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Politics : The Arab-Israeli Solution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeff Jordan who wrote (1039)	4/4/2002 3:00:30 PM
From: SouthFloridaGuy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2279

Ninety Five Percent Nonsense A letter to NPR March 19, 2001 Dear NPR News, One of the most enduring and well-loved myths of the past few months is that former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a "state" in "about 95% of the West Bank." This claim is often brandished to show how ungrateful and unreasonable the Palestinians supposedly are and how "courageous" and "generous" Barak was. It is shame that NPR uncritically repeated this claim as established fact in its 7 am news bulletin today since it is highly inaccurate. The claim of "95%" is confidently made despite the fact that Israel presented absolutely no maps of what it intended to return. Nor is it usually pointed out by those who make the claim that Israel has redefined the West Bank on its own terms, different from the definition under international law that the West Bank comprises all the territory occupied in 1967 which had previously been under Jordanian rule. Israel's redefinition of the "West Bank," excludes the whole of illegally annexed "greater" Jerusalem as well as other arbitrary changes. Hence, the actual amount of land from which Israel proposed to withdraw is considerably less than the 95% asserted by NPR and Israel's supporters in the media. An analysis of the Israeli proposals of December 2000 by the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) projected that Israel actually proposed to withdraw from only 80 percent of the West Bank excluding east Jerusalem. FMEP projected that the proposals put forward by President Clinton would give the Palestinians at most 86.5 percent of the West Bank excluding east Jerusalem, the majority of which Israel would also keep. [See maps at www.fmep.org] The wildly exaggerated estimates of what the Palestinians would get in percentage terms also do not convey that under the most "generous" Israeli proposals the entire Jordan Valley (a significant chunk of the West Bank vital to any viable Palestinian economy) would remain under Israeli military control and the resulting Palestinian entity would be cut into pieces and criscrossed with suffocating Jews-only roads such as that described in The Washington Post this morning (See: "A Road Too Close Squeezes Gaza Village; Jewish Access Route Is Barrier to Palestinians," March 19, 2001) The claim that the Palestinians gave up the chance to recover 95% or more of the occupied territories (all of which Israel must under international law return) serves Israeli propaganda purposes and no doubt pleases its ardent partisans, but it does nothing to serve your listeners understanding of what actually happened. NPR should stop making such reckless and unsubstantiated claims.