“Put Arafat on Trial”

By

-

August 18, 2002

The rule of law requires that murderers be brought to justice. Yasser Arafat is a cold-blooded, premeditated murderer.

It would seem to follow that he should be brought to trial.

The incontrovertible evidence of Arafat’s complicity in murder goes back to 1973, when Palestinian terrorists invaded a diplomatic reception at the Saudi Arabian embassy at Khartoum, Sudan and kidnapped two American diplomats and a Belgian diplomat.

The U.S. National Security Agency intercepted a communication between Yasser Arafat in Beirut and Khalil al-Wazir in the Khartoum office of al-Fatah.

According to James Welch, an American security agent who over- heard the intercept, Arafat was directly involved in the operation, which was code-named Nahr al-Bard, Cold River.

The U.S. government has hard evidence that when the Americans refused the demands of the Palestinian terrorists–to free Sirhan Sirhan, the murderer of Robert Kennedy–Yasser Arafat personally ordered the murder of the three diplomats, one of whom was then the highest ranking African-American in the foreign service.

The diplomats were taken to the basement of the embassy and tortured to death so brutally that “authorities couldn’t tell which was black and which was white.”

Arafat took credit for these murders during a private dinner with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu two months later.

The dinner was attended by General Ion Mihai Pacepa, a high-ranking Romanian intelligence officer who later defected to the United States.

Pacepa wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal earlier this year in which he stated that “Arafat excitedly bragged about his Khartoum operation.”

According to General Pacepa, Arafat also claimed credit for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

These are just some of the thousands of victims–American, Israeli, and others–of the godfather of Palestinian terrorism.

Arafat, like Osama bin Laden, has also targeted Jews, just because they are Jews.

These targets have included people at prayer in synagogues throughout Europe as well as children in nurseries and school buses.

His killing continues up to the present time, as do his false denials.

One can only imagine how many innocent civilians would have been killed by the boatload of Iranian arms captured by the Israelis earlier this year.

As General Pacepa wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “Yasser Arafat remains the same bloody terrorist I knew so well during my years at the top of Romania’s Foreign Intelligence Service.”

This conclusion has been confirmed by many documents discovered by the Israel Defense Forces during Operation Defensive Shield.

Any experienced prosecutor, given access to the evidence–some of which is currently secreted in American, Israeli, and European intelligence files–could present an open-and-shut first-degree murder case against Yasser Arafat.

In considering the various options available to Israel–exile of Arafat, continued negotiation with him, and even targeted assassination–scant consideration has been given to the most obvious legal option: arresting Arafat for murder and placing him on trial in a public courtroom with lawyers and witnesses of his choice.

The reason this option has not been seriously considered is the practical fear that a trial of Arafat would cause more terrorism and more hostage-taking by Palestinians determined to free him. In addition, putting him on trial could make him a martyr among Palestinians, and perhaps even among some Europeans.

In the end, the Israeli government must make the tough decision whether or not to bring Arafat to trial, weighing the claims of public accountability against the practical difficulties of achieving justice. Were I an Israeli, I would recommend a public trial, despite the risks.

The world should see the hard evidence that terrorism has become the tactic of choice for the Palestinian Authority and that Yasser Arafat is personally responsible for the mass murder of innocent civilians.

This is especially important today, when so many Europeans and American academics seem unwilling to see Arafat as a racist murderer.

Whether or not Israel chooses this option, one conclusion remains crystal clear: a fair and open trial of Yasser Arafat on charges of first-degree murder would definitely produce a verdict of guilty.

Harvard Law Professor Alan M. Dershowitz is the author of numerous books, most recently Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (Yale University Press, September 2002).

Don’t Confuse us with Facts – How Israeli Military Intelligence Botched Assessments of Arafat

By

Center for Near East Policy Research

-

August 18, 2002

[This article is a vindication of our work, during the years 1994-1996. d.b.]

During a cabinet meeting in 1994, then head of Military Intelligence Major General Uri Saguy, presented a “personal memorandum.” The Israel Defense Forces MI chief has the right to present such a document, which expresses his personal opinion, as opposed to a formal paper obligating Military Intelligence as a whole.

“The personal memorandum,” recalls Saguy, “discussed the Lebanonization of the Gaza Strip. This was in the aftermath of the first attempted suicide strikes; the first was a horrendous explosion at the Netzarim junction. I felt that cabinet ministers weren’t thrilled about [my] statements. They didn’t want to hear an evaluation holding that it [Netzarim] was a suicide attack. I had the feeling that it was as though they were saying `you’re ruining our peace process.’ I explained to them that my job was to paint a picture of the situation. They wanted to shatter the mirror, to shoot the messenger – me. My job wasn’t prophesy; it was to understand what happened, and predict what could occur. In this respect, the analysis was precise. True, we didn’t hazard a guess about the scope of the violent eruption and its date; but we pointed to the process.”

The fact that the Military Intelligence chief had to formulate his evaluation as his own personal opinion is telling. At the time, the research division under his command submitted other, sometimes contradictory, views. In other words, it is clear that it was not only Israel’s political leadership that was held hostage by the chimerical conception that an era of peace with the Palestinian Authority had begun: MI and the Shin Bet security service had trouble liberating themselves from the same feeling. The intelligence officials were not always willing to let facts disturb a rosy perception of reality.

In an interview with the Intelligence Heritage Center journal in January 2002, at a time when he was in the running for IDF chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon indicated that after 1996, Military Intelligence kept tabs on incitement and terror in the PA as a way of monitoring the stability of the peace process. Ya’alon, who replaced Saguy and became chief in 1995, said that after 1996 an “indicating sign” used by MI to monitor the level of Arafat’s commitment to the Oslo process, and of his disavowal of terror, was “incitement in the Palestinian media.”

But some Knesset members and government ministers who asked MI officials in 1994-95 to assess Arafat’s frequently militant appearances and his hellfire declarations calling for violence and Jihad, were told that the PA leader’s incendiary rhetoric had to be understood in a relatively harmless context. Arafat, the MKs and ministers were told, appeared in forums comprised of veteran PLO members, and liked to reminisce with them about the past. Thus, no conclusions should be drawn about his public appearances – they were mostly rhetoric. An analysis composed by the MI research division in the summer of 1995 concluded: “No firm evidence can be found to demonstrate that Arafat is not showing a commitment to the [Oslo] agreement and the peace process with Israel.”

This IDF Military Intelligence analysis drove then MK Benny Begin to write a critical letter in August 1995 to the new MI head, Ya’alon. “The author’s statements are so groundless,” Begin wrote, “that they lead to a regrettable conclusion: The author’s interpretation is seriously misguided by his [political] outlook. I want to alert you about the gravity of the encroachment of such a trend in MI’s research division. I am, of course, conscious that it could be claimed that this letter is misguided on account of my own outlook, and that it is a blatant effort to stifle free expression among MI researchers. Nonetheless, I will venture the comment that no reasonable person can accept the lamentable analysis presented in this [MI] document.”

Ya’alon’s response to Begin had a tone of censure: “Your comments constitute political intervention in work undertaken by MI officers,” he wrote.

Begin’s model

Begin didn’t give up. A month later, the MK wrote another memorandum, this time to the head of the MI research division, Brigadier General Ya’akov Amidror. Begin wrote: “Your hypothesis that Arafat’s declarations are a kind of harmless reminiscence [of the kind] indulged in by Palmach [elite commando] veterans is now contradicted by four events that have occurred in a short period of time – these are clear incendiary statements advocating violence against Israel; and in the case of the final incident they were delivered to a young audience… [Arafat’s] statements are systematic and consistent; and, given the proliferation of such declarations, the research division would be wise to develop an alternative model. In MI idiom, this model would say: `It cannot be ruled out, and there is a certain probability, that two years after signing the Oslo I accord, Arafat is a sworn enemy of Israel.’ (This is sensitive material, not for quotation, and based on public information which has fortuitously reached MI.)”

Using biting irony and sarcastic parenthetical asides, Begin hinted at a writing style that can be found in MI research division reports. Division officers, who want their superiors to read their reports and want to deliver warning messages, tend to use parentheses and asterisks to emphasize that their analyses are founded on classified materials – hoping to pique curiosity.

In order to substantiate his contentions about faulty MI and Shin Bet assessments of Arafat’s speeches and media statements made by top PA officials, Begin relied partly on recordings furnished to him in 1994-96 by Brigadier General (res.) Yigal Carmon and the journalist, David Bedein.

Carmon, today president of the Middle East Media Research Institute, embarked at the time on a private crusade, closely monitoring reports that circulated in Palestinian and Arab media. A former senior officer of MI’s 504 unit, who subsequently served as an anti-terror adviser to prime ministers, Carmon operated as a one-man intelligence force, and relentlessly tracked down recordings. He handled a network of informants in PA areas, and paid each dozens, or hundreds, of shekels for a single tape.

Taking exception to the MI evaluation, Begin and Carmon argued that public declarations made by Arafat and his associates contradicted the spirit of the Oslo accords and reflected their genuine intentions. One of the most revealing recordings, whose contents were made public, preserved a speech delivered by Arafat in Johannesburg in May 1994. The tape recording documented a militant address formulated in Arafat’s old, incendiary style. At one stage, Arafat likened the Oslo accord to the prophet Mohammed’s Hudaybiya truce accord with the Quraysh tribe – Mohammed, the PA leader reminded his audience, signed the agreement with the intention of violating it once his power consolidated. The Johannesburg tape recording surfaced in Israel without the help of Israeli security officials.

