PBS News Hour Buries Map of What Israel Offered

Your coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will remain incomplete and distorted until you show your viewers maps of the proposed settlement which Arafat rejected at Camp David II. I have attached several maps of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and of the Israeli proposed final status for the West Bank. The maps can be found at www.gush-shalom.org.

In the 1993 Oslo accords, Rabin and Arafat at last agreed in principle on the land-for peace formula set forth in UN resolutions 242 and 338. In its political essence, the agreement was simple exchange of quitclaims: (1) the Palestinians would renounce claims to the entirety of Mandate Palestine and recognize the State of Israel behind its 1967 borders in exchange for which (2) the Israeli’s would withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza. The agreement reflected a recognition by both parties that peace and security in the region was achievable only through acts of political will.

Yesterday (02.04.01) on CNN, Simon Peres stated that Israel had been and was willing to give back “all” of the West Bank to the Palestinians. As the attached maps demonstrate, this statement was purely and simply a lie. It is a lie which has been consistently reiterated by Israeli government propaganda and which has been just as consistently mindlessly broadcast by the American media, notwithstanding some occasional “footnote” which might be buried in the bowels of a web page or sports section. It is a lie which is not technically “not made” because some interlocutor states that Israel was prepared to return 92% or 96% or 98% of the West Bank territories to Palestinians “control”. At best, such percentile summations are a stretch based on a variety of legalistic equivocations and terminological vagaries. None other than Ami Ayalon, the chief of the Shin Bet (1996-2000) has stated “The Israelis were provided with a one-sided version: 'We were generous and they refused.' This is ridiculous.” (Le Monde 12/22/01 [emph.added].) Surely, the NewsHour does not wish to perpetuate a one-sided version.

Admittedly it is impossible for any mass information medium, such as the NewsHour, to review in detail all of the technicalities involved in treaty negotiations. Nevertheless, the reiteration of the notion that Arafat unreasonably and idiocyncratically rejected a fair and generous offer for the “return of the West Bank” to the Palestinians is an egregious informational disservice. The attached maps are the most simple and visual way to convey exactly what was offered and what was rejected. One cannot but look at the maps to understand why the "offer" was rejected -- Israel offered no more than a ghettoized Palestinian “homeland” very much akin to an Indian Reservation, adapted to the geographic and demographic particulars of the region. Your coverage of the conflict will remain both distorted and partisan until, in addition to focusing on its geopolitical context, your reporting immunizes itself from accepting the Israeli contextualization of events as the presumptive point of departure for so-called "in depth analysis".

Among these spurious contextualizations is the axiomatic zionist assertion that they are terrorist while Israel is the ever guiltless victim. This is drivel.

There is probably no definition of “terrorism” which is not redundant or circular. The best one can manage is that it is violence against non-combatants for political or strategic purposes. It is a plain historical fact that both states and non-states engage in either official or non-official terrorism. However, as currently used , the term contains an implicit judgement about the party to whom it is applied; namely that the alleged terrorist is doing something either unlawful or unjustified. Whether the alleged terrorist is doing either depends on questions of law and expediency which are seldom asked. The inevitable result is that the acts of one party to a conflict get smeared with the terrorist epithet while the acts of the other are excused away with the lexicon of euphemisms used for military or police operations.

With the foregoing in mind, the notion that Israel reasonably and generously ante’d up its quid of the quo is one half of a propaganda coin the other half of which is “to stigmatize Arafat as a troubled terrorist and to link his policy to the US struggle against terrorism.” as stated by Zbgniew Brzezinkski. (NewsHour 01/04/02). As put by Ayalon: “Yasir Arafat, contrary to what is hammered into us, neither prepared nor launched the Intifada. The explosion was spontaneous against Israel, due to the absence of hope for the end of the occupation; and against the Palestinian Authority, its corruption, its impotence. Arafat could not repress it. What differentiates between [Arafat] appearing as a collaborator with the Israelis or as the head of the national liberation is the existence of the political process. Without it, Arafat cannot fight against the Islamists nor his own supporters. The Palestinians would end up hanging him in the public square." (Le Monde, supra.)

The Israeli attempt to stigmatize Arafat as a terrorist and to link its occupation strategy to the the U.S. struggle against terrorism is not only designed to shift focus onto what is essentially a non-issue; it is a propaganda based on the fallacy of accident. Simply put, a pig and a cow are not equal because both are subsumable under the term “animal”. Likewise, not all terrorism is equal. Surely, no one would argue that pelting snow covered stones at lobster backs was such an egregious instance of non-official violence as to justify the Boston Massacre. Similarly, the bombing of the World Trade Center and the suicide bombings in Israel are not in pari materia either in terms of the status of the perpetrators, the causes of the conflict or the aims sought to be attained by the violence. “Terrorism” and a fetishistic, tabloid focus on its gruesome spectacles serves only to shift away from the more important consideration of causes and ultimate political aims.

For political analysis, as distinct from crime stories, what has to be assessed is the degree of violence in relation to the causes which give rise to it and in relation to the avowed aims it seeks to achieve. As with the Hagganah, Begin and the Avraham Stern gang, Palestinian terrorism ensues from political causes and seeks to achieve political ends. Focusing on the horror of the means (which was the essence of Kissinger’s remarks) is simply a way of not focusing or conducting what you call “in depth analysis” of issues that really matter. Focusing on terrorism as an issue per se and reporting the mid east crisis as if it were nothing more than a revolting soap-opera of violence, is precisely the mis-contextualization the Israeli government seeks to achieve.

