Todas las entradas de: adminJS2021

Miami Herald

Por Julián Schvindlerman

Sharon is the right man – 26/01/01

26/01/2001 adminJS2021

Palestinians call Barak ‘The Lemon,» because Arafat has squeezed so many concessions out of him.

Jerusalem – Poor Ehud Barak. He has been viciously attacked from every conceivable quarter, collecting condemnations so harsh that one wonders whether he is the worst ruler Israel — and the world — has ever known.

Washington Post columnist George Will called Barak «the most calamitous leader a democracy has ever had» while, on the other side of the ideological spectrum, CNN devotes a good share of its programming to bashing Barak. In the Middle East, he fares no better. While the Egyptian media compare him with Hitler, Nero and Pharaoh, the Palestinian media call him a «war criminal.»

According to Israel Radio, Palestinians have nicknamed him «The Lemon,» because Yasser Arafat has squeezed so many concessions out of him. Within Israel, controversial Parliament member Azmi Bishara and respected political scientist Shlomo Avineri have accused him of Bonapartism, as polls show him lagging 20 points behind the historically problematic Ariel Sharon in the current electoral campaign.

So what to do when you are a prime minister in the middle of elections and your public image has been shattered? First, you may try to reach a peace agreement with an historical enemy with whom your country has been negotiating for years to no avail.

It may be a difficult task to do so when you hardly enjoy parliamentarian and popular support, after you have resigned to the premiership – thus lacking moral and perhaps legal authority to make fateful decisions — and especially when you no longer enjoy the support of an enthusiastic American president, because he is out of office.

So, unable to produce an impressive diplomatic achievement, you may opt for mercilessly attacking your contender for the high office. This is why Barak’s ad campaign is centered mostly on character assassination. In politics, of course, there is nothing new or atypical about it, but it is quite a comment on Barak’s desperate position.

So voters are treated to what can be described only as a public exhibition of Sharon’s weaknesses and past mistakes.

First came the gossip about his senility; he doesn’t hear well, he looses attention, he is overweight. A pro-Barak journalist went as far as even contacting Sharon’s personal medical doctor, in Kampuchea on vacation, in an attempt to try to get a new scoop to add to the repertoire. He was disappointed; the good doctor said that Sharon was clinically all right.
Then Barak’s spin doctors introduced the obvious card: Sharon’s role during the Lebanon War. Not completely satisfied with this, Barak’s public-relations campaign placed an advertisement in Israeli-Arab newspapers showing Sharon ascending the Temple Mount last September in an effort to persuade Arabs that it was the Likud candidate who started the whole «Al-Aqsa intifada» —in which 13 revolting Israeli-Arabs were killed, a fact that Barak knows all too well will cost him the Arab vote.

This explains why Sharon is making every effort to present himself as the ultimate dove. «Sharon: A leader of peace» says his main electoral slogan. In the Likud TV ads one can see Sharon fatherly hugging cute little kids, cutting a flower in a field, gently looking at the camera as he removes his grandpa glasses and so on. The Likud jingle, coming pretty close to a local version of USA for Africa, is full of intonations about peace and smiling Israelis. Anything that can counterbalance Sharon’s warmonger image is emphasized.

But no matter how much Sharon invests in trying to convince Israelis that he will bring peace to this war-stricken land, he simply can’t. Not because he doesn’t want to, but because peace or war is not an option for him to decide. As scholar Daniel Pipes points out, that decision is not made in Jerusalem but in Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and elsewhere in the region.

In any case, these elections are not about peace as much as they are about security; sorely needed security. Personal and national security have to be restored in Israel. For this, Sharon is unquestionably the right man for the job.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Jerusalem.

Miami Herald

Por Julián Schvindlerman

The right to destroy Israel – 04/01/01

04/01/2001 adminJS2021

Imprimir

Jerusalem -According to the PLO, the Palestinian «right of return» is legally supported by U.N. Resolution 194 and morally sheltered by the history of the conflict. In truth, however, both points are incorrect.

Consider:

Resolution 194 of Dec.11, 1948, makes no reference of the expression «right of return.» This was a Palestinian invention. This resolution encompasses refugees from the 1948 war, not their descendants.

This resolution was adopted by the General Assembly, whose decisions are nonmandatory. Additionally, all the Arab states voted against this resolution, precisely because it did not establish a «right of return» – something they now conveniently forget.

But this one was not the only U.N. resolution that Arab nations rejected at the time. A year earlier they had rejected Resolution 181, better known as the Resolution for the Partition of Palestine, which determined the establishment of two states to live side by side; one Jewish, the other Arab. Not only did they reject it but actually launched a war of extermination against the newly born state of Israel. They exhorted their Arab brethren in Palestine (people who after 1967 started to call themselves Palestinians) to abandon their houses to allow the holy warriors to attack and «throw the Jews into the sea.»

