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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1999, pages 113-119 Waging Peace
A dozen activists in Ohio calling themselves Dayton Peace Action have two giant billboards in busy locations with their message and a phone number. The billboards invite passersby to telephone for more information about the increasing death toll from U.N.-imposed sanctions and the ongoing bombing of Iraq, which have caught the Iraqi people in the vise of the U.N./ U.S.-imposed embargo and the whims of a ruthless dictator. The sanctions were established nine years ago by a frustrated U.N. under U.S. pressure. But like other U.S. sanctions it appears that there is no positive solution in sight. Saddam Hussain has convinced his people, falsely, that he is their only hope, and his iron-clad defense organization can quell any perceived opposition. Iraq’s weapons may have been eliminated but experts tell us that they can be rebuilt in weeks if inspections are relaxed. As the U.N. initiated the sanctions, hoping to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, they are replacing one class of weapons with another weapon of mass destruction-sanctions, labeled “the Silent Holocaust.” For more information contact Dayton Peace Action, 1060 Salem Ave., Dayton, OH 45406 or check out their Web site: http://www.cyberfaith.org/DPeaceAct.htm —Ralph Jones
Two Palestinian-Americans and a Lebanese-American, all of them U.S. citizens, have detailed for journalists in the U.S. national capital the brutal, prolonged and life-threatening torture they endured at the hands of Israeli interrogators attempting to coerce them into signing false confessions of working for “terrorist” organizations. The revelations were made in their testimony and in affidavits they presented at an Aug. 26 press conference at the National Press Club sponsored by Partners for Peace (PFP), a Washington, DC human rights organization. Perhaps most disturbing to some of the journalists who attended the conference were charges by Yousif Marei, 44, of Chicago, Anwar Mohamad, 27, of Miami Beach, and Beshar Saidi, 35, of Inkster, Michigan, of seeming indifference of U.S. consular authorities to their plight. Following the press conference they had two additional opportunities to air some of these charges. They were taken by PFP president Jerri Bird, who lived in Jerusalem and other Middle East posts for several years with her foreign service officer husband, to the White House to meet with a National Security Council official, and to an Aug. 27 meeting with State Department officials. As a result of the meetings, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright took up torture of U.S. citizens with Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy on Sept. 3 in Israel. Whether the Sept. 6ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court calling for an end to Israel’s legalization of “moderate physical pressure,” the euphemism for the legalized torture permitted in Israeli law, was related to the meeting or was coincidental is not clear. Nor is it clear how much the torture techniques described at the press conference will be affected by the court ruling, since such procedures were practiced by Israeli internal security authorities for many years before they were codified. First to speak at the press conference was Yousif Marei, office manager for the Islamic Community Center of Illinois, who had immigrated from the West Bank to the United States in 1978. He and his wife, Anadel, a teacher in a Chicago Islamic school, completed a pilgrimage to Mecca in April 1999 and, after visiting briefly with relatives in Jordan, sought to enter the Israeli-occupied West Bank to visit his 88-year-old parents there, since both were too frail to travel to Jordan. Since Mrs. Marei was not yet a U.S. citizen, she was directed to the crossing point for Palestinians and he to the crossing point for foreigners. But instead of allowing him to pass through to join his wife, he was held at the checkpoint for 14 hours, without being able to communicate with her or the relatives he knew were waiting to meet them. Then, still without being able to contact his family or American authorities to tell them what had happened to him, he was thrown handcuffed onto the floor of a police vehicle and driven across Israel to Kishon prison in Jaffa. There he was put into a tiny prison cell, 8 by 7 by 6 feet. It contained surveillance cameras and was brightly illuminated 24 hours a day. There was only a hole in the floor of the cell for sanitary purposes, and he described his mattress and blanket as “filthy as if they had never been washed.” The boiled eggs, meat and other cooked foods, Marei said, “were always spoiled. At one time after I tried to eat a boiled egg, I had severe diarrhea. After that I couldn’t eat the cooked food again. The only thing I survived on was