It is hardly coincidental that the Israeli consul general in New York has taken to the airwaves to dismiss Arafat as “irrelevant” while blaming him for not calling off the violence and to decry the lack of “poets and philosophers” with whom to negotiate while characterizing Palestinians as “sub-civilized” beings who have a “culture of death”. (CNN-Ayalon Pinkus interviews 4/1-2/01) This sort of palaver would be ludicrous were it not so evocative of racist gook and untermenschen talk. Although stripped of Kissingeresque veneers, this sort of two-minutes-of- hate propaganda is the ultimate aim and consequence of a stigmatization which is designed to confuse and avoid substantive issues.

If the News Hour wants to seriously address the issue of terrorism, as a phenomenon, then it should rustle up some experts in history and international law and dedicated a full hour to define or at least elucidate the term. Without that necessary first step, the rest is meaningless. If the News Hour does not wish to provide that much depth, then it should avoid assuming sub silentio that there can be such thing as a war against terrorism. In fact, it should avoid in so far as possible speaking of terrorism at all because the term, because of pre-judgement it reflects about the party to whom it is applied. A truly fact-based reporting (with which American journalism preens itself) would not, as Mr. Brzezinski suggested, stigmatize one party with the epithet of “terrorist” while sanitizing the “military incursions” and “collateral damages” inflicted by the other side. A fact based approach would state, for example, that a Palestinian girl blew herself up in a supermarket killing two civilians and that an Israel patrol shot one priest and injured 8 nuns when denied entrance into Christian convent.

It is difficult, no doubt, for a news program such as yours to completely eschew the currently hot vernacular. Nevertheless, your incautious and wholesale characterization of Palestinian violence alone as “terrorist” coupled with a complete failure to report on the claims and proposals in dispute has the ultimate effect of rendering your reportage on the crisis a mere trumpetting of the Israeli government’s perspective.

The cynicism of the current Israeli government is beyond belief, even by the wretched standards of international relations. After seven years of relative quiesence, the “absence of hope” alluded to by Ayalon was triggered not only by the refusal of the Netanyahu-Barak governments to offer any meaningful exchange of land for peace but also by Sharon’s blatant attempt to provoke a crisis by suddenly deciding, after a lifetime in Israel, that he simply had to visit the Temple Mount.

Even under domestic tort law, one is not excused from liability simply because after laying all the conditions for a fire or explosion one did not actually light the match. Having thus insured the outbreak of Intifada II, the Sharon government piously intoned that the violence was “intolerable” put the peace process on hold and then began a reoccupation of the autonomous areas. Despite victimized protestations to the contrary, these further measures are not designed to restore calm or to lead anyone to the negotiating table. Looking behind the sophistical phrases used, they are designed to effect a reoccupation of the previously ceded portions of the West Bank, to destroy the existence of any negotiating counterpart and to lead to a war of attrition which the Sharon government evidently hopes will end with an exhausted, quisling style Palestinian “representative” acceding to Israeli diktats. It is not for nothing that the rest of the world, aside from Israel and the Bush Administration, are appalled.

The cynicism of Israel’s current leadership was likewise manifested on the day of the World Trade Center bombing. Immediately ensuing 9-11 Sharon and Barak joined in expressing their sympathy; but they did not do so in a simple and sincere fashion. Instead, they sought to co-opt American horror to their own ends. Sharon stated that now Americans could understand what “we” -- Israelis -- had been going through and could “join” with Israel in the fight against terror. To cash in on cooptive-sympathy, Barak that same day called for access to information which the CIA had hitherto resisted sharing with Israel. One can only conclude that the Israeli government had a long term strategy: (1) make an illusory and unacceptable offer at Camp David; (2) provoke an escalating violent reaction on part of the Palistinians; (3) link the repressive and provocative “reactions” to America’s “war on terrorism” and (4) use the entire canard as justification for the ultimate goal of a de facto and permanent effective control over the West Bank.

It is obvious from the preceding, that I essentially agree with Brzezinksi’s remarks made last night. I do so not out of any arbitrary consumer choice of favorite bias, but because, in my view, the facts compel the conclusions he stated. Your viewers are entitled to draw their own conclusions. Indeed, they are entitled to make the case and conclude that Israel should annex the West Bank outright and displace the Palestinian population elsewhere. However, your responsibility, should you choose to accept it seriously, is to present the facts; and the indespensible fact for proper contexualization of the issue is what was offered at Camp David II. I watch your program regularly, and to date you have not presented that fact, in any clear bright-line manner. In addition to this critical failure, your daily focus on specific incidents of terrorism -- always cast in a context of Israel’s reaction to incident -- only serves to distract from and mask the real geopolitical issues invovled. If you want to analyze “terrorism” as a phenomenon, then I would suggest you. If you want merely to broadcast what Mr. Ayalon has essentially characterized as the propaganda of the current Israeli government, then continue on as you have been.


©Barfo, 2002