Five months ago I was elected president of the Palestinian Authority. My election placed upon me great responsibilities but also gave me a feeling of great pride—not in myself, but in the Palestinian people. For despite living under conditions of Israeli military occupation—with the pervasive presence of soldiers, armed settlers and roadblocks—and extreme economic distress, the men and women of Palestine cast a resounding vote for democracy.

Like any democratically elected leader, I have responded to the people’s needs: My government has initiated serious reforms of our governing institutions, our economy and our security forces; we have heeded the people’s call for transparency and accountability; we have worked hard to secure and maintain a cease-fire with Israel, and we have begun the process of building our battered nation. Although I have great faith in the Palestinian people and in our democracy, I also am aware that democracy without freedom is ultimately meaningless: An “occupied democracy” is an oxymoron. I share President Bush’s desire to see democracy and freedom spread throughout the Middle East, and I am grateful for all he and his administration have done to encourage Palestinian democracy. On behalf of the Palestinian people, I now call on him to help us, in dialogue with Israel, fulfill our dream of freedom.

Every day, Israel is taking steps that undermine President Bush’s vision and effectively preclude a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s ongoing settlement construction in the West Bank, its insidious Wall which, since not built on the 1967 border, is suffocating Palestinian cities and towns, and its illegal attempts to cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank will, if allowed to continue, render a two-state solution to our conflict an impossibility. If the two-state solution dies, our democracy cannot be far behind, for democracy and freedom are intertwined: It is impossible to have one without the other.

“While much is being made of Israel’s withdrawal of 7,300 settlers from Gaza, homes for another 30,000 Jewish settlers are being built in the West Bank.”

For the next few months, world attention will focus on Israel’s planned unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians have no illusions about this action: It is not a gesture of peace; rather it diverts attention away from Israel’s settlement expansion of the West Bank. While much is being made of Israel’s withdrawal of 7,300 settlers from Gaza, homes for another 30,000 Jewish settlers are being built in the West Bank. Moreover, even after Israel withdraws its settlers from Gaza, it wants to continue to control Gaza’s borders, airspace, and seacoast. No one will be able to enter or leave without Israel’s approval, and the Israeli army has made clear its intention to operate at will within Gaza. The 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza who have lived under an oppressive occupation will hardly be made free by Israel’s evacuation. Palestinians fear that the Gaza Strip will become a large prison.

Despite all that, I have pledged that the Palestinian Authority will coordinate with Israel to make the evacuation successful and will undertake responsibility for Gaza after Israel pulls out. My government is determined to support the well-being of all Palestinians, and we will do everything in our power to maintain peace and stability, and to improve the lives of Gaza’s residents. I call on Israel to not hinder our efforts.

The parameters of my vision of a permanent peace agreement are well known: a return by Israel to the pre-1967 borders, the sharing of Jerusalem as the capital of two states; a just and agreed solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, and a permanent peace treaty between the states of Israel and Palestine based on equality and reciprocity. This vision is shared by an overwhelming majority of Palestinians and Israelis. Unfortunately, it is not shared by the Israeli government. Currently, many actions the Israeli government is undertaking contradict these parameters.

Time is the greatest enemy of peace in the Middle East. And the time for interim agreements and partial accords is over. It is no longer enough to simply manage the conflict while Israel unilaterally acts. For the sake of peace and democracy, it is time to end the conflict.
—Mr. Abbas is president of the Palestinian Authority. This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

By David J. Forman, The Jerusalem Post
"We Are Not Paranoid!”
No one has suffered greater “crimes against humanity” than we Jews.

A patient comes to a psychiatrist complaining that he suffers from an inferiority complex. After a period of intense analysis, the psychiatrist tells the patient, “I have a diagnosis. You do not suffer from an inferiority complex—you are inferior!”

We Israelis are not paranoid. Much of the world truly is out to ‘get us.’ Witness the Amnesty International report accusing Israel of “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes.” What of America’s carpet bombing of Fallujah, where half the city was destroyed and untold civilian life lost? Is this not a war crime? What about the brutality that has infested too much of the African continent? Or, more to the point, what of the intentional Palestinian murders of innocent Israelis? Are these not “crimes against humanity”? It is ironic that it took the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, not Amnesty, to report on the systematic torture and killing of Palestinians by the Palestinian Authority. Why not use similarly loaded language when addressing Palestinian human rights abuses of both Israelis and their own people?

