June 1994, Page 64

Arab-American Activism

By Catherine M. Willford

Palestinian Commission's Hebron Findings Described in Press Conference

The Coalition for Hebron Relief, an ad hoc committee of Arab-American organizations to support relief efforts following the killing of more than 30 Palestinians in and around Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque on Feb. 25, sponsored a Washington, D.C. press conference for Dr. Abdul Hafeez Al Ash-hab, chairman of the Palestinian Inquiry Commission into the Hebron massacre, to present the commission's preliminary findings on March 24. The coalition includes the Bir Zeit Society, the Palestine Aid Society, United Palestinian Appeal and the Palestine Medical Relief Association.

Dr. Al Ash-hab reported that the approximately 400 Jewish settlers living in the heart of Muslim Hebron provide a constant provocation to 65,000 Palestinian residents. The settlers move through the town fully armed, and harass Palestinians without interference from the Israeli authorities. Previous incidents of settler violence, including the murder of a Muslim merchant in his shoe store by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, leader of the Jewish settlers, have been treated leniently by Israeli occupation authorities.

Palestinian appeals to Israeli occupation authorities for protection from the settlers have been ignored, even though the Israeli military chief of the Hebron region has warned Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of the potential for violence in Hebron.

The Islamic authorities in charge of the Ibrahimi mosque sent an Oct. 19, 1993 letter to the Israeli Ministry of Defense specifically citing Dr. Baruch Goldstein's harassment of Muslim worshippers in and around the mosque.

On the day of the massacre, Goldstein walked from the section used by Jews into the central room of the mosque, used by Muslims for prayer. He was in uniform, though not on duty, carried a machine gun and seven magazines of ammunition and was wearing protective earcoverings, as one would at a shooting range. When he opened fire, according to the Palestinian commission, 29 Palestinians were killed and 96 injured. Among the murdered were two boys under the age of 12.

Some Palestinian witnesses stated that there was more than one source of gunfire inside the room, and not just at the exits to the mosque as reported by the Israeli military. The Palestinian witnesses said that Israeli guards on the premises fired at Palestinians, and not just into the air or above their heads. Palestinians have not been permitted to examine the scene of the crime—the mosque still is closed to Palestinians—so they have been unable to corroborate these eyewitness reports with evidence.

Witnesses said Israeli guards fired on Palestinians trying to remove casualties at the exits. (This corroborates testimony by Israeli guards before the Israeli commission of inquiry.)

Following the massacre, thousands of Palestinians gathered at Al-Ahli Hospital in Hebron to donate blood, identify the victims and search for survivors. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) surrounded the hospital. The Commission of Inquiry called this an "unjustified" act, because the hospital is far from the mosque and there are no settlements in the immediate area. A confrontation occurred at the hospital in which IDF soldiers fired at the crowd, killing four more Palestinians.

"I was there," Dr. Al Ash-hab said at the Washington news conference. "I saw four young people killed. Each was killed with one bullet. This shows that there were snipers there, not shooting to disperse the crowd, but shooting to kill. One of the victims was killed shortly after donating blood at the hospital."

Five Palestinians were killed in Hebron by the IDF on the day of the massacre. In the following week, the IDF shot another 24 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Therefore, said Dr. Al Ash-hab, the IDF was responsible for as many Palestinian deaths as was Baruch Goldstein. Throughout the week after the massacre, the 400 Jewish settlers continued to roam the streets of Hebron fully armed, while the 65,000 Palestinian residents remained under curfew.

The Palestinian Inquiry Commission's three key findings are: 1) Israeli guards at the gate of the mosque should not have permitted Goldstein to enter armed during the time for Muslim prayers. "All the regular guards knew very well the attitude of Goldstein towards Muslims." 2) Goldstein did NOT act alone. Shots were fired inside the main room of the mosque by Israeli guards—and not just to warn or disperse the worshippers. 3) Israeli security personnel at the exits delayed the removal of casualties.

The commission's ongoing investigation is hampered by its inability to examine the scene of the shooting and lack of resources for sophisticated forensic analysis.

According to Dr. Al Ash-hab, the Palestinian Commission hopes that the Israeli investigation into the Hebron massacre will lead "to recommendations to relieve the explosive situation we are in. We want their commission to extract a political outcome regarding the peace negotiations."

In concluding his reading of the commission's findings, Dr. Al Ash-hab noted, "the massacre did not happen by chance, nor did it happen in a vacuum. The settlements and settlers provided the racism in which it grew and flourished. Even at Goldstein's funeral, a Jewish settler was heard to cry out, 'One million Arabs are not worth the fingernail of a Jew.' "

According to the commission, outlawing the Kach and Kahane Chai parties as terrorist is not enough. The settlement issue must be at the top of the agenda in the peace negotiations, to be dealt with in the present, in the discussions of the transitional period, and not left to final status negotiations because, ultimately, "settlements and peace do not go together."

Jesse Jackson Speaks at Hebron University Conference

Despite the best obstructionist efforts of Israeli military authorities, the Rev. Jesse Jackson was able to address Palestinians in East Jerusalem at a conference organized by Hebron University entitled, "Promoting Peace Through Understanding."

The civil rights activist and former U.S. presidential candidate discussed this experience at an April 14 gathering at Skewers restaurant in Washington, D.C. hosted by the Arab American Institute (AAI). AAI President James Zogby, who accompanied Jackson in Jerusalem, also was able to circumvent Israeli obstructions and address the Hebron conference.