bread and tomatoes. Because of that hardship and continuous mental and physical torture, I lost about 25 pounds during my 36 days of detention.” During his interrogation, with his feet manacled, and a urine- and vomit-soaked hood placed over his head, he was tied into the “sheba,” a child-size chair with front legs shorter than the rear legs. One of his hands was handcuffed behind his back and the other behind the chair, so that he could not shift his body weight. “The Israeli interrogators questioned me for many hours each day, repeating the same questions over and over,” Marei said. “One of the interrogators cursed with very profane language my father, my mother, my family and my American citizenship....Besides knowing almost everything about my life, the interrogators tried to force me to say that I had done something that I never did.” Sometimes, between interrogations, they put him in an even smaller cell which Marei called “the living grave.” Because of the cramped positions in which he was held, Marei began to have severe pains in his back. He was taken to a doctor, who wrote a prescription, but he never received any medicine. Marei had better experiences with U.S. consular officials than did either of the others. The first to visit him, only two days after his arrest, was Todd Haskell of the American Embassy in Tel Aviv. Haskell gave him two magazines and some printed forms, which Marei believes may have explained his rights as a U.S. citizen. He isn’t certain, however, because after Haskell left the Israeli guards took away the forms before Marei could read them. “I appreciated the visit of Mr. Haskell,” Marei said. “I wish he had done more for me than give me a magazine.” Marei said that he also was visited by “Mr. Jonathan [Jonathan Friedland, an Israeli citizen], the American representative from Haifa, nearly 10 days later…Mr. Jonathan also relieved me about my wife and my family. He and Mr. Haskell knew about my family through the continuous calls they received from my brothers.” No family members were allowed to visit him. Marei said that when the interrogators realized he had nothing to tell them, the interrogations stopped and “they just kept me in my cell for long days without calling for me.” He spent the last two weeks of his interrogation in a place called “Me’ebaar,” (the waiting place). Finally, on June 1 he was transported, chained to another prisoner, to Moscobiya prison in Jerusalem, and the following day he was driven, again chained to another prisoner, to the Allenby Bridge. There his U.S. and Jordanian passports were given to a bus driver who took him across the river to Jordan. He was never charged with anything, and he never saw his aged parents. Not so lucky was Beshar Saidi, who left Lebanon in 1986 and finished his education with an electrical engineering degree at the School of Mines and Technology in South Dakota in 1995. He was employed in Michigan by the Cargill company and later married Sawsan, an Israeli citizen of Palestinian origin. The wedding was held in Amman so that the groom’s parents from Lebanon and the bride’s parents from Israel could attend. In November 1997 Sawsan went to visit her parents in the Galilee area of Israel, and Beshar traveled to Lebanon to visit his parents. He then journeyed on to Israel to spend six days with his wife’s family. On Christmas Day, while they were having a Christmas dinner only hours before the Saidis’ scheduled return to the United States, 20 members of the Israeli Shabak (internal security police) stormed the house. They handcuffed Beshar, manacled his feet, covered his head with a hood, and took him to a nearby interrogation/torture center. The torture began immediately, with the sheba chair, hooding, slamming against walls and doors, and threats to kill him with 240-volt electric shocks. The interrogators also told Beshar that his pregnant wife was being subjected to the same process of torture in the next cell and that it would continue until he confessed to having belonged to the Syrian Nationalist Party in Lebanon and of aiding the resistance against the Israeli occupation 15 years earlier. When he protested that he had done none of those things and was an American citizen, his interrogators told him the only way to end his wife’s torture before she miscarried and for him to get out of his situation alive was to cooperate with them and become an informer for the Israelis in Detroit. “‘We run the policy of the U.S. in the Middle East and we will get you in Detroit if you cause us any trouble,’ I was told,” Saidi said. “They denied me access to a Bible. They cursed me and cursed my faith repeatedly. They denied me my basic rights as an American citizen to see a representative from the American Consulate and the right to see a lawyer. I was told to go bang my head against the wall and ‘Your only way out of here is to coordinate with us here and in