“It’s true, we didn’t have the Johannesburg speech,” admits Colonel (res.) Dr. Eran Lerman, today director of the American Jewish Committee’s Middle East office, and then the deputy (in charge of assessment) to the head of Military Intelligence’s research division.

For the first time since September 1993, evidence flattened the euphoria that had gripped the nation’s political leadership, intelligence community and public. Tape recorded evidence undermined the assumption that a new dawn had broken in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Military Intelligence’s lack of diligence in obtaining information about Arafat’s public appearances, compared to Carmon’s relentless activity, angered then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. At a meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Rabin asked MI delegates: Why can’t you obtain such material? Why didn’t Military Intelligence manage to get its hands on the tape recordings, instead of learning about them from MK Begin, or the media?

In interviews with Ha’aretz, members of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, along with politicians who served as ministers under the Barak and Rabin governments, explain that intelligence officials were lax about attaining such tape recordings because MI and the Shin Bet went along with the prevailing theory of the time: They believed that Arafat had chosen peace, and given up on terror.

But former MI officials furnish a different explanation. They claim that any materials that could be obtained outside the cloak-and-dagger realm of classified information simply weren’t considered important. “It’s true,” Lerman says. “MI followed an approach whereby material culled from public sources was regarded as unimportant.”

Agreement at Cairo

Whatever its reasons, Military Intelligence drew peculiar conclusions regarding another of Arafat’s militant public appearances. In September 1995, about three months after Arafat issued a call for jihad and sacrifice in a speech in the Gaza Strip, MI decided that “Arafat is not inciting murder; his statements do not suggest that Jews should be killed now.”

At the time, autumn 1995, Israel’s government and its intelligence community (represented by the Shin Bet) were mediating secret contacts between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Shin Bet officials, lead by Yisrael Hasson, the head of the security service’s Jerusalem and West Bank desk, met in prison with Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

“I knew about these meetings,” recalls then public security minister Moshe Shahal. “In my capacity as the official responsible for the Prisons Service, I sent my assistant Moshe Sasson to attend the meetings. As far as I know, the Shin Bet was involved at the government’s request, in an effort to help them [the PA and Hamas] formulate an agreement.”

Yet no report of the Shin Bet’s involvement in this mediation effort was ever supplied to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Ha’aretz’s questions to the Shin Bet regarding the security service’s participation in the Oslo process efforts, and its analyses of the peace process, drew no response.

In December 1995, about a month after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, PA officials met with Hamas delegates in Cairo to work out an agreement. The meeting was preceded by pressure imposed by Israel and senior PA officials following lethal terror attacks perpetrated by Hamas and Islamic Jihad during the year. The Cairo meeting concluded with a joint PA-Hamas statement; among other things, it announced that “Hamas does not pursue a goal of embarrassing the PA.”

Carmon supplied information about the Cairo meeting to Begin and other right-wing politicians. In his analysis, sides at the meeting forged an agreement whereby Hamas operatives would refrain from terror activity on PA territory, yet would carry out strikes everywhere else, with the tacit consent of the Palestinian Authority. This interpretation was based on drafts of the agreement that in 1995 were relayed at Arafat’s initiative by the PA to Hamas, and which were published openly in Arabic-language newspapers. Also, Carmon and Begin relied on an interpretation by Salim al-Zanun, Palestinian National Council president, and Arafat’s delegate to the talks with Hamas.

The PA’s draft agreements from October 1995 basically included only one reservation about terror activity against Israel: No public declaration was to be made about such activity. Hamas and Islamic Jihad could continue terror attacks on condition that they could not claim responsibility for them. In other words, there was at the time reason to suspect that a division of labor had been outlined under the Cairo agreement. The PLO and the PA would engage in diplomatic negotiations with Israel and promote the peace process on the Oslo track; concurrently, Hamas and Islamic Jihad would continue to use militant, violent means.

If this interpretation of the Cairo understanding is correct, its implication is that the PLO had not desisted from the “dual track approach” it had followed since 1974, despite its promises and obligations under the Oslo accords. It would simultaneously use diplomatic means and the “armed struggle” in order to liberate the homeland.

Despite assertions made to the contrary by Ya’alon in his interview with the Intelligence Heritage Center journal, Israel’s intelligence community hesitated and equivocated. At first, it was not even willing to confirm the assumption that an agreement had been forged in Cairo. “That’s a question of interpretation,” said then Shin Bet head Carmi Gillon, who appeared before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in January 1996. Some two months later, in March 1996, Arafat himself confirmed at a press conference attended by Meretz ministers Yossi Sarid and Yair Tzaban: “It’s true, we reached an agreement. There was a dialogue in Cairo, and it was acceptable to Prime Minister Rabin.” The PA chairman was proud of the agreement, and claimed “it was agreed that they will end their terror activity, and support the peace process and the Oslo accord.”

The intelligence community was hard-pressed to present a cogent analysis of the contents of the Cairo agreement. Its reports were characterized by vague, inconclusive formulations. In early 1996, MI chief Ya’alon said ambiguously that it could be inferred from the PLO-Hamas talks in Cairo that Hamas will not perpetrate terror attacks, but other interpretations could also be made.

Finally, with the benefit of hindsight, following a brutal series of Hamas terror attacks in February-March 1996 on buses in Jerusalem and at Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv, Amidror mustered the courage needed to issue clear, forthright statements to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “The understanding reached by PLO representatives with Hamas delegates in December 1995 did not become an official agreement, but it is what has effectively guided the Palestinian Authority’s and Hamas’ subsequent behavior. Under this framework, Hamas implicitly promised not to launch attacks against Israel and Israelis from territories under PA control… Arafat has subsequently done almost nothing to crack down on Hamas’ and Islamic Jihad’s operational infrastructure.”

Clouds of confusion

For all its clarity, Amidror’s interpretation did not become definitive. In April 1996, then IDF chief of staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak sent a letter to Labor MK Nissim Zvili which scrambled interpretations anew. Shahak (whose view reflected Military Intelligence’s conclusions, IDF sources say) determined that it was Hamas which proposed a draft agreement which implicitly condoned terror operations conducted by it on lands not controlled by the Palestinian Authority. “But Palestinian Authority delegates did not accept this proposal,” Shahak wrote.

This new interpretation of the Cairo meeting reflects the confusion that clouded Israel’s intelligence and security community. Despite the fact that the Shin Bet and MI had information about contacts and draft agreements between the PA and Hamas, Israel’s intelligence community failed to deliver a consistent, perceptible warning about the dangers posed by the formula “no terror on, or launched from, PA territory.” Intelligence officials did not alert Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres to the gravity of the situation – that Israel would have to prepare for the possibility that extremist Palestinian organizations would continue to carry out acts of terror, so long as their operatives did not depart from lands under PA control. Instead of delivering this warning, intelligence officials hemmed and hawed. Even in surveys presented to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in May 1996, Mossad and Shin Bet officials stammered out obscure conclusions, finding it hard to say clearly what had happened at the Cairo meeting.

Dr. Shmuel Even, who served as assessment advisor to the head of MI’s research division, objects to attributing too much significance to analyses of the Cairo meeting. “We didn’t view the agreement as a departure from Arafat’s behavior pattern, whose essence we pointed to all along. The [Cairo] agreement accorded with what we had always believed: Arafat had no intention of disarming [Hamas], either because he viewed the organization as part of the Palestinian people and wanted to avoid civil war, or because he wanted to use it as a whip to be unleashed against Israel, in order to promote strategic goals.”

Other MI experts, who spoke on condition of anonymity, admitted that the intelligence community found it hard to absorb the possibility that the Cairo agreement symbolized the beginning of the end of the logic of Oslo, of the assumption that Arafat had abandoned the use of terror.

Unanswered letters

The bitter experience of trying to mediate an internal Palestinian agreement did not stop Israel’s intelligence community from trying again. During the first few months of 1996, Israeli intelligence officials, this time from MI, once again found themselves dabbling in internal Palestinian matters. This time around, the goal was to secure changes in the Palestinian covenant, which had been promised by the PLO. Once again, the Israeli effort fell short. The Palestinian National Council met in April 1996, and failed to adopt the formulas which had been worked out with Israel’s government; the covenant was not amended. Neither MI nor the Shin Bet warned about the possibility that Arafat and his associates would dupe Israel’s government, and not incorporate revisions in the covenant as promised.

Alarmed by this sequence of events, Begin fired off letters in June 1996 to the heads of MI, the Shin Bet and the Mossad. He wrote: “As in the case of the Palestinian covenant which was not annulled or revised, the Cairo agreement also expresses deep, long-term intentions harbored by Arafat and the PLO.” Begin’s letters were never answered.

Begin, who has refused to give interviews since he left the Knesset in 1999, wrote in the preface to his book “Sad Story” (published in 2000): “This is a sad story. Those who appear in it did not know, or did not want to know, or knew but didn’t understand, or refused to understand, or understood and refused to say.” Begin’s criticism is aimed not only at political leaders like Yossi Beilin, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, who initiated and guided the Oslo peace process. The barbs are also directed against Israel’s intelligence community.

MK Yossi Sarid also believes that MI tends to slant its assessments in line with prevailing political perceptions. The Oslo period is no exception, he believes: Intelligence has been slanted with respect to virtually every major, transformative event in Israel’s history.

