Imprimir

Something did not go as expected at the latest «International Quds Day» in Iran. Introduced in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini in solidarity with the Palestinian people and against Israel, the event has been held yearly on the last Friday of Ramadan. It has traditionally been a festival of anti-Zionist diatribe and pro-Palestinian fervor.

Not the latest one.

In response to the calls by the regime’s leaders to mark the event, Iranian students — still angered by the death sentence handed down for university Professor Hashem Aghajari and frustrated by the lack of freedom in their country — rejected the government’s appeal and actually called for a boycott of what they termed a «sham and mandatory demonstration.»

The statement, issued by the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran, was strong in content, daring in tone and valiant in essence.

The communique referred to Iran’s political and clerical rulers as «the usurpers of political power,» «supporters of the culture of terror and violence» and «promoters of anti-Semitism.» It stated that «the people of Iran want to establish peaceful relations with the United States and believe that both the nations of Israel and Palestine have the right to exist.» It condemned the «pro-war factions» of Iran as well as the «Palestinian terrorist groups» and «Hezbollah thugs.» They called the International Quds Day «outdated» and said that observing it in support of violence was «a lunacy that is neither advantageous to the Palestinian nation nor does it coincide with the national interests of the people of Iran.»

To fully appreciate the intensity of this denunciation, one has to consider the place and context in which this statement was issued: in the Islamic Republic of Iran — where human rights are systematically violated, where religious coercion is rampant, where women are treated like cattle and political dissidents like bugs, and where boys and girls are subjected to public whippings for «sins» such as drinking alcohol, attending parties and listening to Western music. And in this land of oppression, a group of students goes public against the «rulers of tyranny» who show «disregard for the demands of their own people as well as public opinion in the West.»

Talk about courage.

Now contrast this with what’s going on at university campuses in the United States. To be sure, most American students are politically active and ideologically committed — but to the wrong causes, it seems. Many students are busy with pressure-campaigns to get their universities to divest from companies that do business with Israel. At rallies, some display highly offensive placards against Israel and the Jews.

That these students rarely have launched similar campaigns and demonstrations protesting human-rights violations in China, North Korea, Russia, Sudan, Syria, or for that matter the Palestinian Authority, does not add much to their intellectual credibility. «The defense of peace and calm in the Middle East is not attainable through the support for terrorists and war-mongering groups,» wrote the Iranian students, which is basically what some American students are doing by supporting ideologically and morally those who launched war against Israel and encourage terror against its people.

How ironic. It’s in Iranian, rather than American, campuses that Palestinian terrorists are being called for what they are — and it’s not «freedom fighters,» «militants,» «activists» or any other sanitized terminology so widespread in the halls of academia in the West.

The Iranian students are teaching their American colleagues a lesson in ideological integrity. Whether the latter would learn it remains to be seen. But American students would be well advised to answer their Iranian friends in their hour of need. In a sentence that captured it all, the Iranian student movement told the ruling mullahs and the free world (they translated their manifesto into English): «Leave Palestine Alone, Think About Us.»

Anyone listening in Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, et al?

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.

Imprimir

Saddam Hussein’s record is well known: He took part in a coup d’etat in the ’60s; became president 11 years later and has oppressed his own people since; attacked Iran and gassed thousands of Iraq’s Kurds in the ’80s; invaded Kuwait and launched missiles against Israel in the ’90s; and is currently financing Palestinian suicide bombers and embarked on an insane procurement program of weapons of mass destruction while playing hide-and-seek with the international community.

He poses a threat to global peace and must be removed from power. So says the United States.

But why should I believe President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has not yet confirmed America’s fears, when U.N. Secretary-general Kofi Annan says that Iraqi cooperation «seems to be good,» and when one of Hussein’s generals, Hossan Muhammad Amin, reassuringly declares: «Really, we have no weapons of mass destruction»?

Instead of getting tangled with the issue of Hussein’s deadly arsenal, I suggest that the dictator of Baghdad be deposed for a different reason — an artistic one. Let me explain.

