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

Yalla Peace: Out with the old (system)

Jerusalem Post: Yalla Peace: Out with the old (system)
By RAY HANANIA
06/15/2010 JERUSALEM POST

To survive, Palestinians needs an election system that will result in true representation, rather than the failed one that has sputtered on and off.

Parliamentary systems do not really work in the Arab world. It definitely doesn’t work in Palestine, where coalitions are hard to establish and people vote not on the basis of issues but on ethnicity, religion, tribes and clans.

To survive, Palestinians need a real election system that will result in true representation by the people and for the people, rather than the failed system that has sputtered on and off since 2003.

There is nothing successful about any of the elections in Palestine, from the 2005 municipal and presidential elections to the 2006 legislative elections. International observers like former president Jimmy Carter can claim they were fair, but they are talking about the casting of the votes, not about the process of the election itself.

In fact, the history of Palestinian elections is one mess followed by another, with a minority of voters controlling the government. The 2005 municipal elections were supposed to be completed over several election dates. Voters were to select from two ballots, one a list of parties, the other a list of individual candidates. The election cycle was never completed.

Mahmoud Abbas was elected president in that same process on January 9, 2005, with 62 percent of the vote. But despite the majority, the system was unfair. State run media coverage was denied to his challengers.

After Abbas’s election, Hamas continued to act as a shadow government, engaging in foreign policy and suicide missions against Israel to further destroy the ailing peace process.

Built on the failed municipal elections, the legislative elections went ahead anyway on January 25, 2006.

A real election results when the majority of the voters chooses its leadership. That’s not what happened. Hamas won the election but never won a majority of the votes.

Hamas won 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats with Fatah winning only 43 seats, later increasing to 45. The remaining seats were won by smaller splinter groups which were less coalitions and more parties set up by individuals who had no real grassroots support.

The voting system was confusing. People voted on two ballots, again to select a “party” and then to select individuals. It was intentionally confusing, I think, because the powers that be wanted to undermine Hamas and strengthen Fatah. That backfired.

Hamas won a majority of parliament’s seats, but again, it only won 44 percent of the votes cast on the party lists. More than 50,000 of the 1.1 million votes cast were thrown out. Hamas candidates also only won 41% of the votes on the individual lists, while Fatah candidates won 37%.

Instead of embracing the peace process that brought the elections, jubilant Hamas leaders immediately declared their intention to undermine the peace process. That should not have been surprising as Hamas, and the left-wing rejectionist groups like the Jabha and extremist activists in the West, spent most of the prior 13 years using suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks to block peace.


PRIOR TO the election and the expansion of the parliament from 88 to 132 seats, Fatah held a solid majority, 68 of the original 88 seats. What went wrong? Well, Fatah had the votes. But while Hamas offered no choices, Fatah offered too many choices. That divided its base. Long time Fatah leaders were engaged in an internal battle with young rebels who sought to change the leadership of the party. That should have been decided outside of the election, not during the election.

Rather than challenge the corrupt election system, the ruling Palestinian leadership, including Ahmed Qurei, who was appointed prime minister in 2003, too quickly accepted its fate.

What Palestine needs is a Western-style democratic system where elections are held in two distinct rounds of voting. The first vote represents the process by which party supporters decide who will be their candidates. In the West, that is called a “primary” election.

The winners of the primaries then become the candidates who run for office in the final round, called the general election. Only when a candidate wins more than 50% of the votes cast in a general election is that candidate declared the winner.

Because this election process was flawed and there was no clear majority, Palestine was destined for turmoil. Abbas was supposed to run for reelection in 2009 but that never happened because of the Hamas “victory.” In response, the PLO suspended elections and extended Abbas’s term in office. Israel responded by imprisoning many in the Hamas government. Rather than weaken Hamas, Israel’s policies empowered it even more.

Recently, elections have been again delayed, but without offering a real alternative. That only makes matters worse. Instead of simply delaying the elections, Abbas should reconstitute the election system. Throw out the parliamentary system. Replace it with a primary-general election process. Require that every office holder be elected by a majority of votes cast. Replace the office of prime minister with a vice president and keep the power in the hands of the president.

