Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, pages 54-56

A Letter From Palestine

An American’s Attempt to Bridge the Gap Between Perception and Reality in Palestine

By Joseph Zogby

July 30, 1998

Dear Friends:

After two years living and working in Palestine, I fear that I have forgotten how to talk to you about what is happening here. You have often asked me, as an Arab American, to explain my views on Middle Eastern politics, particularly regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Similarly, Palestinians and others in the Arab world frequently ask me about life in the United States. Now I am afraid that the gulf between your perceptions and those of Palestinians is so large that I do not know how to bridge it.

Palestinians’ views of the peace process also differ radically from yours. You think that the Oslo agreement was a courageous deal struck by two old warriors, who had finally decided to put aside long-standing enmities and make peace. That was the big hurdle, you feel, and now we have to support the Palestinian and Israeli moderates and oppose the radicals on both sides who are trying to undermine the “peace of the brave.”

You worry especially about the threat to peace posed by fundamentalist Palestinian terrorists, and think it is crucial to protect Israel’s security. It is difficult to make peace, you believe, and it always involves sacrifices and compromises on both sides. Neither side will be completely satisfied, but, as an acquaintance explained to me, “we should not make the best the enemy of the good.”

On the other hand, because they have not benefitted tangibly from the process in any way, most Palestinians view Oslo as a capitulation, a virtually unconditional surrender to an occupier. How can I begin to explain to you what is actually happening here? That the reality is that Palestinians today are suffering more than they were prior to the beginning of the process in 1993. That Palestinians used to travel freely between the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, and that today they must apply for permits (which are rarely granted) from the Israeli government in order to leave or enter the occupied territories.

That the Israeli military government frequently imposes internal closures that turn Palestinian towns into prisons. That the Israelis have detained hundreds of Palestinians without charge and trial in the last several years, some for periods exceeding five years. That the Israeli security services still torture hundreds of Palestinians each year, applying “moderate physical pressure” with the sanction of the Israeli High Court.

That the Israeli military still demolishes countless Palestinian homes in an effort to restrict and contain development. That, although you believe that “land for peace” is the basis of the peace process, the Israeli government has consolidated its hold on the occupied territories since 1993 through a comprehensive strategy of land confiscation, settlement expansion, and bypass road construction.

I wish you could visit the occupied territories so that you could better understand what is happening here. I would take you to a Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, where the unemployment rate exceeds 90 percent and over 85,000 people live in single-story housing in four square kilometers, among the highest population densities in the world.

You would walk the dusty streets, which are split down by the middle by troughs that carry raw sewage from each house because there is no indoor plumbing. You would see so much anger, frustration, and suffering, and you would not find a single Palestinian who supports the Oslo accords. You also might begin to understand why an American friend of mine who lives in Palestine recently told me that, in light of the conditions Palestinians endure, he was surprised that more of them did not become suicide bombers.

I would also take you to Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement that is located in the West Bank on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Hebron. It is built on land that the Israeli government confiscated from Palestinians and resembles nothing more than an upper-middle-class American suburb. We would travel from Jerusalem to Kiryat Arba via a brand-new four-lane highway that bypasses Palestinian population centers, allowing its residents to travel to and from the occupied territories without having to see a single Palestinian.

Baruch Goldstein, an American doctor who immigrated to Israel, lived in Kiryat Arba. In February 1994, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Dr. Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi mosque as Muslims prayed and began shooting. He massacred 29 Palestinians before onlookers wrestled him to the ground and killed him. In the flurry of commentary that followed, American and Israeli observers carefully distinguished Goldstein’s act, an isolated incident perpetrated by a madman, from Palestinian “terrorism,” which, they stressed, was the product of a culture of hatred and incitement.

If you were to visit Kiryat Arba today, you would certainly see the beautiful promenade located directly adjacent to the settlement’s main entrance. The residents of Kiryat Arba named Meir Kahane Park for a Jewish-American extremist who advocated the expulsion of the Palestinian population from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel. The centerpiece of the park is a monument that contains the remains of Baruch Goldstein. The sepulchre, which includes a fountain for ritual washing for those who wish to pray, has become a site of pilgrimage for Jewish settlers who revere Goldstein as a martyr and an exemplary Jew.

