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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (16663)	1/17/2002 2:25:16 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I think it's fundamentally dishonest to one the one hand claim that the land in the West Bank and Gaza belongs to the Palestinians, and on the other hand allow militant Jewish religious groups to settle there. Period. Well, Israeli politics is certainly divided. Even now, the government cannot express a single opinion concerning its own actions, the PM Sharon says one thing, FM Peres says another, DM Ben Eliezer says a third. The Left and and the Gush Emonim (the religious settler's bloc) say the nastiest things about each other. (Of course the Left has been pretty dispirited lately) But one thing the Israelis have never said, that the land in the territories 'belonged' to the Palestinians. They said the land was in dispute, and its final borders must be settled by negotiations per UN 242. The great PR triumph of Palestinians during the Oslo period was introducing the general use of the word 'occupation', which they are careful to use every 5 seconds. Think about the implication of the word: that you have two countries, Country A and Country B, with long-existing historical borders, and that during war Country A invaded and occupied Country B. So we speak of the German 'occupation' of France during WWII. These implications are false in Palestine. First, the borders of Palestine are not of long historical duration; the British Foreign Office drew them in 1917. The British were influenced by their knowledge of the ancient borders of Judea, as the Jews were. There were no such borders in the Ottoman Empire nor was there any Ottoman vileyat of Palestine; if you had asked the inhabitants of Palestine what country they lived in, they would have said, Syria. Second, after the creation of the Mandate of Palestine, the issue became one of partition, a border struggle. The internationally recognized borders of Israel are the truce lines of 1949. The borders of the occupied territories are the truce lines of 1973. The final eastern border of Israel remains a matter of dispute. Israel has never said that the territories all 'belong' to the Palestinians; they cannot afford to. If the West Bank really 'belongs' to the Palestinians, what is different about Israel inside the Green Line? it would imply that Israel does really not 'belong' to them either, they just hold the land by force of arms.

To: Ilaine who wrote (16663)	1/17/2002 4:53:26 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

CB, Here's an interview with an Arab League official that appeared in today's Daily Star, a Beirut newspaper. It sums up the boundaries of the ideological struggle rather well: How Arabs can use the Beirut summit to extricate Arafat Maksoud says International monitors the way to go Former ambassador to the UN and US feels that intervention is the best step to take Micheline Hazou Special to The Daily Star LONDON: Arab leaders should make it their top priority at their March summit in Beirut to impress on the United States the “absolute necessity” of sending an international monitoring force to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to veteran former Arab League diplomat Clovis Maksoud. To Maksoud’s mind, apart from scrutinizing the two sides’ actions on the ground, the deployment of such a force would serve the vital political and legal purpose of making it clear that Israel is the occupying power in the territories rather than Palestine’s rival claimant to them. The failure of the interim accords concluded by Israel and the PLO to acknowledge that fact is ultimately what doomed them to failure, he reasoned. And he predicted that future quests for Arab-Israeli peace would prove equally elusive unless the international community makes the occupied status of the lands Israel conquered in 1967 unambiguous. Commenting on the Arab world’s seeming resignation in the face of Israel’s current onslaught against the Palestinians, and its placing of Yasser Arafat under virtual house arrest in Ramallah, Maksoud who was the Arab League’s ambassador to the UN and US in the 1980s and now serves as director of the Center for the Global South at the American University in Washington said the lack of Arab support for the Palestinian leadership was largely the product of its own past mistakes, including the “blatant ambiguities and ambivalences” that featured in the Oslo Accords. continued at dailystar.com.lb