each other and from their agricultural
land; in fact, before the current warfare, they segmented the
areas of semi-autonomous Palestinian control into 227 separate,
non-contiguous patches of land.
Before there was terrorism, there was
land confiscation. Something approaching 60% of the land area
of the West Bank has been confiscated for settlements, for this
extensive road network, and for military bases. Before there
was terrorism, there were olive groves and other agricultural
land bulldozed to build roads and security areas for Israelis.
Olives are a staple of the Palestinian economy. Before there
was terrorism, there were checkpoints-Israeli-manned checkpoints
through which Palestinians had to pass to move from one town
to another and through which every item needed to run a city-food,
medicines, manufacturing supplies, mail, ambulances-had to pass.
Before Jenin, the refugee camp that Israel
destroyed last month in the name of rooting out terrorism, there
was the occupation. Before Israel destroyed the entire infrastructure
of Palestinian civil society last month-rampaging through Palestinian
civil ministries for education and health and agriculture, destroying
computers and hard disks and the entire written record of Palestinian
society, ransacking Palestinian businesses and banks, blasting
their way into and occupying and looting Palestinian residences,
bulldozing whole housing blocks, destroying land registry maps
and census records, as if to erase all trace of Palestinian existence-before
all this, there was the occupation.
The occupation has always, from the beginning,
been intended to exert permanent control over the Palestinian
people in order to provide security for Israelis. Now, is this
immoral, is this singular concern for Jewish security at the
expense of Palestinian security and Palestinian rights immoral?
Israeli commentator Gideon Levy wrote recently, in describing
several instances in which Israel refused entry to or expelled
representatives of international human rights organizations,
that "as far as Israel is concernedhuman rights are still
perceived primarily as an obstacle to security policies."
Is it immoral that Israeli security should take precedence over
human rights for Palestinians? I think so, although many would
debate me on that. Without question, however, whether the occupation
is moral or immoral, it is illegal under international law. The
Fourth Geneva Convention, which governs the conduct of states
occupying foreign territory, was written and adopted in 1949
for the most moral of reasons: specifically to prevent the kind
of horrors committed against Jews during the Holocaust. Both
Israel and the U.S. are signatories to the Geneva Convention,
but Israel ignores its provisions with respect to the occupied
West Bank and Gaza, and the U.S. goes along with this. The rest
of the international community does recognize the applicability
of the convention to these territories.
The Geneva Convention prohibits the following:
It prohibits the settlement of the occupier's population in the
occupied territory; that is, it should prohibit settling Jews
in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It prohibits the
occupier from appropriating the property of the local inhabitants;
that is, it should prohibit Israel's confiscation of Palestinian
land for settlements and roads, as well as its destruction of
Palestinian agricultural land. It prohibits the occupier from
taking any action that makes its temporary presence permanent
and from asserting any claims to sovereignty; that is, it should
prohibit Israel from permanent settlement-building and from any
effort to annex those settlements to Israel-in fact, the convention
actually prohibits any peace agreement that would legitimize
any Israeli territorial claim in the occupied territories.
It prohibits the occupier from deporting
the inhabitants of the occupied territory; that is, it should
prohibit Israel from expelling any Palestinian from the West
Bank, Gaza, or East Jerusalem-deportations Israel has carried
out in the hundreds and thousands over the years. It prohibits
collective punishment; that is, it should prohibit Israel from
demolishing the homes of the families of suspected terrorists,
from shelling entire neighborhoods in response to the actions
of one or a few Palestinian gunmen, from retaliating economically
against the entire Palestinian population following a terrorist
attack. It prohibits the occupier from appropriating the natural
resources of the occupied territory; that is, it should prohibit
Israel from using the underground water resources of the West
Bank and Gaza-water that Israel allocates to Israeli settlers
at a rate at least five times as great as is allocated to Palestinians.
The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has estimated
that Israeli settlers consume 348 liters per day, while Palestinians
are permitted only 70 liters per day. The World Health Organization
standard is 100 liters per day.
Much of the public discourse and policy
today has come down to whether at Camp David Israel actually
offered the Palestinians a generous deal that would have gotten
Israel out of the occupied territories and given the Palestinians
a state. There is a widespread impression-a misapprehension-in
this country, fostered dishonestly by Israel and the U.S. media
and U.S. policymakers, that Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat a
state on a silver platter but that Arafat refused this generous
offer and started the uprising instead. This is a gross misrepresentation
of the facts. What Barak proposed would have left the Palestinians
not with a state, but with a series of disconnected enclaves-three
in the West Bank, plus Gaza, plus several disconnected neighborhoods
in East Jerusalem-each of which would have been surrounded by
Israeli-controlled territory. This would not have been a viable
or defensible state. It is not a state that Israel itself would
ever have accepted, and the Palestinians could not possibly have
accepted it either.
Let me return to this issue of comparative
morality before I finish. In late March, responding to the Seder
massacre-a suicide bombing that killed 27 Israelis gathered for
a Passover meal-President Bush said that "justice and cruelty
have always been at war, and God is not neutral between them."
He had used this same phrase in his speech to Congress after
September 11. In the context of his constant pressure on the
Palestinians but not Israel to end violence, this statement indicates
that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bush believes justice
lies entirely with Israel, cruelty with the Palestinians, and
that God is therefore on Israel's side. Interestingly enough,
Elie Wiesel wrote in his novella Dawn that God is a terrorist.
