Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998, Pages 6-7, 94

Special Report

Israel Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary as Palestinians Struggle for Their Own Independence

By Rachelle Marshall

A recent op-ed article in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined, “Israel at 50—A Success Story,” included a box on the side with the words, “The Bay Area Celebrates Israel at 50” and a drawing of the Star of David. There was no mention of the thousands of Arab Americans in the Bay Area who will not be celebrating the anniversary of Israel’s birth, or of the fact that many will be mourning instead. The omission was a reflection of Israel’s success in rewriting its own history.

The Israelis have launched their year-long ritual of self-congratulation reluctant to acknowledge that their country’s origins are rooted in the dispossession and forced expulsion of the Palestinians. An official anniversary poster shows the faces of three Jewish boys—an Ethiopian, a Russian, and a native Israeli—over the slogan, “Together with pride, together in hope.” No Arab face is depicted, even though Arabs were the majority population of Palestine at the time of the 1947 partition.

Current attempts by objective Israeli historians to dispel Israel’s founding myth of the Jews’ return to “a land without a people” face strong resistance. A documentary on Israel’s first 50 years shown on Israel Television this spring was condemned by members of the government and others for including eyewitness accounts of the destruction of Arab villages and the indiscriminate killing of Arab civilians by Israeli forces. At least two cabinet ministers demanded that the series, titled “Tkuma,” or “Rebirth,” be taken off the air, and the director, Ronit Weiss-Berkowitz, received several death threats. “Showing ‘Tkuma’ forces us to remember facts that we would like to forget,” a columnist for Ha’aretz wrote. “The anger at ‘Tkuma’ is because we don’t want to know.”

The deliberate erasing from official memory of the calamity that befell the Palestinians after Israel’s birth gives the anniversary celebrations the morbid aspect of a bandage placed over a suppurating wound. Fifty years after Jewish fighters seized most of Palestine and forced over half the population to flee, the wound is not yet healed. Instead it is being further inflamed by an Israeli government that rejects the principle of land for peace and continues to impose military rule on more than two million Palestinians. As a result, violence and the threat of violence continue to dominate relations between the two sides.

This has become increasingly true at the traffic checkpoints Israel has set up all over the West Bank. Guarded by bored and trigger-happy soldiers, the barriers not only cause maddening delays to Palestinian drivers but are too often death traps as well. On March 10, Israeli soldiers killed three Palestinian workers at a checkpoint near Hebron, and seriously wounded 10 others, as a result of what the Israeli army called “a mistake.” In a similar incident only a few months earlier, Jimmy Kanawati was fatally shot as he tried to reach his home in Bethlehem. On April 7 border guards killed Mohammed Salaimi as he drove through a checkpoint on his way to see his wife. Again it was “a mistake”—the guards said they thought Salaimi’s van was stolen and claimed they had aimed for the tires.

During the street protests that followed the March 10 killings, Israeli soldiers using rubber-coated steel bullets wounded more than a hundred Palestinians, including eight journalists. An 11-year old boy, Samer Karama, died on March 17 a few days after he was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper as he walked home from school.

Violence broke out again in April, this time within Israel’s Green Line borders, when hundreds of Israeli police descended on the northern Israeli village of Suweij to stop a group of Bedouin from rebuilding three homes that the Israelis had demolished a few days earlier. The police clubbed and tear-gassed at least two dozen of the hundreds of Israeli Arabs who turned out to protest the demolitions. Israeli authorities claimed the homes lacked building permits, although residents said they had been standing for 40 years. Suweij and other villages were established in 1948 when Bedouin and other Arabs settled in northern Galilee after being forced from their land by Israeli forces, but Israel has refused to recognize these villages and they receive no municipal services or government aid.

Observers interpreted the rare outburst of anger by Arab citizens of Israel as a reaction to the government’s scuttling of the peace process as well as to its policy of ousting Arabs from their land in order to expand nearby Jewish communities. Salah Saliim, an Arab Knesset member, declared over Israel Radio that “We will not agree to this sort of humiliation and oppression. It is as if we are in occupied territory.”

Tense Confrontations

The confrontations in the Galilee took place as tensions rose in the West Bank over the killing of Hamas militant Muhyiaddin Sharif, whose body was found near Ramallah in a car that had been wrecked by explosives. When an autopsy revealed that he had been fatally shot before being placed in the car, Palestinians assumed Israelis were responsible. It was a reasonable assumption to make, since Israel has used car bombs, remote control devices, and other weapons to assassinate scores of Palestinian leaders as well as suspected terrorists over the years. The Israeli government has routinely issued denials afterward, but this time the denials were apparently true.

The Palestine National Authority (PNA) announced on April 7 that Sharif had been killed by members of a rival faction of Hamas and that three Hamas militants arrested in connection with the crime had confessed. A fourth suspect arrested a week later also confessed but later recanted his confession. Hamas officials described the announcement as “lies and insults,” and charged the PNA with coercing the suspects into confessing in order to fulfill Israel’s demand for a crackdown on Hamas members. As Hamas and the PNA continued to exchange accusations, and in the absence of conclusive proof in the case, many Palestinians worried that the dispute would seriously undermine national unity. Several organizations, including the Islamic Salvation Party, urged the two sides to cooperate in order to get at the truth.

Instead of expressing gratitude to the PNA for clearing Israel of the crime and defusing potential protests, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu used the arrests as another excuse to attack the Palestinian leadership. He claimed the arrests proved that “If the Palestinian Authority wants to, it can fight terrorism,” and warned that Yasser Arafat would be held responsible for any future attack on Israelis by Hamas. Since the PNA cannot prevent terrorism any more than Israeli security forces have been able to, the warning puts Arafat in a difficult position. Netanyahu is certain to use the next such act as an excuse to further stall the peace process.