Hussein is certainly the villain in the current drama, but he is also a man of many talents — an artist, if you wish. He has a taste for paintings, sculpture and architecture — as can be appreciated in the Mother of All Battles mosque in the outskirts of Baghdad, inaugurated last year to mark the 10th anniversary of the Gulf War. Creatively enough, the mosque’s minarets were built to resemble ballistic missiles sitting on launch pads. According to The Sunday Telegraph, the Scud-shaped minarets are 37 meters high, and there are four more minarets next to the mosque dome that look like huge machine-gun barrels, each 28 meters high. Taken together, 28/4/37 give Hussein’s date of birth. The mosque has a holy shrine housing a 605-page Koran, which was written, according to Iraqi propaganda, with the blood of the elected dictator himself.

«Over three years, the president gave us a total of 28 liters of his own blood, which has been mixed with chemicals to produce this handwritten Koran,» explained Dahar al-‘Ani, the mosque’s director of information.

But it is perhaps in the realm of literature where Hussein has excelled. In 2000, the sensational novel Zabiba and the King appeared in Iraq. Although it was anonymous, it was rumored that Hussein had authored it. The Iraqi media, writers and poets all praised it generously, Iraq’s television began to prepare a 20-part series of the novel (casting famous Iraqi actress Hind Kamil), and the Iraqi National Theater announced that a grand musical based on the book was in the making (adapted by Palestinian poet Adeeb Nasir).

Western reactions to the novel were diverse. A British journalist called it «an allegory of the confrontation between the Iraqi leader and the evil West, which combines romance, patriotism and adventure with openly sexual accounts.» In a review published in the Middle East Quarterly, Ofra Bengio, an expert on Iraq, said that Zabiba «is boring and incoherent . . . not written in the best Arabic style . . . clearly the work of an amateur . . . propaganda disguised as a novel — and poorly disguised at that.» For its part, the CIA studied the text in an attempt to access Hussein’s mind.

So here’s my suggestion. Remove Hussein, and everyone will benefit, primarily Hussein himself, who would have plenty of time to write more novels and design new mosques while serving his life sentence in prison. As a plus, Blix and Annan would be freed from the difficult task of searching for weapons in an expanse the size of Central America, the Iraqi people would enjoy a breath of freedom at last, and the planet would be free of the clear and present danger that the Iraqi leader represents.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.

Imprimir

In 1987, Egyptian author Said Ayyub published a book titled The Anti-Christ, in which he claimed that all the popes of the Catholic Church, Martin Luther King and Napoleon Bonaparte were Jewish.

In 1990, another Egyptian writer, Izzat Arif, published The End of Saddam, where he accused the dictator of Baghdad of being a Jew. In 1995, the Syrian newspaper Ath-Thawara said that Yasser Arafat agreed to negotiate with Israel because he himself was a Jew. And last year, a Palestinian sheik claimed that Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, had been a Jew pretending to be a Muslim.

Just when I thought I had exhausted my capacity for surprise at Arab conspiracy theories about the Jews, I was struck by a new, creative one. Perhaps I was even more astonished because I did not hear it in the streets of Tripoli, in the bazaars of Damascus or even, at the McDonalds of Cairo, where I invited for lunch the Egyptian taxi driver who was driving me around, only to be treated to an anti-Jewish diatribe. (No, it wasn’t because he preferred Burger King.)

I heard the latest canard in Geneva, a perfectly civilized city in the heart of Europe. I was attending a lecture by a Swiss journalist on the post-9/11 world. His views didn’t sit well with three Arabs seated in the front. After interrupting him repeatedly, one of the Arabs, a Palestinian journalist, stood up and began to say that Osama bin Laden was not a Muslim. Challenged, she raised her voice and claimed quite matter-of-factly that bin Laden was – you guessed correctly – Jewish! She shouted that preposterous line a few more times as she stormed out.

This scene came on the heels of a no-less-disturbing event that had taken place at the same conference hall just a few moments before. A Western-looking journalist stated that he had been in New York on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and that to his surprise, the subways in New Jersey were all empty — empty of Jews, that is. Furthermore, he claimed that he saw that all the Jewish stores in the area were closed.

So confident was this gentleman that he quietly ignored the many dismissive laughs that his statement brought and felt comfortable enough to join the audience for cocktails.

A year ago, I wrote that anti-Semitism should not be disregarded when addressing European attitudes toward Israel. Since then, scores of anti-Semitic attacks have been recorded in Europe: Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated, synagogues set on fire, yarmulke-wearing Jews beaten, Molotov cocktails thrown at Jewish institutions, and Jewish school buses stoned.

