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December 25, 2001
Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's
Human Rights Record
December 24, 2001
Sam Bahour
It
Happened One Morning
Yair Khilou
Why I Resisted
Being Drafted into the Israeli Army
Michael
Chisari
War
as Diversionary Tactic
Cockburn/St. Clair
Enron
and the Green Seal
December 21, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
War
Good for Bush
John Chuckman
The
First Victim in the
War on Terror
December 20, 2001
Lawrence
McGuire
Killing
Other People's Children
Miriam Rozen
Foundation
Without Representation?
Kenneth
Roth
A
Letter to Rumsfeld on
Military Tribunals
William Blum
Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
December 19, 2001
Marjorie
Cohn
Don't
Pre-Judge John Walker
Sam Bahour
Palestine
and You
December 18, 2001
Shahid
Alam
Clash
of Civilizations?
Carl Estabrook
Who
Opposes This War?
December 17, 2001
Edward
Said
Mahfouz
and the Cruelty
of Memory
December 16, 2001
Amira Howeidy
Dangerous By
Definition?
Bahour
and Dahan
Zinni's
Doomed Mission
December 15, 2001
John Isaacs
Bush's 12
Lumps of Coal
for Christmas
Dana Cook
The
Execution of bin Laden
Yusuf Agha
Tale of the
Tape:
Osama Gump?
December 14, 2001
Don Atapattu
A Conversation with
Norman
Finkelstein
December 13, 2001
Trojanow and Hoskote:
Nonsense
Mantras of Our Times
Dr. A.
Tajudeen
Afghanistan
and Zaire
Michael Williams
Prohibit
Prohibition
December 12, 2001
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens,
Walker
and Osama's Tape
Laura W. Murphy
Ashcroft's
Jihad
Shahid
Alam
Race
and Visibility
December 11, 2001
Joshua Orton
University
of Wisconsin
Won't Aid FBI Interviews
Philip
Farruggio
Cleansing
the Nation's Soul
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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bin Laden and Bush
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Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
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Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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December 26,
2001
2002: The Year of 2's
by Sam Bahour
"We Palestinians believe that the
creation of the State of Israel was a grave political error,
one which has done grievous harm to the interests of all concerned
[...]. But it was not merely an error, it was also a crime.
A crime perpetrated against the natural, fundamental and inalienable
rights of the Palestinians." (A Palestinian Strategy for
Peaceful Coexistence: On the Future of Palestine, Said Hammami
as quoted in Israel: Apartheid State, Uri Davis, 1975). The
Palestinian collective memory is blistered by the fact that
Palestine was violated, raped if you will, with the establishment
of the State of Israel in 1948. To this living collective memory,
the latest sixteen months of bloodshed is only yet another chapter
in a far worse 'catastrophe' for the Palestinian people that
began with the creation of Israel, or even before, in 1896,
when the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, published
a pamphlet titled, The Jewish State.
In this stunning pamphlet that served
as the ideological basis for the foundation of the modern state
of Israel, Herzl proposed a Jewish nation be established in
either Palestine or Argentine [Argentina] (and later added Uganda
to the target list). Herzl's point of departure in envisioning
the Jewish state was exemplified when he bluntly wrote, "We
shall take what is given us...".
Unfortunately, for the Palestinians that
were uprooted to make room for the state of Israel, the United
Nations "gave" the Jewish people part of Palestine
in a General Assembly resolution, namely resolution 181 of November
29, 1947. Resolution 181 clearly defines that two states, one
Jewish and one Arab, would be created in British Mandate Palestine.
Interestingly, this was a non-binding General Assembly resolution,
similar to the one taken almost unanimously last week calling
for Israel to withdraw its forces.
When Israel was accepted as a member
of the UN in 1949, it explicitly agreed to a pre-condition placed
upon it by the UN, to implement resolution 181. Furthermore,
a second UN resolution, 194 of December 11, 1948, was also explicitly
stipulated, and accepted by Israel, as a condition to its membership
approval. Resolution 194 calls for the return and compensation
of Palestinians made refugees when Israel was created.
History has progressed and the United
Nations' conflict resolution bearings seem to drift with every
passing year. The reference point for the Oslo peace talks
was the legally binding, United Nations Security Council resolution
242 of November 22, 1967. Resolution 181 was swiftly brushed
aside, its partial implementation ignored by the world community.
In its place, Resolution 242, which demands the "Withdrawal
of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent
conflict", namely the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem,
become the new line in the sand. To date, Israel continues its
refusal to implement UN resolutions 181, 194, 242 and countless
others, including the latest one last week calling for an immediate
reversal of all measures taken on the ground since the latest
wave of violence began on September 28, 2000.
Why Israel, blindly supported by the
United States, was permitted to move the original 181 and 194
goal posts and ignore its original UN membership requirements
will haunt this issue forever.
Similarly, now that the fallout of Oslo
has resulted in the third human "catastrophe" for
Palestinians (1948, 1967, 2000), their acceptance of this new
goal post, called 242, as the foundation for a final solution,
may have permanently stained a chapter in the Palestinian struggle
for their inalienable rights.
As the world apathetically watches the
Middle East head toward self- destruction, I am reminded of
the words of Said Hammami, the PLO representative in London
before being assassinated in 1978. Mr. Hammami said it best
in 1975 when he was speaking about the need for peaceful coexistence
and the need to find a political solution to the issue. He wrote:
All of this will take time and must depend
on the maintenance of effective security for the infant Palestinian
state. This is a real problem. We have heard so much in the
past of Israel's need for security, but to us Palestinians and
to other Arabs living in the countries adjacent to Israel this
seems like putting the boot on the wrong foot. We believe on
the basis of our experience over the past twenty-seven [now
54] years, that we are more in need of protection against Israel
than Israel is of protection against Arabs. I know that Western
opinion has difficulty in believing this, but the truth is [...]
it has suited the book of Israel's leaders in the past to have
conditions of instability prevailing on her borders so that
these could be exploited from time to time to provide pretexts
for renewed war and renewed opportunities of expansion. If
a limited settlement is to survive and gain time for the two
peoples to learn to live together at peace and in mutual tolerance,
the first necessity is to provide the most cast-iron safeguards
possible against a Ben- Gurion or a Moshe Dyan or an Arik [Ariel]
Sharon contriving in [the] future to manufacture a new crisis
and a new conflict to upset the settlement if peace seems to
be working to the disadvantage of Zionism in Israel. That will
be the real risk once a settlement is reached.
Many believe that history repeats itself.
In this case, it has not moved an inch. Israel can end its
agony, and ours, by unilaterally and unconditionally ending
its illegal military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip
and East Jerusalem as well as assuming its original obligations
as a member in the community of nations.
The year 2002, an appropriate number,
may be the last chance for a lasting peace between two peoples,
in two states, to live side by side in harmony.
Sam Bahour
is a Palestinian-American living in the besieged Palestinian
City of Al-Bireh in the West Bank and can be reached at sbahour@palnet.com.
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