[oman-l] Urge your local paper to run this article (fwd)

[Abdulla Baabood]

The following article appeared on the SaudiList... I thought that it might
be of interest to some on this list.
Thanks.

Abdulla


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 1998 21:23:22 -0400
From: Abdulfattah Zahed <bz936@torfree.net>
Reply-To: Saudi Arabia mailing list <saudi-l@haynese.winthrop.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list saudi-l <saudi-l@haynese.winthrop.edu>
Subject: Urge your local paper to run this article


From: zahi damuni, zdamuni@classic.msn.com/ Alhambra, 
alhambra@globedirect,com (.com)

Dear Friends,

We need to act quickly!!!

A version of the following piece (see below) ran in the Baltimore Sun
(Sunday, May 31,1998). It was just put out over the LA Times - Washington 
Post wire.  
As I understand it, this means that hundreds of papers around the country
have access to it.
I suggest we contact our local papers (the opinion page editor, 
particularly 
the Sunday editor) and urge them to publish this piece.

If they do not have access to the wire, you can e-mail them the article 
(see 
below).

Many thanks,

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Celebrate 50 Years? Of What?
by Sam Husseini

It was the most loving fax I've ever received. I had just come back to the
office from asking Benjamin Netanyahu a few questions at a press 
conference
during his visit in January. I was astonished to learn that my dad, now in
Amman, Jordan saw it on CNN International. "You were fantastic," he wrote 
me.

I was thinking of dad -- and the fact that he and 700,000 other 
Palestinians
were forced from their homes 1948 -- as I asked the Israeli leader if it 
was
not time that Israel acknowledged this wrong that it has committed. The 
most
he conceded was that the Palestinian people have indeed suffered because
of their own bad leadership.

During Netanyahu's visit earlier this month, the Israeli Prime Minister
managed to squabble with the Clinton administration possibly the most
pro-Israeli in history.  He rejected even the paltry pullback from 13
percent of the West Bank the administration favors. Palestinians are to be
denied even the slightest face-saving deal. Rather, they will, if Israel
gets its way, be subjugated to Bantustans -- dense population areas and
limited control of areas surrounding them. Israel wants to continue to
control the population flow from various cities and most of the land and 
the
water resources in the West Bank. As Netanyahu stalls for time, he
confiscates more Palestinian land, heaps more injustice upon an injured
people and sows the seeds of more Palestinian resentment.

The inability of the Clinton administration to make any sort of progress
prompted the French and the Egyptians to call for an international peace
conference. That could put the issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
were it was 50 years ago: In the hands of the United Nations.

I talked to dad on his birthday -- April 9, but it was low key. Neither of
us mentioned it, but it was 50 years to the day after the massacre of Deir
Yassin, a village near Jerusalem, virtually the only massacre of
Palestinians by pro-Israeli forces that has any recognition, but it is 
only
one of many, including one where my father was in a village called 
Eilaboun
in the Galilee. Last time I was in the Mideast, I visited the towns and
villages where he was in 1948 and he put some flesh on events that he had
hinted at for years.

One evening we walked around Terra Sancta College where my father was a
boarder at the end of the British mandate, in a largely Jewish part of
Jerusalem. On a similar evening in 1947, he was puzzled when he heard
jubilation and dancing in the streets. Another student said that the UN
apparently made a decision the Jews liked. The UN had voted to partition

Palestine. They had good reason to celebrate. The Jewish state was 
allocated
56 percent of Palestine, even though Jews only owned 6 percent of the land
and made up one-third of the population and most of them were mandate-era
immigrants.

We visited Tiberias, where my dad was born. We saw the lovely stone house 
he
was raised in, now abandoned, overlooking the Sea of Galilee. I had 
visions
of it becoming a museum for what happened in 1948 -- before it is 
demolished
to make room for another hotel. Despite my prodding, my dad, hardly a shy
man, did not want to try to get into the house.

My dad told me of his earliest memories of his own father, who was
vice-mayor of Tiberias, gerrymandering election maps. But a Christian, no
matter how adept at dividing up districts, could not secure reelection
without substantial Jewish and Muslim support. There certainly were
prejudices, but the intermingling of the faiths contradicts the "ancient
hatreds" mantra we hear so often. Two of my uncles nursed by neighbors,
since my grandmother had problems lactating. One had a Muslim wet nurse,
another was breast-fed by a Jewish neighbor. We went to a gaudy hotel not
far from the house and got a room at about the same level as the house. 
They
gave us the tourist rate, since we "weren't from there."

I resented much of what I saw, but my dad chummed around with the clerk, 
who
was an Israeli Arab. Later, I would complain about the price of film in
Israel -- my dad was amused, "they steal the whole country from us and
you're upset about a roll of film?"

He wasn't seeking justice he just wanted to enjoy his special place.
Swimming in the lake, I saw my dad as a child, telling me of his exploits
with friends, catching crabs, stealing fruit from nearby orchards and 
other
devious deeds I never dreamed of as a kid.

We went to a lawyer's office and he showed us the land records with my
grandfather's name, "Yousef Habib Husseini" in English, crossed out as 
owner
and the "Israeli Authority of Construction" written in Hebrew. My father's
claim to the property of his parents, though fully documented have been
rejected by the Israeli authorities who regard him as an "absentee," and
thus not a legitimate inheritor. Never mind that he was made an "absentee"
at the point of a gun. This even as the World Jewish Restitution
Organization gets restitution and ownership of Jewish owned property in
Europe.