What is so troubling about Amnesty’s report is what was so troubling about the Presbyterian edict claiming that the “root of all evil is the occupation.” On a recent lecture tour in the United States, I met with members of numerous Presbyterian churches. Not once did I encounter agreement by a local congregant with their National Assembly’s statement. Nevertheless, all wanted to know why Jews were so troubled. I explained to them that both their own church leadership and the Amnesty report completely missed the Israeli/Jewish narrative. And it is for this reason we are so upset by their prejudicial statement as well as Amnesty using language first coined to characterize the crimes of the Nazis.

“…the nightmare we Israelis live with [is] that the Arab nations
have not given up their dream of destroying us.”

It is amazing how one can start out with a perfectly logical formula and misapply it so it becomes dangerous nonsense. Granted, Nazis and Jews are both members of the human race, but they are not interchangeable, as the language characterizing Israel’s behavior in the territories suggests. Even the untrained eye cannot help but see this noxious comparison. And so, we are not paranoid, because neither the Presbyterians nor the authors of the Amnesty report have the slightest sensitivity to our perspective. It is not one that takes us back to the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms, or the Holocaust. It is not even one that recounts multiple Arab armies invading Israel after its establishment under the auspices of the United Nations.

What is our narrative? …it is the story of a terrorist entering a Jewish home and shooting, at point-blank range, a three-year-old and a five-year-old child, in the head. The root of that evil is not the occupation, but the nightmare we Israelis live with—that the Arab nations have not given up their dream of destroying us. Let us Israelis judge ourselves according to our own heritage and Jewish values. We will admit that we come up painfully short of what our history and literature demands of us. As for others, it is only by the standards that they apply consistently to other nations that the Presbyterians and Amnesty International have any right to judge us.

No one has suffered greater “crimes against humanity” than we Jews. Before judging us, the world would do well to understand our narrative, and to acknowledge not just our historic nightmare, but its many manifestations that continue to this day.
—The writer is the founding chair of Rabbis for Human Rights.

Israelis Favor Mass Transfer of Palestinians

A grass-roots organization that has set up survey stations across the country says it is finding a large majority of Israelis favor transferring the Palestinian population out of Israel instead of implementing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to evacuate Jewish settlements from Gaza and parts of the West Bank this summer. A group formed to assess public opinion with regard to the Gaza withdrawal, has been sending teenage volunteers throughout the country to man survey stations in public areas. Participants are given a ballot card asking whether they “prefer the ‘Sharon/Peres Disengagement Plan,’ which includes transferring Gaza and parts of the West Bank to Palestinian control and expulsion of all Jews who live there. Or do you prefer the ‘Jewish Alternative Disengagement Plan,’ which includes annexing these territories and expulsion of the Arabs living there to an area outside Israel, deep beyond a safe security buffer zone?”

What Mishalot is finding, it says, is staggering: Upwards of 90 percent of respondents are checking the box in favor of the mass transfer of Palestinians. “This number is remarkable,” said Director Yekutiel Ben Yaacov. “We aren’t taking these polls in the heart of so-called nationalist communities in the West Bank. Our polling stations are in the busiest sections of major cities, like Jerusalem. We get all kinds of people, religious, secular, old, young, Israeli-born, immigrants ... you name it.”

Last week, WND monitored a polling station outside Jerusalem’s central bus station. Hundreds of Israelis, both secular and religious, participated. During the three hours, 807 ballots were filled out and later tallied. Nine ballots favored evacuating Jews from Gaza, while 798 were in favor of kicking the Palestinians out.
—WorldNetDaily

By Rusty Dinkins-Curling, CPT
On Being a Neighbor—in Hebron!
“One of the settlers was about to throw stones and garbage at him and his house.”

It seemed the lawyer already knew the right answer and had no need of asking Jesus the question about inheriting eternal life… “Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.” But then he asked another question, “Who is my neighbor?” You would think that this would be a difficult question for the people now living in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron. Tel Rumeida is an ancient Biblical site, thought to be the place of the first capital of King David. Because of this history a group of the most radical Israeli settlers has moved onto the site. These settlers constantly harass the Palestinians who live nearby.

Recently one of the Palestinian men living in a home with the settlement enclave almost on top of his house talked about the settlers as being his neighbors. As he related the story to me, one of the settlers was about to throw stones and garbage at him and his house. He asked him to wait for a moment and talk with him before he threw things at him. “Can we make the peace together?” he asked, and then said, “I accept you as my neighbor. Can you accept me as your neighbor?” The settler said he could not and that, to make peace, the Palestinian would have to move his family to Egypt, Jordan, or Iraq, so that he, the settler, could take over the Palestinian’s house. The Palestinian said he would still be this man’s neighbor if his neighbor would let him.

