Interesting article about Arab coverage of Israeli elections. Since this is from Ha'aretz, it is presented as sympathetically as possible, with reasonable rather than representative voices being heard. It's interesting to notice where this treatment winds up; there's definitely a limit.
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`Alas, oh enemy'
The Arab press and intelligentsia are losing faith in Israel's desire for peace.
By Zvi Bar'el
The e-mail sent to me by a Lebanese friend contained just four lines. "What a pity," he wrote, "that when I read Ha'aretz on the Internet I understand that we are again facing four years of no hope for peace. After all, you will again elect Ariel Sharon as prime minister. The Israelis are about to opt for occupation and oppression again."
Lebanese journalist Samir Kasir, who closely follows political developments in Israel and knows how to analyze them, was more pointed and went into a bit more detail in his article, "Letter to the Enemy," published last weekend in the Lebanese Al-Nahar newspaper. The following is a translation of the main points of that article.
"Alas, oh enemy. I know that it is not customary for enemies to correspond. However, our enmity is not the usual kind. After a generation in which we refused to reconcile ourselves to the onslaught on Palestine [a reference to the 1948 war - Z.B.], we reached the stage where our countries and our governments accepted the fact that you are no longer an enemy with whom we have an existential conflict, but rather an opponent with whom we have a border dispute. Not everyone accepted that shift and many of us still speak the rhetoric of war. Nevertheless, we have chosen the principle according to which peace is a strategic choice, especially after our countries have all entered into a more complex peace process with you.
No commitment
"This shift became rooted in our minds after extended denial, when you recognized the Palestinian people and with it established a foundation for a historical compromise, which you quickly emptied of all content and withdrew your hand from all your commitments. We soon understood that the peace that we had adopted is not the general consensus among you, but we continued to maintain our choice, while standing guard, and we continued to follow the signals from your direction, in the hope that they would bolster the peace.
"Thus, great and small among us became experts in your elections laws, your Knesset's amendments and your society's quirks. When the Internet spread and the reading of Ha'aretz and the Jerusalem Post became a daily custom among many of us, and when the number of Arabic-language satellite television stations grew, shattered the mental block and held interviews with Israeli guests, statesmen and analysts, I think we all received a degree in the Israeli political sociology. But woe is that knowledge. What have we gained from it but more loss of direction? The truth is that I should admit to you, oh enemy, a few days before your fateful elections, that I do not understand you.
"Alas, oh enemy. I know that it is not customary for enemies to speak openly with one another. However, our enmity is not the usual kind. You forced yourself upon us and then went and complained that we are not accepting you, and after we accepted the idea of coexistence with you you became indifferent. I am not saying this only because you are determined to reject the opportunity to renew the peace process - you broadcast contradictory signals, as you did in the previous elections, when you elected Sharon at a time when you claimed you supported peace. Okay, that too I could understand. You are forged from feelings of hatred toward your surroundings and it is difficult to shake off what has become second nature. What I do not understand is that you behave as if you do not know what you want. I am not asking you what you want, I am telling you what you are - you are sick.
"I know how you will reply. You will probably say that we are the sick ones, and that is true. Our countries are ill and our societies are ill. The difference between us and you is that we recognize our unwell situation while you are behaving haughtily. We understand the risks of our illness to the point that we have taken upon ourselves, as an initial treatment, to amputate one of our limbs; that part of Palestine over which you took control over half a century ago, we operated like a surgeon who knows that refraining from amputating a diseased arm will expose the patient to extermination. We therefore accepted the compromise that will allow us to take care of our person. You did not do the same for yourself because you have still not noticed that you are ill, perhaps more than we."
No expectations
The is one of the few honest articles published in the Arab press about the Israeli elections. Albeit Al-Ahram Al-Arabi, the weekly magazine of the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, devoted a long article to the corruption investigation against Sharon and his sons and even surmised that the affair could cause Sharon's retirement from the race for prime minister. Beyond that, however, it appeared that, at least until yesterday, the coverage of the Israeli elections in the Arab press was shrouded with silence. Here and there there were statistical analyses based on figures published in the Israeli press, and a few articles on the need for Arab Israelis to actively participate in the elections. But there were no expectations.