When the sublime attack turned into a humiliating defeat, the Arab world confined the fleeing Palestinians in camps along the borders. As Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), now one of the top Palestinian negotiators, put it in the 1976 March issue of the PLO journal in Beirut: «The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live.»

By refusing to integrate them into their economies and societies and, in effect, keeping their brothers in camps under extremely poor conditions, Arab rulers perpetuated their plight thus sustaining a collective resentment, turning it into the oldest active refugee problem in the world.

Only two countries absorbed Palestinian refugees, granting them citizenship and civil rights: Jordan and Israel. The 150,000 Palestinians who had stayed within the borders of Israel were integrated into Israeli society – an action hardly fitting with PLO propaganda of Israeli «expulsions.» Today they have their own representatives in the Israeli parliament and constitute almost 20 percent of the population. In 1949, then-Israeli Primer Minister David Ben-Gurion offered to accept about 100,000 Palestinian refugees (a figure tantamount at the time to one-sixth of the Jewish population in the Israeli state), but the Arab nations rebuffed the initiative.

From the 1950s until 1993, Israel allowed 125,000 refugees to return to Israel under a family-reunification program; and since 1993, another 90,000 Palestinians were allowed to enter the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This, when Israel had to absorb its own 850,000 Jewish refugees expelled en masse from Arab lands in the 1948 war.

Incredibly, the Arab world and the PLO are demanding from Israel to pay the price for a military defeat that they suffered in a war of aggression that they themselves initiated. This moral absurdity is nonetheless surpassed by a logical absurdity of even greater proportions, as was expounded by Israeli military analyst Zeev Schiff: Not only do the Palestinians expect Israel to concede territory but that it also absorb Palestinian refugees inside its reduced borders.

The rate of natural growth of the Muslim sector in Israel doubles that of the Jewish population; in a short period of time, the 3.5 million Palestinian refugees democratically could turn the Jews into a minority into their one and only tiny state in the entire globe.

Actually, the Palestinian «right of return» is nothing but a euphemism for the destruction of Israel. Gamal Abd-el Nasser put it clearly in 1960: «If the refugees return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist.» It is evident then that if the PLO insists on materializing the right of return within Israel, the chances of reaching a peace accord will be buried. But if the right of return is realized, it is the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel what will be buried indeed. If this is what Arafat truly wants, then the time finally has arrived to call him for what he really is: not a peace-seeker but an unreconstructed warmonger bent on Israel’s destruction.

Julian Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Report (Israel)

Por Julián Schvindlerman

The coddling of Arafat – 01/01/01

01/01/2001 adminJS2021

Imprimir

Israelis have good reason to be suspicious when Yasser Arafat calls for U.N. intervention to «protect» his people from Israel. The Palestinian leader, despite his violent career, has always enjoyed preferential treatment at the world body, even as the U.N. consistently shows antipathy toward Israel. But this isn’t just a preference for the «freedom fighter» over the «occupier.» The moral absurdity can be truly appreciated by comparing the U.N.’s coddling of Arafat with its treatment of the Dalai Lama, rightly considered an icon ofpeaceful resistance to occupation.

The contrast between the two leaders could not be greater. The Dalai Lama was born to a poor farming family in Tibet, was exiled to India after the Chinese invasion, and with scant resources conducted peaceful resistance to China’s occupation ofhis land. Arafat, as his biographers have noted, was born to a prosperous family in Cairo, was never made a refugee and, enjoying the generous assistance of an entire regional bloc, launched an international campaign of violence to «free his land.» Yet the two have one thing in common: both have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. By awarding Arafat the prize, the committee sent a message to the Tibetan people: Like the PLO, they could have hijacked airplanes, bombed embassies or committed other brutal acts of terror to achieve the same level of international recognition and legitimacy. But it is within the halls of the U.N. that the disparity is clearest between the ways the world has treated these two leaders. In 1959, Chinese troops crushed a Tibetan uprising, killing over 87,000 in Central Tibet alone and transforming 80,000 Tibetans into refugees in India. Seeking to suppress the Tibetan culture, China transferred many of its own nationals to Tibet, allowing them to exercise control over political, cultural, religious and economic life. Thousands of monasteries, temples and historic structures were looted and razed while the U.N. remained silent.

The U.N. never explicitly condemned China’s occupation of Tibet. While the General Assembly adopted three resolutions on the Tibet issue (in 1959, 1961 and 1965), none contained the words «invasion» or «occupation.» China was not even mentioned by name. Nor was the Tibetan question ever discussed by a U.N. body between 1965 and 1992. The assembly never adopted a resolution validating a Tibetan «right of return,» nor did it create a refugee agency to deal exclusively with the Tibetan exiles.