True, most of these attacks were perpetrated by Muslim immigrants, but it is equally true that their Muslim brothers in the United States and Latin America have not resorted to violence against their co-nationals.

Contrary to Latin and North Americans, Europeans seem to have created the proper political and cultural ambience for Muslims to feel comfortable enough to attack Jews with impunity.

We see this at the popular level, where street demonstrations have turned especially crude when it comes to rallying for the Palestinians as in Ireland or as in Italy, with demonstrators dressed like suicide-bombers. In elite circles, the Jose Saramagos and the Daniel Bernards lead.

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof recently wrote that as he was about to leave for Riyadh, a Kuwaiti official told him to set his watch back 100 years. I should be pardoned for falling for the temptation of borrowing this piece of advice, and recommend anyone traveling to Europe these days to set their clocks back, too — but just 69 years, to 1933.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.

Imprimir

All it takes for a baseless statement to be accepted at face value at the United Nations is for an Arab diplomat to utter it. Just observe the evolution of the newest diplomatic charge by Arab leaders: the United Nations, it turns out, is biased in favor of Israel.

• Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz protested in May that, while sanctions were imposed on Iraq for noncompliance, they were not imposed on Israel for its violations of U.N. resolutions.
• In September, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara asked why should the world demand that Iraq adhere to U.N. resolutions while Israel was allowed to be above international law.
• A few days later, the representative of the Arab League to the United Nations complained that the world community was ignoring Israeli violations of U.N. resolutions while pressing for their enforcement on Iraq.

To see how inaccurate this comparison is, one has to understand the different legal weights that U.N. resolutions carry.

The main distinction is between U.N. General Assembly resolutions and U.N. Security Council resolutions. The former have political (and in the eyes of public opinion, even moral) authority, but are not legally binding. The latter do create legal obligations for the states they refer to, but — as United Nations Watch, a Swiss NGO, reported — the implementation of these obligations vary depending upon the chapter of the United Nations Charter under which they are adopted.

Thus, resolutions adopted under Chapter VI of the U.N. Charter, entitled «Pacific Settlements of Disputes,» require negotiation. Such is the case, for instance, of U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, adopted in 1967 and 1973 respectively, which call for an Israeli withdrawal from disputed territories in the framework of a negotiated comprehensive peace settlement.

In opposition to this, resolutions adopted under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, entitled «Action With Respect to Threats to Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression,» can be enforced by third parties. Moreover, as noted by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the United Nations can authorize under Article 42 of its Charter the use of military force if a Chapter VII resolution is violated.

Here comes the trick. All U.N. Security Council resolutions that involve Israel were promulgated under Chapter VI of the U.N. Charter. All but two U.N. Security Council resolutions related to Iraq’s invasion and subsequent occupation of Kuwait were adopted under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter.

This crucial legal distinction means that there is no legitimate basis for the trendy comparison between Iraqi and Israeli compliance, or lack of thereof, with U.N. resolutions.

Now, if the charge that the United Nations is biased against Iraq is unfounded, the implication that the international body is biased in favor of Israel is just bizarre.

Discrimination against Israel in the U.N. system is rampant.

In a constellation of 190 member-states, Israel is the sole nation prevented from winning a seat at the New York-based U.N. Security Council. The Geneva-based U.N. Commission of Human Rights devotes disproportionate attention to real or putative Israeli violations of human rights under a special item of its agenda during its annual meeting; the remaining 189 states are collectively examined under another agenda item.

Furthermore, Israel is the only country ever to have been branded a «non-peace loving state» by the U.N. General Assembly, which is driven by the Arab-Muslim bloc.

As a matter of fact, in more than 50 years, the United Nations voted in favor of Israel just two times: in November 1947 (partition of Palestine) and in May 1949 (admission of the Jewish state to the United Nations). It would be hard to find a single pro-Israel resolution since, with the notable exception of the 1991 resolution that revoked one from 1975 that compared Zionism to racism.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is aware of this reality. A few years ago, after citing the appalling U.N. record on Israel, he said that «it has sometimes seemed as if the United Nations serves all the world’s peoples but one: the Jews.»
But of course, don’t confuse Arab diplomats with these facts.

Julián Schvindlerman, a political analyst and journalist, is associate executive director of UN Watch, an affiliate of the American Jewish Committee in Geneva.