“Generally, the intelligence community and MI, in particular, have fallen in line with stands taken by the government,” Sarid observes. “My thesis is that since 1967, the intelligence community has been mistaken each time it has tried to formulate a strategic estimate. Regrettably, Israel’s intelligence services have been increasingly politicized. I didn’t hear statements such as `you can’t do business with Arafat,’ or `he’s not built for peace agreements,’ from the intelligence community.”

“We did not operate to placate the government,” says Saguy. “Military Intelligence reached suppositions about what might possibly occur; it could not know what would occur. We said that terror would grow stronger as the [peace] process advanced. That perception went against the grain of the consensus.”

The crucial question is whether MI grasped the dangers at the start of the peace process. Did it perceive that Arafat might not have abandoned the use of terror; and if so, did MI issue warnings?

“Yes,” says Saguy. “Our view was correct. We said that Arafat represented the pragmatic stream in the Palestinian camp, as opposed to Hamas – but should Arafat share interests with Hamas, he would support the organization. We consistently emphasized that should Arafat not attain his goals, the militant Palestinian stream would come to the fore.”

In March 1997, following a terror attack at Cafe Apropos in Tel Aviv, MI identified what was called at the time a “green light” to terror. “We identified information,” says Even, “which linked Arafat to the terror attack. Arafat gave the green light. Before then, there were terror attacks that did not advance his interests, and which he did not initiate. Apropos was the first time we saw clearly that Arafat was encouraging and initiating lethal attacks inside Israel to promote his political goals. Negotiations with the Netanyahu government for a third-phase withdrawal were stuck, and Arafat hoped to improve his position via the use of terror.”

This statement suggests that before March 1997, MI operated in a cloud, and could not believe that there were links between Arafat and terror attacks.

Military Intelligence has yet to carry out an in-house investigation of its early Oslo estimates, like probes of misbegotten intelligence analyses that were conducted after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

This piece ran in Ha’aretz on 16 August, 2002

The Refugees’ Choice: Another Look at UNRWA

By

Center for Near East Policy Research

-

August 15, 2002

Critics accuse UNRWA of perpetuating the Palestinian Arab refugee problem and abetting terror. Israeli officials say everyone would be much worse off without it. Has the 50-year-old mission gone right or wrong?

The vanished buildings of the now-notorious 200 square meters at the center of the Jenin refugee camp, flattened to rubble by Israeli bulldozers at the end of a tough battle in April against dozens of Palestinian gunmen of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Fatah Tanzim, are set to rise again. Any day now Peter Hansen, the commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), will sign an agreement with the United Arab Emirates Red Crescent Society for $30 million in emergency aid to rebuild the 100 or so destroyed homes.

Along with UNRWA’s obvious obligation to help the largely hapless refugee families who lost their decades-old “temporary dwellings,” there’s a double irony in the fact that the agency is busy with the reconstruction in the area Israeli officials have described as a “hornet’s nest” of terror. For the U.N.-mandated agency, which has provided humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees in the Near East for the past 52 years, primarily in the areas of education, health and social services, has been placed under unprecedented scrutiny of late.

Its critics in Israel, in Jewish and Zionist organizations and among an increasing number of lawmakers abroad, argue that UNRWA perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem by maintaining a “camp culture” and feeding refugees’ expectation that one day they may return to their original homes. And they ask, incredulously, how civilian camps such as Jenin, which are being serviced by the agency, could have turned into nests of militancy and launching pads for terror under the nose of UNRWA’s vast staff and without so much as a squeak from the U.N.

Irwin Cotler, a Canadian Jewish member of parliament and professor of international human rights law, has long had qualms about whether UNRWA hasn’t become “part of the problem rather than the solution.” Now, he tells The Jerusalem Report during a recent visit to Jerusalem, “the emerging allegations appear to suggest that UNRWA allows the camps to be used as a sanctuary for terror and for incitement.”

Among other things, Cotler points to phenomena such as the “glorification of suicide martyrs as poster boys” in the schools and giving armed elements free rein of the camps. Those, he says, are clear violations of the U.N.’s own conventions regarding both the need to maintain the civilian nature of refugee camps and counterterrorism. The Security Council’s 12-point anti-terror convention of last year, he notes, requires all U.N. parties to report back any relevant information.

UNRWA, he goes on, “has neither done anything to prevent, nor has reported any of the above. So one begins to infer that it may be complicit in incitement and terror.”

Among Cotler’s file of documents, Security Council resolutions and press cuttings about UNRWA is the letter sent to Secretary General Kofi Annan by U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, ranking Democratic member of the House International Relations Committee in May

According to David Bedein, head of the Jerusalem-based Israel Resource News Agency who has been researching UNRWA operations for the past 15 years, these letters constitute the first serious challenge to the agency’s mandate since 1958. Then, Israeli ambassador Abba Eban made a statement at the U.N. on the Arab refugees in which he argued that the problem had been “artificially maintained for political motives against all the economic, social and cultural forces which, had they been allowed free play, would have brought about a solution.”

Bedein and others now hope that questions about UNRWA will be raised not only in Washington and Ottawa, but in every European capital as well.

Lantos’s May 2002 letter echoes something of Eban’s frustration. As well as addressing the “ongoing exploitation for terrorist purposes of Palestinian refugee camps administered by UNRWA,” he also voices his “deep concern that UNRWA is perpetuating, rather than ameliorating, the situation of Palestinian refugees.”

The Jenin camp alone, he notes, produced 23 suicide bombers that killed 57 Israelis. He cites a Security Council resolution that calls upon the secretary general to report to the Security Council situations where “camps are vulnerable to infiltration by armed elements.” And he cites Kofi Annan’s own report to the Council of April 1998 concerning violence in Africa, when the secretary general urged that refugee camps “be kept free of any military presence or equipment, including arms and ammunition.”

Lantos states that he is “frankly baffled as to why, more than 50 years after the founding of the State of Israel, there continues to exist a U.N. agency focused solely on Palestinian refugees,” while all other refugee situations have been adopted by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.

The Lantos letter came in the wake of lobbying by Avi Beker, secretary general of the World Jewish Congress and by the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main Israel lobby in Washington. The battle in Jenin, and the extent of the terrorist infrastructure revealed in the camps by Israel;s Operation Defensive Shield last spring, acted as the catalyst.

Although Israel has been taking a back seat in the campaign, Alan Baker, the Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser, reportedly raised similar concerns to Lantos’s with U.S. officials and members of Congress during a visit to Washington in June.

The Lantos letter contained a number of inaccuracies. It stated that UNRWA’s mandate was up for renewal on June 30, though in fact it had been renewed last December through to June 2005. And it repeated AIPAC’s figure of 23 suicide bombers from the Jenin camp. UNRWA officials counter that the 23 came from the Jenin governerate, which includes the camp, the town and the surrounding villages. The Israeli government speaks of 23 suicide bombers “from Jenin.”

Nevertheless, with Lantos pressing for hearings in the House committee and with the allocation of U.S. funding to UNRWA coming up for annual approval, possibly in September, the stirrings in Congress are certainly not being dismissed. Senior UNRWA officials are concerned that funding could be cut or made conditional. UNRWA receives between a quarter and a third of its annual budget — which stood at $310 million in 2001 — from the U.S.

Annan’s reply to Lantos explains that “the United Nations has no responsibility for security matters in refugee camps, or indeed anywhere else in the occupied territory.” Rather, since the Oslo agreements, that responsibility lies with Israel or the Palestinian Authority. Of the 27 camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 20 sit in PA-controlled areas, and 7 in areas where Israel has overall security control.

Annan says the U.N. has frequently called on the PA to do more to fight terror. Furthermore, alarmed by the human toll on both sides, he writes, he suggested in April that an armed multinational force be established in the area — something that Israel would vehemently oppose.

Hansen, in his clarifications attached to Annan’s letter, stresses that UNRWA, a humanitarian organization, has no mandate to administer or police the camps, and as such has no “police force, no intelligenceapparatus and no mandate to report on political and military activities.”

And he takes strong issue with charges that UNRWA creates dependency. In normal times, he writes, only 5.7 percent of the refugees receive food or other direct assistance from the agency. And UNRWA has awarded over 49,000 loans to budding refugee entrepreneurs over the past 10 years, amounting to over $69 million. Today, less than one-third of the 3.9 million Palestinian UNRWA-registered refugees live in the camps around the Middle East, though all are entitled to use UNRWA’s facilities.

UNRWA was established by the U.N. General Assembly in 1949 with a temporary mandate to provide basic humanitarian and social services to the refugees until a political solution could be found. Under UNRWA’s operational definition, Palestinian refugees are people whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. Their descendants are also classed as refugees, and as such, the register has grown from 914,000 refugees in 1950 to close to 4 million.

There are 59 recognized refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. In Jordan, the government extended citizenship to all refugees in the country, who now number over 1.6 million. In the West Bank and Gaza, over 600,000 of the 1.5 million refugees live in camps.

The UNRWA tents of the early 1950s turned into cement-block dwellings. Some have now grown into rickety-looking three-story homes. With the arrival of the PA in the mid-1990s, Paltel, the Palestinian telecommunications company, introduced phone lines into the West Bank and Gaza camps for the first time. Foreign donor aid was used to modernize sewage systems.

UNRWA schools have a reputation for excellence. The UNRWA mandate stipulates that its schools teach the same curriculum as ordinary schools in the “host” areas or countries, so students can qualify to go on to university. UNRWA says it provides extracurricular enrichment that “focuses on peace education, human rights, tolerance and conflict resolution.”

Along with its international staff, UNRWA employs some 18,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, making it the largest employer in the field after the PA.