Compare this silence with the dozens of resolutions the U.N. adopted on the «Palestinian question» and with the establishment of UNRWA to deal exclusively with the Palestinian refugee problem. Moreover, when the U.N. decided to apply the 4th Geneva Convention — for the first time since its establishment — it did so not to very real and blatant Chinese human rights violations, but rather to those which Israel supposedly committed during its occupation of «Palestinian territories.» And the Dalai Lama can keep dreaming that someday the U.N. will establish a Committee for the Inalienable Rights of the Tibetan People.

No «International Day of Solidarity with the Tibetan People» has ever been observed under the auspices of the U.N., contrary to that which is almost religiously commemorated for the Palestinians since 1977. The U.N. has neither created special committees to publicize information about the Tibetan cause nor given the Tibetan people permission to organize exhibits on U.N. premises. This, while the Palestinian people have been able to count on the assistance of three units within the United Nations, enjoying a several-million-dollar budget set aside for spreading essentially anti-Israel propaganda.

Unlike Arafat, the Dalai Lama has never enjoyed the rare privilege of taking part in the commemorative picture of world leaders at the U.N., and contrary to the PLO, the Tibetan Government-in-Exile has never been inscribed in the «Blue Book» of permanent missions to the august body; it has not even been granted «observer status.» The Dalai Lama has never been invited to speak before the General Assembly or any special agency or U.N. institution, save a one-time lecture before UNESCO in Paris in 1998. The Tibetan leader’s absence is even more striking when compared to Arafat’s frequent appearances at U.N. headquarters in New York, not to mention the instances in which the entire General Assembly packed its bags and temporarily moved to Geneva just to hear what the Palestinian leader had to say when he was denied entry to the United States (the consequence of a U.S. law forbidding known terrorists to cross its borders).

It is thus hardly surprising that the Dalai Lama was also conspicuously absent from the recent U.N. Millenniun World Peace Summit and had no option but to join the event «in spirit» from India. Arafat was a welcome invitee at the Millennium gathering; he must have listened with satisfaction to the chorus of Arab leaders ignoring the poverty of their own people to focus on his cause.

The sorry history of the U.N.-PLO-lsrael triangle only highlights the unfair treatment the body has also accorded to a peaceable Tibetan monk. Indeed, the U.N.’s absurdly discriminatory practices sadly confirm the prescience of writer Paul Johnson, who back in 1975 described the world organization as «rapidly be coming one of the most corrupt and corrupting creations in the whole history of human institutions.»

Julian Schvindlerman is a freelance journalist living in Jerusalem.

Miami Herald, Miami Herald - 2000

Miami Herald

Por Julián Schvindlerman

Egypt’s cold peace policy – 15/12/00

15/12/2000 adminJS2021

Imprimir

Cairo sees peace as a threat to its supremacy.

Relations between Israel and Egypt have drastically deteriorated since the eruption of the Al-Aksa Intifadah. After the Palestinian boy Mohammed Al-Durrah was killed in the line of fire between Palestinian snipers and Israeli soldiers, Egypt announced that it would name after that boy the street where the Israeli embassy sits in Cairo.

At the United Nations, Egypt was at the vanguard of those countries condemning Israel. At the last Arab Summit, Hosni Mubarak’s regime supported the final communique that condemned Israel, which among other things, called for an international court of justice to judge Israeli leaders under «war crimes» charges.

For abstaining from inviting a war against Israel, Egypt was applauded by the Western world for its moderation. After Israel shelled Gaza in retaliation for a Palestinian terrorist attack against a school bus, Mubarak recalled his ambassador to Tel-Aviv, protesting Israel’s excessive force. Shortly afterward, the Egyptian secret service discovered an Israeli spy ring operating on Egyptian soil. The timing of this «discovery» – as well as its deliberate publication in the media – did not cause much surprise in Israel, which denied the whole issue.

Far from being uncharacteristic of Cairo’s foreign policy, all this is nothing more than a reflection of its general hostility toward its northern neighbor. During the past 20 years, Egypt has adopted and implemented a policy commonly referred to as «cold peace.» Whereas it is preferable to a «hot war,» it can hardly be regarded as constructive for peace-keeping. Contrary to what the 1978 Camp David Accords stipulate, Egypt actively restricts all kinds of cultural, scientific, economic and tourist exchanges with Israel.