Dawn is Wiesel's story, said to be at least partially
autobiographical, about a young man who fights against British
control of Palestine in the 1940s by joining the Irgun, Israel's
pre-state terrorist organization led by Menachem Begin. Wiesel
calls the organization a terrorist organization, without embarrassment,
throughout the novella, and about midway through, by way of justifying
his hero's actions, he declares that "God is a member of
the Resistance movement, a terrorist."
George Bush and his supporters have made
much of the notion that he is acting against terrorism with what
he calls "moral clarity." Elie Wiesel is hailed as
a man of surpassing "moral clarity." But one man's
moral clarity, it's clear from these two views, is another man's
moral obfuscation. This is the kind of trouble, the kind of inconsistency,
you get into when you try to define morality, and when you claim
to base your foreign policy on God. Whose morality are we dealing
with, and whose God, and whose definition of terrorism?
_____
I've been asked to give you my vision
of a peace settlement. George Bush and I both have a vision of
peace; he has described his vision of two states, Israel and
Palestine, living side by side in peace, and that's my vision
too. Where we differ is that I don't think Bush has a vision
of how to get there. Most serious analysts believe that Bush
came to his vision not out of any interest in forging a peace
agreement, but in order, as Judith Kipper of the Council on Foreign
Relations recently put it, to "make nice" with Saudi
Arabia. Bush first enunciated his "vision" last fall,
immediately after the Saudi crown prince had expressed his anger
over U.S. support for Israel's treatment of the Palestinians,
and Bush has reiterated the vision whenever-but only whenever-the
Saudis have expressed enough concern about the Palestinians to
make the Bush team worry that their "war on terror"
might be impeded.
In fact, Bush's policies and actions
preclude any possibility that his vision can ever come to fruition.
His support for Ariel Sharon, his grant of carte blanche to Sharon's
actions in the occupied territories, his declaration that Sharon
is a "man of peace," precisely at the moment when he
is actively attempting to destroy the Palestinian people and
nation, all indicate that Bush not only has no plan for achieving
Palestinian statehood, but doesn't care whether there ever is
a Palestinian state, or indeed whether the Palestinian people
survive. Several senior policymakers in Bush's administration,
in fact, particularly in the Defense Department, advocate never
permitting a Palestinian state.
Any real peace agreement that is just
and fair to both sides and that is stable and guaranteed to last
must be based on a mediation approach that treats both sides
more or less equitably. That does not mean they have to get an
equal amount of territory in a peace agreement. Far from it,
in fact: in any peace agreement Israel will always be guaranteed
at least the 78% of Palestine that lies inside its 1967 borders,
while the Palestinians will never get-and do not expect to get-more
than the remaining 22%.
But equity does mean that if you are
the United States trying to mediate a just and stable peace,
you must take the two sides' concerns into account equally. It
means that, if you are concerned to guarantee Israel's security,
you must equally guarantee Palestinian security. It means that
if you are concerned to assure that Israel remains a viable,
defensible state, you must equally assure that the Palestinian
state is viable and defensible. It means that you must start
from the premise that neither people is inherently more moral
than the other. It means that a dead Israeli child is no more
innocent than a dead Palestinian child. The death of an innocent
Israeli is no more tragic, no more outrageous, no more an obstacle
to peace than the death of an innocent Palestinian. This is what
equity means.
(Let me say as an aside that equity does
not mean the policy absurdity we have just gotten ourselves
into, of giving Israel the weapons-and the green light-with which
to destroy Palestinian cities and then giving Palestinians a
little bit of aid with which to rebuild them.)
Most fundamentally, an equitable approach
to forging a peace agreement means that you must honestly examine
what lies at the root of the conflict. What lies at the root
of the conflict is the occupation-Israel's 35-year-long occupation
of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The root of the problem
is not the right of return, it is not Israel's right to exist,
it is not the fear in which Israelis live. It is the occupation
and what this means for Palestine's right to exist and for the
fear in which Palestinians live.
Ariel Sharon and George Bush, along with
most Israelis and most Americans, seem to believe that the root
of the problem is Yasir Arafat, that he is the principal impediment
to peace and that, if only he were somehow removed from the scene,
everything would move forward easily. In fact, however, let's
imagine a situation in which there is no Yasir Arafat. Let's
even imagine a situation in which there is no suicide bombing.
Without Arafat, without suicide bombing, there would still be
the occupation, and there would therefore still be resistance
to the occupation, and the United States would still be confronted
with the need to mediate a solution. But, unfortunately, even
without Arafat, Israel would still be building settlements, building
roads, confiscating Palestinian land, demolishing Palestinian
homes, impeding Palestinian movement with checkpoints. Palestinians
would still be angry and frustrated at having their opportunity
for freedom and independence totally blocked, and they would
still be using small arms, a few home-made mortars, and stones-the
only military force available to them-to attack Israeli soldiers.
Such attacks would be legitimate under international law because
armed resistance to foreign occupation is considered legitimate,
and Israeli soldiers are foreign occupiers in Palestinian land.
So, essentially, even without Arafat,
we would be right where we are today. You can rant and rave all
you want about Arafat. I rant and rave myself about how awful
Arafat is. But eliminating him will not solve the problem. Only
eliminating the occupation will solve the problem. That's a real
vision of peace.
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