Imprimir

We know the cycle. First comes the Arab provocation, followed by Israeli inaction. The international media ignore the event. Then, Arab pressure mounts, prompting an Israeli retaliatory measure that triggers headlines from Lima to Beijing. The Arab world is furious, mass hysteria reigns in Europe, the United Nations calls emergency sessions to discuss Israel’s aggression, and the United States — in an impossible effort to try to please everyone –jumps in with an «evenhanded» statement calling all the parties to exercise restraint. And so it goes until another crisis erupts.

The current one involves a water dispute between Lebanon and Israel that by now may have turned into a countdown to war. These countries have no diplomatic relations and technically are in a state of war. Lebanon hosts Hezbollah, a radical Shiite group that has attacked Israelis in the past. Israel occupied south Lebanon for nearly two decades. Under such a tense atmosphere, almost any minor issue has the potential of becoming a major confrontation. This is especially so when, as in this case, water is at the center of the conflict.

Nations have fought for water in the past in the Middle East, and in particular, the 1967 War resulted in part from a Syrian-Lebanese scheme to divert the Jordan River. After Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon, the Lebanese have tried twice to alter the water status quo, regulated by unwritten understandings dating back to the 1920s. Israel protested Lebanon’s conduct but took no military action. Now Lebanon has begun a diversion water project from the Wazzani River, a tributary of the Jordan River, which in turn flows into the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret) — Israel’s primary water reservoir.

Water experts observe that such action will have a direct impact on the quantity and quality of available water in Israel. First, any amount of water diverted from rivers that feed Israeli lakes will result in a reduction of available water. Second, by reducing the quantity of sweet water that reaches the Sea of Galilee, its level of salinity inevitably will increase, something that could «permanently endanger the entire Kinneret as a viable source of sweet water,» according to Martin Sherman, author of The Politics of Water in the Middle East.

Importing water

With a per-capita supply five times smaller than Lebanon’s, Israel is facing a severe water shortage. In recent years, Israel has had to cut the allotted water supplies to agriculture, and it has been unable to transfer the water quotas to Jordan that the peace treaty between these two nations mandate. Last month Israel signed a treaty with Turkey to import water to meet its national needs. Lebanese authorities, of course, know this reality all too well.

Beirut attempts to justify its unilateral decision alleging that Israel stole water from southern Lebanon rivers during the occupation years (untrue) and arguing that the water demand in the south has increased since many nationals moved there after Israel’s withdrawal. Even if the latter point were true, Lebanon could satisfy that demand by taking water from other sources that would not affect Israel’s water supply, such as the Litani River, which flows into the Mediterranean Sea. As Lt. Col. Gal Luft (IDF, res.) points out, the fact that Lebanon is not pursuing the Litani River option indicates that political, rather than welfare, considerations are behind its Wazzani project.

Perhaps arriving at the same conclusion, Washington has threatened Beirut to cut a pledged $35 million aid package if the Lebanese don’t show some flexibility. But, wary of the repercussions that an Israeli military action on Lebanon water facilities might have on an impending U.S. attack on Iraq, the Bush administration has been exerting pressure on the Sharon government, too.

Resort to force?

Forty percent of Israel’s water resources is in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), where the Palestinians want to establish their state. Another 30 percent of Israel’s water resources is in the Golan Heights, claimed by Syria. Lebanon is already diverting water from a major tributary to rivers that stream to Israel.

While Lebanon has a right to take water from rivers that run through its territory, Israel also has the right to respond militarily to what can be termed a casus belli. Unless U.S. diplomatic mediation succeeds, Israel will have to resort to force to protect its water supplies.

At that point, expect the headlines – naturally.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.

Imprimir

One can only feel sorry for the American, Russian, European and United Nations’ diplomats of the «quartet.» Their task is unenviable: to offer, on a silver platter and for the umpteenth time, a sovereign state to a people who have been rejecting it again and again.

Understandably, they have to become more creative each time. Now they are talking about a «provisional state» (whatever that means) and full independence by 2005. I wish them luck but also remind them of a few historical facts that might help them better understand the roots of Palestinian rejectionism and thus articulate realistic policy options.