All of which begs the question why many suicide bombers did come out of the Jenin camp — and why terrorists and armed militiamen have been able to turn other West Bank and Gaza camps into refuges of their own, where PA police often fear to tread.

Cotler acknowledges that UNRWA “may not be wrong in ascribing responsibility to the host countries.” But it cannot exonerate itself, he says, as an agency of the U.N., which has set forth principles of conduct in its Security Council resolutions. All this, he fumes, is “taking place on UNRWA’s watch. They may have no police, but they have a responsibility to report to the U.N. that ‘we are unable to implement the mandate to which we are charged, or to fulfill international humanitarian law. Instead, Cotler asserts, UNRWA is displaying a “willful blindness to what’s going on. And that’s being charitable, because this appears to be complicity.”

UNRWA’s Deputy Commissioner General Karen AbuZayd pleads innocent. “We just don’t see anything like this,” she tells The Report, speaking from UNRWA headquarters in Gaza. “These things are not visible to us.” She says her staff files daily reports on events in the camps to the security office in New York — about a bomb that goes off here, or a casualty there — but what the security office does with that information she doesn’t know.

What AbuZayd does know is that UNRWA staffers are operating within a very grim reality. Expelling armed men from the camps would be “difficult in this region,” she says, with obvious understatement, though they are not allowed in the clinics and schools. When it comes to the posters and shrines to the suicide bombers that TV cameras have shown in the schools, she says, “We have to take the safety of our staff into account too. If we were to ask our staff to do certain things, we realize that would get them into big trouble. And if they didn’t do them, would we take action against them?” As things stand, the local staff is not required to report on such activities.

She adds that U.N. resolutions about keeping armed elements out of the camps, haven’t been applied elsewhere. “Think of the Somali or Afghan camps. People just look the other way.” And here, she says, everything is “upside down. The refugees are the armed elements.”

UNRWA did complain to the PA once when its police tried to use a school in Gaza after hours for meetings. “The PA police are not allowed in our facilities,” she says.

In Minister Dani Naveh’s March 2002 special report for the Israeli government on “Inciting and Educating Children Towards Hate, Anti-Semitism, and Violence in the Palestinian Authority,” there is one documented case from July 2001 where Saheil Alhinadi, an UNRWA teachers representative, praised suicide bombers at a Hamas rally at the Jabalya camp in Gaza. AbuZayd says this case was only recently brought to the agency’s attention by AIPAC, and that UNRWA is investigating. According to AbuZayd, the agency still lacks evidence. For now, Alhinadi remains on staff.

But AbuZayd suggests that it is ridiculous to blame UNRWA for all the ills in the camps. Incitement, she argues, comes principally from TV and the mosque sermons that all Palestinians are exposed to.

“We certainly do our best. If we weren’t there, things would be much, much worse. The children would not have access to the extracurricular activities we provide. It would be dreadful to think.”

Surprisingly, perhaps, Israeli officials agree. Diplomatic sources in Jerusalem say that “so long as UNRWA is here, Israel supports its mandate, its work and its goals. It is very important, specifically at this time, to have assistance for the Palestinian refugees whose situation is very difficult.”

Still, Israel has complaints about the agency at the operational level, and protests against what it sees as an increasingly anti-Israeli flavor in the statements Peter Hansen has been making to the press. After the Jenin battle, sources say, he was quoted in the Scandinavian press accusing Israel of having carried out a “massacre.” Moreover, Israeli diplomats say, in its annual reports to the General Assembly, UNRWA consistently ignores the fact that the camps are breeding grounds for terror and that the PA police do nothing to stop it.

Officials admit there is sometimes a problem providing UNRWA with evidence of claims against the organization’s staff because much of it is classified. But they add that when they have offered material, the UNRWA staffers don’t always want it.

Israeli diplomats feel that UNRWA, which has a budget problem, is “demonizing” Israel to garner donor sympathy. “We don’t want countries not to donate,” they say, “but it shouldn’t be at our expense.”

Israel seems to have little interest in Congress cutting UNRWA funds. “If UNRWA wasn’t doing what it does, Israel would be in a worse situation, and the refugees would be worse off too,” says an official in Jerusalem. “We agree with a lot of what Lantos wrote,” he goes on. “On the one hand, we want to see reform in UNRWA. But we don’t want the baby thrown out with the bath water. We have no interest in harming UNRWA’s ability to work.”

To Israeli anti-UNRWA campaigner David Bedein, that smacks of expediency over morality. Israel, he states cynically, has benefited for years from cheap labor, with workers subsidized by UNRWA willing to work for a third of the normal rate.

A Lantos staffer told The Report from Washington that the questioning of UNRWA is ongoing. “We are interested in holding hearings on the subject. Many questions remain unanswered,” he went on. “The purpose of UNRWA in the camps, particularly in the Palestinian territories, is still something we want to look into.”

It is still too early to say whether Lantos will seek a reduction in funding to UNRWA, or for funds to be made conditional, “but I wouldn’t rule it out,” said the staffer. Asked about Israel’s desire to see UNRWA’s work continue unhindered, the staffer said, “We’re aware of that. That’s why we aren’t jumping to conclusions.”

Nevertheless, on the international agenda for the first time is the very question of UNRWA’s continued existence. Many critics argue that the Palestinian refugees should come under the aegis of the UNHCR, established in 1951 initially to deal with European refugees of World War II. Diplomatic sources in Jerusalem call that “a whole other discussion” — one they don’t seem overeager to engage in right now.

Some experts argue that Israel would be better off with the UNHCR, whose mandate is more oriented toward finding permanent solutions for refugees than pure maintenance. UNHCR aspires to offer refugees three options: resettlement in host countries, relocation to a third country or repatriation. UNRWA officials argue that in the Palestinian case, these options have not so far applied with the first two rejected by the refugees, and the third by Israel.

Some experts also argue that under the UNHCR terms of refugee status, the number of Palestinian refugees would significantly drop, since those living within PA areas, or those with Jordanian citizenship would be considered “resettled.”

But Karen AbuZayd, who came to UNRWA after years at UNHCR, says nothing would change in the Palestinians refugee status. On the contrary, she says, the numbers could even rise as the UNHCR doesn’t have as strict a definition as UNRWA regarding the 1946-1948 place of residence. All refugees’ children are refugees, she adds. Ironically, AbuZayd arrived in Gaza in August 2000 because her bosses thought that her UNHCR-acquired expertise in permanent settlement for refugees would be needed as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process progressed. “Now I’m doing emergency relief,” she remarks wryly.

Whether the Palestinians fall under the aegis of UNRWA or the UNHCR, she says, there has to be a political solution to the root cause of the refugee problem before there can be moves to implement resettlement. The refugees in Jordan, she says, “have in a sense opted temporarily for local resettlement,” by taking citizenship. And if local resettlement basically means becoming self-sufficient, then the majority of Palestinian refugees would fall in that category, she says. But eventually, once the root problem is solved, those refugees should have the choice, she suggests, whether to remain with local integration, or, say, to go to Canada.

Officials in Jerusalem, for their part, are split on whether it would be best to stick with UNRWA or opt for UNHCR, seeing advantages and disadvantages in both.

In the meantime, UNRWA will work to rebuild the destroyed houses of the Jenin camp. A roomier piece of land adjacent to the camp had been offered, says AbuZayd, but the refugees turned it down.

“They families didn’t want to move out of the camp,” she says. For them, at least until further notice, it has become home.

This article ran in the August 2002 issue of the Jerusalem Report

Profile of Stanley Cohen, the Jewish Lawyer for the Hamas

By

Center for Near East Policy Research

-

August 15, 2002

NEW YORK — Israel is a “terrorist state,” he says. Palestinians have no choice but to attack Israelis “by any means necessary,” he says. Yes, that includes suicide bombings.

Who is this bearded supporter of jihad and what’s he doing in a Lower East Side loft decorated with Syrian banknotes, a close-up photo of an AK-47 and his own mug shots? He is Stanley L. Cohen, Esq., defender of accused terrorists and possibly one of the most hated lawyers in this city.

Cohen, 49, hustles into his kitchen, his graying ponytail fluttering behind him as if attached to a coonskin cap. He points proudly to a recent picture of him sitting side by side with Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas spiritual leader who cheers on the shrapnel-laden Palestinian bombers from his wheelchair in Gaza.

“Look at the noses and foreheads,” he says. See how their profiles comport? Even their beards – the cleric’s is white and wispy, the lawyer’s black and rabbinical – line up in weird symmetry.

“Who says we’re not cousins?” He chuckles. “We’re cousins!”

Finally, Arab and Jew – brothers of antiquity – find common ground. Can’t you just feel the love?

“Who put the chutzpah in Hamas?” an item in the New York Post asked the other day. Who else but Stanley Cohen, who for years has represented the political head of Hamas, also called the Islamic Resistance Movement, designated a terrorist group by the United States. Last month Cohen gained further notoriety – if that’s possible for a lawyer who was quoted as saying he’d be willing to represent Osama bin Laden – when he filed a federal suit in Washington, hoping to suspend U.S. aid to Israel.

He worked on the case for a year, shuttling around the Palestinian-controlled territories as well as Lebanon and Syria. In Qatar, he appeared on al-Jazeera, the Arab news network, denouncing President Bush. He hopes to line up funding for his lawsuit from Saudi Arabian sources.

