Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2001, page 12

Four Views on U.S. Foreign Policy

An American Journalist

 

A Call for the U.S. to Be Fair To Palestinians

 

By Derrick Z. Jackson

IN REACTING to the attack on the United States, Ehud Sprinzak, a widely quoted Israeli terrorism expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said, “Many of us feel vindicated by this.” He said the pictures “are better than a thousand ambassadors trying to explain how dangerous Islamic terror is.”

Sprinzak said, “From the perspective of Jews, it is the most important public relations act ever committed in our favor.”

That was a smug and brazen display of self-assuredness. Sprinzak assumes that the attacks will allow Israel to become the most innocent lamb in the Middle East.

As the United States shakes down the Islamic world for Osama bin Laden, Israel’s army hopes it will be spared a shakeup of its relationship with us.

Contrary to Sprinzak’s hope that the attack would play in Israel’s “favor,” it should inspire in the United States a new sense of fairness. If terrorism out of the Middle East is to stop, America must stop fueling the spiral of violence with its lopsided support of Israel. America has to stop turning a blind eye to Israel’s use of American weapons to kill Palestinians.

Much has been made of the Palestinians who cheered the destruction of the World Trade Center. Photos of rock-throwing Palestinians are a staple in American newspapers. In American households, names like “Arafat,” “Hamas,” and “Bin Laden” are much more reflexively connected to Middle East violence than “Lockheed Martin,” “Boeing,” and “Pratt and Whitney.”

It is tragic whenever a Palestinian mob or bomber kills Jews. But if Americans really want to understand why Americans might have been targeted for catastrophe in New York and Washington, we can no longer ignore the fact that we are helping the Israeli police and military to outkill Palestinians by more than a 3-to-1 margin.

In the last year of clashes, the Associated Press has counted 632 Palestinian and 174 Israeli deaths.

Americans can no longer ignore why Israel is winning the body count in their conflict. Since World War II, and despite some ups and downs in our relationship, Israel has been the largest total recipient of American aid, between $81 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service, and $92 billion, according to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a publication founded by former American foreign service officers.

The beginning of large-scale sales to Israel began with the selling of Hawk missiles by President John F. Kennedy. Today, Israel has 320 American-made F-16 fighter planes, more than any other nation in the world except for the United States. Israel has ordered 100 more, which will be delivered through 2009.

While Palestinian children are criminalized for throwing rocks, Israel has not been seriously criticized for using its 50 American-made Apache helicopters (with orders for 29 more) to attack Palestinians with laser-guided missiles. According to Newsweek last month, U.S,-made helicopters have been involved in nine of 29 assassination attempts by Israel.

“We spend a lot of money buying arms in the United States,” Shlomo Dror, an Israeli defense spokesman, told Newsweek. “I’m sure U.S. companies would not want that to change.”

The United States sells plenty of arms to friendly Arab nations, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, but by all accounts, Israel gets the most lethal equipment with the best targeting electronics.

Though on paper it appears that Egypt is close to Israel in U.S. aid, the quality of the aid is so different that retired U.S. Army Colonel Norvell B. De Atkine told The Wall Street Journal a year ago, “from a military point of view, the gap between Israeli and Arab military might has widened profoundly over the last 15 years.”

The gap in carnage has widened so profoundly that it is no surprise that the Arab world is angry not only at Israel, but at us for letting Israel behave too often as if it is a law unto itself.

The United States never said much back in the 1980s when Israel sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa and not much now when Israel has bulldozed and impounded Palestinians into parched lands no different than Soweto. While 1,300 Israelis have been injured in clashes, at least 10 times more Palestinians, more than 14,000, have been injured by the more potent Israeli police and military.

Until that imbalance is confronted, America is chasing only symptoms, not solutions. No one any longer doubts how dangerous Islamist terrorism is. We might not have had to experience it so horribly here at home, if we had long ago condemned Israeli terrorism, conducted with weapons made here at home.

Derrick Z. Jackson is on the staff of the Boston Globe. This article first appeared Sept. 21, 2001. Reprinted with permission.