Detroit, and we will put you on the first flight heading back to the U.S. with a promise of a good life in the future.’” In fact his wife had returned to the U.S. and contacted members of Congress, Michigan authorities, and the State Department as Saidi’s interrogation continued. At one time he was nearly suffocated by a gang of prisoner informers who, after they could not get him to admit to anything, covered him with blankets and said they would not remove the blankets until he confessed. After 24 days of systematic torture Saidi, who was so delirious that he does not remember doing it, signed a paper that said, in Hebrew, which he does not understand, that he was an agent of an illegal Lebanese organization. On the basis of the coerced false confession he was tried in a closed court, and then held for three months awaiting sentence. The sentence was five years in prison. He was deported from Israel in June 1999, after serving 18 months. Summarizing, Saidi said his wife was left alone when she delivered their first child, John Majd, and he lost his job. “The legal fees covering my case exceeded $20,000,” he said. “Finally, one and a half years of my life were totally wasted, with nothing but suffering for me and my family.” Anwar Mohammad, who has an infant son and, before his arrest, managed a restaurant in Miami Beach and had been recently divorced, had returned to visit Silwad, the West Bank town in which he was born to an American citizen father, and from which he had traveled to the U.S. at age 17. In Silwad he visited two aunts and his nieces and nephews. After 12 days there he left for Jordan to visit a sister and her children in Amman. At the border he was detained and his family deduced what had happened only when he did not turn up in Amman. Meanwhile Mohammad was undergoing such rigorous torture that in 40 days of detention he lost 40 pounds. In addition to the torments described by his colleagues he suffered sleep deprivation during “long periods of loud music blasted through speakers just in front of my face,” being “kicked down some stairs, kicked and punched, all while I was shackled hand and foot.” During his time in “the chair for days at a time,” he said, his hands swelled and he lost all sense of feeling in them. This ended only because he shouted continuously for hours, despite being struck by interrogators who told him to stop. Finally when his handcuffs were opened his numb, swollen hands flopped to his sides. For a time he was unable to move them or feel any sensation in them. “I was confined in a tiny concrete cell known as ‘the coffin,’ which measured about six feet by four feet by four feet with no window, little air, and a hole in the floor for a toilet,” he recalled. “For a period of 19 consecutive days I was confined in this cell in isolation and I was told I would be killed if I didn’t confess to a variety of charges.” Mohammad reported also that “over days at a time I was subjected to freezing cold from air conditioners and had only a light shirt and pants for clothing.” At the time he was arrested he told the Israeli authorities that he has a chronic ear condition which requires medication. They ignored his request for medical attention and he became feverish with a severe throat infection. He not only had no warm clothing, he had no change of clothing at all. He was able to wash his underwear only by using some of his limited drinking water to do so, and dry the underwear in front of the air conditioner vent. “An investigator named Shawqi told me, ‘We are America and we can do anything we want to you,’” Mohammad said. “The questions he posed were related to my life in America. I am the manager of a pizza restaurant in Miami Beach. Shawqi asked me about the ‘fund-raising’ I did in the restaurant. A Muslim group that wanted to hold a dinner at the restaurant had approached me and I arranged for them to use part of the restaurant for a ‘donations dinner.’ It was good business. “Then Shawqi asked me about donations to Islamic organizations in America. When I said that I gave $25 a month to support an orphan in Silwad and I had given $200 to a friend of my brother who had just had a baby, that didn’t satisfy him and he accused me of being a member of a terrorist organization. I denied it vehemently and he left me.” Mohammad has provided visual descriptions of “Shawqi” and also of interrogators named “Uri” and “Captain Ahed,” who seemed interested in getting information about inhabitants of Silwad. From the descriptions, an American police artist has prepared identification sketches for possible use in court actions against the interrogators and the government of Israel. Mohammad explained that Human Rights Watch has documents naming 17 persons who have died under torture and that he hopes that with the help of some of the estimated 1,100 Palestinians who are tortured every year, international investigators will