Tiberias fell to Israeli forces fifty years ago. It was then that my dad 
and
his younger brother went to the small village of Eilaboun where they had
relatives. Today, my extended family there are educated, but they retain a
simplicity I haven't experienced elsewhere. They are technically Israeli
citizens, but since they are not Jewish, are distinctly third class
citizens. They and other Christians and Muslims cannot buy or lease land 
on
90 percent of Israel, controled by quasi-governmental organizations such 
as
the Jewish National Fund -- even land confiscated from my family.

The "who is a Jew" debate only matters because Jews in Israel are granted
rights that others, like my relatives, are denied because of their 
religion

-- Christianity. Yet we are constantly told that Israel is a democracy. 
They
even do not dare go on picnics on Independence Holiday for fear of attacks
from Jewish extremists this after 50 years of being Israelis.

Dad showed me the square where the massacre at Eilaboun took place. On
October 30, 1948, most everyone from the village was in the church as the
Arab irregulars were withdrawing. The bombing from the Israeli forces came
closer and closer until finally, a loud voice in the village yard adjacent
to the church said "He who wants to live let him come out." They rushed
outside with hands held high. The Israeli soldiers occasionally shot those
coming out of the church. The priest, with a white flag in hand, watched 
in
horror.

Fourteen civilians from the village were put on a truck and lead the 
convoy
going north -- to Lebanon. They were told that they were at the front 
incase
of land mines. The Israelis proceeded to force the rest of the people, 
young
and old to walk. When they wanted people to stop, the Israeli soldiers
would fire, sometimes into the crowd. A three year old girl was shot in 
the
arm as her mother was carrying her. My dad, then 16, jumped on top of his 
10
year old brother, who was very frail because of rheumatic fever figuring
that only one body would be exposed. When his father later found out about
this, it was the one and only time my dad saw grandpa cry.

People walked all day with no food to eat. When a truck with some bread 
came
by, and people rushed towards it, soldiers shot at them, killing a fifty
year old man, Samaan Shufani, who was standing next to my dad moments
earlier. Later, the Israeli soldiers took all the money from the men, 
strip
searched them, and threatened to kill 10 men if the women didn't fork over
100 Palestinian Pounds. My aunt Julia came through -- as she would years
later, having saved several of my grandfather's letters. The village later
repaid her.

The 14 men on the truck included some distant (by my standards) relatives
and they were eventually taken back to Eilaboun and shot in the town
square. The other villagers were thrown on the Lebanese border. These were
all relatively fortunate. My father was lucky because an uncle who was an
officer in the Jordanian army took him in and he continued his studies in
Terra Sancta Collage, which moved to Amman, Jordan. Other Eilabounites 
made
their way back to their village the Israelis turned a blind eye to them,
apparently in part because the church had protested the massacre of the
fourteen villagers.

Hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians are to this day in refugee 
camps
in southern Lebanon -- periodically getting bombed by Israel. As we drove
around Galilee, we stopped at the village Lubya. Or rather, all that 
remains
of it. It is one of 418 villages that were razed by the Israelis after 
they
"ethnically cleansed" the 2000 inhabitants. All you see now are hints of
rows of stones tracing the foundations of homes -- as well as some
cactuses, the anti-theft system of village life.

Atrocities by Israeli forces were more than just flukes, but part of a
sustained effort by the Israeli forces to drive non-Jewish Palestinians 
out.
It's a picture of Israel that most Americans even more than Israelis 
shrink 
from, but it is the historical record.  Israel's "new historians" are 
noting 
often sugar-coating the crimes of Zionist forces that
Palestinians have been noting for decades.  The former director of the
Israeli army archives wrote that "in almost every Arab village occupied by
us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined 
as
war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes."

As Elie Wiesel and others condemn ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, they refuse 
to
acknowledge that Israel has done basically the same. Ted Koppel has 
falsely
claimed that the Palestinians left voluntarily in 1948. Michael Lerner of
the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun has disavowed Jewish culpability in
driving Palestinians from their homes.  Early in Schindler's List, a Jew 
is
shown pleading with Nazis, saying that their seizure of his property
violates the Geneva Convention. But Israel violates the very same laws as 
it
continues to confiscate Palestinian land. Steven Spielberg joined in a
recent celebration for Israel on CBS.

Nineteen forty-eight resonates for Palestinians not just because it was a
catastrophic event, but because the process of getting Palestinians off
their land has never really stopped. Through out the fifties and sixties,
present-day Arab Israeli citizens lived under suffocating military 
mandates.
Similarly, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have contended with
Israeli military occupation government schemes permits, checkpoints,
closures pressure them into leaving. Another mass exodus from the West
Bank took place in the 1967 war, and Israel continued expelling political
leaders and others into the 1990's.

In 1989, after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the Israeli Deputy 
Foreign
Minister, said "Israel should have exploited the repression of the
demonstrations in China, when the world attention focused on that country,
to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories." That
Minister was Benjamin Netanyahu.

The threat of another mass expulsion is useful to Israel as many
Palestinians are accepting a peace based on anything but equality under 
the
Oslo accords -- better to be subservient but still have a stake in your 
home
goes the reasoning. What is needed first is to get rid of the myths. What 
is
needed is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like South Africa's. Real
peace can only come from facing the past.


Sam Husseini is former Media Director of the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Sam Husseini
Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building
Washington, DC 20045
202-347-0020; Fax: 347-0290