The issue of neighbors and who can be accepted as neighbors is very important here in Hebron where Israeli settlers live in close proximity to their Palestinian neighbors. The situation is always tense and often becomes violent. The answer of the Israeli government seems to be to build barriers of concrete, razor wire, checkpoints, and constant military presence to keep Palestinians and Israelis apart. It seems that here Frost’s idea that “good fences make good neighbors” is carried to a radical extreme, and that my Palestinian friend offers a refreshing alternative: be a neighbor.

Jesus answered the lawyer with a story of a man who was beaten and robbed by bandits. Two people who could be expected to help him would not. A Samaritan, who would not be expected to help, was moved with pity and helped the victim. Jesus took the question of the lawyer and transformed it. The point was no longer to define neighbor, but to be a neighbor to everyone. Unknowingly my friend taught me a lesson in how to live that out.
—Christian Peacemaker Teams
See also http://www.cpt.org. Photos of CPT projects may be viewed at: http://www.cpt.org/gallery

By Toni L. Kamins, Israelinsider
Let’s Get Rid of the Word “Holocaust”
“Holocaust is…a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire; a whole burnt offering… Shoah means a calamity or catastrophe, something devoid of the presence of God.”

As we recall, on Remembrance Day, the defeat of the Nazis and their collaborators 60 years ago it is also appropriate that we take a look at the single word that has come to define many of the horrendous events of that period—Holocaust. Why? Because the word holocaust is an inappropriate description of what occurred, an insult to the memory of those who were murdered, and a theological affront to Jews.

Despite the fact that the English language calendar notes that ‘Yom HaShoah’ translates to “Holocaust Remembrance Day” the Hebrew word shoah and the word holocaust (which comes from Greek) do not mean the same thing—not even close. Shoah means a calamity or catastrophe, something devoid of the presence of God. It was this word, along with the word hurban (Hebrew for destruction), that was used by contemporary European Jews to describe what was happening all around them. Jewish documents and reports of that era also use the word shoah as did the pre-Israel Jewish government. And it is the word used in Israel today to describe the events. But the word holocaust means something very different.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary holocaust is derived from the Greek words holos (whole) and kaustos (burnt). The first definition listed is “a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire; a whole burnt offering.” The earliest uses of the term to describe the mass murder of the Jews of Europe goes back to the 1950s, although some sources can pinpoint such a use in the mid 1940s.

“…the end to the practice of human sacrifice was codified in the Book of Genesis when God provided Abraham with a ram in place of his son Isaac.”

The key words for this discussion are sacrifice and offering and as such this definition is fraught with theological implications. In using the word holocaust to describe the death of millions of Jews, for the crime of being Jews, the word holocaust really begs three very disturbing and interrelated questions: Who is being sacrificed; for what reason; and to whom? Are we to infer that the millions of Jews were sacrificed to God? Did God accept this sacrifice? For the sake of argument, if the answers to the first two questions are ‘yes,’ we must then assume that the sacrifice had a purpose. If the answers to the first two questions are ‘no’ we are left to wonder why we are using the word holocaust.

Among Jews, for whom the end to the practice of human sacrifice was codified in the Book of Genesis when God provided Abraham with a ram in place of his son Isaac, the very notion of millions of lives given as an offering for any reason, and the acceptance by God of such an offering, is not only abhorrent, it is theologically untenable. Yet for Christians, the idea of human sacrifice—more accurately, one human’s sacrifice for a higher purpose—is at the core of their belief.

“Can the Christian belief in the sacrifice
of the Jew who has come to be known as Jesus of Nazareth…
be extended down through the centuries to include every Jew?”

From the Christian perspective does the death of so many Jews have a higher purpose? Was it God’s plan that Jews should continue to be punished for the crime of refusing to accept Jesus as their Messiah? Can the Christian belief in the sacrifice of the Jew who has come to be known as Jesus of Nazareth, and his transcendence through death, be extended down through the centuries to include every Jew, perhaps his familial, but not his theological descendants? Christians are comfortable with the concept of physical and spiritual destruction and rebirth. Indeed Christians might feel at ease with the premise that so many Jews were destroyed and then reborn in the form of the State of Israel. Not only does it absolve them of complicity in the shoah and the centuries of persecution, murder, segregation, and forced conversions to Christianity that preceded it, but it serves as a means of fulfillment of their prophecies.