be able to identify the killers and charge them with murder. Mohammad said he was visited by “Majid” and Abdel Noor Zaibek, who identified themselves as being from the American Consulate. “I said ‘I want the Congress and the Department of State, the media and anyone else to know about what is happening to me. Please get me out.” “Abdel Noor said the only thing he could do was to visit me once a month. He asked if I was being tortured and I told him that I was and gave him the details. He gave me a list of names of lawyers and I told them to tell my family to get a lawyer. I pleaded with him to help. “I told him what had been happening to me and that I was afraid that I was going to lose my mind....I told him to please do something to help me, to get me out of there.... “He told me, ‘we will try, but it is going to be your word against their words.’ He could see me and my condition, so he knew the truth....I told him that he could come and collect my body in a few days. He left after about 15 minutes with me.” Three days later, on Dec. 7, the guards took Mohammad out of his cell, searched his luggage, and kept his clothes, the gifts he had brought for his sister and her children, his address book and his personal papers. Then he was released and, in a dazed condition, found his way back to his family’s home in Silwad. However, the Israelis would not let him leave on his American passport and forced him to get a Palestinian passport, a procedure that kept him in the West Bank another month because of border closures. Upon his return to the U.S. Mohammad said he was deeply concerned about the information the Israeli interrogators had about his life in Florida. “Where did they obtain this kind of personal information?” he asked. “As a result of the Wye agreement is the CIA and FBI providing raw data to security forces in Israel about Americans?...I have not even been politically active on the Palestinian question. Why was I targeted and who targeted me? “When I returned I was so depressed and disappointed because I felt abandoned by my American government,” Mohammad continued. “I was sick. I had to have my teeth repaired. I consulted a psychiatrist and was put on medication. I have to suffer this memory my whole life.... “I want to protest what happened to me, protest the lack of consideration by the American Consulate, and I want to know why the Israelis did this to me. I am told that the Department of State says that I did not want them to do anything in the way of protest. This is not true.... “My physical condition is slowly mending. But I lost the investment in my business....I lost all my clothes, and the gifts I had with me for my sister’s family. I had to buy a new return ticket and pay for the Palestinian passport. I had to pay the attorney. This amounts to more than $35,000. Who is going to give me the money to start over again? “I want my government to protest my treatment in the strongest terms. I want the Israeli government to apologize to me. I want my government to issue a warning to all Americans about Israeli detention and torture of Americans. And I want the Israeli government to pay reparations for the monetary costs of this terrible experience.” At the press conference Partners for Peace president Bird provided journalists with biographic sketches of two other recently released U.S. citizen detainees who had been tortured. Hashem Mufleh is a third-generation U.S. citizen from Albuquerque, NM who was arrested at age 18 while visiting the West Bank with his mother and sister. He was released this summer after serving a year in prison. Another recently released prisoner is Anwar Hamdan, whose family lives in Louisiana. He was arrested at the airport last June 4 while seeking to fly to the U.S. with his infant son. He was interrogated and tortured for more than a month and then released with no charges. Bird also listed four other American citizens believed still being held in Israeli prisons: Abbas Fawaz Na’ora, born to American citizens living in Jerusalem and a resident of Georgia, was arrested in February 1998, when he was 16. Amjad Ahmad Farah Kur’an, 22, from Wisconsin, is believed to be in Megiddo prison awaiting sentencing after being forced to sign a confession in Hebrew. He does not know what crime he is charged with. Salah Sarsour is an American citizen from Milwaukee who is married and the father of five children. A wealthy businessman with extensive holdings in Wisconsin and the West Bank, he reportedly has been sentenced to three years for giving money to the widow of a Palestinian. Luay Qasam Abdel Jabber, born 19 years ago in Chicago, was detained at Ben-Gurion airport when he was departing for the U.S. on May 15 of this year. He reportedly still is in prison. —Richard H. Curtiss