In 1959 Yasser Arafat and other revolutionaries founded Fatah. In 1964 then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser established the Palestine Liberation Organization. Both organizations set the «liberation of Palestine» as their strategic goals. This took place before a single Israeli soldier set foot in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, before a single settlement had been built in «occupied territory,» before the Israelis began to «humiliate» and «oppress» Palestinian workers at checkpoints, and at a time when Jerusalem was in Arab hands (under Jordanian rule).

In other words, Israel had committed no sin yet. The Jews were living in «Israel proper,» this side of the Green Line. The «Palestine» that Fatah and the PLO wanted to liberate was not the area including Jenin or Nablus but that containing Haifa and Eilat — namely, the Jewish state. They wanted, and still want, Palestine from the river to the sea — a purpose that they codified in the most important documents of their national movement and that the PLO and the Palestinian Authority proclaimed, in Arabic, throughout most of the 1990s.

This fundamental rejection of Israel crosses many borders in the Middle East. In Ramallah and Beirut, people celebrate whenever Jewish blood is spilled. In Dubai and Damascus, they burn Israeli flags. In Cairo and Tripoli, they accuse the Jews of conspiracy theories. In Baghdad and Teheran, they stockpile weapons of mass destruction for what could be described as their ideal Arab solution to the Jewish problem. Indeed, Arab hostility to Israel is so visceral that during the past century Arab nations sided with the most fanatical enemies of the Jews (and mankind): German Nazism and Russian communism.

And yet, there is room for measured optimism. Two of the 22-member Arab League have peace treaties with Israel. That is not much, nor quite encouraging for a 50-year experience. But it is something. In particular, Egypt’s «cold peace» format offers a workable, if disappointing, model of relations.

Hosni Mubarak’s regime maintains alive the flame of anti-Semitism in the country’s controlled media; it repeatedly blocks Israeli attempts at economic, scientific or cultural cooperation; and it promotes policies of political isolation of the Jewish state in international fora.

But Egypt has adhered to the peace agreement’s military clauses, keeping its borders with Israel free of aggression for more than two decades. In fact, the peace treaty has been successfully tested in the past: when Israel bombed Iraq’s atomic reactor in Osirak in 1981, when it entered Lebanon and expelled the PLO in 1982, during the Gulf War in 1991, and during the current and previous intifada.

More than at peace, Israel and Egypt enjoy a state of no war, which — in the context of an Arab Middle East where Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a best-seller — marks quite an achievement. This kind of «peace» does not realize the optimistic dreams of regional integration, but it does provide Israelis with physical security. This isn’t a warm, harmonious peace; it’s cold and imperfect but achievable.

So perhaps negotiators need the right thermometer that would allow them to measure the exact temperature of the viable peace. A warm peace, the kind found between Sweden and Norway, is impossible to have today in this chaotic Middle East. Egypt’s cold peace might emerge as the only realistic way of coexistence between Arab and Jew.

It is up to the diplomatic geniuses of the «quartet» to figure out how to make it happen between Palestinian and Israeli.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.

Imprimir

The paramount features of Palestinian victimhood are its refugee status and its identity as a people living under occupation. Amazingly, the father of the Palestinian revolution has suffered neither: Yasser Arafat has never been a refugee nor has he ever lived under Israeli occupation (except during the last few months). In fact, he isn’t even a Palestinian.

Arafat’s given name is Abd el-Rahman Abd el-Rauf Arafat el-Qudwa el-Huseini. He was born in Cairo on Aug. 24, 1929. (Aware of the power of symbolism and legitimacy in Arab culture, he claims to have been born in Jerusalem, but many of his biographers disagree.)

Together with university friends, Arafat founded Fatah during the late 1950s. His association with the Muslim Brotherhood — a radical Islamic movement birthed in Egypt in early 20th Century — as well as his involvement in Fatah’s «military operations» earned him incarceration in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria in the 1950s and 1960s. Fatah joined the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1968, and the following year Arafat became its chairman, a position he still holds today.

During his tenure, the PLO was expelled from Jordan (1970) and Lebanon (1982), and it would have been thrown into exile once more — this time from Israel (2002) — were it not for the pressure that the international community exerted upon Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The Palestinians were massacred by the Jordanians in 1970, by the Christian Falangists in 1982 and by the Amal Muslim Shi’ites in 1985. They were evicted from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1991 — all as a result of their leader’s mistakes.

