Time to separate Israelis, Palestinians
By Omar Jabara, Special to the News -- August 17, 2001
The time for an international observer force in the Palestinian territories, occupied by Israel's military since 1967, has come. Clearly, the two sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are unable to restrain themselves and risk plunging the entire region into a war that will require a massive U.S. military intervention to protect our vital strategic interests from a damaging, full-scale conflagration. In this instance, an ounce of prevention is worth 100 pounds of cure.
The United States, the other Western democracies and Russia also agree that an international observer force is necessary to create a barrier between the awesome Israeli military and the Palestinian population that opposes it. Yet Israel is against the idea. Could it be Israel has something to hide?
Thanks to $5 billion a year in American tax dollars, Israel is the fifth strongest military in the world with well over 200 nuclear warheads. Yet Israel and the extremely powerful pro-Israel lobby (with more than 60 political action committees in the U.S.) have done an excellent job of convincing people that Israel is somehow the victim of the people its military dominates. This wouldn't be the first time Israel's well-funded public relations campaigns in the West have succeeded.
Even before Israel was created in Palestine in 1948, the motto of the Zionist (Israeli) movement was, "A land without a people for a people without a land." With this simple phrase they succeeded in convincing many that the land of Palestine -- some of the most fertile land in the entire Middle East -- was empty. As the saying goes, it is the big lie that is more likely to be believed.
Professor Maxime Rodinson, professor of history at the Sorbonne University in Paris and himself a Jew, wrote in 1968: "The Arab population of Palestine was native in all senses of the word and their roots in Palestine can be traced back at least 40 centuries."
The campaign to create Israel was not only intent on physically removing the indigenous Palestinians, it sought to eliminate any historical reference to their presence in the land of Palestine.
As esteemed, former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said to The Times of London on June 15, 1969: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people, and in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people, and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
Three hundred eighty-five of the 475 Palestinian villages and towns in Palestine were bulldozed by Israel and 780,000 Palestinians were forced to flee to the surrounding countries or face death and torture at the hands of Israeli terrorist gangs such as the Irgun and Stern Gang.
Today, torture and attacks on Palestinian civilians continue; the difference is the Israeli terrorists of today do it under the auspices of state legitimacy.
According to an Israeli government report released in February of last year -- five years after it was written -- the Israeli internal security service, Shin Bet, used systematic torture against Palestinians and regularly lied about it. The report said, "The irregularities were not, for the most part, the result of not knowing the line between the permissible and the forbidden, but rather were committed knowingly."
Is Israel the victim of the people whose land it occupies, as it wants the world to believe? A May article in the Jerusalem Post quoted renowned international war crimes investigator, Terje Lund of Norway, as saying, "Israel is guilty of innumerable war crimes. I regard much of Israel's aggression against Palestinians to be pure terrorism."
The first step to ending the bloodshed on both sides -- including the tragic
suicide bombings which target Israeli civilians -- is to separate the Israeli
Army from the Palestinian population. The alternative to an international
observer force is a wider war in which everyone loses.
Omar Jabara is a resident of Arvada. He can be reached at ojabara@sprynet.com.