A broad coalition of groups supporting Kurdish rights demonstrated July 30 in New York City to call attention to Turkish oppression of Kurds and to protest the death sentence that the Turkish government had imposed one month earlier on Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Marchers carried a banner saying “The real crime is Turkey’s war on the Kurds.” The protesters assembled at the Turkish Mission to the United Nations, marched past the U.S. and Israeli missions, and ended with a rally outside Grand Central Station. The U.S. and Israeli missions were included because of the widely held conviction that the CIA and Mossad helped the Turkish secret service abduct Öcalan in Kenya last Feb. 15. In addition, both countries have military ties with Turkey. Sixty percent of the world’s 25 million Kurds live in Turkey, making up 25 percent of that country’s population. The other 10 million Kurds are divided among Iran, Iraq, and Syria, with a small number living in the Caucasian republics of the former Soviet Union. As possibly the largest stateless ethnic group in the world, Kurds do not enjoy self-determination in any of these countries, but it is in Turkey that their situation is most difficult. Since the creation of the Turkish republic in 1923 under World War I military hero Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, Kurdish language and culture has been suppressed. Even the word “Kurd” is outlawed. Abdulla, a 42-year-old Kurd who left Turkey as a young man and who did not want to give his full name because he still has family there, pointed out that the one million Turks living in Germany are permitted to operate their own Turkish- language schools, newspapers, and public television channel. Why, he asks, do the 15 million Kurds living in Turkey not have the same privileges? Abdulla has reason to fear for his family. He says that one of his brothers was tortured for 16 days by the Turkish military. Another brother, who had joined the PKK while a college student, disappeared for six months. His body was then returned without hands and with the internal organs removed. In recent years, Turkey’s repression of the Kurds reportedly has intensified greatly. According to Mustafa Malik (Turkey Imperils European Ties, a report written for the American Friends Service Committee, March 1999), since 1992 the Turkish government has killed 37,000 Kurds and destroyed some 3,000 Kurdish villages, cementing the wells to prevent the possibility of return and rendering more than two million Kurds internal refugees. Perhaps because Turkey is a NATO member, these human rights abuses have not elicited the same reaction from the West as NATO’s response to similar Serbian actions in Kosovo. But they have at least been a factor in the European Union’s rejection of Turkish membership. The U.S. position, by contrast, is immoral, according to Kani Xulam of the American Kurdish Information Network. Despite reports of these abuses, the U.S. has supplied Turkey with 250 F-16 fighter jets, 1,000 Sikorsky helicopters, and 1,000 M-60 tanks, all of which are used in genocidal actions against the Kurds. Similarly, the U.S. imposed a no-fly zone in northern Iraq ostensibly to protect Iraq’s Kurdish population, and has been bombing military targets there almost daily since Operation Desert Fox last December, but has been silent when Turkish forces have invaded the same area to attack rebel Kurds from Turkey. Xulam pointed out that before his abduction and arrest, Öcalan offered to take the Kurdish issue to the International Court of Justice in The Hague and on three occasions suggested cease-fires. Turkey, backed by the U.S., rejected these proposals. For a brief period after the Gulf war in 1990-91, Americans were made aware of the Kurdish people, at least of those Kurds living in Iraq. But the abusive treatment of Kurds by NATO ally Turkey is somehow less newsworthy. This situation is well understood by Faruk A. Muhti of the Palestine Education Committee, one of the organizations that sponsored the July 30 demonstration. He said that, as a Palestinian, he felt it important to stand for justice for all peoples and that Kurds and Palestinians both want the same rights of self-determination, justice and equality. [The American Kurdish Information Network may be contacted at 2623 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite #1, Washington, DC 20008-1522; telephone: (202) 483-6476; e-mail: <akin@kurdish.org>. It maintains a Web site at <www.kurdistan.org>. —Jane Adas
Washington Report executive editor Richard Curtiss discussed the history of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute Aug. 28 as a participant in a series of public affairs programs at a Columbia, Maryland branch of the Howard County Public Library system. His talk, outlining what he described as “indisputable facts about the history of the dispute, none of which are ever discussed in the mainstream American media,” sparked a lively discussion which ended only after the library had remained open a half-hour after its normal closing time. —Donna Bourne