By the early 1990s, Palestinians in the territories were still under Israeli rule, and most of the Palestinians in the diaspora were still confined to miserable camps; Arafat’s PLO had not «liberated» one inch of historic Palestine after three decades of struggle.

Then came Oslo: a political life-vest thrown by the Israelis to a sinking revolutionary organization. Arafat quickly embraced it, and he was almost instantly rehabilitated — from bloody terrorist to statesman of international stature. He was given land and power (which came as a result of Israel’s political miscalculation more than Arafat’s own merit). Like an inverted Midas, everything that the Palestinian revolutionary touched became cursed. The 8-year experiment in Palestinian self-government confirmed this reality.

In the late 1980s, according to historian Efraim Karsh, after decades of Israeli administration leading up to the intifada, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were the fourth fastest growing economy in the world, ahead of Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and even Israel. But the first intifada, the peace process, Palestinian autonomy and the latest intifada have drastically reversed the trend. «He promised he would build a Singapore in Palestine. Instead he delivered a Somalia,» complained one Palestinian.

In reality, Arafat’s real successes were in the realm of public relations. His pinnacle moments of glory included appearing on the cover of Time (1968), addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York (1974), shaking hands with the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the White House (1993), and being awarded the Nobel Peace prize (1994).

No less significant, however, has been the impressive size of PLO assets and the chairman’s deft management of the organization’s finances. According to estimates by the CIA and the British National Criminal Intelligence Service, the value of PLO assets in the early 1990s varied between $10 billion and $14 billion. In 2000, Israeli intelligence put the figure at around $20 billion.

If we were to rank the PLO among the companies listed in the Fortune 500, we would be astonished to learn that PLO assets of the early 1990s today would place it above those of Kellogg’s, Continental Airlines, Nike, Colgate-Palmolive and Apple Computer. As if this vast organizational wealth were not sufficient, Arafat also has been showered with American, European and Japanese money since the beginning of the peace process. Yet, not one single Palestinian refugee’s life has improved as a result.

Indefatigable fighter, despised terrorist, eternal revolutionary, small dictator, respected Nobel laureate, failed statesman, celebrated media personality and savvy financial manager, Arafat is all and nothing at the same time. In the final analysis, he is a leader who failed his people on most counts; a seller of broken dreams. He is a man whom — as veteran journalist Oriana Fallaci wrote in the 1970s — history eventually will reduce to his true proportions.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.

Imprimir

Spain legitimately prides itself in the cultural richness it inherited from the Muslims of past centuries. Today it enjoys excellent relations with both the Islamic and Arab worlds and is highly involved in Mideast affairs. The European Unions special envoy to the Middle East, Miguel Angel Moratinos, is a Spaniard. So is Javier Solana, NATOs former secretary-general, a man deeply engaged in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

Systematically, Spain and its media side with the Palestinians and the Arabs in their war against the Jewish state, accusing Israel of being colonialist and expansionist, as well as of using excessive force in its retaliations.

It is consequently bizarre to witness Spains handling of its own conflict with Morocco, a member-state of both the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. These two countries have a dispute over a few colonial outposts, namely the areas of Melilla and Ceuta and an islet called Isla del Perejil by Spaniards and Leila Islands by Moroccans.

On July 11, members of the Royal Moroccan Gendarmery disembarked on the islet and planted their country’s flag. The islet had been under Portuguese rule since 1415, and under Spanish control since 1688. During the following centuries, Spain, Morocco and Great Britain squabbled over the tiny, rocky island. In 1956, Morocco gained independence and claimed that the islet belonged to it.

With the territorial dispute still unresolved, in 1960 Morocco and Spain agreed that neither country would establish a permanent presence there. Morocco violated that bilateral agreement in July, and Spain — after exhausting the diplomatic channel in a mere six days — responded with military force. On July 17, Spanish commandos backed by four naval vessels and six helicopters retook the island inhabited only by wild goats.

«Spain was attacked by force in a very sensitive part of its geography,» said Spanish Minister of Defense Federico Trillo. «In military terms, we are talking about a clear act of legitimate defense.» Thats true, but it bears noting that the islet is at a safe distance from the coast of Spain.

