Old realities
George Will

April 18, 2004


WASHINGTON -- The United States government is not a speed reader, but
after 37 years of reading U.N. Resolution 242, on Wednesday the government
finally read it accurately. The government saw what is not there -- the
missing definite article, ``the.''

Passed after the 1967 Six Day War, 242 mandated the withdrawal of
Israel ``from territories occupied in the recent conflict.'' Not from ``the
territories.'' Israel insisted on deletion of the ``the'' because it
implied, as Arab and other powers acknowledged by their vehement opposition
to the deletion -- withdrawal from all territories.

This was strategic ambiguity. On Wednesday, ambiguity was abandoned. In
his letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, President Bush said:

``In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing
major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the
outcome of the final status negotiations will be a full and complete return
to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a
two-state solution have reached the same conclusion.''

It is fine to talk about ``new realities,'' such as patterns of
settlement, but this new U.S. policy also, and primarily, comes to terms, at
long last, with an old reality. It is that 242 also recognized the right of
every state in the region to ``secure and recognized boundaries,'' which
Israel's 1967 borders were not.

But wait. Palestinian spokesmen, denouncing the new U.S. position,
speak not of the 1949 armistice lines but ``the 1967 borders.'' It is not in
the interest of the Palestinian Authority to have the world reminded --
being willfully forgetful, it needs much reminding -- that the borders of
Israel in 1967 were accidents of the military facts on the ground 18 years
before that.

Bush, by emphasizing 1949 rather than 1967, reminds those who are
forever saying ``Israel is being provocative'' that for 56 years -- since
Israel's founding in May 1948 -- the problem has been that, to Israel's
enemies, Israel's being is provocative. Hostility to Israel predated 1967
and would not be cured by a return to 1967 realities.

The territories occupied by Israel since 1967 have been lawfully held
because a nation that occupies territories in the process of repelling
aggression launched from them can hold them until the disposition of the
lands is settled by negotiations between the relevant parties. Palestinians
and their supporters have tried to erase this fact by semantic infiltration
of the world's political vocabulary, getting the territories routinely
referred to as ``Palestinian lands.'' Actually, in law the territories are
unallocated portions of the 1922 Palestine Mandate, the final disposition of
which is still to be settled by negotiations.

And there, for 56 years, has been the rub -- the absence of a suitable
interlocutor for Israel. Meaning a negotiating partner not committed to the
destruction of the ``Zionist entity,'' or completion of the project
interrupted but not abandoned when the last Nazi death camps were liberated
59 Aprils ago.

It is instructive -- and wonderful -- how few and optional have been
references to Yasser Arafat in discussions of Wednesday's developments. In a
life of terror, his only service to peace was his demonstration, at Camp
David in July 2000 with President Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Barak, that the most that Israel could ever offer in the way of concessions
is less than the current Palestinian leadership will accept.

Which is why Wednesday's policy flowed ineluctably from Bush's June 24,
2002, pronouncement that the first prerequisite for progress is for the
Palestinian people to produce ``regime change'': ``I call upon the
Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by
terror.'' That prerequisite being unattainable, Sharon has chosen unilateral
disengagement -- the fence -- and a long wait for the time when, in Bush's
words, ``the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new
security arrangements.''

In 1998 the then-governor of Texas, preparing to run for president,
visited Israel and was given a helicopter tour of the nation's
vulnerabilities. Bush saw the place where Israel, from 1949 until 1967, had
been nine miles wide. Back home, Bush said: Why, in Texas we have driveways
longer than that. Bush's host in the helicopter was Sharon.

Sharon, who is 76, is a reminder of why it is reasonable to prefer
young doctors but old politicians. Young doctors because recently in medical
school they learned the latest panaceas. Old politicians because, having
lived long enough to not hope for miracle cures to political problems, they
do what they can, on their own.


<vesuvian.doppelgange@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:1103124694.750243.276550@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
The Third Intifada
'Yes to Peace, No to the Wall'

by Ran HaCohen

To appreciate the breathtaking magnanimity expressed by this short
slogan, one needs to remember its context. Imagine: a foreign army
occupies your village for decades, reduces you to subjects without any
rights, arrests you arbitrarily, savagely tortures the arrested, and,
on top of it all, sends mighty bulldozers to erect a gigantic wall on
your land, locking you up as in a cage. And your reaction? Peaceful
demonstrations, shouting "No to the Wall" - but "Yes to Peace," to
peace with your very oppressor and dispossessor.

Budrus, where this slogan was coined, is a small village of some 1,200
Palestinians in the northern part of West Bank, just across the Green
Line. Few Israelis have ever heard of it; but some may remember
neighboring Kibia, just a mile to the east, where, on Oct. 14, 1953, an
Israeli army unit - led by a young officer called Ariel Sharon -
ravaged the village (then still under Jordanian rule), destroying 40
houses and killing more than 50 people, an atrocity that caused
international outrage and was strongly condemned by the UN Security
Council.

Half a century after that massacre, PM Ariel Sharon sent his bulldozers
to the same rural area. Many imagine the Wall as a kind of border
separating Israel from the Palestinian territories. The facts are
different: the Wall twists like a snake entirely inside the Palestinian
territory, and - in combination with other physical barriers, most
notoriously roads for-Israelis-only - it creates numerous small
enclaves, in which Palestinian villages and towns - sometimes just a
few hundred people, less than in any average prison - are locked up,
unable to leave their unsafe haven except by mercy of an Israeli
soldier at the gate, when equipped with proper permits issued (or
rather not issued) by the Israeli army. The contiguous territory
in-between the enclaves is designated for the Israeli settlements.


