Want Security? End the Occupation
By Marwan Barghouti
Wednesday, January 16, 2002; Page A19
WASHINGTON POST
RAMALLAH - Israel's assassination of Fatah activist Raed Karmi on Monday was predictable. Despite Israel's having killed more than 18 Palestinians since President Yasser Arafat's call for a cease-fire on Dec. 18, there have been no Israeli civilian casualties during that time. That, according to world governments and the international press, constituted a "lull in the violence." But a lull in the violence is exactly what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cannot afford. He was elected in a time of crisis and knows that his rule is sustainable only in a time of crisis. For his own political survival, he will do whatever it takes, and look for any excuse, to stoke the flames of unrest and avoid a return to peace negotiations.
Hence, more than 600 Palestinians, already refugees, were recently made refugees yet again as Sharon's bulldozers razed their homes in Gaza. A day later Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem were destroyed. And then, just to ensure that Palestinians are sufficiently provoked and the cycle of violence starts again, Israel assassinates Karmi.
Sharon justifies such barbaric and illegal measures in the name of "security." But as someone often considered a candidate for Israeli assassination myself, I can assure the Israeli people that neither my assassination nor any of the other 82 assassinations during the past 15 months will bring them any closer to the security they seek and deserve.
The only way for Israelis to have security is, quite simply, to end the 35-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Israelis must abandon the myth that it is possible to have peace and occupation at the same time, that peaceful coexistence is possible between slave and master. The lack of Israeli security is born of the lack of Palestinian freedom. Israel will have security only after the end of occupation, not before.
Once Israel and the rest of the world understand this fundamental truth, the way forward becomes clear: End the occupation, allow the Palestinians to live in freedom and let the independent and equal neighbors of Israel and Palestine negotiate a peaceful future with close economic and cultural ties.
Let us not forget, we Palestinians have recognized Israel on 78 percent of historic Palestine. It is Israel that refuses to acknowledge Palestine's right to exist on the remaining 22 percent of land occupied in 1967. And yet it is the Palestinians who are accused of not compromising and of missing opportunities. Frankly, we are tired of always taking the blame for Israeli intransigence when all we are seeking is the implementation of international law.
And we have no faith in the United States, the provider of billions of dollars in annual aid to fund Israel's expansion of illegal colonies, the "fighter of terrorism" that supplies Israel with the F-16s and helicopter gunships used against a defenseless civilian population, the "defender of freedom and the oppressed" that coddles Sharon even as he faces war crimes charges for his responsibility in the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees. The role of the world's only superpower has been reduced to that of a mere spectator with nothing to offer other than a tired refrain of "Stop the violence" while doing nothing to address the root causes of that violence: denial of Palestinian freedom.
Watch as the hapless Gen. Anthony Zinni focuses his efforts on "violence" while Jewish settlers violate international law and even American policy by moving into a new illegal colony in occupied East Jerusalem. We Palestinians are not impressed.
Over the past 15 months, Israel has killed more than 900 Palestinian civilians, 25 percent of them under the age of 18. And still the United States has the audacity to veto a U.N. plan for an international protection force to stop the onslaught.
So we will protect ourselves. If Israel reserves the right to bomb us with F-16s and helicopter gunships, it should not be surprised when Palestinians seek defensive weapons to bring those aircraft down. And while I, and the Fatah movement to which I belong, strongly oppose attacks and the targeting of civilians inside Israel, our future neighbor, I reserve the right to protect myself, to resist the Israeli occupation of my country and to fight for my freedom. If Palestinians are expected to negotiate under occupation, then Israel must be expected to negotiate as we resist that occupation.
I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated -- the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else.
This principle may well lead to my assassination. So let my position be clear in order that my death not be lightly dismissed by the world as just one more statistic in Israel's "war on terrorism." For six years I languished as a political prisoner in an Israeli jail, where I was tortured, where I hung blindfolded as an Israeli beat my genitals with a stick. But since 1994, when I believed Israel was serious about ending its occupation, I have been a tireless advocate of a peace based on fairness and equality. I led delegations of Palestinians in meetings with Israeli parliamentarians to promote mutual understanding and cooperation. I still seek peaceful coexistence between the equal and independent countries of Israel and Palestine based on full withdrawal from Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 and a just resolution to the plight of Palestinian refugees pursuant to U.N. resolutions. I do not seek to destroy Israel but only to end its occupation of my country.