In the event that there are more than two parties in an election and more than two candidates, then if no one gets more than 50% of the vote, then the two highest vote-getters would run-off with the winner taking the majority.

Without a new election system, there can be no democracy in Palestine. The turmoil of the failed elections in 2005 and 2006 will continue to undermine Palestinian democracy and prevent the nation from emerging as a whole.

The collapse of secular government in Palestine is not only Israel’s biggest concern, it will also be a nightmare for the Palestinians.

The writer is an award-winning Palestinian columnist. He can be reached at www.YallaPeace.com and rghanania@gmail.com

Wanted: Israeli strategic long-term thinking

Wanted: Israeli strategic long-term thinking
By RAY HANANIA
06/08/2010 JERUSALEM POST

At the rate it’s going, Israel will eventually help Hamas
become one of the most formidable political forces in the region.

Israel’s botched handling of the seizure of the Mavi Marmara seeking to break the Gaza blockade isn’t the first time a government in Israel has messed up. The Israelis actually have a long and consistent record of missing opportunities to avoid conflict.

Just look at the record of bad decisions.

In the 1970s, to avoid peace talks with the PLO and Yasser Arafat, Israel’s leaders developed a scheme to create an Islamic alternative. They provided support to the Islamic Association, headed by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, whom the Israelis killed in a targeted assassination in 2004.

That scheme allowed Yassin and his Gaza-based organization to launch Hamas in 1989 at the start of the first intifada. Although Israel did not “create” Hamas as some claim, Israel’s mess ups helped midwife Hamas.

Big mistake.

When Yasser Arafat’s peace partner, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered by an extremist Jew, instead of using the tragedy to undermine Israeli extremism, the government spiraled toward a policy of blaming the Palestinians for all peace failures. Voters responded by electing leaders who opposed Rabin’s peace vision, wrongly believing that a “tough” leader – I call it the Menachem Begin factor – would bring peace.

Instead of reinforcing peace, tough policies once again reinforced extremism and further weakened peace.

WHEN THE Israelis finally decided to consider returning lands seized in 1967, instead of making the right choice for peace, Israel’s “tough” leaders made the politically expedient choice, withdrawing their troops – and citizens – from Gaza in 2005 unilaterally.

Again, Israel’s policies strengthened Hamas and made it look like a hero to a people besieged by military occupation and frustrated by the start-and-stop failures of peace.

This was a mistake that crowned Hamas as the movement to defeat Israel’s 1967 occupation policies.

And just as these failed policies reinforced a slow and steady movement of Palestinians toward religious extremism and Hamas, it also created a growing intransigence among Israeli voters who, instead of voting for new, fresh or creative leadership, always voted instead to chose the “tough” leader. The one they hoped would beat down Palestinian nationalism and allow them to believe they could make peace with no substantive concessions on land.

When President Barack Obama spoke about the need to recognize the needs of “both sides” in a speech one year ago designed to reinforce moderation in the Arab and Muslim world, Israelis, seemingly unfamiliar with balanced arbiters, took the comments personally and did everything they could to undermine his policies using their political allies who control both houses of the US Congress.

And when Obama sought to kick-start the peace process by bringing Palestinians and Israelis from the battlefield to the negotiating table, Israel’s government (some of the same who were involved in the 1970s decision to support Yassin’s Islamic Association) couldn’t even stand up to the public pressure to freeze settlement expansion without damaging the “special relationship” with the US.

And now there is the disastrous naval response to the bunch of “activists” who might have sailed into distant memory but are now being hailed around the world as leaders of Middle East civil rights, deflecting attention from Hamas, highlighting the nature of Israel’s blockade against 1.5 million civilians and shattering the already precarious relations with its only real ally in the Middle East, Turkey.

If these policy decisions were intentionally designed to undermine peace and Israel’s standing in the world, I would call the tactics brilliant. But the truth is each and every failure is the result of government policy gone wrong, reinforced by an Israeli public that lives in denial.

At this rate, Israel will eventually help Hamas become one of the most dominant and formidable political forces in the region, the other being Hizbullah.