Living in a Cage

A'ed Murar from Budrus counts three levels on which the Wall is
destructive to Palestinian life. First the immediate level: the Wall
takes the agricultural lands and water wells of the village, either
because it is constructed on them, or because they are left outside the
Wall, inaccessible to the farmers. The section of the population that
depends on agriculture thus loses most of its means of survival.

The second level is imprisonment: there are no clinics or hospitals, no
higher schools or universities, nor any other social and economic
infrastructure inside the enclave; moreover, about 80% of Budrus'
population works outside the village: they, too, lose their means of
survival as their access to the outside world is dependent on Israeli
army caprices.

The third level is that of nation and vision: by locking up the
Palestinians and taking the land in-between the enclaves, Israel robs
them of their future, of a contiguous territory for the Palestinian
State promised in President's Bush roadmap. The Palestinians are thus
left with no way to earn their living, with no infrastructure to run
their present life, and with no hope for the future.


A Short History of the Wall

Historian and Ta'ayush activist Gadi Algazi distinguishes several
periods in the construction of the Wall. From April 2002-May 2003, the
Wall was built with incredible speed - 300-500 bulldozers working
simultaneously - hardly attracting any public attention at all,
neither in Israel nor abroad, thus enabling the Israeli government to
quietly and irreversibly change the geography of the land for decades.
The Israeli public had the illusion that the Wall was being built along
the Green Line - a good reason for naïve peaceniks to support it -
and that at worst it was perhaps conflicting with property rights of
some Palestinian landowners along its route. Even the Palestinians
could hardly grasp the full impact of the project, both because of its
indeed incredible dimensions, and because Israel refused to publish any
maps at the time, so that information was scarce in a West Bank hardly
recovering from the massive Israeli aggression of "Operation Defensive
Shield." Some resistance to the Wall was led by small groups of
Israelis, international activists, and Palestinians, like in the Mas'ha
camp.

May 2003 signaled a change: since then, the Wall has become the focus
of media attention, and turned into a political issue in Israel and
abroad. Demonstrations, many of them by Israelis and international
activists, and their violent dispersion by the army increased public
awareness and reduced the pace of construction. The clear decision of
the International Court of Justice against the Wall as well as the
critical position taken by the Israeli Supreme Court regarding its
route mark a peak in the public struggle against the Wall;
consequently, in the summer of 2004, the construction was virtually
stopped, and the Israeli establishment started looking for new tactics.

It is in this period, in places like Budrus, that people like Mr. Murar
- who had participated in the first Intifada and had been jailed and
brutally tortured by Israel - reached the conclusions that resistance
to the Wall should be led and organized first of all by Palestinians
themselves; that waiting quietly for courts and verdicts was not
enough; and, above all, that nonviolent demonstrations were the best
weapon of the weaker side. He believes this for moral reasons, but also
because nothing could harm the Palestinian interest more than violence,
immediately exploited by Israel to distract public attention from the
Palestinian plight and to accelerate the construction project behind
the thick screen of "fighting off terrorism." A'ed Murar calls it the
Third Intifada: the Intifada against the Wall.

Since the Palestinian Authority offered no real strategy or help in the
villagers' struggle, they had only themselves to rely on - aided by
Israeli and international supporters, like Ta'ayush, International
Solidarity Movement, or Anarchists against the Wall. The Third Intifada
is a popular uprising: in villages like Budrus, party affiliation and
other differences are put aside, and the whole village marches together
time after time to demonstrate against the Israeli bulldozers. Footage
taken in several such demonstration shows the utter embarrassment of
the Israeli soldiers, armed to the teeth against unarmed men, women,
and children, who can stand for hours just a few meters away from them
singing and shouting without any violence at all. If at last a single
stone is thrown, the soldiers seem to be truly relieved: they
immediately employ their heavy truncheons, shoot tear-gas and
rubber-covered bullets at the crowd, and make violent arrests. But the
resistance is not in vain: when a whole village stands together day
after day, even the cruelest army must have second thoughts. So far,
the demonstrations in Budrus managed to save the biggest plantation of
the village from Israel's bulldozers.


Crucial Stage

The construction of the Wall, says Algazi, seems to have reached a
crucial period. Following the verdicts from The Hague and Jerusalem,
the Israeli establishment made a pause and took some time to reorganize
and elaborate a new route and new strategies; these are now ready, and
the construction of the Wall is about to resume in full speed. Signals
and threats conveyed to inhabitants in Budrus make it clear that Israel
is not going to give up easily on their land and water. The number of
soldiers sent to demonstrations in villages like Budrus has been
reduced, to increase the soldiers' insecurity and ease their finger on
the trigger, and villagers are warned that if they do not capitulate
this time, live ammunition may be used.

This nonviolent popular struggle is hardly reported in mainstream
press. One needs to refer to alternative media to read about it. The
idea of nonviolent Palestinian resistance sharply contradicts the
stereotype of Palestinians as a "nation of suicide-bombers"; reporting
peaceful Palestinian demonstrations is highly undesirable in official
Israel's eyes. For all those reasons, this is a struggle very worthy of
both public interest and support: The future of Israel/Palestine will
be decided here, on the ground, rather than in press conferences in
Washington or coalition intrigues in Jerusalem.