Today, the occupied territories resemble nothing more than South African-style bantustans: isolated, over-crowded, economically destitute islands of Palestinian autonomy surrounded by a raging sea of rapidly expanding Israeli settlements and the Israeli army. You will probably cringe at such characterizations, just as you would upon learning that most Palestinians casually bandy about terms like “apartheid state” in conversation. You probably feel such language is extreme and unconstructive. It may be such, but I hope you can understand that it is the cry of an oppressed, powerless people. It is also undeniably accurate. How else can one describe the crazy Swiss cheese cantons and de jure discrimination created by the Oslo process?

Prior to Oslo, the international community, including the United States, condemned Israel’s occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a violation of international law (specifically, the Geneva Convention, which prohibits the acquisition of territory by force and the settlement of the occupier’s population in such territory). Oslo legalized Israel’s presence in the territories by creating a bizarre system of shared sovereignty. In “Area A,” which thus far consists entirely of the largest Palestinian population centers, Palestinians have authority over civil and security matters.

In “Area B,” Palestinians control civil affairs, while the Israelis maintain responsibility for security. In “Area C,” the Israeli Civil Administration, the euphemistically entitled military government, has complete control over civil and security matters. The upshot of this division of responsibility is that the Palestinian Authority, the governing body created by Oslo, controls only 3 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Over 95 percent of Palestinians live under PA control, but over 95 percent of the land remains under Israeli occupation. I cannot think of a better word than bantustans to describe this situation.

I wish you would read the Oslo agreements. The agreements are primarily distinguished by two interrelated characteristics: vagueness and limited scope. The agreement consists largely of opaque language that is subject to varying interpretations. A Palestinian friend of mine compared it to the Old Testament, explaining, “It can mean anything you want it to mean.”

As any lawyer can tell you, when contracts are drafted vaguely, the more powerful contracting party has the ability to impose his interpretations of the agreement on the weaker party, especially if an impartial arbitrator does not have the power or will to intervene. For example, the Interim Agreement provides that Israel agrees to “exercise their powers and responsibilities pursuant to this Agreement with due regard to internationally accepted norms and principles of human rights and the rule of law.”

The treaty does not require, however, that the Israelis halt settlement expansion, land confiscation, administrative detention, torture, or house demolitions. The Israeli government continues all of the above practices, apparently maintaining, despite Palestinian objections, that it is showing due regard for human rights and the rule of law. And no one is prepared to stop it.

Second, and equally troubling, the treaty does not substantively address several issues of utmost importance to Palestinians, including Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, and final borders. The treaty provides for a five-year “interim period,” which began on May 4, 1994, during which: “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”

The agreement defers consideration of “final-status issues,” including Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, and borders, until permanent-status negotiations, which were supposed to begin on May 4, 1997 and end by May 4, 1999. However, as of July 1998, the negotiations had not yet begun, and meantime, despite the vaguely worded provision above, the Israelis have taken steps that predetermine the outcome of negotiations on several of the final-status issues.

For example, they have spearheaded a multi-front campaign to isolate historically-Arab East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as their capital, from the West Bank, and reduce the Palestinian population therein. The Israelis have rapidly expanded Israeli settlements surrounding East Jerusalem and built a network of bypass roads that link these settlements to one another, allowing settlers to travel to and from Israel without having to pass through Arab-populated areas, and cutting off East Jerusalem from the West Bank.

At the same time, the Israeli government has embarked on a massive campaign against Palestinian Jerusalemites that amounts to a “quiet deportation,” according to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. The Israeli government revokes the residency rights of Palestinian Jerusalemites by seizing their identification cards, forcing them to leave Jerusalem and relocate in the West Bank, although many trace their roots in Jerusalem back hundreds of years. The Israelis also force out Palestinians by refusing to grant permits for Palestinians to build. When Palestinians build without permits, the Israeli government brings bulldozers and demolishes their homes.

Most Palestinians, including high-ranking Palestinian Authority officials, have not read the dense, legalistic accords. A minister in the Palestinian Authority told me that the Israelis had violated the treaty by failing to withdraw from 30 percent of the West Bank in each of three separate redeployments. However, the treaty does not require that, but rather provides for “Further redeployments of Israeli military forces to specified military locations.”

The vagueness and limited scope of the Oslo accords, combined with the powerlessness of the Palestinians and the willful ineffectuality of the Americans, have allowed the Israeli government to systematically destroy the possibility of a two-state solution, the preferred outcome for many Palestinians and Israelis. Expansion of settlements, establishment of an extensive network of bypass roads, refusal to grant control to Palestinians over a sizable, contiguous swath of land, and Israeli policies with the aim and effect of stifling the creation of an independent, vibrant Palestinian economy (e.g. closures that prevent the movement of goods and labor) have all rendered the creation of a Palestinian state very unlikely.