The few Egyptians who apply for a visa to enter Israel are interrogated by the secret police. Save Itzhak Rabin’s funeral, President Mubarak has never visited Jerusalem. Likewise, Mubarak did not attend the signing ceremony of the peace agreement between Israel and Jordan, as one would expect from the leader of the first Arab country to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

One can, more often than not, find Egypt at the forefront of those countries trying to internationally isolate Israel – be that at the UN, the Non-Proliferation Treaty conventions, or economic conferences such as those in Casablanca (1994) and Amman (1995) where Israel did not appear in the Middle East maps in the Egyptian brochures. Whereas the film Schindler’s List (whose theme is unrelated to the conflict) was forbidden, Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – a 200-year-old Soviet forgery accusing the Jews of world domination –are bestsellers throughout the country.

For their part, official Egyptian media are replete with articles denying the Holocaust, comparing Israeli leaders to Hitler and Nero, and attributing to the Jews the most ludicrous conspiracy theories. Pepsi, according to an Egyptian group calling for a boycott of Israeli and American products, stands for «Pay Every Penny to Save Israel.»

Why all this? Why does Egypt boycott its Jewish neighbor, when it was precisely the first Arab nation to ever reach a peace agreement with Israel?

Simple: Egypt wants to keep its hegemony in the Middle East. Were Israel to integrate regionally, it would soon become the regional leader – economically, scientifically and technologically – at Egypt’s expense. Peace is seen by Cairo as a threat to its supremacy in the area.

Why not then completely cancel diplomatic relations with the Jewish state? Even more simple: Since it signed a peace agreement with Israel, Egypt received more than $30 billion in American economic assistance. Consequently, Mubarak implements a dual policy. He keeps a «cold peace» with Israel in order to guarantee the flow of American dollars to his coffers, while he minimizes Egypt’s relations with Israel and demonizes it as much as possible to prevent Israel’s regional integration.

This American policy of financial appeasement, fully supported by Israel, consists of tempting moderate Arab countries with economic help in exchange for diplomatic relations with Israel. But it has its restrictions. The same policy will be condemned to failure so long as a parallel policy of regional democratization will not be pursued.

Just as Tel-Aviv University professor Martin Sherman pointed out: «By making the inherently aggressive dictatorships of the region more prosperous, we will not make them more pacific, only more powerful.» Sadly, Egypt’s «cold peace» remarkably confirms this statement.

The author is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.

Midstream

Por Julián Schvindlerman

Wagner in Israel – 12/00

04/12/2000 adminJS2021

Imprimir

JULIAN SCHVINDLERMAN, a Jerusalem-based political analyst, holds a master’s degree in Society and Politics of Israel from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Why Israel’s Rishon Letzion Symphonic Orchestra found it appropriate to reintroduce the thorny debate concerning public performances of Richard Wagner’s music while Israel is consumed with a resurgent, violent uprising by Palestinian protesters is beyond comprehension.

True, the performance had probably been planned for some time; the orchestra members had been practicing for months, and so on. But to proceed with the concert the same day a synagogue had been desecrated in Efrat, just one day after a suicide bombing in Kfar Darom (traumatic even though only the terrorist was killed), and while residents of Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood went to bed with bullets whizzing over their heads (shot by Palestinians from the nearby village of Beit Jallah), does not speak well of the orchestra’s sense of fitness with reality.

Of course, other artistic and cultural events have also taken place during this current period of instability. But this one was different — full of moral and societal implications. An Israeli orchestra, for the first time before a public audience, would perform a symphonic work by Richard Wagner — the composer whose music was adopted by Hitler and whose antisemitic writings contributed to the shaping of Third Reich ideology.

Predictably, the concert was not free of incident. Before the first notes of «Siegfried Idyll» could be heard, a group of audience members stood and left the auditorium in silent remonstration. But an elderly man chose a noisier form of protest: for several minutes in succession he energetically sounded a noisemaker he had carried into the performance hall for the express purpose of disrupting the concert. The man’s name was Shlomo, a survivor whose entire family had perished in the Holocaust. One member of the audience tried to restrain him, but only with the help of two ushers was Shlomo finally silenced. Afterward, he was led outside the auditorium into the flashing of cameras and the flurried questions of journalists anticipating this kind of incident. The orchestra’s conductor, himself a Holocaust survivor, ignored the entire episode and continued playing Wagner’s music. A few minutes later, the performance ended with the enthusiastic applause of the audience. Outside, asked by a journalist why he had brought the noisemaker with him, Shlomo retorted, «because I couldn’t find a bomb.»