Of course, Israeli voters might wake up from their hallucinations about their future based on an iron-fist policy and withdraw completely from the West Bank to, for the first time, do something to support the only alternative to Hamas, the secular and anemic Palestinian Authority.

But then, that would require some strategic long-term thinking and that’s not something Israel has a good record of.

The writer is an award-winning Palestinian-American columnist. www.YallaPeace.com

From Dubai to Twitter - what's real? Hanania Jerusalem Post column March 3, 2010

From Dubai to Twitter - what's real?
Could Salam Fayyad's new Twitter feed be another Mossad strategy to throw Palestinians into turmoil?
From The Jerusalem Post Published March 4, 2010
By RAY HANANIA

Whenever my wife Alison and I go out to eat, she always asks the waitress about her menu choices: “Does this one taste good?” I’m sitting there thinking, hmmm! I wonder if the waitress is going to lean over and say, “No. That really tastes terrible. You should go to another restaurant.”

Alison gets very angry with me when I point out the obvious: “Do you really expect the waitress to tell you the food doesn’t taste good?” The waitress responds with public relations, ignoring me and saying, “It’s good, but this one is better.”

Well, it’s one thing to confront a waitress and be naïve in a restaurant. It’s another in the Middle East, where it’s easier to blow nargila smoke in someone’s face. Arabs and Israelis are always willing to believe whatever they are told about the other, especially if it’s something bad.

Who murdered Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on January 19? Dubai police point the finger at the Mossad, Israel’s secret spy agency, which has a record of assassinations, as depicted by filmmaker Steven Spielberg in Munich. Israel reacted predictably, asserting that Mabhouh was involved in smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip, and insisting he was responsible for the killing 20 years ago of two Israeli soldiers.

The Israelis refuse to take “credit” for the killing: Mabhouh was reportedly injected with a muscle relaxant that made him immobile, and was then suffocated with his hotel pillow.

Like the waitress put in a spot, Israel understands the power of public relations. Israelis spend millions on PR. They were the first in the Middle East to create a presence on the Internet, back in the early 1990s. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have no concept of PR or professional communications. They do little with strategy and most of it is by accident.

When Israel does something bad, Israeli officials never take credit. When Hamas commits a killing, they can’t wait to blame themselves.

YOU CAN see the differences between Israelis and Palestinians on the Internet’s leading new social networking tool, Twitter, which (for those who don’t know allows you to post messages of under 140 characters, including spaces). Other people can “follow” you and read your posts. Some people have as many as 1 million followers. Imagine being able to send a fast message to one million people at a time? That’s power PR.

A quick check shows there are many Palestinians and Israelis using Twitter.

Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon has an account. Despite his bungling style, Ayalon has 1,745 followers and is following 805, nearly every one of them an Israeli person or a news site.

Ayalon is on top of the news, and is quick to send notices to his followers condemning the Palestinians for this or that and defending Israel’s actions. After the Chilean earthquake last week, he offered his condolences to the people of Chile and the families who lost loved ones – something he never seems to do when Palestinians are the victims of some confrontation with Israel.

I also found Twitter accounts for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and one of my friends, Labor Party Knesset member Einat Wilf.

On the Palestinian side, there are accounts for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, former security chief Muhammad Dahlan, and for the popular Palestinian moderate Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

I connected with Fayyad after he started to “follow” me. But how do I know any of the Palestinians are who they claim to be?

“Twitter Fayyad” writes fascinating posts like this one: “I think Rafik al-Husseini should take a page from Tiger Woods and do a press conference admitting his actions and taking responsibility.”

Or this exchange with “Twitter Dahlan” over who was responsible for the Mabhouh murder: “Ya man. Beards are only OK if you are mujahideen on holiday or Mossad tennis stars?”

And another from “Twitter Fayyad” to “Twitter Dahlan.” “Bas ya zelameh. I heard you were in Dubai pulling in old favors to get your ex-mukhabarat construction workers’ release, no?”

There is a real sense of humor in that last one.

The posts seem to suggest “Twitter Fayyad” is a regular guy with a good sense of humor, which is why he is so favored by many in the West, and scolded by Hamas and Jabha fanatics.

