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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2006, pages 49-51 Southern California Chronicle PLO Ambassador Afif Safieh Eloquently Proves His Diplomatic MettleBy Pat and Samir Twair
SINCE HIS NOV. 27, 2005 appointment as head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s mission to the U.S., Ambassador Afif Safieh has been making waves in Washington, DC with his non-stop calls on lawmakers as well as Arab-American and Jewish organizations. Prior to his current assignment, Ambassador Safieh was Palestinian envoy to the United Kingdom and the Holy See. The Jerusalem-born Roman Catholic, who was educated in Belgium and France, is hailed in diplomatic circles as an extremely astute and eloquent speaker. Southern Californians were able to see the dynamic diplomat in action when he made a June 3 to 8 visit here that included four major speeches and a meeting with The Los Angeles Times editorial board. “It is the Palestinian Diaspora which will make the decisive choice on the future of Palestine,” he told an audience of 600 attending the 45th annual meeting of U.S. Organization for Medical and Educational Needs (USOMEN) at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. “It is in the U.S. that the battle will be won or lost.” There are two Americas, Safieh opined. The first, preferred by Israeli leader Ariel Sharon, was the America of colonizers, settlers and slavery. The other America, which Safieh admires, is that of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson’s contribution to the Versailles Treaty, and Martin Luther King, Jr. “Our cry should be heard in the U.S.,” he stressed. “Even in my bleakest moments, I believe Palestine will be resurrected.” In accepting USOMEN’s lifetime achievement award, Dr. Clovis Maksoud referred to Ambassador Safieh’s words: “We are living in a Palestine on the Friday before Crucifixion, but with your help, we will reach the Sunday of the Resurrection.” On June 5, Los Angeles Americans for Peace Now heard the Palestinian envoy at the Westside Jewish Community Center. There, his message was that American Jews have a moral duty and strategic interest to help create a prosperous Palestinian state. The following day, Safieh proved his diplomatic prowess deflecting hostile questions relentlessly fired at him following his speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. He dismissed the first question on where all the millions of dollars Yasser Arafat had “stolen” were, enumerating corruption scandals associated with Israeli Prime ministers Binyamin Netanyahu and Sharon. When asked why Christians flee as Muslims move into their towns, Ambassador Safieh stressed that the Christian presence decreased dramatically after 1948, that Israeli Jews ethnically cleansed Haifa and Jaffa, and that the settlement of Gilo was built atop the Christian town of Beit Jalla. He also cited the illegal settlement of Har Homa in East Jerusalem, where Christians are suffering from Israel’s annexation wall, as are residents of nearby Bethlehem. Regarding Palestinian suicide bombers, he averred: “I advocate nonviolence. Any victim is one victim too many. Whoever does not condemn Israel’s bombardment of Palestinian communities cannot condemn suicide bombers. The one who pushes the button to drop a missile from an F-16 is just as guilty as a suicide bomber. This selective indignation is very disturbing.” War Resisters Speak Out
Spokesmen for Iraq Veterans Against the War and the Israeli-Palestinian group Combatants for Peace toured Southern California May 12 to 14 to explain why they refuse to serve as military occupiers in Iraq and Palestine. Their appearances were sponsored by American Friends Service Committee. Speaking at the University of California Los Angeles, All Saints Church in Pasadena, and at a Women In Black event were Jeff Key, who served in Iraq as a U.S. Marine lance corporal, and Dan Tsahor, a paratrooper in Israel’s Nahal infantry brigade. Two months after Key was deployed to Iraq in April 2003, he was flown back to the U.S. for non-combat-related surgery. The recovering Marine was amazed to discover that the official reason for invading Iraq was no longer weapons of mass destruction, but to export democracy to the Iraqi people. “The reason I got into this war was to defend my country,” Key declared. He expressed his disillusionment before five million viewers of CNN’s “Paula Zahn Show,” explaining that he broke the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule to exit the military so as to “avoid ever again being asked to take innocent lives for corporate gains.” His one-man show, “The Eyes of Babylon” (<www.TheEyesOfBabylon.com>), based on journals he wrote each night he was in Iraq, ran for eight months in Los Angeles, was performed in Kentucky and is slated for July 5 at the Esalon International Arts Festival in Big Sur, CA. It is also scheduled to run for three weeks, beginning July 27, at the Festival Theater in Birmingham, AL. According to Tsahor, being called a traitor is mild compared to the Nazi-related epithets shouted at him by right-wing Israelis and American Jews. Nor is his family pleased with his refusal to serve on the West Bank in 2003, which resulted in his serving a one-month prison sentence. “But my parents visited me in prison,” Tsahor said, noting that his parents met while both were serving in the Israeli army. His father was a secretary for David Ben-Gurion and is a professor of Zionist history. “The army defines your manhood in Israel,” said the refusenik, who at age 19 became a green beret in an elite Israeli military unit. “After nearly a year of training, we went to south Lebanon, where we were told we were there to protect Israel’s northern settlements.” Later, while serving in the occupied territories, he began to comprehend colonization, poverty and sorrow. “The first crack came when I saw an Israeli soldier proudly showing the photo of a dead Palestinian teenager, while troops smiled proudly over his grotesquely twisted corpse,” he explained. “My awakening came near Qalquilya in 2002, when I saw the initial construction of the apartheid wall. We were given a book, entitled Urban Combat Guidebook, that outlined step-by-step how the Nazis defeated the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. “Incredibly,” he recalled, “there were photos of the ghetto wall, but no one—no Israeli—seemed to grasp or take exception to this association.” After serving a one-month sentence as a war resister, Tsahor says he is still registered in a military history unit of the Israeli army. He teaches alternative Zionism classes to high school teachers and is a researcher for television documentaries. On weekends, he travels to the West Bank for dialogue with Palestinians. “Before we only saw each other through rifle sights,” he pointed out. “Now we talk under auspices of Combatants for Peace. We go to kibbutzes and schools and speak as one Palestinian and one Jew telling our personal stories. “Even if there is a nuclear war,” Tsahor concluded, “I don’t think the IDF will call me.” UCI “Dialogue” on Israel/Palestine