No Moroccan «Fatah Brigade» or Moroccan «Islamic Jihad» operated there. No mortar shell was ever fired from Perejil against Barcelona. No massacre against pizza-goers in Madrid was ever planned on the islets soil. There werent even children throwing stones against the «soldiers of the Spanish occupation.» And yet, Spain, which so often chastises Israel for its conduct when facing these dangers, invaded and evicted an «enemy» that posed no considerable threat. On July 20, Spain and Morocco resolved their ridiculous confrontation; the 75 Spanish soldiers who had been stationed there during the conflict began to leave.

Some commentators labeled the Perejil comedy/affair a «miniature war» and a «microcosm of the clash of civilizations,» given that NATO and the EU sided with Spain whereas the Arab League and the Islamic world supported Morocco. However small the facts on the ground, and however microscopic their consequences, the accompanying hypocrisy has been mammoth.

A more-telling case of Spanish diplomatic duplicity can be found in its conflict with Great Britain over the Rock of Gibraltar. This strategically located island has been under British control since 1704. The 30,000 Gibraltarians, mostly descendants of Mediterranean immigrants, favor British rule. They have a parliament, political parties and an elected leader.

Nonetheless, Spain haggles over control of air traffic to Gibraltars airport and over the islands international phone code. Vehicles crossing into Spain are held at the border for hours. The Tony Blair administration seems willing to cede sovereignty over Gibraltar to Spain, which Gibraltarians oppose, calling the initiative » a gratuitous betrayal of our political rights and legitimate aspirations as a people.»

The Gibraltarians are calling for a referendum on the final deal between Great Britain and Spain. The Jose Maria Aznar administration rejected the idea and stated that the nationalist aspirations of the Gibraltarians would not be honored.
So the Spaniards are keeping Gibraltarians waiting for hours at border checkpoints and denying them the right of self-determination. It looks like collective humiliation and oppression. Sounds familiar?

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.

Imprimir

Undoubtedly one of the most fascinating characters Israel has ever produced, Shimon Peres, may be the single most recognized and internationally acclaimed Israeli leader.

Born in Poland in 1923, Peres immigrated as a child, with his family, to Palestine, where he would become one of the founders of Kibbutz Alumot in the Jordan Valley. A David Ben-Gurion protégé, Peres has had an impressive run in Israeli politics.

In 1948 Peres was appointed head of naval services, and in 1959 he became a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. During a political career spanning more than five decades, he has been minister of Immigrant Absorption, Transport and Communications, Information, Defense, Finance and Foreign Affairs — and prime minister (upon the death of Yitzhak Rabin). He was vice president of the Socialist International and is a Nobel laureate.

All of which is amazing, when one considers that Peres has lost every national election in which he has participated, both for prime minister and for president. These failures notwithstanding, his contributions to the state are legendary. Together with Ariel Sharon, he belongs to the generation of great statesmen that includes Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and Menachem Begin.

But in the early 1990s, Peres had an idea — or, more accurately, a vision ~ that would cast the die leading to his own demise. In his book (aptly called) The New Middle East, Peres presented his view of Israel and its Arab neighbors closely intertwined in economic and bona fide political relations that would result in «visions of happiness and beauty, fife and peace,» as he so candidly put it.

Speaking to an audience in Paris in 1993, Peres said: «We envision a new Middle East where the skies will be free of missiles, the ground free of deserts, the water free of salt, its peoples free of violence and its children free of ignorance.» He became a strong advocate of Palestinian statehood and Israeli land withdrawal. To an audience in New York, Peres once said: «A successful Palestinian state is the greatest promise for peace and understanding. We want Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian farmers to work together, cultivating the land.»

Predictably, Peres’s rosy world view elicited ridicule, particularly in Israel. His political nemesis, Benjamin Netanyahu once referred condescendingly to his dovish counterpart as «Israel’s first astronaut.» Some of his critics called him hopelessly nave, but others saw him as a visionary ahead of his time. In fact, some of his speeches have had almost prophetic overtones. Even after the current murderous intifada erupted, Peres proclaimed: «We are at a watershed. Our region is going through a period of transition. The dark days are at an end, the shadows of its path are lengthening. The twilight of wars is still red with blood, yet its sunset is inevitable and imminent.» These could have been the words of Isaiah anticipating a future messianic age, as columnist Charles Krauthammer observed.