A BBC Correspondent

 

Explaining Arab Anger

 

By BBC News Service

In the wake of the attacks on New York many have struggled to understand what could have motivated those responsible. Despite almost universal condemnation of the attacks, many argue that a misguided U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is at least partly to blame. The BBC’s Tehran correspondent, Jim Muir, who has spent decades covering conflicts in the region, explains the forces at work.

The man standing beside me in the crowd was sobbing his heart out. Along with dozens of other people, his wife and children lay crushed beneath the rubble of the collapsed building we were looking at.

It had been brought down quite scientifically by two big explosions.

The multi-story apartment block was demolished because somebody thought Yasser Arafat was there. He wasn’t.

It was destroyed by two Israeli jets which flashed out of the sky on that Friday summer morning in Beirut during the Israeli siege of 1982.

They were acting on the orders of then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon.

Now, he is Israel’s prime minister, and he’s eagerly signing up to take part in America’s new crusade of good against evil.

 

Forgotten Victims

The above was one of many such incidents during Israel’s adventure in Lebanon, in which uncounted thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were killed.

They died unmourned and largely unnoticed by the American public, whose largesse—financial, military and political—made it all possible.

The same formula has held true for the Palestinians practically since Israel’s creation in 1948.

Apart from President Dwight Eisenhower, who pressured the Israelis to pull out of Sinai after their tripartite assault on Egypt with Britain and France in 1956, few U.S. leaders have ever stood up to Israel and its enormous influence on Capitol Hill.

Although there are many other issues, Washington’s enabling alliance with Israel may be the biggest element in the Arab and Muslim anger, hatred and despair which are focused on America.

For them, Israel is a terrorist, gangster state which has usurped Palestinian land and water, demolished Palestinian homes, and stopped at nothing in pursuit of its interests and enemies, including torture, murder and pioneering the use of the car bomb in the region.

 

Powerful Ally

Whatever Israel has done, it has always been able to count on unflagging U.S. diplomatic support, especially in vetoing, diluting or ignoring U.N. resolutions.

In the wake of the latest crisis, one Palestinian long resident in the U.S. wrote: “Typical of the way America handles such matters, they’re throwing money and military might at what they perceive to be the problem, totally oblivious of the necessity to change their ways.

“The problem? American foreign policy is flawed, fundamentally bankrupt, totally biased, and very self-serving. But do you think they’re going to admit or even see that? Heaven forbid!

“They may vaporize Bin Laden and all his cronies, but they will not get rid of future Bin Ladens unless they screw their heads on the right way, and start realizing and practicing ‘fair play’ in the Middle East.”

 

Unsympathetic

In a comment typical of much regional reaction to the terror attacks, one Iranian newspaper wrote: “It is obvious that they never even thought of sharing the plight of, or expressing sympathy with, the oppressed and innocent Palestinians, whose ‘sin’ is demanding an end to Israeli military occupation and systematic crimes against humanity.”

Other aspects of the impact of America’s massive global power on the region also add to the bitterness felt by many ordinary people. Perceptions include:

• American support for Iraq in its eight years of war with Iran (1980-88) in which hundreds of thousands of people died. Many Iranians believe Washington encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in order to puncture the Islamic revolution, and provided him with intelligence and other help for many years.

• When Saddam later invaded Kuwait and threatened U.S. oil interests, the picture changed. The U.S. sponsored and invoked U.N. resolutions to cover a massive Western intervention, having ignored many other resolutions relating to Palestine and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. The image of cynicism and double standards is widely held.

• While Gulf Arabs might have applauded the U.S.-led war against Iraq, the subsequent sanctions regime has punished the Iraqi people while Saddam continues to build palaces. There is a widespread feeling that the Americans have never been serious about unseating Saddam.

• Throughout the Arab world, Washington’s closest alliances are with regimes which have negligible democratic foundations and highly dubious human rights performances. This too does nothing to endear the U.S. to ordinary people, reinforcing the image of an arrogant, uncaring and deeply hypocritical global power, pursuing its interests without regard to principle.

 

Familiar Images

For decades, people in the Middle East have lived with countless images not unlike the horror pictures coming out of New York, albeit rarely on such a concentrated, massive scale.