This is not the first time that the Rishon Letzion Orchestra has challenged conventional wisdom. A decade ago, it added to its repertoire works by Richard Strauss — whose music had also been banned in Israel due to the composer’s ties with the Nazi movement. Nor is this orchestra alone in its tenacious fight for “freedom of artistic expression” in the Jewish state. In 1981, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra chose to play an excerpt from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as an encore after an otherwise uncontroversial performance. After announcing the selection, conductor Zubin Mehta invited those who might disapprove to leave the auditorium. Some did choose this option — including two violinists. But an usher, who apparently had not understood Mehta, jumped onto the stage when he recognized the strains of Wagner and, dramatically, removed his shirt to expose the scars he still bore from World War II. At that point, Mehta chose to stop the performance.

Ten years later, in 1991, the Israel Philharmonic made another attempt to insert a work of Wagner into their concert season schedule, but had to remove it after subscribers complained. Finally, this October, the Rishon Letzion Orchestra won a legal battle over the issue that pitted them against both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Holocaust survivors organizations, and the concert was consequently allowed to take place as scheduled.

Those who support the public playing of Wagner’s music in Israel argue that the «man should be separated from his work.» They point out that by appreciating his music they are not celebrating Wagner’s antisemitic ideology, but rather paying tribute to a creative genius whose art, unfortunately, became associated with the Nazi Party. Wagner, they remind us, died half a century before Hitler’s ascent to power, although they admit that his fiery antisemitic ideology influenced Nazi thought.

Another point raised by Wagner music advocates, and recently upheld by Israel’s Supreme Court, is based essentially on the intellectual fetish of modern Liberalism: absolute freedom of expression, according to which Israeli orchestras, for example, have the right to express themselves artistically at their own discretion. If this expression offends a third party, so be it — even if that third party happens to include survivors of the most indescribably painful tribulation in modern history. Freedom of expression, taken to its extreme, trumps everything.

When the debate was first introduced into the public arena in 1981 by the Israel Philharmonic, a Haifa University professor observed that two clashing symbols were at play. Wagner went down in history as a cultural symbol of Nazism, no less than the swastika; particularly from the Jewish perspective, both became deeply associated with suffering and evil. Could the Israel Philharmonic, as a cultural symbol of the Jewish state, ever be comfortably integrated with a cultural symbol of the Nazi movement, any more than the Star of David could be placed alongside the swastika?

But there also appear to be two sets of rights essentially at issue: on the one hand, the legitimate right of an individual to play or listen to the music he or she enjoys, and on the other, the right of another individual not to be offended by that music. How to reconcile the two? Today, under the umbrella of freedom of expression, virtually anything can see the light of day regardless of its objectionable content — from pornographic «art» to the antisemitic writings of the most rabid neo-Nazi. Protected by this right, for example, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a proven forgery, is currently bought and sold quite legally and freely in most countries of the Western world.

But here’s one suggestion. Those Israelis who fervently wish to play or hear Wagner’s music can do so — either privately in Israel, or publicly in Austria, Germany, and elsewhere. With certainty, however, that right should not extend to the public performance in Israel of music that is so intimately associated with the physical and emotional scars borne by so many citizens of the Jewish state. Let’s call the rights of the survivors and their families the Right to Emotional Integrity — one that should be regarded as superior on the scales of justice and common sense.

But contrary to what the barons of Israeli culture want us to believe, the question of whether or not Wagner’s work should be performed in Israel goes far beyond «freedom of expression» to something much more essential in Israeli, or any, society: In effect, to force this kind of extraordinarily sensitive issue on grounds of some absolute personal right to artistic enjoyment, enrichment, or fulfillment — all pleasures that can, and often should, be postponed when overshadowed by weightier considerations — is the worst kind of abject insensitivity and collective selfishness. The image of an old man, a survivor of the Holocaust, being escorted from a theater, in Israel of all places, under music reminiscent of the gas chambers — and this as his more «culturally enlightened» co-nationals look down condescendingly upon him — can be seen as a triumph of expression only through the kafkaesque lens of contemporary Western Liberalism.

No, as long as one, single survivor of the Holocaust remains in the Jewish state, there is no place for Wagner and his music here.

Miami Herald, Miami Herald - 2000

Miami Herald

Por Julián Schvindlerman

U.N. Is Pro-PLO, and Arafat knows it – 24/11/00

24/11/2000 adminJS2021

Imprimir

Jerusalem – Almost from the beginning of the current round of hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians, Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat has demanded that United Nations forces be sent to the region «to protect» Palestinians from Israeli «aggression.» With about 200 Palestinians killed so far and a few thousand wounded, Arafat’s claim would seem logical.
Upon closer examination, however, it is difficult to find genuine humanitarian concern in this Palestinian demand. After all, is one to believe that Arafat – who on Aug. 6, 1995, at al-Azhar University in Gaza said that “the Palestinian people is prepared to sacrifice its last boy and girl in order to wave the Palestinian flag» who uses children as human shields to protect the Palestinian snipers, who remunerates families with $2,000 per «martyr» and who initiated the present confrontation in the first place – really cares about the physical integrity of his people?