Cohen toils in a third-floor walk-up above a Palestinian-owned supermarket in a gritty Hispanic neighborhood. Usually he’s alone, although he has a long-term relationship with a Mohawk woman who visits him from the reservation in Upstate New York. His constant companion is Sadie, an aging chocolate Labrador who likes to munch carrots.

Sounding like a nasal stand-up comic, Cohen narrates a quick tour of the run-ins where he made his name: “There’s a picture of me being dragged away at a Tompkins Square demonstration…. The 13th Street squatters case, a big battle…. Bill Kunstler and I in the early days with the Mohawks in Quebec… sedition, possession of weapons and riot… the Red Squad in New Rochelle… fun memories.”

“I’ve been arrested on a good number of occasions – it comes with the turf – both before being a lawyer and since being a lawyer. But, as we say, inshallah” – Allah willing – “my record is perfect.”

None of the charges ever stuck, though a federal judge in Virginia recently held him in contempt and fined him $740 after he failed to show up at a hearing. It was an innocent mix-up and he’s appealing, Cohen says.

His walls are a shrine to his public persona: lacquered, mounted news clippings about cases of yore. “Defending Larry Davis” – that headline refers to a client who wounded nine police officers in a shootout. “Inside the Mohawk Civil War”: a Village Voice cover about militant Indians who ended up going to war with Canada in 1990.

“I just sent out for framing 30 new stories and pictures,” Cohen boasts. Of course the displays are strictly for the entertainment of clients, he says.

This man’s ego could set off car alarms blocks away. Okay, he later concedes, “I like picking up the newspaper or turning on a TV and seeing me.”

He strolls past a photo of Lenin atop his roll-top desk; a certificate admitting him to practice before the Supreme Court sponsored by his mentor, the late radical lawyer Kunstler; a poster that declares, “He who plunders always lives in terror.” Another that proclaims, “History cannot be written with a pen. It must be written with a gun.”

His e-mail address is “burnnloot,” which he says pays homage to a Bob Marley song. But another lyric comes to mind amid the throw-blanket decor and detritus of ’60s-style struggles: “Let’s do the Time Warp again.”

Cohen’s Comrades

Stanley Lewis Cohen was only in high school but somehow he got addicted to left-wing activism during the Vietnam War. “He had some pretty serious run-ins with authority in his mid-teens,” says his law school classmate Patrick Brown. “He is fond of saying he fought the war on the home front, as a precocious youth.”

The son of a bookkeeper mother – who once raised funds for Zionist organizations – and a salesman who fought the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge, Stanley didn’t want to become just another lawyer. “I kept putting if off,” he says. “It was expected for me to become a lawyer, and I didn’t want to do what was expected for me.”

He ran anti-poverty and anti-drug programs for a few years. But eventually he won a scholarship to Pace University’s law school. As a student in the early ’80s, he signed on with attorney Lynne Stewart to help fight the state’s prosecution of a cabal of revolutionaries.

“We were trying a case involving the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground – a fairly famous case involving Kathy Boudin and a couple of police officers who’d been killed in the course of a holdup,” recalls Stewart, who later became Cohen’s friend and law partner. (She is now under federal indictment for allegedly helping an imprisoned sheik direct terrorist activities from his cell.)

“We were amazed,” she recalls. “Not too many people were volunteering for that case.”

After graduating, Cohen worked for seven years at the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx, defending street thugs and rapists. (“All criminal cases are obviously political,” he declares.) In the late ’80s, he paddled a canoe to evade police roadblocks, working with the Mohawk Warrior Society, which he calls the tribe’s “national guard.” He later assisted Bosnian and Albanian Muslims, including mercenaries bound for Kosovo.

In 1995, a Muslim friend in Washington called to ask whether Cohen would represent Mousa Abu Marzook, the leader of the political wing of Hamas, who’d been detained at Kennedy Airport. Cohen didn’t hesitate. For the next 22 months he successfully fought Abu Marzook’s extradition to Israel on terrorism charges, including conspiracy to commit murder.

“The first time I saw Stanley, with his long hair and cowboy boots, I thought to myself, this guy is a hippie, not a lawyer,” Abu Marzook writes in an e-mail from Damascus. “It only took a few moments of speaking with him that I was reminded of the lesson that one should not judge a book by its cover…. He is very courageous in his stance for justice, even when those who are committing injustice are his fellow Jews.”

“My dear friend,” Cohen calls Abu Marzook.

In the Gaza Strip, where Abu Marzook’s older brother is an official in the Palestinian Authority, Cohen is treated like a visiting dignitary – plied with meals, supplied with well-armed bodyguards, given audiences with Sheik Yassin.

He was there in April, researching his latest civil case. As thick as the Manhattan phone book, the lawsuit says American tax dollars should not support a “program of killing, torture, terror and outright theft” by the Israeli government against Palestinians. Cohen names President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, various Israeli military officials and sundry U.S. arms manufacturers, accusing all concerned of “genocide.”

Cohen is seeking an injunction against U.S. funding for Israel. He also is seeking damages on behalf of Palestinians who are American citizens and returned to Gaza and the West Bank to help build a Palestinian state – then allegedly faced “war crimes” perpetrated by Israel, armed mainly by American weapons makers.

A Justice Department official said yesterday that the government had just received the suit and had no comment. Israel says it wants peace and has scrupulously tried to avoid civilian casualties in recent military crackdowns. Israel says Palestinian terrorists keep stoking the conflict with bombings – including two in the past week by Hamas militants.

A Spiritual Person

For the sake of argument – and Cohen’s life is all about argument – he will concede certain points.

“I’m a pig. I’m a self-hating Jew. I’m a communist.”

Please, don’t hold back.

“I hate my mother. I hate my father. I hate my dead great-grandparents.”

Duly noted.

“I write bad checks. I sleep with my dog.”

A pause.

“Now, can we get to the real issues?”

This is tactic he used on a recent talk show, attempting to deflate an opponent – someone who accused him of being a traitor to his religion and his country. “That’s what it’s degenerating to,” he sighs.

Cohen describes himself as a “very spiritual person.” He attended Hebrew school and was bar mitzvahed while growing up in Westchester, but now he is a nonbeliever, a secular Jew. “I’m proud to be a Jew – very proud of it. Not the Judaism of Ariel Sharon. Not the Judaism of the generals of the Israel Defense Forces. But the Judaism that stands with the oppressed, the disadvantaged and the disaffected.”

He seems immune, at this point, to blistering criticism and death threats. That stuff happens when you generate headlines like LAWYER SAYS HE’D DEFEND BIN LADEN, which ran in the New York Daily News on September 26.

Cohen says he was misquoted and what he actually said was: “I don’t know if I would take the case. I wouldn’t take the case or avoid the case because of the allegations against bin Laden. I would judge the case the way I do all political cases. Do I connect? Is there a personal or political connection? These are the factors I use.”

“He believes very deeply in the Bill of Rights,” says his friend Brown. “At the time he made the statement it was a very courageous thing to do. On the other hand, it was insane for him to say that publicly.”

A splinter group here called the Jewish Defense Organization leafleted against Cohen, calling on Jews to boycott his law practice. Its hotline termed him “garbage that needs to be swept into the bag.”

Alarmed, Cohen sent his dog, Sadie, to a “safe house” for a couple of weeks until the furor died down.

“I don’t support attacks on civilians by anyone, but you know what?” Cohen says, working himself into a rant. “I think what Israel does is far more morally repugnant than what Hamas does.”

He later e-mails a slight clarification, saying, “People have a right to resist occupation; indeed they have an obligation to do so…. It is often a nasty, dirty and painful experience.”

In April, Cohen inspired another round of jaw-dropping, sputtering criticism when he appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News Channel show, blasting Israel’s military response to a series of suicide bombings aimed at civilians. He was beamed live from Gaza, alongside a Hamas spokesman, Ismail Abu Shanab, who declared, “We are defending ourselves.”

“Watching this troubling reenactment of a Woody Allen sketch, I couldn’t help wondering whether this same man would have felt just as comfortable representing Heinrich Himmler 60 years ago,” Avi Davis, a columnist for Jewsweek.com, wrote after seeing Cohen.

“He’s entitled, that’s what this country is all about. Do we consider him seriously? No,” says Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “The fact is that he’s making news because he’s Jewish. I think he is exploiting that identity to get attention.”

“Stanley Cohen, the attorney for Hamas,” mused Larry Miller, a columnist for the Weekly Standard magazine. “… A man who, if he listened very carefully, would no doubt hear voices in the next room planning to blow the eyes out of more of his nieces and nephews.”

In fact, Cohen says, a distant cousin was killed by a Hamas bus bombing about six years ago, when he was representing Mousa Abu Marzook. She was 25, a graduate student.

He doesn’t know his cousin’s name. He’d never met her.

An Old Friend

The phone rings, echoing sharply in Cohen’s loft. It’s his longtime friend Joel Blumenfeld, a justice on the State Supreme Court in Queens. A trustee of a conservative synagogue, Blumenfeld is about to depart for a week-long visit to Jerusalem, part of a United Jewish Appeal effort to boost the city’s spirits and its shattered tourist economy. He plans to give blood and visit with terror victims.

Don’t go, Cohen begged him last week. It’s too dangerous. Hamas operatives just killed five Americans with a bomb deposited in the cafeteria of Hebrew University.

Blumenfeld was undeterred. Canceling the trip would mean the terrorists have won, he says.

“We don’t listen to each other,” he says of Cohen, whom he supervised in the 1980s when they worked at the Legal Aid Society.

What about the Hamas connection – does that bother Judge Blumenfeld?