Or is it fake? Is this the waitress telling my wife what she wants to hear, or real honesty from a politician willing to jeopardize his job by telling the truth?

I like to think people who have a sense of humor are also likely to embrace peace. No sense of humor means no chance of ever making peace.

Of course, “Twitter Fayyad” may not be the real Salam Fayyad at all. That’s what my friend Hussein Ibish at the American Task Force on Palestine insists, and I believe him.

“Twitter Fayyad” has only 160 followers, and is following 305 others. That’s a clue.

Among people he is following are Shakira, Kim Kardashian, Rihanna and Lady Gaga.

In a region of the world where anger, hate and violence dominate the headlines, we could use more humor and a lot more of Shakira, Kim Kardashian, Rihanna and especially Lady Gaga.

Of course, “Twitter Fayyad” could just be another Mossad strategy to throw Palestinians into internal turmoil. It’s not hard to believe, and certainly more effective than killing some obscure Hamas operative in Dubai.

end

Pro-Hamas media bias and Gaza activists block peace

Pro-Hamas media bias and Gaza activists block peace
By Ray Hanania

When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas complained recently in Qatar that the media there was pro-Hamas, and that tis bias was threatening the ability to achieve peace, he struck a chord that many Palestinians know is true.

It isn't just the mainstream Arab media that is pro-Hamas, branded a "terrorist organization" by many nations, but it's also the groups that support Hamas that slowly dominate the Middle East landscape unchallenged that are threatening peace.

A good example of this is the issue of the Gaza Strip, where Palestinians complain they are under an oppressive military and economic Israeli siege and where Israelis counter that radical elements there continue to target their civilians with Katyushas and Kassam missiles.

Gaza is a very complicated issue, but not that hard to really understand.

The area has been controlled by Hamas and radical Muslims since the 1970s. Although Hamas's parent organization, the Islamic Association, did provide health and social care to its citizens, that care was only given to those who embraced its hard-line religious ideology.

Hamas opposes genuine peace with Israel, and used the most pernicious form of violence - suicide bombings - throughout the 1990s to destroy the peace process and prevent compromise. Its mission is not to achieve peace based on compromise, but to pursue the impossible dream - more a nightmare for everyday Palestinians - of destroying Israel and returning Palestine to what it was in 1917, before it came under British colonialism.

THAT HAMAS desire is not only shared by the religious extremists who continue to grow, but by those who are secular fanatics yet also oppose peace based on compromise. Most of those activists are based in Western countries, where it is easy to chant for the destruction of not only Israel but of Abbas's secular Palestinian government which does support compromise based on two-states.

These are strange bedfellows in the Palestinian extremist camps, religious fanatics shoulder-to-shoulder with secular extremists like the Popular Front and the rejectionists led by the activists and fawned on by the Arab media that mistakenly believe "freedom" means embracing the most extremist activists.

The Arab media, which glorify religious extremism and even violent attacks, don't realize, of course, that under a Hamas-run government, it wouldn't just be Jews, Christians and secular Muslims who would be oppressed. The media in a Hamastan would be among the primary targets, stripped of the "freedoms" they enjoy today - of criticizing Abbas, two states and peace based on compromise.

THE ISSUE for the Free Gaza protesters is not about bringing freedom to the 1.3 million Palestinians there or lifting Israel's "oppressive military and economic siege." It's about their long-term goals. By "freeing" Gaza, they mean declaring Hamas the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people." But that's not their goal.

The purpose of many of the protesters is to strengthen Hamas. They know that Israel is forced to deal first with the threats rather than the compelling cases for peace. And Hamas is a threat not only to Israel but also to the Palestinians, secular Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan, to Christian and Jewish religious independence and, more importantly, to the goal of achieving a peace based on nonviolent compromise.

The activists continue to cling to the false and irrelevant claims that Hamas won one election in 2006 and ignore the fact that Hamas was ousted from political leadership in the same way it was installed. It was a corrupt election that was poorly constructed, allowing the divisions of the majority of Palestinians to be merged with Hamas's faith-based reticence. In Western nations with elections, they separate the two processes, allowing individual parties to select their candidates from internal battles before putting them up against candidates from the other parties.

