- *One of the happiest moments in my life occurred in a
restaurant.*
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- * *
-
- *It happened before the second /intifada/. I had invited
Rachel to celebrate her birthday with dinner at a famous restaurant in
Ramallah.*
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- * *
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- *We were sitting in the garden under strings of colorful
lights, the air was fragrant with the perfume of flowers and the waiters
were hurrying back and forth with laden trays. We ate Mussakhan, the Palestinian
national dish (chicken with tahini baked on pita bread), and I drank arak.
Our waiter, who had overheard us talking, took our order in Hebrew. We
were the only Israelis there. At the nearby tables, Arab families with
the children in their best clothes, as well as a bride and groom with their
wedding guests. Bursts of laughter punctuated the murmur of Arabic conversations,
and spirits were high.*
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- * *
-
- *I was happy, and a sigh escaped me: "How wonderful
this country could be, if only we had peace!"*
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- * *
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- * *
-
- *I THINK of that moment every time I hear sad news from
Ramallah. The news is depressing, but the memory helps me to keep alive
my hope that things could be different. *
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- * *
-
- *The most depressing news concerns the split between
the Palestinians themselves. This split is a disaster for them, and, I
believe, also for Israel and the world at large. That's why I dare to comment
on a matter that seemingly does not concern us Israelis. It does.*
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- * *
-
- *It is easy to blame Israel. Easy and also justified.
In their struggle against the national aspirations of the Palestinians,
successive Israeli governments have applied the old Roman maxim /divide
et impera/, divide and rule.*
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- * *
-
- *Since the Oslo agreement, the central component of this
policy has been the physical separation between the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip.*
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- * *
-
- *Article IV of the Oslo Agreement of September 1993 says:
"The two sides view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial
unit, whose integrity will be preserved".*
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- * *
-
- *Article X of Annex 1 of the Interim Agreement of September
1995 says: "There shall be a safe passage connecting the West Bank
with the Gaza Strip for movement of persons, vehicles and goodsIsrael will
ensure safe passage for persons and transportation during daylight hoursin
any event not less than 10 hours a day."*
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- * *
-
- *In practice, the safe passage was never opened. Among
all the blatant violations of the Oslo agreements, this was the most severe.
Its consequences have been disastrous for both sides.*
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- * *
-
- *True, there was a lot of talking about the passage.
Ehud Barak once fantasized about constructing a giant bridge between the
West Bank and the Strip, after seeing such a 40 km long bridge somewhere
abroad. Others spoke about a tunnel underneath Israeli territory. Yet others
proposed an extraterritorial highway or railway. None of these ideas was
ever implemented. On the contrary, while before Oslo there had been free
movement for all, including the inhabitants of the occupied territories,
after Oslo this freedom was abolished.*
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- * *
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- * *
-
- *THE PRETEXT was as always security: convoys
of murderers and terrorists would pack the safe passage, trucks loaded
with Palestinian rockets would drive to and fro. But the consequences disclose
the true aim: what remained of Palestine was cut into two disconnected
parts.*
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- * *
-
- *One cannot rule a territory without physical contact
with it. That was proven in Pakistan, which was founded as a state with
two disconnected parts separated by Indian territory. Soon enough, war
between the two broke out and the Eastern part became the independent state
of Bangladesh.*
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- * *
-
- *According to the latest Palestinian statistics, which
seem reliable, there are now 2.42 million Palestinians living in the West
Bank and 1.46 million in the Gaza Strip (in addition to 379 thousand in
East Jerusalem). From Yasser Arafat I once heard that more than half of
the Palestinian Authority's resources were being devoted to the Gaza Strip,
in spite of the fact that the Strip amounted to only 6% (one sixteenth)
of the Palestinian territories.*
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- * *
-
- *Now there exist in practice two Palestinian entities:
the West Bank, whose actual capital is now Ramallah, and the Gaza Strip,
with its capital Gaza city. From the political, economic and ideological
points of view, the distance between them is growing.*
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- * *
-
- *And from the point of view of the Israeli occupation
policy, that is a great victory.*
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- * *
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- * *
-
- *THE ISRAELI government conducts different strategies
against the two Palestinian entities. *
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- * *
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- *Against Gaza, the policy is simple and brutal: to overthrow
the Hamas government by turning the life of those 1,460,000 men and woman,
old people and children, into hell. They are allowed to bring in only the
most basic foodstuffs. There was an international outcry when Senator John
Kerry discovered the import of noodles is prohibited, because /pasta/ is
apparently a luxury. "We shall not give them chocolate when Gilad
Shalit is not getting chocolate," an army officer declared this week.