“It gives me pause,” he admits. “I suspect that many people in my synagogue wouldn’t be big fans of Stanley, but that’s their problem.”

But both take to heart what they learned in law school: Everyone is entitled to a defense. “And if we lose that, we lose what this country is about,” Blumenfeld says. “This whole country falls apart if the unpopular aren’t represented…. As I’ve said before, if this were 1941-42, he would be representing the Japanese people who were being detained.”

Cohen takes the phone and wishes his friend a safe trip. He signs off in Yiddish, “Zay gesund!”

Be well.

Cohen’s Family

Cohen’s parents are old and ill – he requests that a reporter not bother them. His father is 91, his mother 87.

Friends say Cohen pays for constant nursing care so that the couple can live out their last days in their own apartment. It’s the least he can do, the son says: “I’ve always had a tremendous amount of support from my parents.”

He and his older brother Joseph grew up in a Democratic household brimming with debate and political awareness. Stanley says his parents are “relatively Orthodox Jews,” but the boys were free to pursue whatever they believed in.

What became of brother Joe?

“He’s an ordained fundamentalist Baptist minister.”

Stanley smooths his beard. He isn’t kidding.

The Rev. Cohen couldn’t be reached for comment. His brother said he was traveling, doing missionary work in the name of Jesus Christ.

Defense Lawyer

Eight TV cameras and about 30 reporters fill the Edward R. Murrow Room at the National Press Club in Washington. Strutting near an American flag, Cohen lays out his case, as if the media were his jury.

“What happened to this American citizen was outrageous, was uncalled for and was illegal,” he says, referring to his newest client, 37-year-old Ali Khan. An investment banker and official of the American Muslim Council, Khan says he was recently detained and interrogated by authorities at the Las Vegas airport.

Racial profiling “has taken over” in this country, Cohen says. He promises to file a “multimillion-dollar lawsuit” against the police, FBI and the airlines.

“He’s a good New York lawyer, a civil rights champion,” Khan says.

What about Cohen’s connections to Hamas, a reporter wants to know.

“The only hummus I know is the hummus in a Middle Eastern restaurant – the dish,” Khan retorts.

His attorney smiles in delight. It’s a great line for this Tuesday afternoon episode of what some call “The Stanley Show.”

Cohen’s Den

The address of Cohen’s building is spray-painted above a thick gray door, blending in with the graffiti. He heads into the steamy din of Avenue D, complaining that the neighborhood has been going downhill… ever since more police started patrolling.

Things have gotten too law-abiding.

“It’s horrible!” he wails. “It’s cleaned up. It’s white…. I miss the drive-bys. This neighborhood was fabulous in the old days. The drug business is down tremendously, so their only base of economic support is gone.”

He’s been here 15 years. “If the owners ever sell this building, what would I do?” he frets. “I guess I’d have to move to Gaza.”

At least there, he knows he’ll always have friends and family.

Al-Jazeera vs. The Israel Government Press Office

By

Center for Near East Policy Research

-

August 5, 2002

There is one thing that all the sides involved in the matter agree on: the Prime Minister’s Office, the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Ministry agree with the Al-Jazeera TV station only as to the very high rating that the satellite channel enjoys throughout the Arab world.

Al-Jazeera, which launched its broadcasts six years ago in Doha, the capital of Qatar in the Persian Gulf and was given the title “the CNN of the Arab world” thanks to its around-the-clock news broadcasts – has long since overtaken CNN’s ratings. And it is in fact its very success that has led the sides to the present confrontation, centering on the TV’s crew in the territories.

The Al-Jazeera crew contends: we have hundreds of millions of viewers, Israel should treat us fairly. Israel agrees: Al-Jazeera is a very important and influential media outlet but its influence is mainly negative, its reports are one-sided and its insistence on airing heart-rending photographs of Palestinian children’s bodies, among others, makes Al-Jazeera into an “inciting and dangerous station.”

The complaint made in Jerusalem is that the pictures of the bombing of the PA offices in Gaza – that were aired every hour on the hour on Al-Jazeera at the beginning of the Intifada – are what caused millions to go out and demonstrate angrily against Israel, and led to a high state of alert in Israeli diplomatic missions in the Arab world. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak explicitly stated that he made the decision to recall the veteran ambassador Mohammed Bassiouny as a result of the pictures that caused him to lose sleep. These pictures were shown exclusively on Al-Jazeera.

On the other hand, Al-Jazeera openly defied the boycott of the Arab world’s Journalists Association: Israeli figures – ministers, MKs, intellectuals, right wing and left wing activists, and mainly official spokespeople – are invited even today to present the Israeli angle after every incident in the territories. The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem even trained a special spokesman, Ophir Gendelman, to comment live, in spirited Arabic, on questions put to him in an earphone from the newsroom in Qatar.

Soldiers Boycotted Film

However, the curfew in the territories, the IDF’s entry into the West Bank cities and the roadblocks have paralyzed, either partially or completely, Al-Jazeera’s 19-strong crew from covering events. A reporter sent, for example, to cover an incident in Nablus, is not certain he will be able to get back to the Ramallah studio. Somebody stopped at a sudden IDF roadblock will be forced to be stuck there if he cannot show an official and valid document issued by the GPO in Jerusalem.

Of the 19 journalists and production crew employed by Al-Jazeera, only three hold such a card today: the chief correspondent, Walid el-Omari, an Israeli citizen from the Galilee, photographer Majid Safdi, also an Israeli citizen, from the Golan Heights, and Jawara Budeiri from Jerusalem. In a few weeks her press card will expire.

Walid el-Omari, whose round-the-clock reports open almost every news broadcast, describes events of the last few days: I went with my photographer to prepare an item in the Ramallah area. When we got back we were stopped by soldiers who claimed that we were breaking the curfew. I showed my press card, but the soldiers confiscated the film, and three house later I got them back scratched and unusable.”

Because of prohibitions on traveling, el-Omari is the only one of the team who can go out into the field and be sure that he will be able to broadcast from there. “I am worried all the time, what will happen if my photographer gets sick, or if I collapse from exhaustion. If this happens, there will be nobody to do Al-Jazeera’s work. I suspect this is the intention of those who set policy in Jerusalem,” he says. Last week, after the terror attack at Hebrew University, el-Omari decided not to try and reach the site of the attack. He stayed in Ramallah because of the curfew, had a special hour-long broadcast, but the pictures shown on screen were those provided by foreign agencies. Sorry, a Delay at the Roadblock

Al-Jazeera’s legal adviser in Israel, Zaki Kamal from Haifa, sent a long letter of complaint (53 items) to the director of the GPO, Danny Seaman, a month and a half ago. He demanded, in the name of free speech and democracy, that the press cards of the Al-Jazeera’s crew be renewed, as is the case with other foreign media teams. “There is no need to overstate the great importance of conveying the news and the link between Israel and its Arab neighbors and the other Arab countries in the world, created in the wake of Al-Jazeera’s activity in Israel,” Kamal wrote.

“Despite the heavy pressure applied by many Arab states, Qatar allowed the State of Israel to open an office in its capital and it treats Israeli reporters equally and fairly. For that we want reciprocity,” Kamal wrote.

“Precisely at this time, when tension between the different peoples is facing an abyss, the importance of Al-Jazeera’s work as an Arab media outlet, for authentic coverage of events in those areas under Israel’s and the PA’s control and inside the State of Israel, increases.”

The long letter, which describes Al-Jazeera’s uniqueness and its advantages, reviews the activities of its reporters since it opened offices in the territories six years ago: “They were allowed to do their journalism work faithfully, move about freely, and reach the sites of various incidents just like the other journalists, Israeli and foreign.” Kamal notes the loss of livelihood to the workers, and says the Israeli security officials themselves have no objection to their being given permits.

“In January,” el-Omari relates, “I asked to renew the press cards of Al-Jazeera’s 19 workers in Israel. Unfortunately, we were told that ‘there is a new policy.’ Some of our people continued to work, until their card expired. Only a few managed to work without cards. Most are forced to stay home.

“I hear it said that our reports are not balanced, that they are biased, that we don’t show the Israeli angle, don’t report terror attacks. How do they want us to cover events on the Israeli side if we’re not allowed to travel? We are forced to use material filmed by foreign agencies, and I know that if we could go to the place itself, our filmed material would look different. But we are not given access. Every time I go out, I don’t know how long my broadcast will have to wait because of delays at a roadblock.”

Kamal says: The GPO must act to uphold freedom of the press, “which is not the situation today, which discriminates against the Al-Jazeera crew in Israel.”

GPO Director Danny Seaman took his time getting back to Kamal. Prime Minister’s Office officials (responsible for the GPO) gave the legal adviser, Yael Cohen, authorization to reply in a laconic letter: “Your letter was conveyed to our office’s legal department, and I hereby confirm that it was received. After examining the matter with the relevant authorities, we will reply to your letter.”

Kamal’s patience ran out ten days ago. After not receiving any reply, he made a precedent-setting petition to the High Court of Justice, in the name of Al-Jazeera and its workers in the territories and in Israel: Al-Jazeera is demanding of the Prime Minister’s Office (which is responsible for the GPO), the Defense Ministry (responsible from traveling in the territories) and the GPO director to explain why Israel is hounding the Al-Jazeera workers and not letting them do their work and why it was decided to suspend their press cards. If We Don’t Respect Ourselves

The GPO, so it turns out, has complaints of its own. Seaman: “When a new reporter comes to Israel, from the New York Times for example, I get an official letter from the newspaper’s editors in which they inform me that he/she is their representative and asking that they be given a press card.