The international conference marking the 30th anniversary of the founding of the PLO originally was scheduled for April 9-10 at the Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem. The Israeli military governor, citing the British Emergency Regulations of 1945, ordered the hotel management to cancel the event for the sake of "public safety. " In addition, Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza were refused permits to travel to the conference.

On the morning of April 9, with Israeli military roadblocks on all the roads leading to the hotel, conference speakers, attendees and organizers met on the hotel's front steps. Jackson then led them, arm-in-arm, around the military roadblocks for five blocks, where they convened the conference at Orient House. Zogby described the watching Israeli soldiers as "bewildered, and unable to stop us."

Jackson later met with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and negotiated an agreement allowing the conference banquet to take place at the Ambassador Hotel as planned. Yet one hour before the banquet was to begin, Israeli military roadblocks once again were in place outside the hotel, and agents of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security police, entered the hotel with orders from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's office forbidding anyone but Jackson to speak. The Shin Bet agents departed only after further communications between conference organizers and the Foreign Ministry.

In his banquet address, Jackson said he understood Palestinian pain because he I 'grew up on the West Bank of America * " Jackson said that he believed real change had occurred in the Palestinian condition in the 30 years since the founding of the PLO, but that "a new vision must emerge as you shift from the defense of survival in war to the offense of development of hope; this is a sea change from war preparation to peace preparation." He called for "mass, aggressive, disciplined nonviolent action as the new strategy to complete the unfinished task," and said that the "cynics and saboteurs of peace must not be allowed to alter the momentum nor divert the course."

In his address in Jerusalem, Zogby told the audience that the morning's nonviolent march had effectively challenged the violence and oppression of Israeli efforts to block the conference, and had attracted worldwide press attention.

At the Washington, DC gathering the following week, Zogby pronounced the Jerusalem conference a success, stating that "the world saw clearly that the occupation and closure of East Jerusalem continues, and we learned what we had set out to learn, how to adapt to a new period to build peace."

Minority Speakers Cite Common Ground at ADC National Convention

Panels at the 11th Annual American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) Convention, "Arab Americans at the Crossroads," held April 14-17 at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, VA, focused as much on domestic issues facing the Arab-American community as the Middle East peace process and the rebuilding of Lebanon. Several speakers noted the shared challenges of combating racism and violence and fighting for civil rights common to Arab Americans and other groups including African Americans, Latino Americans, women and American Indians

In her Friday luncheon address, Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), pledged her organization's support in fighting anti-Arab discrimination in the U.S. She stated that in recent years NOW has achieved results by shifting its focus from "begging for crumbs from the people in power to being the people in power." She said she was pleased to note the growing number of Arab-American women running for public office.

Ireland compared NOW's fight against "disgusting images of violence against women" in the media with ADC's struggle against anti-Arab stereotyping in Hollywood films. "We are both accused of trying to censor art," she noted.

"Yet in only a few days Disney withdrew the scenes in the film 'The Program' which a few young men had imitated by lying down on highway median lines, but they have yet to remove the offensive lyrics from the songs in their video 'Aladdin' more than a year after ADC began its protest of them."

Ireland also pointed out that NOW has been told repeatedly by government officials not to worry too much about the murder in broad daylight of physician Dr. David Gunn, outside a Pensacola, FL abortion clinic, by a fanatic member of the right-to-life movement since it was merely "the work of a 'lone, crazed gunman.' Now, doesn't that sound familiar to you?" she asked her Arab-American audience.

At the Friday afternoon panel on "The Roots of Racism," Russell Means, cofounder of the American Indian Movement (AIM), spoke of the Arab-American community's long history of ties with his organization, initiated by ADC founder and former U.S. senator from South Dakota James Abourezk.

"I have long maintained that Palestinians are the Indians of the Middle East, and we are the Palestinians of the Americas," Means said. "We know what it is like to be out of sight and out of mind, and to be treated by a colonial power as if we were incompetent."

Calling the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs "an abomination—the last colonial office in the world," Means made it clear that the aspiration for autonomy, self-government, and ultimately a state of their own is shared by American Indians and Palestinians. Means' suggestion of third party politics as a possible solution to racism in America, because "we can no longer tell the other two parties apart, was greeted with thunderous applause.

At the Friday evening banquet, keynote speaker Dr. Edward Said of Columbia University expressed dismay that the PLO leadership has accepted a "dismantling of Hebron itself rather than a dismantlement of Jewish settlements in Hebron." The Palestinian-American scholar said the PLO leadership did not realize that in the negotiations leading to the Sept. 13 handshake it no longer was dealing with basically supportive Arab states, but rather "in the Declaration of Principles it was dealing with Israel, a nation of lawyers and Talmudists for whom every word, every comma, is to be taken literally."

Said told the audience of nearly 1,000 Arab Americans that in the Arab diaspora “we can't just protect our image, we must give our image content and presence." Said called for the Arab-American community to "take up the burden" of supporting and making part of the world discourse "what is unique to us, our culture, heritage and achievement" through support of artists, academics, and scientists, both in the Arab diaspora and throughout the Arab world.

In a second Saturday evening awards banquet, keynote speaker Dr. Clovis Maksoud, former Arab League ambassador to the United Nations, described alternatives Palestinians and Arabs should pursue rather than accept any further Israeli obstacles to a Palestinian state, removal of Jewish settlements from its territory, and Israeli withdrawal from East Jerusalem.

Catherine M. Willford is the circulation director of the Washington Report.