An eight-member delegation of journalists from Israel and Palestine came to the United States for three weeks in July to study how the media cover communities in conflict. As they met reporters, editors, analysts, and conflict resolution specialists in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, landmark events were underway in their home region:
These events, not surprisingly, shaped panel discussion topics and provided a backdrop for the group’s talks from coast to coast in the U.S. These included visits to the National Security Council, State Department, Arab American Institute and American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, the Middle East Peace Network and Western Justice Center in Los Angeles, Rice University and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Houston, the Carter Center, CNN, and World Media Center in Atlanta, and the deputy permanent representatives of Israel and Palestine at the United Nations, New York. The journalists—four Israelis and four Palestinians—traveled as part of a United States Information Agency and Meridian House International Visitors Program established in the Israel-Palestine Wye River agreement last October. The journalists were selected as an ongoing activity of the Wye accord Trilateral (Israeli-Palestinian-American) Anti-Incitement Committee. Its main goal: to find ways of reducing inflammatory reporting in coverage of events on both sides of the Israel-Palestine divide. At a debriefing on the eve of their return home, participants in the delegation expressed enthusiasm about its results, and the prospects for a re-energized dialogue between their communities. Specifically, they cited opportunities which arise with the advent of five new leaders in the Middle East since the beginning of 1999: King Abdullah II in Jordan, President Bouteflika in Algeria, Amir Shaikh Hamad bin Issa al Khalifa in Bahrain, Prime Minister Barak in Israel, and King Mohammed VI in Morocco. Delegation members and co-directors of a new Wye-inspired Israeli-Palestinian Media Forum (IPMF) were quick to identify the emergence of new leaders as an important catalyst in the Middle East peace prospects during the difficult months of negotiations which lie ahead. And they said that having time, around the clock, to trade notions about their craft with their American hosts helped bond them in a refreshingly different setting, “away from trenches” and separated communities in their own region. Dr. Shaul Zadka of Bar Ilan University said changes in Jordan and in Morocco (the latter occurred during the journalists’ U. S. visit) “dramatically illustrate the fact that a new generation with fresh views is taking charge in the Middle East.” His Palestinian counterpart, Nabhan Khraishi, director of the Palestinian Media Resource Center, said: “We have renewed hope today that we’ll live to see the coffin of the Arab-Israeli conflict borne away.” The group cited an informal briefing in Houston by former Secretary of State James Baker III, who recounted meetings in Damascus with President Assad only two weeks earlier in which the aging Syrian leader offered unprecedented signals of a willingness to negotiate a final settlement with Israel. Several delegation members rushed to their laptop computers to file dispatches on Mr. Baker’s assessment. In California, they had a lengthy dialogue with members of the Middle East Peace Network and the Western Justice Center, including local members of the Jewish and Arab communities. In that meeting, the visiting Palestinian and Israeli journalists reached agreement on how, at home in the Middle East, they might move beyond “good guy versus bad guy” stereotyping in their own media. —Alan Heil
The Israeli and Palestinian journalists visiting the U. S. came up with their own suggestions for improving the objectivity and quality of Palestinian and Israeli media: Target the truth first. Reporters should balance the quality and quantity of information from all sides, continue to get information from all parties, and use neutral terminology aimed at, in Mr. Khraishi’s phrase, “describing things, not escalating things.” He described the IPMF as a neutral place at home where journalists could “stop talking politics and start talking profession.” Show sensitivity to local usage in interviews. When gathering information, use names and terms preferred by your contacts. “When dealing with Jews,” said Yoram Cohen, of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, “I will use the words Judea and Samaria, but when dealing with Palestinians, I will use the words West Bank.” Develop grassroots sources. Several delegation members, both Palestinian and Israeli, agreed with Israeli political columnist Haim Shibi that a major lesson is not to rely solely on press releases, communiqués, and government sources. Ask: “What