No, there is more. Arafat is in fact pursuing multiple goals through his initiative, first and foremost to internationalize the conflict. By involving the United Nations (including Russia and the European Union), Arafat would block the chances of solving the conflict with Israel; for the participation of these parties, each with its own domestic and global interests, would mean that negotiations would be lost amid endless talks. This is what happened at the Madrid Conference inaugurated 10 years ago: the high level of international involvement combined with excessive media exposure obstructed progress. The Oslo secret channel was created as an alternative to this failed initiative.

Arafat is trying to emulate the situation Israel is currently facing on its border with Lebanon. Into the theater of this conflict, the multinational United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon was positioned, a force that at best can be defined as useless.

To wit: For years, Hezbollah habitually launched Katyusha rockets against Israel over the heads of UNIFIL troops. Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from South Lebanon, dozens of Lebanese daily throw stones and metallic objects at Israeli soldiers on the other side of the border without UNIFIL taking action. Nor did the presence of the U.N. contingent prevent Hezbollah from crossing the international border and kidnapping three Israeli soldiers almost two months ago. In practice, the U.N. presence not only failed to deter a terrorist group from attacking Israel but also limited Israel’s ability to defend itself.

The United Nations is an essentially pro-PLO organization. The Security Council and the General Assembly already have condemned Israel for the current wave of violence, while the Geneva-based U.N: Human Rights Committee sent a delegation to the area, in the face of Israeli objections. The PLO has enjoyed preferential treatment in U.N. corridors. Even before Arafat was invited to speak before the General Assembly in 1974, the PLO already had acquired observer status in many U.N. agencies, among them, the International Association of Civil Aviation — this, when the PLO was considered the No. 1 hijacking organization. Also in 1974, the PLO was granted «permanent observer status,» an honor until then reserved only for nonmember states such as the Vatican and Switzerland.

During the last 20 years, the United Nations religiously has commemorated the annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. In 1982, U.N. flags waved over the ships transporting the defeated PLO from Beirut to Tunis. No other separatist group or movement of national liberation has been accorded this level of U.N. attention — not the Basques, the Irish, Armenians, Tibetans, Biafrans or Kurds.

With these precedents in mind, one does not need a Ph.D. in political science to predict that any kind of U.N.-sponsored observer group will condemn Israel in this violent set of confrontations with the PLO-led Palestinian Authority.

That in a group of 188 member states, 30 percent of General Assembly condemnations and 40 percent of mandated investigations of human-rights violations have fallen on just one nation, Israel — and never on the Palestinian side — is not very reassuring. Arafat knows it. That’s why he wants the United Nations here.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.

Washington Times

Por Julián Schvindlerman

Oslo’s collapse – 21/11/00

21/11/2000 adminJS2021

Imprimir

The violence launched by Yasser Arafat at the end of September marked the end of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Its collapse, however, began at least half a decade ago. Oslo was mortally wounded the day the Palestinian leader issued his first inciteful message to an Arabic-speaking crowd; it staggered along during successive years
with each additional Palestinian violation; and took its last gasps with the terrorism committed by Islamic fundamentalists given the «green light» by Mr. Arafat.

All told, from the beginning of the peace process to just before the current confrontations, 237 Israeli civilians were killed and 2,824 were wounded by their Palestinian counterparts (as for soldiers, 97 were killed and 1,376 wounded). That is to say, the first heady years of
«peace» in Israel produced more casualties than during the previous 15 years of open conflict put together. Finally, at Camp David this July, by rejecting magnanimous Israeli terms and returning to Gaza without even having produced a counteroffer, Mr. Arafat placed Oslo in its coffin.

But the question left hanging in the air during these tense and tragic days is that of what, if any, responsibility the Israeli «peace camp» bears for this nightmarish turn of events? To have originally believed in Oslo’s original and ambitious promise of peace might have been
reasonable. To have given the PLO an opportunity to prove it had really turned over a new leaf could have been politically understandable – although perhaps still morally unacceptable. But to have clung to the peace process with messianic fervor and irrational zeal is nearly incomprehensible. Indeed, Oslo’s architects – professors Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak, along with politicians Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin – with the open support of nearly the entire camp of Israeli left-wing politicians – made a strategic decision to ignore the massive amount of evidence that something had gone terribly wrong with their Grand Experiment.