The rules were clear. The May 7 University of California at Irvine (UCI) symposium entitled: “Why Israel? Why Palestine?” was to be a civil dialogue on “How Cultural Narratives Compete.” So while six panelists discussed where they were born and what they do, none addressed the three-ton elephant of Palestinian suffering lurking in UCI’s Crystal Cove Auditorium. Dr. Sari Nusseibeh was born in East Jerusalem, he said, where his family has lived since the 7th century. The Palestinian academic, educated at Oxford and Harvard Universities, is president of Al-Quds University, the only Arab university in Jerusalem. Nusseibeh was too polite to mention that his university is threatened to be padlocked because of the economic stranglehold imposed on the Palestinians by Israel and the U.S. Traditionally, 70 precent of the university’s income came from student fees and 25 percent from the Palestinian Authority (PA). But Al-Quds’ 8,000 students can pay tuition no longer, and the PA has not paid for one year leaving the university $8 million in arrears. Faculty and staff had not been paid for the past three months. Rabbi Bradley Hirschfield, vice president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, explained that he moved at age 17 from the U.S. to a settlement in Hebron. “I found myself living in an inclusive Zionist circle that denigrated those outside,” he recalled. “I realized the price of staying there was too high.” Returning to the U.S., Hirschfield earned his degrees at the University of Chicago. He concluded by describing himself as “a religious Zionist who believes I have the right to have my home in Israel. And I must believe in the state of Palestine.” Dr. Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s Washington, DC lobby, said he is proud of being an American and a Jew, and questioned if it really is in the U.S. interest to solve the Israeli/Palestinian crisis. “Over the past 15 years, the urgency went way down for the U.S. to solve this problem after the break-up of the Soviet Union,” he maintained. “Intifada 2 has had no impact on U.S. interests.” “What about 9/11?” shouted a disgusted audience member. Prof. Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland earlier discussed the “Prism of Pain” through which Palestinians collectively view their narrative. “September 11 became the Prism of Pain for the American collective consciousness,” Dr. Telhami said. “Americans must understand the Arab Prism of Pain. Unfortunately, the U.S. only sees the Prism of Terrorism. It is an incredible notion to be pushing democracy in Arab countries. This policy doesn’t match the aspirations of the Arab people. The price is too high to try to make Arabs go our way.” Other panelists included Israeli Brig. Gen. Michael Herzog (Ret.) and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Sikkuy Attorneys Speak Out
Sikkuy is an Israeli organization founded in 1991 to improve the rights of Arab Israelis, who comprise 19 percent of the Jewish state’s population. On March 20, its co-executive directors, Ali Haider and Shalom (Shuli) Dichter, addressed about 70 guests in the Los Angeles home of Wally and Suzanne Marks. “There is no doubt there is discrimination against Arab citizens,” stated Dichter. “Our job is to try to close the gap.” Sikkuy does not operate on political or legal levels, Haider explained, but on municipal and public levels, by submitting policy papers to encourage the government to open more opportunities to Arab citizens. Less than 5 percent of Israel’s civil service jobs are held by Arabs, he said. The Arab press reports on Sikkuy efforts, Haider noted. “The issue here is despair,” he emphasized. “The Arab minority will fall even more into despair if we can’t effect change.” “A disturbing negative development in Israeli public opinion is the notion of separation from the Palestinians,” Dichter added. “This psychoideology is well-rooted in the patterns of Zionism. The apartheid wall is a development of Zionism. [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert’s Kadima party is a champion of this ideology, especially the Labor contingent in Kadima.” It took 10 years and 20 billion Israeli shekels ($5 billion) to absorb one million Russian immigrants into the Israeli society and economy, Dichter concluded. The same amount of money and time, he observed, could make Arabs equal citizens For more information, visit <www.sikkuy.org.il>. LA/Beirut Sister City Link Underway
Los Angeles has more sister cities than any other U.S. city—but it wasn’t until 2005 that Beirut became a prospective urban sibling. That was when Dennis Zine, the first Lebanese American elected to the Los Angeles City Council, first proposed the idea. The month it was accepted, L.A. City Council President Eric Garcetti traveled to Beirut to deliver the sister city proposal. To celebrate its eight months of supporting the program, the L.A./Beirut Sister City Committee, under President Ferris Wehbe, met for a May 31 inaugural program. The setting was the upscale Sterling Steak House, owned by Lebanese American Alan Hajjar. The Hollywood watering hole for celebrities and journalists with CNN’s nearby Los Angeles headquarters was reserved that evening for the Sister City inaugural. Not only will the sister city exchange benefit Lebanon’s port cities through exchanging ideas with L.A.’s port of San Pedro, said L.A. City Councilman Tom LeBonge, but more exchanges can be made from the Hollywood film industry and medical and senior citizens facilities. A Los Angeles contingent will travel to Beirut June 29 to July 3 for cultural and educational purposes. A July signing ceremony is scheduled in Beirut. Pat and Samir Twair are free-lance journalists based in Los Angeles. |
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