Because they have been through it, most sympathize strongly on a human level.

But irrespective of who precisely did it and why, many people in and from the region had a deep gut feeling that decades of accumulated poison somehow found expression on Sept. 11, 2001.

A Palestinian Diplomat

 

Children of a Lesser God?

 

By Afif Safieh

Consistent with my frequently expressed revulsion at “selective indignation”—depending on the nature of the victims or the identity of the perpetrators—I wish to voice my total and unequivocal condemnation of the horror that took place in the United States.

As a Palestinian, who for 12 endless months witnessed the continuous daily bombing of Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps, my sympathy today goes entirely to the victims of this despicable undertaking. Having watched a cascade of daily funerals, I understand and share the pain of their families and friends. Having joined the unheeded call for international protection and the deployment of international observers in Palestine and having advocated an imposed solution by the international community on the basis of international legality, I sincerely wish that international law, and only that, will guide American decision-makers in the aftermath of this revolting act.

At a moment when globalization has become an undeniable and irreversible international reality, now more than ever before, universal principles and the highest possible standards should be set and equally observed by everybody all over our “planetary village.”

Unfortunately this is not yet the case. In these tragic days we will hear more of revenge, retaliation and the clash of civilizations, rather than a rational debate over why such atrocities find volunteers to accomplish them. Alas, I fear that much of the discourse that will pour out of TV channels will appeal more to the instincts rather than the intelligence of viewers, to their hatred rather than their humanity.

I have often explained that the way the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the status of Jerusalem are addressed, handled or mishandled, will affect relations not only on the regional level, but also on a global one.

Whether there is one mankind or different kinds of men and women is not a rhetorical or a polemical question. Since the inception of the Palestinian tragedy, the Arab and Muslim world had the impression of total Western insensitivity to their ordeal. The “exploits” that led to the dispossession and the dispersion of the Palestinian people were welcomed in mainstream Western public opinion with admiration and applause, and were considered sometimes even as “miraculous.”

I personally tend to believe in the innocence of God, even though the Zionist project was presented as “a divine mission for a chosen people on a promised land.” We were inundated with massive propaganda about the desert turning green, but nobody bothered to answer the moral questions: in the name of what and since when does the planting of a tree justify the uprooting of a human being? Since when does planting a forest justify the uprooting of an entire people?

Israel still addresses the Palestinian refugee issue in the most dismissive manner. Their possible return is seen as a threat to the Jewish nature of the state. But no one in a senior capacity will take this argument to its logical conclusion that the Palestinian refugees were precisely driven out of their homeland with that purpose in mind. From the very beginning there were successful attempts to trivialize and banalize the Palestinian tragedy, as though Palestinian victims were fatherless, motherless, childless, nameless, faceless…worthless.

I have never likened the Naqba to the Holocaust. My conviction has always been that there is no need for comparisons and historical analogies. No one people have a monopoly on human suffering and every ethnic tragedy stands on its own. If I were a Jew or a Gypsy, Nazi barbarity would be the most atrocious event in history. If I were a Black African, it would be slavery and apartheid. If I were a Native American, it would be the discovery of the New World by European explorers and settlers that resulted in near-total extermination. If I were an Armenian, it would be the Ottoman massacres. If I were a Palestinian, it would be the Naqba/ Catastrophe of 1948. Humanity should consider all the above repugnant.

I do not consider it advisable to debate hierarchies of suffering. I do not know how to quantify pain or measure suffering, but I do know that we are not children of a lesser God.

In the United States there will be a debate on whether yesterday’s event will result in isolationism, unilateralism, multilateralism or interventionism. American foreign policy in the Middle East has been most intriguing. It is the only remaining superpower in the international system, yet in our part of the world it seemed as though it had abdicated this role in favor of its regional ally, Israel, which it shields unconditionally in the U.N. and elsewhere. The U.S.A. is committed to Israel’s existence, a message everybody had already understood for decades. Does it need also to endorse the territorial appetite, the expansionist inclinations of its regional protégé? To condone its ferocious repression of our cry for freedom out of captivity and bondage?