The writer is general secretary of Fatah on the West Bank and was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council.
END THE OCCUPATION - END ISRAEL'S APARTHEID
OPINION: Anyone who insinuates that the Palestinian Authority is dedicated solely to the eradication of Israel is bordering on lunacy considering the fact that Israel's army is armed to the teeth thanks to billions in U.S. largess and unprecedented diplomatic cover, as U.S. politicians and news media stumble over themselves to prove their loyalty to Israel. Anyone who thinks for a second that Israel should retaliate vehemently against the Palestinians should go to the West Bank and spend a week under Israeli occupation and then see how carefree he/she feels about imploring full-scale violence against Palestinians. America needs to stop treating Israeli lives as sacrosanct while reducing the Palestinians to a bunch of suicide bombers and a gang of thugs. Until the righteous cause of Palestinian self-determination gains ascendancy over the expansionist dreams of "greater Israel," the region will have no peace. The Israelis will have to accord to international standards, end the occupation and settle for 78 percent of historical Palestine. No justice, no peace.
WASHINGTONPOST.COM (March 23, 2002)
Question: What's
your (Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon) reaction to the recent plan
proposed by the Saudis?
A: Every initiative is welcome. What's interesting is the vision of peace and normalization with all the Arab world. But there appears to be a precondition - Israeli withdrawal to the '67 borders. Israel will not be able to do that if it wants to survive. Of course we are ready to talk to the Saudis. Israel can reach an agreement based on U.N. Resolutions Number 242 and 338. But the Arabs support the Saudi plan because they would like it to replace resolutions 242 and 338 [which speak of withdrawal to secure and recognized boundaries] ...
OPINION: (Mar 23, 2002) Why is it that Israel (as the illegitimate occupying power of the Palestinian people) can violate United Nations Security Council Resolutions and not get punished but when Iraq invades Kuwait and refuses to withdraw (thereby violating UN Resolutions), Iraq was punished heavily and swiftly? The "acquisition of territory by war" is "inadmissible". Resolution 242 clearly calls for "Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied". There is clearly no other way to read those two sentences other than Israel's withdrawal to its 1967 borders. Israel's continued defiance of Resolutions 242 and 338 has prolonged the downward-spiraling misery of both the Israeli and Palestinian people. America's adamant support of Israel's defiance makes peace in the Middle-East a far-reaching goal, and security for the American people equally remote.
OPINION: (Apr 5, 2002) GET OUT OF PALESTINE NOW. The United Nations Security Council has spoken and, indeed, the world has spoken: Israel needs to end its reign of terror in Palestine immediately and without delay. This is insanity and it must be stopped. The Israeli government must be told in no uncertain terms that there can be no military solution to the problem, as no military might, however overwhelming, can ever vanquish the will and determination of the Palestinian people to establish an independent and sovereign state in their homeland. The United Nations must band together and tell Israel that should Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon insist on going down this road of state-sponsored terrorism and slaughtering of innocent civilians, the United Nations will impose sweeping economic sanctions against Israel and compel Sharon to appear in The Hague before the War Crimes Tribunal. Mr. Sharon should face dire consequences for his crimes against humanity, his love for war and his rejection of peace. Hasn't he learned from the Holocaust? Does he want to do to the Palestinians what Adolf Hitler did to his people? Some things in life are either right or wrong. Slavery and Apartheid were wrong. Israel's brutal occupation of Palestine is WRONG. Stop the siege, stop the massacre, stop the occupation, stop the genocide now.
Israel's occupation of the Palestinian people will be judged by history as simply that - an occupation by Israel as the brutal occupying power. This was unacceptable in the past, it was wrong in the World Wars that wrought the Earth in the first half of the 20th century and it is equally unacceptable and wrong now. No military offensive or "terrorist-cleansing" campaign will change that fact. Time will prove that Israel is on the wrong side of history. They will forever be judged by future generations.
OPINION: (Apr 11, 2002) WASHINGTONPOST.COM - It is not in the Israeli people's interest to maintain occupation and settlements. It is not in the interest of the United States to allow it to do so, after 35 years of occupation, because one day people will hold the United States to account for what Israel does and for the American weapons it does it with. It is, moreover, not possible to repress violence with infinitely more violence or to provide security for Israelis by creating insecurity for Palestinians. That strategy has been tried and has failed for 35 years.