does the latest development in the peace process mean to the average Palestinian or Israeli—not just to governments?” In the words of one delegation member: “You have to get off the phone, and out on the street.” Cover the action on the ground. “When it is a hot time, be in the field,” said Hanan Shlein, 35, of Ma’ariv newspaper, “to feel the field, and not just be in contact with stringers by phone.” The group agreed: “Do not look at just one segment of society—the elites—but try to see society through the eyes of those who are not high on the social ladder.” Humanize all perspectives. As a reporter, shed light on “the human face of the other side” in the conflict. Taghreed Suwwan, 29, of Al Arab Al Yom and Al Quds Al Arabi newspapers, said more and more Palestinians are learning “to read between the lines” in interpreting the Israeli press and there is an unprecedented yearning and desire for compromise to reach a settlement on both sides. The other female newspaper reporter in the delegation, Maha Abuein of Al Quds, said: “Try to be objective, honest, connected with the people of the street, not with political people only. Listen to all opinions.” Just hours before taking a late afternoon flight home July 26, the eight journalists met with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Middle East Affairs Martin Indyk and Ambassador Dennis Ross, the State Department’s Middle East coordinator and negotiator. The two officials stressed again the importance of the Trilateral Anti-Incitement Committee work, which aims at improving not only the objectivity of journalism in Palestine and Israel, but curriculum and texts in the schools as well. State Department briefers recalled how the entrance of the Israeli delegation at the palace where dignitaries gathered for the July funeral of King Hassan of Morocco had passed almost without notice, and how the first delegation to welcome the Israelis was that of the Palestinians, who met them with hugs. “Add to this,” they said, “the remarkable meeting between Prime Minister Barak and President Bouteflika at the funeral, and the visit of Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Ahmed Korei (Abu Ala) to the Israeli Knesset and one may be permitted a small dose of optimism.” Within the visiting delegation itself, an incident in Los Angeles served as a reality check. The founding director of the Council on Islamic Education there, Shabbir Mansuri, upset Israeli members of the group when he referred to Israel as “an apartheid state” and assailed “Zionist tactics” (after House Minority leader Richard Gephardt [D-Mo] withdrew his nomination of Los Angeles Muslim activist Salam al-Marayati to the National Commission on Terrorism following criticism of the nomination by Jewish organizations). After all four Israeli participants walked out of the meeting, a chill developed in what had been a warm relationship between the two sides until then. The next day, however, there was joking at meals again and rapport seemed fully re-established. “How did this happen?” I asked. Hanan Shlein of Ma’ariv explained: “We both realized that this was our problem to solve. The differences symbolized what we deal with at home. Here, it was not the same. We could relate to each other as fellow human beings. We saw among the Palestinians in our group regret over Mansuri’s comments. We saw them putting themselves in our place. That, of course, is essential for both of us if we are to have peace in the region for our children and grandchildren.” Hanan contrasted the new relationships developed in the U.S. between Palestinan and Israeli journalists in conversations and at meals with the relationships back in the Middle East as even those same journalists covered stories, side by side. There, contacts were fleeting, relatively rare, and always rushed because of deadline pressures. Yoram Cohen of Israeli TV Channel 1 said efforts to discuss anti-incitement measures during the trip were all well and good, but that he still regarded himself as a journalist first, and Israeli second. If Israel were responsible for misdeeds (e.g., mistreatment of Palestinians at a checkpoint), he, as a journalist, would feel compelled to report the truth—even if it hurts. Meridian International program officer Malcolm Peck summed up: “While many projects like this end with professions of warm, fuzzy feelings and generalized comments to carry the work forward, I think the prospects here are more solid. Six of the eight members of the group belong to the Israeli-Palestinian Media Forum (IPMF), which brings them together on a regular basis. At the final State Department luncheon, and on other occasions, both Israelis and Palestinians spoke of the need to come together back home, as they did here, on a basis of equality “‘to stop talking politics, and start talking profession.’” —Alan Heil |
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