American society is a nation of nations. In today’s monopolar international system, nonalignment in regional conflicts should be what characterizes American foreign policy, because alignment on the preferences of one belligerent actor results not only in antagonizing other regional players but also in alienating one component of its domestic national fabric.

In his memoirs, Present at the Creation, former American Secretary of State Dean Acheson writes that the U.N. Charter was a condensed version of American political philosophy. All I can hope for is that America will reconcile tomorrow its power with its principles.

A Retired U.S. Ambassador

 

Palestine Is Not Part of the Problem: It’s The Whole Problem

 

By Andrew I. Killgore

The United States railroaded through the United Nations the partition of Palestine in 1947, giving the not quite one-third Jewish population 53 percent of the land and the two-thirds Palestinian population 47 percent.

The next year, in 1948, President Harry S Truman recognized the newly declared State of Israel within minutes of its declaration as an independent state. In his memoirs Truman cruelly declared that the State Department’s strong opposition to recognizing Israel—which had and still has no announced borders—was motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment. (These days it is called anti-Semitism, in spite of the fact that the total world Jewish population constititutes no more than 5 percent of the world’s linguistically Semitic population.)

Israeli massacres in 1948 and 1949 terrorized three-quarters of a million Palestinians into fleeing their homes and property, while Israel seized another 25 percent of Palestine. In 1967 Israel picked a fight with the Arabs that sent another quarter- million Palestinians fleeing for their lives, and leaving Israel in control of all of Palestine.

Israel’s every act, no matter how outrageous, was publicly endorsed by the United States. Regular public statements from Washington, DC assured that American military equipment would always be supplied to Israel to keep it stronger than all of the Arab states combined.

Urged on by Fifth Column Zionists inside the U.S. government and in the media, a process was undertaken always to tie the U.S. and Israel together. This was part of a “feel good” domestic mood facilely “compensating” for past Christian persecution of the Jews. In the uncomprehending Arab and Muslim worlds a gradual loss of hope for fair U.S. policies began to take root.

A truly wicked American print and film media played—and still plays—a dump-on-the-Arabs-and-Muslims game. For decades not a single Arab or Muslim hero or role model appeared. Israeli heroes abounded. Zionist correspondents, film writers and directors were lionized. The primary New York Times writer on the Middle East became so one-sided that observers there no longer regard him as a serious analyst. He keeps on writing and appearing on American television, however.

Israeli colonists—called settlers in the American media—gradually proliferated in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. In American official and media parlance “occupied territories” became “disputed” territories, and then simply “the territories.” It gradually dawned on the Palestinians that there was nothing intended for them.
The 1993 “Oslo accords,” however, seemed to offer something, for it invoked, however loosely, the “land for peace” of U.N. resolutions. But Israeli colonists continued to pour into the West Bank and Gaza. Former President Bill Clinton and the egregious Middle East “negotiator” Dennis Ross practiced their fraudulent “peace process” until it finally convinced the Palestinians that there was nothing left for them to do except to fight. The al-Aqsa intifada broke out a year ago after the noisome Ariel Sharon “visited” the Haram al-Sharif protected by a thousand Israeli troops.

Throughout, the Muslim world was watching. Perhaps Osama bin Laden does believe that the presence of American military forces in Saudi Arabia, the Holy Land for the world’s Muslims, does defile Islam. But why is this? Is it because the United States now is so linked in the Muslim mind with a racist, apartheid Israel and its present war criminal prime minister that the difference between the two cannot be perceived?

Perhaps—may we dare hope?—the cataclysm that struck the United States on Sept.11 offers a real chance for peace in the Middle East. The way out of the killing is an Israel-Palestinian compromise along the lines of U.N. Resolution 242. It will never work without a very hard push from the United States. The president’s Oct. 5 response to Sharon’s warning not to “appease the Arabs” at Israel’s expense—White House spokesman Ari Fleischer called Sharon’s comments “unacceptable”—is a good start.

If the administration of President George Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell will do it, America can bring peace to the Middle East.

And some domestic tranquility to the United States.

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