Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2000, Pages 57-58

New York City and Tri-State News

Voices in the Wilderness Co-Founder Kathy Kelly, en Route to Iraq, Addresses New York Audience

By Jane Adas

Voices in the Wilderness sent its first delegation to Iraq in March 1996, to take donated medical supplies and to provide an opportunity for Americans to witness the devastating results of sanctions on the Iraqi people. Co-founder Kathy Kelly, en route to joining Voices’ 35th delegation to Iraq, stopped in New York to speak at Riverside Church on Oct. 16 and at the Interfaith Center the following day.

The situation in Iraq has only worsened, Kelly said. She used to tell people to go inside the hospitals to understand the impact of sanctions. Now, she said, one doesn’t even have to leave the hotel lobby. Whereas in 1989 one Iraqi dinar was worth $3.00, today it takes 6,660 dinars to equal that amount. The average Iraqi salary, even for professionals, is $5.00 a month. A few pieces of fruit cost a week’s salary.

Iraqis are experiencing a health catastrophe. Doctors are forced to watch babies die for want of a piece of plastic. Supplies are so scarce that Iraqi doctors are faced daily with the decision of which patient to treat. The U.N. estimates that 5,000 Iraqis die every month as a direct result of sanctions.

Why, Kelly asked her audience, is the situation in Iraq so downplayed here? Why do religious leaders insist that Clinton apologize for personal indiscretions when they should demand that he apologize to a whole generation of Iraqis? People here who know every detail of JonBenet Ramsey’s murder haven’t a clue about what is happening to children in Iraq, she said.

Kelly concluded that the lack of awareness here is the result of a military-industrial-congressional-media convergence of merged interests. Iraq is hardly a threat to its neighbors—but it might be a threat to America’s ability to control world oil supplies, she suggested. Iraqis are suffering so that Americans can enjoy cheap oil and an economy propped up by weapons sales, she maintained. As a result, Kelly said, much of the world views the U.S. as a rogue superpower.

New York City Rallies Support Palestinians

The Oct. 6 demonstration in New York City’s Times Square to express solidarity with the Palestinian people was as close to spontaneous as a rally can get. Police were told to expect 1,100 people; by their own estimate more than 5,000 showed up.

Protesters directed their anger both at Israel’s excessive use of force and at the American media’s one-sided coverage of the conflict. Their grievances seemed to be crystallized in the Dow-Jones tickertape news headlines revolving over their heads, which read: “Israeli troops battle Palestinian rock-throwers; 7 Palestinian rioters dead.”

An even larger crowd assembled the following Friday across from United Nations headquarters. A pro-Israeli rally had been held on the same site the previous day, Oct. 12, and rally organizers had placed two nearly full-page ads announcing the event in The New York Times. Both New York state senatorial candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rick Lazio, addressed the pro-Israeli rally. The New York Times estimated the crowds at each event to be 15,000. Yet it described attendance at the pro-Palestinian rally as less than its organizers had anticipated.

On Friday, Oct. 20, supporters of Al-Awda (the Palestine Right of Return Coalition) and The Palestine American Congress demonstrated at the Israeli Consulate to demand that Israelis stop killing Palestinian children. As the crowd chanted, “Barak, how many kids have you killed today?” they received news that Israeli soldiers had shot nine Palestinians dead; an hour later the total rose to 11. An orthodox rabbi from Neturei Karta said his response to other Jews who criticize him for supporting the enemies of “our people” is that the Jewish people do not and have never had a quarrel with the Palestinian people. He said that Zionism is an embarrassment to the Jewish people and the path to peace is Palestinian sovereignty over the Holy Land, including Jerusalem.

The protesters then marched to the headquarters of the Arab League, where they made clear demands: no more secret negotiations, because those are usually a cover-up for selling out Palestinian rights; that Israel allow medical aid for the more than 4,000 wounded to enter Palestinian areas; the closing of Israeli embassies in Arab countries; and a complete economic boycott of Israel. “How can we have Israeli products in Arab countries,” they asked, “when Israelis are killing Palestinians?”

Fit to Print?

More than 300 people rallied in front of The New York Times building in Manhattan on Oct. 27 to protest media reporting on the events of the month following Gen. Ariel Sharon’s Sept. 28 visit, with 1,000 armed Israeli police and border guards, to Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif.