Hamas and the activists have allowed the Gaza Strip to fester in economic squalor because it suits their purpose. They can't rally support based on their ideals because they have no realistic ideals. They call for the destruction of Israel and the destruction of a secular two-state Palestine, and also for the destruction of Egypt and pretty much anyone who doesn't agree with their extremist agendas.

Rather than help the besieged people of the Gaza Strip achieve freedom and build the first steps of a secular Palestinian state that would lead to the creation of full Palestinian statehood in the West Bank, the protesters have helped to encase the Palestinians there in continued suffering.

THE PROTESTERS seeking to enter Gaza have closed their eyes to the oppression and brutality that is the true Hamas. They have limited their criticism to Egypt.

More importantly, this bizarre alliance between the religious fanatics and the secular extremists which today is focused on the Gaza Strip is silent on the campaign of terror that Hamas continues to wage against secular Palestinians.

Hamas has made it easy for some to oppose Palestinian statehood, and is the main obstacle standing in the way of peace.

The Arab media are going through an internal struggle no different than the one now dominating Arab and Palestinian politics. It's one between extremists who see the media as an instrument of activism and those of us who believe the media must remain objective witnesses to the truth.

Truth means that not all of today's tragic events can be blamed on Israel, Egypt, Abbas or on the failure, so far, to achieve peace.

The writer is a Palestinian American columnist, satirist and founder of Yalla Peace.

This column appeared in the Jerusalem Post Jan. 12, 2010

Israel's government distorts truth in response to War Crimes report

Israel's government distorts truth in response to War Crimes report
By Ray Hanania --Renown South African Jurist Richard Goldstone has completed a comprehensive report on the war crimes committed during the Israeli war started against Hamas in the Gaza Strip on Nov. 4, 2008 and the Israeli response has been to call Goldstone, a Jew who prosecuted war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia an "anti-Semite" with no basis in international law. While the war crimes in Gaza are a real crime, the outrageous slander that marks Israel's government response to any form of criticism is an even bigger crime. They argue Israel did not start the war, Hamas did. But the facts prove Israel wrong. But does truth matter in today's world? Not when it comes to Israel's government.

I completed an exhaustive study of how the Gaza War started based on Israeli government and university sources that monitored the peace agreement that was in place between Israel and Hamas in 2008 that involved the firing of rockets and Israeli attacks against the Gaza Strip.

The facts show Israel intentionally started the Gaza war mainly fearing that the election of Barack Obama as president -- because he was raised in a Muslim background, has an Arab middle name, Hussein, was friend with many Palestinian activists in Chicago, and has an inherent sympathy for downtrodden people abused by demagogues and government dictatorship.

Here's the link to the report:

www.TheMediaOasis.com/Hamasrockets.htm

What you might also notice if you research anything that has to do with Israeli atrocities and reports of this kind is that the Government of Israel has engaged in a strategic public relations campaign to counter the unveiling of the truth and to protect their lies.

For example, at the bottom of nearly every Google Web site reference to Israel's war crimes in Gaza are ads purchased by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Israel's Government, which leads individuals who red these few online reports to see an alternative propaganda spin.

This debate over Goldstone's war crimes report is being handled differently by Arabs and Israelis.

The Arabs are relying on their worthless, emotional leadership and activist spokespeople to scream and yell and make the Arabs feel good. But the Arab response to the report has been insignificant in terms of educating the world to the veracity of the report.

In contrast, Israel's government has unleashed a sophisticated public relations campaign to counter the truth and make a pre-eminent Jewish legal scholar, Richard Goldstone, into an anti-Semite.

It's the same kind of immoral conduct that Israel and its legion of blind supporters engaged in responding to former President Jimmy Carter who accurately warned that Israel's actions in the West bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip against the occupied civilians there amounted to a form of Apartheid.

Since then, Carter has been vilified and the vilification of Carter continues. Carter's biggest problem is that he continues to associate with the loser leaders and activists in the Palestinian community, especially in the United States, who could argue their way out of a paperbag they are so incompetent.

