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To: Sully- who wrote (50830)	5/2/2002 10:47:41 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

The Time for Peace has Arrived the-idler.com

To: Sully- who wrote (50830)	5/2/2002 10:54:09 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

'Legitimate rights that cannot be compromised' By Wendy Pearlman The Jordan Times May 2, 2002 ____________________________________ 'Legitimate rights that cannot be compromised' By Wendy Pearlman IN HIS recent address to the Israeli people, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared his intention “to root out the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian territories”. Sharon is absolutely right that Israel should attack terrorism at the roots. But he is wrong if he thinks that this can be done with tanks, fighter planes and bullets. The root cause of Palestinian terrorism is Israel's 34-year-old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and none other. If Israel ends the occupation, Palestinians will no longer use violence in an attempt to overthrow it. If Israel withdraws to its legal borders and gives Palestinians some opportunity to live in freedom and dignity, suicide bombers will no longer find death to be preferable to life. Usually when one speaks of the “roots” of a phenomenon, its root causes are implied. Sharon's speech repeatedly referred to terrorist “infrastructures” but made no mention whatsoever of its “causes”. Infrastructure is the “how” of terrorism; any genuine effort to eradicate it must address the “why”. Even if Sharon is able to chip away at the institutions that currently recruit and train would be suicide-bombers, other institutions will inevitably spring up. The only way to stop suicide bombings is to deal with peoples' reasons for committing them. Far from addressing the root causes of Palestinian resistance, Sharon's current war against the Palestinian people will only reinforce their will to fight. The rampage of Ramallah is a case in point. I lived near this West Bank city for several months, and I never once came upon anything you could call terrorist infrastructure. Nonetheless, much of the city in which I studied, worked and received the utmost welcome has now been reduced to rubble. Israeli troops wrecked the hospital where I once visited a sick colleague. They ransacked the offices of a number of local human rights organisations, including the one where I worked. They rounded up hundreds of my former classmates from Bir Zeit University, detaining them without even the pretence of a provable charge. They destroyed the movie theatre that provided young people with a precious escape from the misery of life under occupation. They set fire to restaurants, bombed police stations and flattened any car parked on the street. They cut electricity and water and placed 70,000 residents, 10,000 of whom are Americans, under curfew. They conducted house-to-house searches, destroying anything they wished with complete impunity. They announced that they would shoot anything that moved — and they followed through with their threat. Apparently, everything that I had come to know as the infrastructure of civilian life in the West Bank — hospitals, universities, stores, homes and even running water — was really “terrorist infrastructure”. In Sharon's campaign to “squash” terrorism, any person and any object in the Palestinian territories is a valid target. The stories I am hearing from friends in Ramallah tell of unthinkable horror. One friend described how he saw a man shot in the street and then left to bleed for an hour before Israeli soldiers finally permitted an ambulance to pass. Another said that Palestinians were forced to bury their dead in the hospital parking lot when they were prohibited from reaching the cemetery. Another talked of counting the missiles drop on his neighbourhood, night after night. Yet another talked of the agony of waiting for news of her brother who had been arrested and whisked away to an unknown location with hundreds of young men similarly presumed guilty because they are Palestinians. Everyone says that the terror has brought them, ironically, to a point of fearlessness. The word on the “Palestinian street”, they say, is that people are prepared to die before they surrender to Israel's siege. What we are witnessing in the Palestinian territories today is an onslaught on a captive civilian population. The Bush administration, meanwhile, offers nothing more than the same tired words about how Yasser Arafat, currently trapped in his compound, isn't doing enough to stop the violence. The time is long overdue for us to move past this empty rhetoric and forge a more evenhanded policy in the Middle East. We can start with two basic steps. First, we should put pressure on Israel to withdraw immediately from the Palestinian towns that it has reoccupied. The death toll rises with every hour we wait. Second, we must abandon the false notion that we can broker a ceasefire without dealing squarely with the substantive issues at the heart of the conflict. General Anthony Zinni, the US envoy, is commissioned to broker a security agreement, but not a political one. He is bound to fail, because the former is impossible without the latter. In trying to divorce security issues from political issues, we are allowing Sharon to dictate our diplomacy. It is Sharon's strategy to pound the Palestinians so ruthlessly that they will beg for quiet and forsake the national goals for which they are struggling. The sooner we all realise that only an end to the occupation and a just resolution to the plight of the refugees will bring an end to the hostilities, the more lives we can save. Yes, Sharon is right: there can be no compromise in the battle against terrorism. No battle against terrorism will ever succeed, however, as long as it compromises Palestinians' legitimate rights. ________________________________________________ The writer is earning a PhD in government at Harvard University. She has lived in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and is currently preparing a book of interviews with Palestinians about their experiences during the second Intifada. She contributed this article to The Jordan Times. jordantimes.com