It would be interesting to know how much chocolate the 11 thousand Palestinian
prisoners in Israeli jails are getting.*
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- * *
-
- *The war against Gaza ("Molten Lead") was intended
to wreak death and destruction upon the civilians, so that they would rise
up and overthrow their elected government. The dead are already buried,
but the piles of rubble remain. The Israeli government does not allow building
materials to be brought in, and the inhabitants have started to build homes
of mud, as their ancestors did centuries ago. (To make the whole thing
even more depressing, it is forbidden to bring in toys, books and musical
instruments.)*
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- * *
-
- *The Egyptian government cooperates with the Israeli
army in enforcing the blockade on the inhabitants of Gaza. Lately it has
intensified its efforts to choke the essential supply line through the
Rafah tunnels ("smuggling" in Israeli and Egyptian parlance).
The campaign recently started by the Egyptian authorities against Hizbullah
agents in Sinai has the aim, among others, of cutting this pipeline.*
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- * *
-
- *The Gaza people have not toppled the Hamas government.
On the contrary, their opposition to the Ramallah government seems to be
growing, and some say that it is turning into pure hatred.*
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- * *
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- * *
-
- *AGAINST THE Palestinian Authority in the West Bank,
the occupation authorities employ a different, but no less destructive,
strategy. They make every effort to present it as a kind of Palestinian
Vichy regime, in order to prevent the healing of the Palestinian rift.*
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- * *
-
- *The Israeli government declares this openly and loudly.
This week, the Chief of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, wondered publicly how the
Palestinian Minister of Justice could sue Israel before the International
Criminal Court for war crimes committed in Gaza. *
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- * *
-
- *How come, Ashkenazi complained, when throughout the
Gaza War there was such close cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian
Authority?*
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- * *
-
- *In other words, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli army
declares publicly before the Palestinian people and the entire world that
the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah cooperated with the Israeli government
in the war against their Palestinian brothers in Gaza, in which - according
to the Ramallah Minister of Justice - systematic war crimes were committed.
A more damaging blow to the standing of Mahmoud Abbas can hardly be imagined.*
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- * *
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- *Other Israeli officers do not spare their praise for
the Palestinian security forces, which they allege - cooperate with
the Israeli army in eliminating Hamas sympathizers in the West Bank. It
is hard to imagine that such statements by the occupation officers will
do anything to elevate the standing of Abbas in the eyes of the Palestinians,
who see with their own eyes how the settlements on their land grow daily.
*
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- * *
-
- *This week, a friend told me about a conversation he
had with a Palestinian official from Ramallah. If Israel attacks Iran,
he said with great enthusiasm, the Hamas regime in Gaza will collapse.*
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- * *
-
- *For an outsider looking in, this is incomprehensible.
When the entire Palestinian people is facing a danger to their very existence,
when the Israeli government is working tirelessly to make it impossible
for a Palestinian state to come into being and there is a real threat that
the Palestinian people will be eventually driven out of Palestine altogether,
the split resembles a quarrel on the bridge of the Titanic.*
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- * *
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- * *
-
- *THERE IS an old Jewish saying that "the destruction
of the temple (in the year 70 A.D.) was caused by mutual hatred."
When the Romans were already besieging Jerusalem, the various Zealot factions
in the beleaguered city burned each other's stocks of food. Among the Palestinians,
such things are happening right now.*
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- * *
-
- *Disunity has always been a curse. In 1948, when they
were fighting for their survival, they were unable to form a unified leadership
and a unified military force. In practice, every village fought alone,
without coming to the aid of its neighbors. Otherwise, perhaps, the Naqba
would not have happened, and the untold suffering that continues to this
very day would have been prevented.*
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- * *
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- *The main result of the disunity 61 years ago was that
the Palestinians were unable to establish the State of Palestine next to
the State of Israel, and the territory allotted for it by the UN was divided
between Israel, Jordan and Egypt.*
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- * *
-
- *Yasser Arafat understood this well. He made a huge effort
to maintain the unity of his people at almost any cost. As long as he was
alive, this unity was maintained. The secret services that planned his
murder obviously wanted to sabotage this unity, much as Yitzhak Rabin's
murderers wanted to destroy the peace process. The two murders complemented
each other, and not by accident.*
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- * *
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- *Anyone who believes that peace is essential for the
two peoples and for the entire world must fervently hope for the establishment
of a Palestinian unity government.*
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- * *
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- *I believe that this is still possible.*
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- * *
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- * *
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- *IT SEEMS that in this matter, too, Barack Obama must
play a leading role. He must put an end to the stupid and disastrous policy
of boycotting Hamas and employ his full power to bring about the creation
of a Palestinian unity government. Perhaps it will have to be, in the beginning,
a kind of super-government under which both the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip keep some kind of autonomy.*
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- * *
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- *Peace among the Palestinians themselves is a necessary
precondition for peace between Israel and Palestine. Only Israeli-Palestinian
peace can also bring about reconciliation between the two peoples and perhaps
restore the atmosphere of that magic evening in the Ramallah restaurant
so that it will not remain just a sweet memory.//*
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