The fact is Israel is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in public relations and communications dollars to spin the truth into acceptable lies that favor them. But they really don't need to because the Arab response has been pathetic, filled with emotion rather than facts and logic and actually play in to the Israeli defense strategy.

It is a tragic day in this world when the victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity can't even get a chance to defend themselves and face their accusers in an open court. Palestinian victims are much like the women assaulted by male rapists. The rapists main defense is that the women victims "caused" their own rape by inviting it. They use fear and further shame to force the victims of rape to remain silent.

Goldstone's report was meticulous and fair. It not only cites instances of war crimes in the murder of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli Defense Forces, it also condemns Hamas with also committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But it's the fact that the report is balanced and holds not only Hamas but Israel's government to account that most offends Israel's supporters who would rather lie to defend Israel than to acknowledge the truth in order to achieve a lasting peace.

END

Aljazeera expelled from West Bank exposes issues

Aljazeera Arabic under siege in West Bank
By Ray Hanania

Aljazeera Arabic became the first television station to broadcast balanced news about the Middle East, but over the years its editorial staff has expanded to include several people who are less about journalism and more about partisan political activism, mainly supporting Hamas and the growing Islamic extremist movement.

The biggest complaint has been about its coverage, which critics have called biased and supporters have said does not advocate pro-Palestinian and Islamic views enough.

The station has exposed corruption and government oppression in almost all of the Arab countries, except in its host country Qatar whose royal family launched the station using its huge oil profits, and the station has paid for that journalism.

It has been banned in several of the Arab World countries for challenging and criticizing the host governments, but it remains banned in the United States where pro-Israeli cable companies have refused to include it in its daily lineup, scheduling, instead, Shalom Israel and other pro-Israeli and rightwing programming.

But this week, the satellite TV station was banned in the one country where it has done the most good to expose government injustice, Palestine. For years, Aljazeera has lead the charge in breaking major news stories in Palestine that the biased mainstream American news media has refused to report because of pro-Israel partisanships.

It’s biggest critic has been Israel, which regularly censors the media and imposes bans against media who too harshly criticize the Israeli government. But the ban did not come from Israel, which can afford to tolerate Aljazeera’s tough news reporting. It came from the Palestine National Authority and the besieged and beleaguered government of President Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas acted to ban Aljazeera after a longtime critic and extremist member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Faruk Kaddoumi, accused Abbas of involvement in the “murder” of a sacred Palestinian icon and national hero, Yasir Arafat. Kaddoumi’s extremist views and his rejection of all compromise with Israel are notorious and are in part responsible for the failure of the Palestinians to have established a country after the 1948 Nakba or “Palestinian catastrophe.”

But instead of ignoring the irrelevant Kaddoumi, Abbas responded by shutting down all of Aljazeera’s West bank operations. It’s a stupid move but typical of the stupid moves the Palestinian leadership has made over the past 62 years since Israel was established.

The truth is Aljazeera does have some elements of bias and activism, editors recruited from pro-Hamas bastions like Chicago who openly use their journalism skills to skewer the truth and promote Hamas, the terrorist organization which has used violence and suicide bombings to undermine the peace process and the achievement of the “two-state solution” between Israel and Palestine.

There is little at Aljazeera Arabic can do to change things. The practice of cutting ones nose off to spite their face is a cornerstone of Arab and Islamic culture. The rejection of solutions has always been the Arab and Islamic response to conflict. The extremists who hold the Arab and Islamic World’s hostage have helped bring Palestine to its knees, giving Israel every benefit to expand their occupation and annexation of civilian lands over the years.

Although Palestinians won’t admit it, because sometimes the truth is too painful to accept, it has been Palestinian extremist practices that have helped to reinforce the Israeli occupation and to enslave refugees in lifetimes of poverty, hopelessness and limbo.

The failure of Palestinians to use reason not emotion to develop strategies to confront the threats of destruction from Israel’s own extremists have undermined Palestinian national aspirations and have emboldened the destructive fanatics whose extremist policies are designed to benefit themselves personally.

Israel was quick to jump on the news of the PNA ban on Aljazeera issuing a statement calling the first Arab TV satellite station to break the barriers of Arab World oppression. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said, "What Al-Jazeera does is not journalism. It is political militancy.”

