Jerusalem Post Column, Yalla Peace: Palestinians need to look forward, not backward

Palestinians need to look forward, not backward
By RAY HANANIA
06/23/2010 JERUSALEM POST

The construction of what is called the first ‘Palestinian settlement’ in the West Bank – Rawabi – is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing more of to build Palestine.

Qatar is unlike many of the other Arab countries that support the Palestinians.

Instead of donating lip-service and writing checks to be used in conflict, it has invested heavily in a project with a Palestinian construction company to build a new city in the West Bank called Rawabi.

The Palestinians should be focused on doing more of this; building Palestine, and switching gears from the confrontation-style politics of Hamas, Hizbullah, Iran and a lot of other losers who love to exploit Palestinian suffering.

Even Turkey might consider putting a cork in its rhetoric.

The confrontation politics of the past was a zero-sum game that achieved very little. In terms of Palestinian interests, it’s a step backward, not forward, to keep fighting with Israel. Instead of confronting Israel at every corner, Palestinians should spend at least some of their efforts building their country and strengthening not only its economy but national pride.

Building Palestinian cities in the West Bank is just one way to do this.

If Hamas had any real leaders instead of the modern-day bombastic Nassers it has now, they’d spend more time trying to lure Arab world development into the Gaza Strip to build rather than spending all their time with their confrontational go-nowhere rhetoric that helped empower Israel’s stranglehold on the Gaza Strip.

We really do need to start building more cities in Palestine, mainly for the day when the refugees will be able to walk out of their camps. We need to give them a quality of life alternative to the sad existence sustained by the charity of the outside world.

Not that the outside world doesn’t owe Palestinians a lot. It does.

Rawabi is a brilliant vision of what Palestinian life can be after confrontation with Israel. Palestine can be a better country. It can be the economic hub of the Middle East.

Palestine, in peace, can offer the region far more than as a constant antagonist.

Of course, that means the activists need to stop exploiting Palestinian suffering for their own needs, too.

But mainly, Palestinians need to stop listening to the no-future activists who promise only confrontation.

Rather than flotillas, Palestine needs more Rawabis, places where Palestinian pride can defeat Israeli occupation. Rawabi would be the first modern, planned Palestinian city – a step that officials say will help build an independent state – located about 30 kilometers north of Jerusalem. It’s modeled on the typical US suburb.

THE BIGGEST problem is Israel. Israel has been dragging its feet on giving approval for an access road. The Israelis keep saying how much they want peace and how much they want Palestinians to focus on rebuilding Palestine, but while Israel “talks the talk,” it doesn’t “walks the walk.”

The $700 million Rawabi project is funded by the Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Co. and the Ramallahbased Massar International.

Mortgage loans would be managed by the US Overseas Private Investment Corp., an investment arm of the US government.

The company began pouring foundations this year and anticipates that the first families will be able to move in by 2013.


But without an access road, residents would have to do the “Palestinian-Israeli shuffle” used to navigate Israel’s checkpoints and road access restrictions, traveling through narrow winding roads, including on two miles of West Bank land controlled by Israel. Rawabi is located in Area A, which is controlled by the Palestinians. The road access it needs is in Area C, controlled by the Israeli military, and on the ground, by settlers who continue to protest, angry that foreign dollars for settlement construction in the West Bank are going to Palestinians.

Palestinians will continue to have to put up with the warped views of Israeli writers like Yoaz Hendel, who recently wrote in the op-ed “Anti- Jewish apartheid” for Ynet, rather inaccurately, “We [Israelis] got used to the world referring to the war against Palestinian terrorism as apartheid, we got so used to being guilty, to the point of failing to notice that the construction apartheid is happening to be directed against us. The Arabs are allowed to buy homes anywhere, while the Jews are not. The Arabs are allowed to build, expand and engage in familyreunification.

The Jews are forbidden.”

No Yoaz, Palestinians are not permitted to live or build anywhere.

Take a trip to my land, for example, next to Gilo: 34 dunams that Israel has frozen so non-Jews cannot build there; land located in the West Bank annexed by Israel on the Israeli side of the wall. Yet Yoaz says it is hypocritical for Palestinians to criticize the settlers, who build Jewish-only settlements while the Palestinians build cities like Rawabi, which presumably is for Palestinians only.

Well, Yoaz, the fact is that the settlers are not building homes in Israel. They are building them in the West Bank. The true comparison would be if Rawabi were being built next to Haifa, for Palestinians only.

Of course, that’s a small detail that right-wing Israelis love to ignore.

But if Palestinians are going to move forward, we’ll need to ignore the ranting and self-righteous lamentations from both the Israeli and Arab sides.

Build more Rawabis. And in the process of building Palestine, we must find time to negotiate a genuine peace agreement.

The writer is an award-winning columnist and Chicago radio talk show host. www.YallaPeace.com

Release of Libyan in Lockerbie bombing is opportunity to put injustices of the past behind us

It is understandable that many Americans are upset about the decision by the Scottish court to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi from his 27 year prison sentence after only a few years served.

The accused, al-Megrahi, was convicted in the bombing of PAN AM Flight 103 in 1988. The plane was flying over Lockerbie when it exploded, killing all 259 passengers and crew and 11 civilians on the ground.

But not understandable is the narrow-vision of Americans who always see terrorism as an act of violence by someone else, but never an act of violence that has resulted from terrorism committed by the United States and the West against civilians in the Arab World.

Libyan President Moammar Gaddafi's infant daughter was among the 36 civilians murdered in 1986 when US President Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing of one of Gaddafi's homes.

The attack was not against a Libyan military target but rather against innocent civilians. Reagan alleged that Libya was behind the bombing of a disco many weeks earlier that took the lives of two American soldiers and one Turkish woman, and injuring dozens of others in Berlin.

But Americans screaming about al-Megrahi's release, seem blind and unconcerned when justice is lost involving non-American murdered by American foreign policies.

Thousands of Arabs in the Middle East were killed because of American policies, and those murders often were the motivation between retaliatory violence against Western targets, including the PAN AM Flight and other airline targets.

Terrorism is terrorism, but justice is also justice. The fact is that no one has complained when Reagan was never brought to justice for ordering the killing of Libyan civilians. Or, for that matter, no one in America was ever charged with funding and orchestrating and "masterminding" the murder of civilians in Iran during the pro-American and funded terrorist regime of The Shah of Iran Moahmmed Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi was one of the worst mass murderers in Middle east history and he was protected by Americans.

Osama Bin laden is well known today as the terrorst mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the United States, taking some 3,000 lives. But Americans conveniently forget that Bin laden was a member of the Mujahideen trained and funded by the United States in the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.

And, we conveniently forget that Iraq's murdered dictator Saddam Hussein was in fact our ally int he war against the Iranian religious Muslim successors to the terrorist Shah of Iran, the Ayatollahs who held so many Americans hostage during the administration of former President Jimmy Carter.

Rather than lament the release of al-Megrahi, Americans should look towards it as an opportunity to close a dark period in our history fromt he 1970s and 1980s when American terrorism was answered with Middle East terrorism.

-- Ray Hanania
www.RadioChicagoland.com