Meanwhile, without any excuse at all, he is refusing to budge. Negotiations, such as they are, have been reduced to a three-way exercise involving Israel, the White House and American Jewish organizations, with the Palestinians virtually ignored. Clinton and Netanyahu agree that after the next Israeli troop withdrawal both sides should move immediately to final-status talks, contravening last year’s Hebron agreement which calls for three Israeli withdrawals before the remaining issues are decided. The Palestinians object to the change because it would mean they would go into the crucial bargaining over Jerusalem, the return of refugees, and Jewish settlements with Israel still controling most of the West Bank and therefore in a position to determine the outcome.

Clinton and Netanyahu differ slightly over how much land Israel will return to the Palestinians, with Clinton favoring 13 percent and Netanyahu no more than 10 percent, but neither proposal would provide the Palestinians with enough land for a viable state. Both leaders have stipulated as well that in return for any withdrawal the Palestinians must take a series of actions to prevent terrorism, including silencing “anti-Israel incitement” and abrogation of the Palestine National Cov enant. Netanyahu also insists that Israel be the sole monitor of Palestinian cooperation in safeguarding Israel’s security.

Jewish organizations are playing an active role behind the scenes, with Israel’s powerful Washington, DC lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations sending competing signals to Clinton on how to deal with the peace talks. AIPAC and the Republican-aligned National Jewish Coalition initiated a letter to Clinton signed by 81 senators and 150 representatives expressing support for Israel’s negotiating position and opposing any pressure by the United States on Netanyahu. The Council of Presidents took a gentler approach, with a letter to Clinton thanking him for his efforts so far and supporting his continued involvement in the negotiations. The slightly more dov ish Americans for Peace Now has launched a campaign to persuade Congress to back Clinton’s peace proposal, and 33 members of the House signed a letter circulated by Rep. Sam Gejdenson calling for “American leadership in the peace process.”

Sponsors of the AIPAC letter in both houses proceeded to gather signatures even after Middle East envoy Dennis Ross and Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk asked them not to do so. “The security of Israel is paramount,” Senator Connie Mack said in explaining the sponsors’ refusal. As numerous members of Congress were urging Clinton to refrain from pressuring Netanyahu, a poll by the Dahaf Research Institute in Tel Aviv found that 71 percent of the respondents favored a more active role by the United States in peace negotiations.

But more activity when the activity is irrelevant serves no useful purpose. While the Clinton administration and Netanyahu split hairs over inadequate proposals, and Dennis Ross shuttles fruitlessly between them, Israel is moving at unchecked speed to ex pand settlements and create new Jewish neighborhoods in the West Bank and Jeru salem. At the same time, grassroots support for Hamas, which rejects the Oslo agreement, is growing among students and the thousands of poor Palestinians who rely on the social services the organization provides. Hamas candidates could pose a serious challenge to Palestinian leaders in the next elections, which means that Arafat dare not accept any deal with Israel that falls too far short of achieving the Palestinians’ goal of national independence. Israel’s continued seizure of Palestinian land could soon make that goal, a two-state solution, impossible to achieve.

Such a dangerous prospect has given greater urgency to efforts by peace activists in Israel and the United States. More than 1,500 Israeli reserve officers and soldiers took a full-page ad in the newspaper Yediot Ahronot last March challenging Netanyahu to choose between making peace or expanding settlements. The organizer of the statement, former Sergeant Naftali Raz, warned that Palestinian areas were like a powder keg, and added, “If the government goes on expanding settlements, another intifada will break out but this time it will be with firearms, not stones. It will be war.”

More than a dozen liberal American Jewish groups recently formed a coalition called Beit Shalom in order to provide an alternative voice to AIPAC and other supporters of the present government in Israel. Beit Shalom’s purpose is to generate pressure on the White House and Congress on behalf of an even-handed U.S. Middle East policy that recognizes the rights of Palestinians as well as Israelis.

But in the end, given the realities of American politics and the power of money in determining votes, the most crucial elements in achieving a just peace will be Palestinian unity and steadfastness. This year, as Israel celebrates its 50th anniversary as a state, Palestinians will commemorate An-Nakba, or “the catastrophe,” to mark their forced exodus from the land in 1948. A variety of events will be held throughout the year, including lectures, conferences, exhibits, and rallies. Arab Americans are preparing a quilt containing the names of 418 Palestinian villages that Israel destroyed after it became a state. The quilt will tour American cities for a month this spring before it is shown at a mass rally on Capitol Hill on June 14.

The primary aim of the commemorations, according to the official statement, is to “pro tect the national memory for the next generation from obliteration and distortion.” But Ali al-Khalil, Palestinian minister of culture, points out that the program also aims at the future by reaffirming “the Palestinian people’s right of return, the rights of refugees, and the right to establish an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem within the framework of the recent peace accords.”

While Palestinians are remembering the events of 1948 they might take hope by reflecting on the distant past. Two thousand years ago, on the occasion of the Jewish Feast of Passover, Roman soldiers in Jerusalem patroled the walls of the Second Temple, on alert in case the holiday’s message of liberation from slavery inspired Jews to rebel against their Roman rulers. Today the roles are reversed. This year on Passover Jewish soldiers patrolled the sealed borders of the West Bank and Gaza in order to guard against resistance by Palestinians against Israeli rule.

The historical parallel is worth noting by both Israelis and Palestinians this year as they separately observe the anniversary of an event that enabled one people to gain its independence but condemned the other to dispossession and forced exile, The triumph of the Jewish people after centuries of adversity suggests that with sufficient determination the Palestinians could someday also achieve their freedom. American leaders, if they were wise, could help make that day come sooner rather than later, and without the bloodshed and agony that Israel’s birth entailed.