Why? As former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Dore Gold pointed out a few years ago, canceling the «Oslo project» during its early stages would have been for the Israeli left tantamount to burying its most central item of faith – that peaceful coexistence with a PLO-led Palestinian entity was a reasonable and achievable goal.

Were the signs really that difficult to see? Slaves of their own assumptions, the Israeli left chose to ignore – if not condone – PLO misconduct in the secure belief that mutual confidence would emerge with time; it did not. With the inexplicable infatuation many intellectuals and human rights advocates have for brutal dictatorships and irredentist movements, well-intentioned peace camp politicians projected their own post-nationalist ideals onto the Palestinians, seeing virtuous pacifists in those who were obviously holy warriors in hibernation.

Coming to terms with these truths, the honest observer is left with a tragic irony: that the leaders of Israel’s left – Oslo’s most loyal supporters – indeed bear at least partial responsibility for the agreement’s crumbling. Let there be no doubt: The assassins of the peace process are none other than Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian rock-throwers. The Israeli left should not be judged for wholeheartedly longing for the arrival of peace to this war-weary land, a hope held in the heart of every Israeli. But by negligently and intentionally choosing to ignore systematic and dangerous Palestinian violations, the left in essence created the framework for Oslo’s collapse.

Strategically, then, it was not the so-called «enemies of peace» who condemned Oslo to death, but its best friends. If, instead of rewarding Mr. Arafat every time he breached the accords, Israeli leaders had demanded that their peace partner honor his obligations and stick resolutely to the path of credible reconciliation, then perhaps a fall could have been avoided. Even if this policy had precipitated an earlier collapse of the process, at least Mr. Arafat and his henchmen today would not have the weapons, land, and infrastructure they are now turning against their «peace partner.»

And the mood of the Israeli right? Anyone who was repulsed by the sight of Israeli leaders embracing Mr. Arafat, who refused to accept the abject immorality of Western democracies and the Nobel Peace Prize committee in catapulting the most brutal kind of criminal to international fame and legitimacy as a «hero of peace,» despite an honest longing for peace for which the right is often denied credit, must accept all these facts with a heavy heart. Even during times of turmoil over the past seven years, most of those who stayed firmly outside Israel’s more dovish mainstream still couldn’t help wishing, deep down, that in some inexplicable, irrational -even magical- way, the process would somehow ultimately deliver the peace it promised. For these, consolation is perhaps best expressed in the words of Israeli writer Amnon Lord: «An epoch of lies and fraud has ended.»

Midstream

Por Julián Schvindlerman

Yerushalayim versus Al-Quds – 10/00

04/10/2000 adminJS2021

Imprimir

JULIAN SCHVINDLERMAN, a freelance journalist, holds an MA in Society and Politics of Israel from the International Rothberg School at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Middle East covers an area of roughly 15,000,000 square kilometers.(1) There, you can find a small country called Israel, which encompasses a space totaling 27,800 square kilometers. Its capital, Jerusalem, hardly fills 120 square kilometers. Within it is located the Old City, covering just one square kilometer. Inside the Old City lies the Temple Mount. There, in this tiny area, whose symbolic importance is inversely proportional to its geographical dimension, one of the most atrocious archeological crimes of the modern era is taking place.

It all began when the Islamic Religious Authority (WAQF), currently under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority, opened an «emergency exit» to one of the several mosques located on the historical Temple Mount a few months ago. In time, and with the help of bulldozers and trucks, workers dug a pit 1,250 square meters in area and 12 meters in depth near this original exit supposedly for the sake of renovations to the mosque, thus transforming the «exit» into a monumental entrance to the area of the mosque. During this construction process, the workers have systematically dumped piles of ancient relics from the First and Second Temple periods onto a 6,000-ton mountain of dirt in the Kidron Valley as if it were garbage, in the way someone would toss a McDonald’s hamburger wrapping.

This almost unbelievable act of Islamic sacrilege prompted an open letter addressed to the Israeli prime minister and signed by, among others, the mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert, former mayor Teddy Kollek, writers Haim Gouri, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, professors, recipients of archeological prizes, and 82 members of the Knesset — ranging in ideology from Meretz to the NRP. The letter stated that «a serious act of irreparable archeological vandalism and destruction is being carried out without archeological supervision … this archeological crime is insufferable.»(2)

Haim Gouri, also a member of the Committee for the Protection of Antiquities at the Temple Mount, called for UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) to intervene. This call for help is particularly significant in light of Israel’s past experience with the UN agency. During the 1970s and 1980s, UNESCO repeatedly condemned Israel for various archeological excavations that, according to the Muslim world, were damaging the foundations of the mosques. At the time, UNESCO even went as far as to cut off financial aid to Israel.