But the Al-Jazeera office in Qatar has never, to this day, sent such a letter, on official stationery.”

Kamal: “This is disingenuous, in the past they received such letters and as soon as they ask, they will receive more.”

El-Omari: “we’ve sent in requests for each of the workers, on official Al-Jazeera stationery, and until Seaman became director, we were also given press cards without any problems. The GPO cooperated with us and helped us quite a bit. But the moment Seaman became director, a year and a half ago, things became complicated. He informed us, ‘you are working for the Palestinian Authority.’ That got me angry. I told him, we try to reach places on the Israeli side, but we have problems because we don’t have cards.

“I went to the Knesset, and me and my photographer were stripped. When we tried to go the Prime Minister’s Office, we were checked for an hour and a half. When we reached the site of a terror attack, the IDF was forced to rescue us from being beaten. You have to decide: if you want us to present the Israeli side, you have to help us. You have to treat us like any other foreign journalist who works in Israel.”

El-Omari and the head of Al-Jazeera office in the territories, Weil Abu-Daka, tell of a meeting with Seaman. “Seaman invited us, and when Weil extended his hand to shake, Seaman asked him: do you have a permit to be here? Weil said, ‘I have no permit, that is what I’ve come here to talk to you about.’ Seaman, in response, threatened to call the police and have him arrested for being in Israel illegally. Then Weil took out his press card, which was still valid at the time.”

Seaman: “I remember the incident, but it wasn’t very serious. It’s important for me to stress that I obey the laws of the State of Israel, and demand of those who come and see me that they also obey the law. My threat to call the police was meant to show them that I demand from them exactly what I demand from all the other media outlets of Arab states that work here.”

Question: Al-Jazeera reporters need a press card to go from place to place.

Seaman: “I have a problem with Arab satellite stations that exploit our openness. If we don’t respect ourselves, we won’t be respected. Sometimes you have to give a little slap on the hand, like we did in the case of Abu Dhabi television that smeared us and reported untrue information. We expelled their correspondent, and then things worked out more or less. I hope that now, after Al-Jazeera has submitted its petition to the High Court, we will start instating order in the mess and clear rules will be determined as to who is eligible for a press card and who isn’t.” Question: Al-Jazeera claims that you won’t give them press cards on the grounds that they are hostile, that they broadcast harsh pictures that agitate the Arab world.

“I don’t care what they say about me. I am a professional, not a political appointment. As far as Al-Jazeera goes, I found complete anarchy, and I want to instate order. I don’t set policy and I don’t expect them to be pro-Israeli, but that they work professionally. I know who they are, I know their importance, but I want this to get to the High Court, which will decide in the matter of granting press cards.”

“Israel should be interested in having a media outlet so widespread in the Arab world tell its story,” says Kamal, “I think that because of Al-Jazeera’s importance, it should be respected.”

Question: It is said that Al-Jazeera’s broadcasts are hostile.

Kamal: “What other kind of pictures can you show from the territories? Even on the Israeli side they know that the situation in the territories is terrible. The easiest thing to do is stick your head in the sand and blame Al-Jazeera.”

Intriguing Relations with Qatar

The Jerusalem Foreign Ministry is now preparing a position paper presenting and analyzing the weight of Israeli PR contrasted with the media, mainly the TV stations in the Arab world. The conclusions, the emphases on Al-Jazeera’s weight compared to ANN, for example, owned by Rifat Assad (the Syrian president’s exiled uncle), which has also been found to be employing a crew in the territories without a permit – will be used by the High Court judges in their ruling on Al-Jazeera’s petition against Prime Minister Sharon.

A senior Foreign Ministry said, “we are now in a state of war against the Palestinians, and with this being the situation, it is natural for each side to withdraw unto itself and stress its angle of vision. But the State of Israel, which boasts of being the only real democracy in the region, cannot restrict the Palestinian journalists, and on the other hand, complain of inciteful and biased coverage. We also have unique and intriguing relations with the Qatar emirate, which runs this important station.”

This article ran in Yediot Ahronot on August 2, 2002

Briefing with Defence Expert Richard Perle Concerning Saudi Arabia

By

Center for Near East Policy Research

-

August 5, 2002

[There are those who say that the greatest Saudi threat to the U.S. is that the Saudis would withdraw their assets from Wall Street.]

A briefing given last month to a top Pentagon advisory board described Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that U.S. officials give it an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its oil fields and its financial assets invested in the United States.

“The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader,” stated the explosive briefing. It was presented on July 10 to the Defense Policy Board, a group of prominent intellectuals and former senior officials that advises the Pentagon on defense policy.

“Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies,” said the briefing prepared by Laurent Murawiec, a Rand Corp. analyst. A talking point attached to the last of 24 briefing slides went even further, describing Saudi Arabia as “the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent” in the Middle East.

The briefing did not represent the views of the board or official government policy, and in fact runs counter to the present stance of the U.S. government that Saudi Arabia is a major ally in the region. Yet it also represents a point of view that has growing currency within the Bush administration — especially on the staff of Vice President Cheney and in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership — and among neoconservative writers and thinkers closely allied with administration policymakers.

One administration official said opinion about Saudi Arabia is changing rapidly within the U.S. government. “People used to rationalize Saudi behavior,” he said. “You don’t hear that anymore. There’s no doubt that people are recognizing reality and recognizing that Saudi Arabia is a problem.”

The decision to bring the anti-Saudi analysis before the Defense Policy Board also appears tied to the growing debate over whether to launch a U.S. military attack to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. The chairman of the board is former Pentagon official Richard N. Perle, one of the most prominent advocates in Washington of just such an invasion. The briefing argued that removing Hussein would spur change in Saudi Arabia — which, it maintained, is the larger problem because of its role in financing and supporting radical Islamic movements.

Perle did not return calls to comment. A Rand spokesman said Murawiec, a former adviser to the French Ministry of Defense who now analyzes international security affairs for Rand, would not be available to comment.

“Neither the presentations nor the Defense Policy Board members’ comments reflect the official views of the Department of Defense,” Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said in a written statement issued last night. “Saudi Arabia is a long-standing friend and ally of the United States. The Saudis cooperate fully in the global war on terrorism and have the Department’s and the Administration’s deep appreciation.”

Murawiec said in his briefing that the United States should demand that Riyadh stop funding fundamentalist Islamic outlets around the world, stop all anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli statements in the country, and “prosecute or isolate those involved in the terror chain, including in the Saudi intelligence services.”

If the Saudis refused to comply, the briefing continued, Saudi oil fields and overseas financial assets should be “targeted,” although exactly how was not specified.

The report concludes by linking regime change in Iraq to altering Saudi behavior. This view, popular among some neoconservative thinkers, is that once a U.S. invasion has removed Hussein from power, a friendly successor regime would become a major exporter of oil to the West. That oil would diminish U.S. dependence on Saudi energy exports, and so — in this view — permit the U.S. government finally to confront the House of Saud for supporting terrorism.

“The road to the entire Middle East goes through Baghdad,” said the administration official, who is hawkish on Iraq. “Once you have a democratic regime in Iraq, like the ones we helped establish in Germany and Japan after World War II, there are a lot of possibilities.”

Of the two dozen people who attended the Defense Policy Board meeting, only one, former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, spoke up to object to the anti-Saudi conclusions of the briefing, according to sources who were there. Some members of the board clearly agreed with Kissinger’s dismissal of the briefing and others did not.

One source summarized Kissinger’s remarks as, “The Saudis are pro-American, they have to operate in a difficult region, and ultimately we can manage them.”

Kissinger declined to comment on the meeting. He said his consulting business does not advise the Saudi government and has no clients that do large amounts of business in Saudi Arabia.

“I don’t consider Saudi Arabia to be a strategic adversary of the United States,” Kissinger said. “They are doing some things I don’t approve of, but I don’t consider them a strategic adversary.”

Other members of the board include former vice president Dan Quayle; former defense secretaries James Schlesinger and Harold Brown; former House speakers Newt Gingrich and Thomas Foley; and several retired senior military officers, including two former vice chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired admirals David Jeremiah and William Owens.

Asked for reaction, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said he did not take the briefing seriously. “I think that it is a misguided effort that is shallow, and not honest about the facts,” he said. “Repeating lies will never make them facts.”

“I think this view defies reality,” added Adel al-Jubeir, a foreign policy adviser to Saudi leader Crown Prince Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz. “The two countries have been friends and allies for over 60 years. Their relationship has seen the coming and breaking of many storms in the region, and if anything it goes from strength to strength.”

In the 1980s, the United States and Saudi Arabia played major roles in supporting the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, pouring billions of dollars into procuring weapons and other logistical support for the mujaheddin.

At the end of the decade, the relationship became even closer when the U.S. military stationed a half-million troops on Saudi territory to repel Hussein’s invasions of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Several thousand U.S. troops have remained on Saudi soil, mainly to run air operations in the region. Their presence has been cited by Osama bin Laden as a major reason for his attacks on the United States.

The anti-Saudi views expressed in the briefing appear especially popular among neoconservative foreign policy thinkers, which is a relatively small but influential group within the Bush administration.

“I think it is a mistake to consider Saudi Arabia a friendly country,” said Kenneth Adelman, a former aide to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is a member of the Defense Policy Board but didn’t attend the July 10 meeting. He said the view that Saudi Arabia is an adversary of the United States “is certainly a more prevalent view that it was a year ago.”