The great irony is that, by negating the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel’s tortured implementation of the Oslo accords, purportedly aimed at ensuring its security, may ultimately prevent it from maintaining its Jewish character. The demographic reality is that 5 million Jews and 3.5 million Palestinians live in the land that comprises Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

If the Israeli government completely withdrew from the lands it occupied after the 1967 war, as envisioned by United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338, its population would be only 18 percent Palestinian. If it continues to assert some form of sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza, the population under its jurisdiction will be about 40 percent Palestinian. With this in mind, many, if not most, Palestinian intellectuals and activists have already scrapped the idea of a two-state solution, which they only embraced in recent years, and are again focusing their efforts on the creation of a secular, democratic, binational state in all of historic Palestine (Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza).

Why would the Palestinian Liberation Organization have agreed to the Oslo agreements? This is, not surprisingly, a topic that has preoccupied Palestinians for the last several years. Of course, it is impossible to plumb the collective consciousness of the Palestinian leadership to discover their motives. But the most convincing explanation for their actions is the most tragic—they trusted too much.

Naive Beliefs

They anticipated that the Israelis, and particularly Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor government, would act in good faith, carrying out the land-for-peace quid pro quo that they viewed as the basis of the deal. They did not expect the Israelis to exploit the power imbalance that existed between the two parties and continue the occupation policies of the pre-Oslo days. They naively believed that the Israelis wished to make peace with them, and therefore would follow the letter and spirit of the agreement in order to create an environment of mutual trust and respect.

The Palestinians also had a contingency plan. They felt they could rely on the American government, the sponsor of the peace process, to intercede if the Israelis violated the letter or spirit of the agreement. Unfortunately, the United States has not acted to level the power imbalance between the two parties, allowing Israel to unilaterally impose its interpretations of the Oslo accords.

You will probably be shocked at the Palestinians’ naivet’. They actually believed the American government’s rhetoric about respect for the rule of law and human rights. They thought that the United States would act as an “honest broker,” despite the “special relationship” that exists between the United States and Israel, our largest foreign aid recipient ($6 billion per year), and the power of the pro-Israeli lobby.

Although the United States has not played a constructive role, the vast majority of Palestinians do not begrudge average Americans the actions of their government. I wish that you could visit with the Jahalin, a tribe of Palestinian Bedouins, as I have had the good fortune to do on several occasions.

Although you are a stranger, and an American, the Jahalin would welcome you with broad smiles and open arms. They would invite you to recline on pillows; they would serve you pungent Arabic coffee and steaming sweet tea; they would ask God to bless you; and they would tell you their story.

The Jahalin are from the Beersheba region, a historically Palestinian area in the Negev Desert that is located inside of present-day Israel. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, they were forced to relocate to the West Bank, where they have lived up until today.

In 1975, a handful of Israelis established Ma’ale Adumim, near the Jahalin’s encampment. The Jewish settlement, which currently houses over 20,000 people, quickly expanded to the point where it encroached on the Jahalin’s village. The Israeli government claimed the Jahalin were living on state land, a designation that was subsequently upheld by the Israeli High Court.

The Israeli government destroyed the Jahalin’s homes; forcibly evicted them from the land; and relocated them again to a barren, rocky patch of land located on a slope that lies less than 500 meters from the Jerusalem garbage dump. As housing, Israel provided the Jahalin with metal shipping crates.

Restricted to this plot of land, the Jahalin have found it impossible to graze their animals and continue their nomadic lifestyle. With no other work available, many feel compelled to accept the ultimate indignity, laboring as construction workers in Israeli settlements, building homes for others on their own land.

If you visited the Jahalin, you would also find that they, like most Palestinians, still have hope, despite all that they have suffered. They believe that they will one day be free because, very simply, one people cannot rule over another indefinitely. They trust that occupation, oppression and injustice do not last.

If the Jahalin are hopeful, then I have no right to lose faith. I will return to the United States this fall. I blame myself, as an Arab American, for not talking with you more in the past about Palestine and the Palestinians. In the future, I will try to share the stories of my Palestinian friends with you, my American friends, in an effort to bridge the gap in perceptions that exists and in the hope that we, as Americans, can begin to play a more constructive role in bringing an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people.

Sincerely,

Joe Zogby