That is why the current indifference of UNESCO, as well as that of the international media, various NGOs, and Western governments is simply too much to abide. As these prominent Israeli personalities pointed out in their public letter of protest, it would be inconceivable for a similar act of desecration to take place in areas of comparable historical importance, such as the Acropolis in Athens or the Forum in Rome — or, for that matter, in Mecca itself. Actually, had this pit been carved by Israel, and had the desecrated relics belonged to Muslim instead of Jewish history, World War III would no doubt have erupted.

One need only recall what happened at the same location a few years ago to realize that this statement is no exaggeration. In September 1996, the Netanyahu administration opened a 2-meter-long exit at the end of a Hasmonean tunnel under the Western Wall. This event was denounced from Gaza to Bangladesh as a desecration of the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem, and a few hours later rallies against Israel and the «Judaization» of the City of David filled the streets of the Palestinian autonomous areas. In the ensuing riots, the Palestinian police joined the protesters, at times shooting at the Israeli police and army — with weapons they got from Israel in the framework of the peace process. After three days of fighting, 70 people had lost their lives and dozens had been wounded, mostly Palestinians.

Passions were further inflamed when the official Palestinian television station showed images of the corpses while describing the revolt as an Israeli «massacre.» At Palestinian request, the Arab League met and condemned Israel, while the international media, unsurprisingly, echoed the Palestinian account of events.

The present crime being committed by WAQF on the Mount has, of course, much more to do with the battle over the sovereignty of Jerusalem than with archeology. Nor is this careless, even hostile Islamic attitude toward historical treasure surprising. The entire Palestinian leadership is committed to «erasing» Jewish history from the area through its official media, school textbooks, or, as in the current case, by simply tossing into the garbage any shred of evidence pointing to a Jewish historical presence here.

Throughout the peace process, Israeli foreign policy has generally avoided adopting a systematic information campaign highlighting the historical Jewish link to Jerusalem or the moral dimension underlying such bond. That is to say, Israel could remind the world that the word «Jerusalem» appears 587 times in the Jewish Bible (its synonym, «Zion,» another 151), whereas it does not even appear once in the Koran; that Jerusalem was the capital of a Jewish kingdom and was never the capital of any other rule; that Muhammad attached religious value to Jerusalem with the sole intention of gaining Jewish supporters; and that Jews have been for millennia praying three times a day facing Jerusalem, whereas Muslims — even when they are in Jerusalem — pray facing Mecca.

Israel could also remind the world that, under Jordanian rule, Jews were forbidden to pray at the Western Wall, that almost all the synagogues in the Old City were desecrated, and that tombstones of the old Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives were removed for use in various construction projects (including the building of latrines). Nor was Jerusalem that relevant for Muslims religiously under the Jordanian administration. As Daniel Pipes has recounted, the act of securing a bank loan, subscribing to telephone service, or registering a postal package required a trip to Amman in those days. Friday sermons were not transmitted from Al-Aqsa but from a minor mosque in Amman (by the way, these sermons were censored by the Jordanian authorities, a restriction Israel rescinded when it reunified the city in 1967). Nor was Jordan’s policy toward Jerusalem atypical. Save a few occasions when King Hussein deigned to visit Jerusalem, no Arab leader paid a visit to the Holy City during 1948-1967. Not even in the 1964 PLO Charter, Daniel Pipes reminds us, can one find mention of Jerusalem. (3)

No, only after Israel captured the city in 1967 did the Arab world start to «miss» Jerusalem. It was recently reported, for instance, that King Fahd told the American president he wants to pray at Al-Aqsa mosque before he dies. This is reminiscent of the late Syrian president who, as talks regarding the possible return of the Golan Heights were in full swing, told President Clinton that he wanted to swim in Lake Kineret. Perhaps these declarations of intent and sudden interest in Israeli sites reflect a potential materialization of one of the promises of the «New Middle East»: the promotion of regional tourism. Accordingly, we shouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow we hear that Saddam Hussein wants to eat a falafel in Tel Aviv or Colonel Qaddafi wishes to surf off the coast of Eilat…

In any case, this extreme act of Islamic disrespect toward Jewish history and the lack of elementary Palestinian sensitivity toward its peace partner in themselves constitute the basis upon which Israel should define its Jerusalem policy. Since September 1993, Yasir Arafat has adopted a position on Jerusalem and has not moved one inch from it. Perhaps the time has arrived for Israel to do the same, and for once to set and respect a red line in this peace process — a line which, incidentally, enjoys a significant national consensus.

Notes:

Including Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Yemen.
Ha’aretz/ 11June 2000.
Daniel Pipes, «Whose Jerusalem,» The Jerusalem Post, 19 July 2000.