The demonstration, sponsored by Al-Awda and the International Action Center, was broad-based. Among the speakers were representatives of the Congress for Korean Reunification, the Vieques Support Campaign, the Coalition to free Muma Abu-Jamal, the Philippine Forum, Casa de las Americas, and Workfairness.

The common message was that this conflict is not about religion or ethnicity, not a struggle between Jews and Arabs, but about prolonged injustice that the U.S. media try to mute. One speaker said that The New York Times regularly refers to Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East, when it should be labeling Israel the only apartheid state in the Middle East. Another said that Jewish people want to talk about the Holocaust, but not about what Israelis are doing to Palestinians.

Many asked why The New York Times does not write about Israeli settlers’attacks on Palestinians and their property, nor about the internal closure and curfew Israel has imposed on the West Bank, nor about Israeli attacks on Palestinian medical personnel and Red Crescent ambulances denied passage through checkpoints.

A street theater group from Al-Awda dramatized The New York Times’ approach to reporting on events in the Middle East by wearing pages of that newspaper as straitjackets and mouth gags. Wriggling free of the constraints, they led the crowd in shouting “Injustice cannot be silenced!”

Adalah Chairman Discusses Israeli Arab Minority Rights

Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, was established in 1996 as the only legal defense center for the one million Palestinians living in Israel. Ghassann Agbaria, chairman of the board of Adalah, visited the United States to meet with members of legal organizations representing minority rights of several groups here. He spoke Oct. 19 at a meeting in New York City hosted by the Center for Economic and Social Rights.

Agbaria began by observing that, after spending one week in the U.S., he found a complete lack of balance in U.S. media coverage of the clashes in Israel and Palestine. The reporting is consistently one-sided, he said.

He outlined two main differences between Palestinians in Israel and minorities in other countries. First, before the establishment of Israel, Palestinians were the majority. They have since become a minority in their own land.

Secondly, Agbaria pointed out, Israel is a unique state in that it is by law a state not of its citizens, but of Jews everywhere. Palestinians therefore do not want to become absorbed in Israel because this would require religious conversion. Israel’s Arab citizens have political rights, he said, such as voting and having Palestinian members of the Knesset, but they are not equal in economic or social matters. For example, non-Jews in Israel constitute 20 percent of the population, but receive less than 2 percent of the Ministry of Religion’s budget.

There are more than 60 unrecognized Palestinian villages that are legally deprived of electricity, education, and health services, he continued. Twenty percent of Palestinians in Israel are classified as “present absentees,” and are in effect internal refugees. Their villages and land still exist, but they have no access to them because the land has been confiscated. As in the West Bank, Palestinian homes are demolished for having been built without permits. But Palestinian villagers cannot obtain building permits, Agbaria said, because their villages have no “town plans.”

Since Sept. 28, when right-wing Likud Party leader Gen. Ariel Sharon made his provocative visit to Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif, Adalah has become a center for defensive as well as civil rights. Palestinians felt they could not but demonstrate against an agreement that does not give them the minimum called for in U.N. Resulution 242, namely the 22 percent of historical Palestine that constitutes the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Palestinians in Israel demonstrated to express their feeling about peace talks that fail to address their situation and fail to deliver the bare minimum to which they are entitled.

They protested to say they are Palestinians and cannot be indifferent when Sharon goes to the Al-Aqsa mosque with 1,000 armed policemen, and when Israeli sharpshooters kill 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durra, wound his father, and kill the Red Crescent ambulance driver trying to rescue them both.

Israel’s response to “its Arabs” demonstrating, Agbaria told his audience, left 13 Israeli Palestinians dead and more than 1,000 injured. More than 400 Israeli Palestinians were arrested, of whom 100 were still being detained. By contrast, of the 300 Israeli Jews who were arrested after rampaging in Na-zareth and Tiberius, where they destroyed a mosque, all but three have been released.

Agbaria pointed out that there were far larger demonstrations in Israel when Shas leader Aryeh Deri was convicted. Jewish protesters stoned Israeli police, but they were not shot at in return. In Nazareth, Palestinians under attack by Jewish mobs called in the police, who then fired on the Palestinians, killing two. There are now checkpoints at the entrances to most Palestinian villages within Israel. The harsh Israeli response has pushed Palestinian grievances within Israel beyond the level of civil rights, Agbaria said.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer living in the New York metropolitan area.