"In December we still had some hope," says one Egyptian journalist. "We felt that now Israeli society was about to sober, to return to the peace process. We heard and we read what Amram Mitzna had to say and they aroused heated debate among Egyptian intellectuals: Was he to be believed? Some of us felt that he, Mitzna, was also part of the military establishment, despite his being the mayor of Haifa. After all, he too had fought in the wars and the same blood apparently flows in his veins as in Sharon's. But many of us felt differently. We thought that the peace camp, which had lost its leaders, could gather around Mitzna and pull the whole Israeli society toward political change. But it seems that we still do not understand Israeli society."
The other side
At the beginning of December the Egyptian weekly Akhir Sa'a published an interview with Mitzna. The paper's editor, Mohammed Barakat prefaced the interview with a long article in which he explained why the paper had chosen to interview Mitzna. "The interview with the leader of the Labor Party is important because he represents a glimpse at the other side. We are, of course, not interfering in the Israeli elections, but there is no doubt that we are very interested in them we are interested in everything that happens on the other side of our country's eastern border. It seems to us as if Mitzna is a different voice, the object of change among all the voices of the various political streams in Israel, streams that had controlled the political arena in Israel in the past two years, including the voices that had been heard from the Labor Party itself. After 24 months in which the voices calling for the advancement of peace in Israel had fallen silent, if not died away, Mitzna has taken up the call for peace and he is opening a crack, even if narrow, in the blockade of extremism and violence that have strangled the peace process.
"Here's the hypocrisy," says the Egyptian journalist. "During this whole period we could not publish many things pertaining to the failure of the intifada. We could not present the Israeli side and only debated whether the suicide operations were legitimate or forbidden. Now we are suddenly summoning Mitzna to interview him. On the one hand anyone who makes contact with Israel is ousted from the [Egyptian] Press Association, and on the other they are interviewing an Israeli leader. On the one hand they oppose normalization with Israel and on the other they decry the Israeli toughness regarding the peace process. If that same Mohammed Barakat had been maintaining a continuous dialogue with the Israelis, publishing their opinions and presenting the other Israeli view, here in Egypt we could probably have advanced somewhat the peace between Israel and Egypt. If that had happened it is possible that the Israeli public could also put more trust in the thing called a peace treaty."
All generals
This, however, is not the prevailing conception among Egyptian intellectuals. "We examine the Israeli political arena the way military experts examine Israel's military movements," says a researcher at the Al-Ahram institute in Egypt. "Most of us do not see any spontaneous movement in Israel, not by the military and not by the politicians. You elected Sharon in the previous elections because he reflects the true character of Israeli fear, and you will elect him again because of the same fear. You are a society under siege, and a society under siege always needs a supreme commander.
"In this you are no different than us. Our leaders always make sure to present the times as an `emergency' and during an emergency one has to enlist and unite. In fact, for over a decade you have not had a civilian prime minister; they were all generals. And don't tell me that [Benjamin] Netanyahu was a civilian. And even if Mitzna were to be elected, he would be a general, orchestrating your political lives," concluded the researcher.
"What do you want us to do with those election results?" asked the editor of a Jordanian paper two days ago, referring the results of a survey that indicated the Likud would win 32 seats. "Is it still possible to believe that the Israeli society wants peace? How can I write articles about the peace camp in Israel, on the need for dialogue with Israelis, when that camp is disappearing, when the results show that we, the Jordanians, must be more suspicious than ever of the actions of the Israeli government?"
The truth is that over the years that paper published only a few articles supporting the peace camp in Israel, but at this juncture he has a good point.
On Monday, the veteran and highly esteemed Lebanese journalist Arfan Nizam Al-Din, who served as the editor of the Arabic-language newspapers Al-Hayat and Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, published in London, sent a letter to the Israeli voter via the pages of Al-Hayat. "Think carefully before you cast your ballots," he warns. "This is not a choice between one party or another or between one leader and another; it is a choice between peace and war. The olive branch is still waiting for you in the form of the Arab initiative."
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