A man of the future Peres is. «I am bored with history,» he is fond of saying. Nothing could deter him; no one could rob him of his dream of a paradisiacal Middle East. Thus, Yasser Arafat’s endless calls for jihad, and green lights to terror during the days of the peace process, prompted hardly a peep from Peres. The New Middle East was translated into Arabic and distributed all over the region by the official Egyptian newspaper/publisher Al-Ahram, with an added introduction claiming that the book was a «Zionist plot.» Peres looked the other way.

In 1999, Hilal Khashan conducted a most comprehensive poll concerning Arab attitudes toward Israel, querying 1,600 Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians and Palestinians. More than 75 percent said that Peres was not interested in peace. Imperturbable, Peres went on with his dream.

It is sad to see a man who strives for peace rejected again and again. Even his enlightened European peers have abandoned him. In Belgium the legal committee of the Brussels parliament wants to prosecute him as a mass murderer, and in Sweden some citizens want the Nobel committee to strip Peres (not Arafat) of his prize.

Peres’s vision lies in tatters. His is not just the collapse of a political leader but the epic fall of a failed modern-day prophet. The Oslo fallacy, as with all false prophecies, has brought ruin upon both the prophet and his followers.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.

Imprimir

«No one can control or change this revolution» Yasser Arafat said on a sunny day in September 1983.  “No one can control or change me.»

At the time, many ignored the Palestinian leader’s statement. To this very day, many continue to disregard Arafats commitment to his revolutionary cause — chief among them, Kofi Annan, the European Union, the U.S. Department of State and most of the liberal media.

But some never trusted Arafat: Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Right, Donald Rumsfeld and the U.S. president. In Monday’s speech — characterized by The Jerusalem Post as «perhaps the greatest injection of realism into U.S. policy in 35 years — President Bush addressed the fundamental problem with Palestinian politics today: the lack of a genuinely democratic leadership.

Listen to Bush: «Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born. I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror…  A Palestinian state will never be created by terror. It will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change or a veiled attempt to preserve the status quo.» Which is why Arafat has to go.

Bush mentioned five times the need for Palestinian democracy. He essentially vanquished the «one last chance» policy of his secretary of state. He also made Palestinian statehood conditional on the fulfillment of certain Palestinian actions (e.g. stop terror, fight corruption, clean up the judiciary). While all this was long overdue, it is nonetheless a most welcome development.
Although Bush’s remarks contained enough material to entertain political analysts and diplomats for a long while, the statement that elicited the most reaction was his call for ousting the current leadership, including and primarily, the Rais himself.

Bush’s political exile of Arafat is protested on the grounds that the United States has no business interfering with Palestinian domestic affairs — that it was an insult to «democracy and the outcome of elections that were supervised by the whole world,» as a Palestinian Legislative Council member put it.

Yes, the elections were «supervised,» but they also were rigged.

In January 1996 — 32 years after the establishment of the PLO — the Palestinian people were given the chance to vote for the first time. They overwhelmingly voted Arafat into office, as president of the Palestinian Authority.

Mind you, this was not a Swiss election. It was democracy, PLO-style. Independent Palestinian journalists were so strongly intimidated that most chose not cover the event at all. Unwanted candidates were threatened or bribed, therefore, Arafat faced no credible opposition. The only challenger was a grandmother who, by virtue of being a woman, stood no chance of success in a predominantly chauvinistic and traditionalist Muslim society. Whereas international observers did witness the elections, they failed to guarantee the protection of the ballot boxes during transportation and did not supervise vote counting. As a result, in some districts, there were more votes than registered voters, and some ballot boxes disappeared.

Besides, both the international community and the Israeli government needed Arafat to win the elections. After they had invested so much political capital in the peace process inaugurated 2 1/2 years previously, they were not going to allow an unexpected newcomer to jeopardize their political program. Whats more, a defeat of Arafat would have shaken their axiomatic belief in his being the «sole representative of the Palestinian people» — also a key marketing point used to persuade the Israeli people of the inevitability of having to deal with the head of the PLO.

In reality, Arafat was elected as legitimately as Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, whom the West turned into pariahs after they became a threat to global peace. The tyrant of Gaza should be no exception.

«Arafat is not a leader; he is a myth» said former Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Shlomo Ben-Ami when the Camp David talks collapsed. It was high time someone shattered this «myth.» That it was done by the president of the United States and leader of the Free World is nothing short of a diplomatic revolution. To which I say: Thank you, Mr. President.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.