Christianity as a group of institutions may find it difficult to live with its complicity in the vicious murder of so many Jews, and in order to mitigate this they may take comfort in wresting something good from it. By doing this Christianity attempts to shoehorn the surviving Jews into the same theological agenda that lead to the shoah in the first place... that a Jew can be murdered for the crime of being a Jew, but an entirely new life awaits after redemption through death. In reality it is just another form of forced conversion.

Parenthetically, it is no coincidence that Evangelical Christians, nominally some of Israel’s strongest supporters, also perpetuate this notion, and their support for Israel on this basis is disingenuous: Their sole purpose in supporting the modern manifestation of a sovereign Jewish state is the hope that all Jews will find their way there in fulfillment of Christian prophecy. They are eager for a whole lot more Jews to be sacrificed so that we and the rest of the world can be redeemed.

It is admittedly difficult to change a word that so simply and conveniently evokes that pivotal series of events, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
—Israelinsider

By Akiva Eldar
The Worth of a Killing

A soldier was convicted of killing a 16-year-old Palestinian boy named Mohammed Ali Said. The punishment—two months in prison and a demotion in rank. A soldier stole a cellular phone, a cigarette lighter, and $500 in cash. The punishment—six months in prison. Conscientious objectors were sentenced to 12 months in prison. According to statistics gathered by human rights organizations in Israel, from the beginning of the intifada until May 2005, the IDF opened 108 investigations of deaths or injuries of Palestinians, which yielded 19 indictments and six convictions. Two soldiers were convicted of manslaughter, two were convicted of causing serious injury, and two were convicted of illegal use of weapons. The most severe sentence in these cases was 20 months in prison.

This harsh data appears in a report by Human Rights Watch published recently. The document casts a dim light on the legal enforcement branches of the IDF, creating, in the language of the authors, “an environment of exemption from punishment,” which causes soldiers to believe there is no price for killing innocent victims. Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the organization’s Middle East department, defines most investigations of injury to civilians as “pretense and whitewashing.” In their last announcement to the organization, in May 2004, IDF officials said that military police investigated 74 cases of alleged illegal use of weapons with fatal consequences. This statistic represents less than five percent of the total number of documented deaths of civilians in the relevant period.

The report claims that the judicial system is subject to pressure by the military command, and that injured parties have almost no access to the investigative process. The IDF prosecutor’s office avoids ordering investigations, even when there is access to witnesses and clear evidence of a violation of international law. In both cases of severe beatings of Palestinians described in the report—one of them ending in death—the IDF Spokesman's response to Human Rights Watch was summarized in the statement, “We have no knowledge of this case.” The report notes that there is no national human rights institution in Israel that accepts complaints pertaining to human rights violations.
—Jewish Voice for Peace

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“There may be times when
we are powerless to prevent injustice,
but there must never be a time
when we fail to protest.”

—Elie Wiesel, writer and holocaust / shoah survivor

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“O Jerusalem” Movie in the Making

French director Elie Chouraqui (Harrison’s Flowers) is currently working on a movie version of “O Jerusalem,” the best-selling epic by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre about the founding of the State of Israel. Filming for the movie, which is to premiere in Jerusalem in early 2006 under the title “Beyond Friendship” is underway on the Greek island of Rhodes. (While the movie goes ahead, the author Larry Collins died last week.)

With a budget of 22 million euros, the film boasts some big names among its cast members, including Britain’s Ian Holm (Lord of the Rings), who plays David Ben-Gurion, and Tom Conti (Shirley Valentine). The story follows the fate of two young friends, one Jew and one Arab, and shows how their relationship is affected by the events leading up to Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948.

Faces of Hope—Olive Harvest Delegation*
October 8-17, 2005

The tour is an opportunity to observe and participate in the nonviolent resistance movement to the Israeli occupation. This movement brings together Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals to support the Palestinian olive harvest. The olive harvest season in the West Bank is generally a time of great community activism, where people of all ages work together to pick olives and join farmers as they reap their harvest. Assistance from Israeli peace activists and international volunteers has helped Palestinian communities overcome many obstacles that impact the harvest, including gaining access to farmers’ fields, transporting olives through checkpoints, and replanting olive trees destroyed by Israeli soldiers or settlers.

*Tour organization by American Friends Service Committee.
Contact Kathy Bergen, National Coordinator of Middle East Peacebuilding Programs, at olives@afsc.org.

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