Is Israel responsible for Palestinian misery?

At Camp David in 2000, Yasser Arafat rejected Israel's offer to return to the 1967 pre-war borders with minor land swaps, East Jerusalem as Palestinian capital, the return of refugees to unite Israeli Arab families, and compensation for Arab refugees settling outside of Israel.

Seven years later, Mahmoud Abbas is reported to have turned down a better offer, and for the same reason: the demand that Israel absorb "all refugees and their descendents."

Do the Palestinians want independence and sovereignty? Put differently and more to the point, are their leaders willing to share what was previously Mandatory Palestine with an independent Jewish state?

In 1947, the Palestinian leadership turned down any division of the land leading to Jewish independence. The result was what they now describe as the nakba, the loss not only of the opportunity for their own state, but also the creation of the Palestinian Diaspora and their 60+ year-long refugee problem.

Fifty years later, in 1998, Yasser Arafat turned down Netanyahu and Clinton at the Wye River summit, and two years after that refused Ehud Barak and Clinton at Camp David, turning down concessions many believe to be maximum Israel can offer if it is to survive as an independent state.

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Dear Senator George Mitchell

The author is head of the Genocide Prevention Program at Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine and associate director at Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem and head of World Genocide Situation Room at GENOCIDE PREVENTION NOW (GPN). The opinions are those of the author alone and do not represent those he is affiliated with.  

Dear Senator Mitchell

I am a medical researcher whose background includes more than 30 years of work in epidemiology and environmental toxicology and injury prevention with Palestinians, Jordanians, and Egyptians and the design and supervision of joint projects in asthma in Gazan refugee camps. I have worked with the US CDC and USAID MERC on these projects. Currently, I am doing work to apply the tools of prediction and prevention to genocide and genocidal terror, with an emphasis on the role of state-sponsored hate language and incitement. Sadly, the wars and terror in the region have compelled me to move from the epidemiology of peacetime exposures to those having to do with genocide, genocidal terror, violence, war and mass atrocities.

Like many Israelis who supported the Oslo Accords, I have been mugged by reality. We have discovered that "land for peace" has morphed into "territory for terror." Like many who have thought long and hard about the troubles in our region, I have concluded that we have to stop talking about "the peace process" - a nebulous term, and use something more binding: respect for life, live and let live and human dignity for all. The "peace process" has resulted in thousands of Israeli and Palestinian deaths.

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An open letter to Alan Dershowitz

Dear Alan,

We begin by affirming our high esteem for you, both as a legal scholar and a powerful voice against anti-Semitism. We also appreciate that as a parent of a Hampshire College alumnus, you are part of a community that we hold dear. Nonetheless, we are saddened and frustrated by your recent column in the Jerusalem Post and elsewhere and by your many comments in the press, which present information about the actions of the Hampshire College Board of Trustees that is simply not true. Hampshire College did not divest from Israel or take the action it did because of Israel's relationship with the Palestinians or its presence on the West Bank.

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PR and Gaza - not a pretty picture

Israel is stuck in a PR morass. All of the logical arguments that its spokesmen have been hammering away at leave the foreign press cold.

The Economist's former Israel correspondent, Gideon Lichfield, wrote last week of Israel's PR: "[It] is so sophisticated that there is still no adequate word for it in English." The Palestinians, on the other hand, are so inept, he adds, that they "barely know what a spokesman is."

Hyperbole aside, Lichfield is on target when he explains why Israel's media blitz for Operation Cast Lead has fallen flat on its face: "Partly, of course, it's because the numbers are against it...On television, what looks bad looks bad."

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No one is listening to the settlers

Settlers.

The mere word is enough to bring out the strongest emotions in all of us. Disgust. Sympathy. Anger.  Frustration. The settler situation in Israel is enough to send normally calm people into tirades. Quiet people into shouting matches.

When I lived in America, I never quite knew what to make of settlers. I was confused by the whole situation. But I knew one thing: they were extreme. And I was scared of that.

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