He’s not far off. But what Aljazeera does is far more professional in terms of true journalism than most Israeli or mainstream American news media who base their coverage of the Arab World on a savage and sometimes hateful anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim spirit.

Without Aljazeera, and a few other independently professional Arab TV satellite stations like Alarabiya, truth will continue to be the primary victim in the journalism coverage of the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Clearly, both Israel and the Arab governments, including the ineffective Abbas regime, share that same goal.

But while that may be true, Hamas is issuing phony proclamations about how the action has suspended freedom of speech and civil rights. Are you kidding me? Over the past decade, Hamas has been the leader in forcing women to veil, closing down dance and music stores, threatening and beating individuals selling alcohol and engaging in practices teaching children that violence, not reason, is the answer to suffering.

Aljazeera needs to clean its house of the handful of pro-Hamas activists who veil themselves in the phony cloth of journalism to promote their pro-Hamas and pro-Islamicist agendas.

(Ray Hanania is an award winning Palestinian American columnist, author and Chicago radio talk show host. He can be reached at www.RadioChicagoland.com.)

Future of Middle East peace hangs in Israeli election balance

Violence drives politics in the Middle East, not just in the decisions by the dictators who control the Arab countries, but also in the election booth in Israel's quasi-Democratic parliamentary system.

Tuesday, Israelis go to the polls, and once again they share in this election what has been shared before. The elections follow a major wave of violence and conflict. And, most of the Arab Palestinian citizens in Israel will, once again, cut off the noses of their pride to spite their best interests. They will boycott the elections argiong that there is no difference between the Kadima and Labor Parties on the left, headed by Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak, and with the utltra-extremist parties led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

In the past, elections that have followed long periods of conflict and violence in Israel, have ended up causing israel's electorate to spin out of control to embrace the far right.

In happened in 1996, a year after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli fanatic who opposed his support of peace with the Palestinians and a growing spat of suicide bombings by the Hamas terrorist organization. Benjamin Netanyahu ousted Shimon Peres as prime minister and drove the nation towards a harsher confrontation with the Palestinians and moved the region further away from peace.

In 2000, the peace process collapsed driven by a lot of factors. Those factors included the inept manipulation of the process by President Bill Clinton and his biased Middle East liaison Dennis Ross; the refusal of Barak, then Israel's prime minister to meet face-to-face with Palestinian President Yasir Arafat; and Arafat's inability to accept the elimination of the Palestinian Right of Return without a major quid pro quo from Israel. The collapse launched the 2nd Intifada, or Palestinian "rebellion" against the Israeli occupation, and another long wave of violence and suicide attacks by Hamas. That violence helped Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most extreme leaders, to win the election.

Now, as the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip has raised the level of condemnation of Israel's harsh military assault that included hundreds of civilian fatalities by nation's throughout the world, Netanyahu is perched to once again win. Many believe Netanyahu's rivals, Livni and Barak and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister who has been accused of wide spread corruption and was forced to step down as a candidate for re-election and th ehead of his party, launched the Gaza War thinking they could undercut Netanyahu's extremism by showing the voters they could flex their muscles.

But the Gaza war failed to achieve any of Israel's goals. Hamas remains not only as a potent force but with growing popularity among frustrated Palestinians convinced Israel will never concede any land or remove core settlements in the West Bank. Israel withdrew after weeks of onslaught, but without destroying Hamas.

The real tragedy is that the Middle East has been leaderless for years. Everyone talks peace, but few leaders, Arab or Israeli, have the courage to fight for peace. it is easier to fight in wars.

Even more tragic is the fact that Arabs and Israelis both know what the final compromise will be: Land for peace. Israeli security. Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A sharing of Arab East Jerusalem with Israel given control over the city's ancient Jewish areas. Compensation for the refugees, Palestinian and Jewish. And Israel keeps some settlements in the West Bank in exchange for an equal amount of land (inch-for-inch) from the pre-1967 Israel borders.

The peace agreement is out there. It's just waiting for people willing to make it work.

-- Ray Hanania
www.RadioChicagoland.com