And, finally, it is not possible to pretend the clock started when the last attack on Israelis took place. Three times as many Palestinians have been killed as Israelis during these tragic 18 months, in both cases mostly innocent civilians. There can never be security for illegal occupation and settlement. Expecting some quisling body to provide it, as happened for the past 10 years of interim immobility while more than 100,000 new settlers were implanted in the occupied territories, is utter folly.
If the United States wants security for Israel's population, as it should, it ought to tell Israel that security can only exist on its side of a mutually agreed, guaranteed international frontier between two sovereign states, Palestine and Israel.
That the Palestinians should condemn suicide bombings or any attacks on civilians, that they should attempt to repress them, that they should commit to a peaceful resolution of the dispute, all are reasonable demands. But to demand that the Palestinians police their people while settlements expand, while the occupation kills more civilians, and in the absence of a guaranteed political outcome tied to a firm timetable, is wrong: No one can stop legitimate resistance to an indefinite, illegal occupation.
Everyone knows the basis of a resolution of this conflict. This will not be the grotesque Swiss cheese map put forth by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at Camp David (called a "generous offer" by those with no idea of what it really entailed: no control of borders, no contiguity between parts of the West Bank, no Palestinian sovereignty, or even contiguity of neighborhoods, in Jerusalem). It will rather be on the basis of the December 2000 proposals of President Clinton (accepted by both sides with reservations), as these were modified at Taba in early 2001, and the Beirut Arab summit peace plan.
Those who scoff at this do not want a compromise: They want the capitulation of the other side. President Bush is right: It is a mistake to have a summit meeting until the broad outlines of a settlement are agreed upon and key details have been worked out. Powell should be aiming to start this process: Enunciate United States backing for a clear linkage between the rapid ending of occupation, the rolling back of settlements and Palestinian statehood, and the guaranteed security of Palestine and Israel within recognized, mutually accepted frontiers.
Very simply, nothing else will work. If Powell tries only to bring about another cease-fire without progress toward solving the real causes of conflict, his inevitable failure will make things worse, and the fire next time may be beyond the power of even the United States to control.
OPINION: (Apr 17, 2002) SALON.COM - What is the fundamental difference between Slobodan Milosevic and Ariel Sharon? The former is on trial for war crimes, while the latter still leads an occupying army.
For those already loosing angry e-mails from their quivers, I ask you to take a few minutes to consider the comparison before rushing to defend Sharon's scorched-earth march through the West Bank as a necessary response to the terrorists that Yasser Arafat either condones or has been too gutless to stop.
Milosevic, like Sharon, cited the terror tactics of neighboring peoples - Croatians, Bosnians and ethnic Albanians who stood in the way of his vision of a secure Yugoslavia - as a rationale for preemptive use of massive military force against them. An occupied people can get ugly in their resistance, unless a near-saint such as Mohandas Gandhi or Nelson Mandela leads the movement away from mayhem while winning political victories. Arafat is anything but a saint, and there is much blood on his hands. But it is always the occupier, with the big guns and control of the real estate, that holds the real keys to reconciliation.
Rarely does such an occupation end voluntarily; land is exchanged for peace only when the occupiers feel there is no other choice. Both the plan laid out by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell and the recent Saudi-inspired Arab League peace proposal offered such an option, but Sharon would not accept it anymore than Milosevic would the compromises presented to him up to the end of the Yugoslavia wars.
Instead, both have sought to destroy any momentum toward peace by waging war.
Sharon has humiliated President Bush, not only by ignoring his demand for a withdrawal but by co-opting the president's war-on-terrorism code phrases as cover for his drive to prevent - forever, if possible - a Palestinian state.
By blasting through West Bank towns, possibly burying children in their wake, the once-proud Israel Defense Forces is heading down toward the moral level of suicide bombers. Whatever is ultimately discovered about the carnage committed by Israel's forces, enough is known to implicate Sharon for a form of ethnic cleansing - purposefully destroying the Palestinians' ability to govern themselves.
OPINION: (Nov 4, 2003) America's hypocrisy when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is staggering. Since 1972, the US has vetoed 37 Security Council Resolutions related to this conflict; all in defense of Israel. To make matters worse, in all 37, the US was the lone dissenting vote with a few cases of abstentions.