In recent weeks, two neoconservative magazines have run articles similar in tone to the Pentagon briefing. The July 15 issue of the Weekly Standard, which is edited by William Kristol, a former chief of staff to Quayle, predicted “The Coming Saudi Showdown.” The current issue of Commentary, which is published by the American Jewish Committee, contains an article titled, “Our Enemies, the Saudis.”

“More and more people are making parts of this argument, and a few all of it,” said Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins University expert on military strategy. “Saudi Arabia used to have lots of apologists in this country…. Now there are very few, and most of those with substantial economic interests or long-standing ties there.”

Cohen, a member of the Defense Policy Board, declined to discuss its deliberations. But he did say that he views Saudi Arabia more as a problem than an enemy. “The deal that they cut with fundamentalism is most definitely a threat, [so] I would say that Saudi Arabia is a huge problem for us,” he said.

But that view is far from dominant in the U.S. government, others said. “The drums are beginning to beat on Saudi Arabia,” said Robert Oakley, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan who consults frequently with the U.S. military.

He said the best approach isn’t to confront Saudi Arabia but to support its reform efforts. “Our best hope is change through reform, and that can only come from within,” he said.

This piece ran in the Washington Post on August 6, 2002

300,000 Cars Stolen and Transferred to Areas Under the Control of the Palestinian Authority

By

Center for Near East Policy Research

-

August 5, 2002

The most successful source of income in the areas under control of the Palestinian Authority is the theft of vehicles from Israel, carried out under the sponsorship of the PA. Over the last decade about 300,000 vehicles have been stolen from Israel, disclosed Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Maj. Gen. Amos Gilad yesterday.

Maj. Gen. Gilad, who spoke to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, actually accused the PA of direct responsibility for car thefts, which began in 1992 and reached its peak in 1997, and said that its senior officials are “involved in crime” and in fact directing the thieves.

The theft industry constitutes an additional source of income to the PA, which issues license plates to anybody. Anyone who has a stolen car from Israel has to pay a fee to the PA and in exchange receives local license plates, the Palestinian model for “transfer of ownership.”

The PA crime industry also includes the forgery of Israeli ID cards in large quantities as well as the forgery of Israeli money.

Ruling over this black economy is Mohammed Rashid, Arafat’s close associate. Maj. Gen. Gilad said, “Rashid knows all the secrets. His family is in Canada and he travels extensively abroad.”

The coordinator of government activities in the territories also described the lives of luxury and corruption of senior PA officials, whom, he said, do not at all take into account the difficult situation of the Palestinian population. “They employ nannies from Sri Lanka, drive fancy cars, and their children do not commit suicide bombings. They don’t care at all about the suffering of the people.”

This article ran in Maariv on August 7, 2002

Reviewing the US AID Report on Malnutrition

By

David Bedein

-

August 5, 2002

On Monday, August 5th, US AID, the Agency for International Development, Scheduled a press conference in Gaza to present their report on the state of malnutrition in the areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

After Israel Resource News Agency alerted US AID to the fact that a Gaza venue would prevent Israeli reporters from taking part, and mitigate against any serious questions, because of censorship policies of the PA, US AID changed its venue to the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem.

The findings of the US AID report had already appeared in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune on July 26th. US AID spokespeople said that this was because of a Palestinian leak. In all fairness, US AID has met with both PA and Israeli officials on July 15th. The Israeli Civil Administration officials sat on the report while the PA officials placed it on more than a dozen Palestinian media websites.

The US AID press conference was a highly biased highly politicized event that came in the guise of a non-political scientific report.

The report’s author began with the conclusion that conditions regarding malnutrition in the refugee camps is “far worse” than those of sub-Saharan Africa, where starvation is wiping out millions of men, women and children in an epidemic of global proportions.

The study, (funded by uninformed American taxpayers at an unknown cost) was largely based on anecdotal evidence and blood tests, sites the shortage of beef, chicken, lamb and fish in the refugee daily diet. Given that Gaza sits directly on the Mediterranean, the stated lack of fish protein was at best, difficult to comprehend.

These shortages have an average duration of three days to two weeks.

There was no information as to health conditions and dietary content prior to the border closings made available, despite the fact that “chronic” malnutrition takes longer than two weeks duration to become “chronic” in nature. (Hence the meaning of the word, chronic…)

It was also stated that health problems were far worse for children, pregnant women and the poorest members of Palestinian society with little or nothing left to sell within the community as payment for needed food.

When asked if the PA would accept food from Israel, the members of the panel said that they would check into it and get back with the correct answer.

US AID personnel and Palestinian medical professionals all spoke about the root cause of the issue of acute malnutrition: the fact that the Israelis are doing blockades and curfews.

Nowhere in the report nor at the press conference did either the US AID officials mention what an Israel Ministry of Health official, Dr Yaakov Adler, reported to the media, which was that the Palestinian Authority has forbidden Israeli health officials from providing the basics of medical And nutritional assistance to the PA for the past two years.

At no point did US AID hold the Palestinian Authority esponsible for their own behavior — which was not repesented as being part of the problem or even part of the solution. The only “problem” was the blockades and curfews. The “solution” was lifting the IDF blockades and curfews.

Palestinian Authority responsibility could have been stated as:

Curtailing terrorist actions
Failing that, to curtail the PA policy of allowing terrorists to hide amongst the civilian population
To ensure that all funds donated by third party nations for humanitarian relief is utilized for humanitarian relief, are not diverted for graft (the P.A.) or for propaganda or weapons
To provide instruction to the population via Health Services and NGOs on how to get the most nutrition for the amount of money they have to spend and
To renew cooperation with the Israelis and receive offered assistance.
A truly objective approach would have been: the Israelis are responding to terrorist actions that are not tolerable for any nation (and in fact, being blown apart by a bomb represents a more severe health problem than malnutrition). Given this reality, and the fact that until the terrorism ends there will be some blockades and curfews that exacerbate a situation of malnutrition, we must all work together to see what remedies are possible during this crisis situation. This means monitoring international assistance, bringing in stores of food, distributing vitamins and iron pills, educating the populace, encouraging the Palestinian heath authorities to work with their Israeli counterparts and accept their assistance, working with the Israelis to see in what ways they can be of assistance, etc.

However, the persistent answer of the panel was to remove the blockades, until one Palestinian panelist said, “Well we could feed them, but that wouldn’t address the root cause of the malnutrition”

A scene fit for Mad Magazine.

The Consistent “Peace Now” Position: Jews Must Leave Their Communities in Judea and Samaria

By

Center for Near East Policy Research

-

August 2, 2002

Israeli politics may, at times, seem absurd. But nothing is more absurd than allowing a handful of hardcore ideologues in the settlement movement to hold an entire nation hostage to its beliefs.

The Israeli Peace Now movement recently issued an extremely thorough study of the attitudes that settlers have toward Israeli democratic institutions and possible compensation for being required to evacuate their homes. Peace Now found that most settlers are more pragmatic, respectful of the democratic process and willing to accept reasonable compensation than many people had been led to believe.

But rather than embracing this benevolent portrayal of settlers, the Settlers Council, which is supposed to represent them, hotly denied these “allegations.”

Why? Because the ideological views of the Settlers Council and their supporters in the Israeli government simply do not reflect the thinking of the settlers themselves. They would have Israelis believe that any attempt to remove the settlements would be met with fierce resistance from the people who live there, people who supposedly are living in the territories to fulfill their commitment to religious and Zionist ideals.

However, Peace Now — which has long considered Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza to be impediments to Israeli security and peace — found that more than three-quarters of settlers moved to the territories for “quality of life” issues, not for religious or national security reasons. Successive Israeli governments have offered heavy financial incentives for people to move to the West Bank and Gaza and provided further subsidies for them to stay there. Combined with beautiful landscapes and bypass roads that allow easy access into Israel proper, government funding has provided settlers with an attractive lifestyle that they otherwise could not afford inside the Green Line.

It was no surprise, then, when the study further revealed that only 2% of settlers would use extreme measures, such as taking up arms, to fight a democratic decision taken by the Israeli government or a referendum to withdraw from the settlements. In fact, 68% of settlers recognize the authority of Israeli democratic institutions to make that decision and would comply with it, while another 26% of settlers would obey such a decision following a struggle against it with legal means.

If Israel decided to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, Peace Now found, 59% of settlers would consider suitable financial compensation as the best solution, while another 10% would prefer moving to a community inside the Green Line as sufficient compensation. Around 23% of settlers would prefer moving as a community to another settlement in the territories. Just 9% would refuse any solution.

The Settlers Council said that the Peace Now study was slanted. In actuality, it was very accurate, with just a 2% margin of error.

The Settlers Council also said that Jews continue to move to the West Bank and Gaza, with a 7.7% population increase since the outbreak of the intifada in September 2000. But a closer look at that number is revealing. New Interior Ministry figures show that over the last 12 months, there has been just a 5.21% increase in the territories, with most of this rise coming from natural growth, not internal migration.

The main lesson behind the Peace Now study is that, contrary to the assertions of the Israeli government and the Settlers Council, settlers will not be a major obstacle to any future peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The majority of settlers would accept such an agreement, even if it means leaving their homes in exchange for reasonable compensation.

Unfortunately, there is no official program in place to help settlers move to Israel. Peace Now is calling on the Israeli government to fill this void by establishing an entity that will help settlers relocate, by stopping the flow of subsidies that keep people in the settlements and by using some of those funds to establish a fair compensation program for settlers.

It is time for the Israeli government to make it possible for settlers to make aliya, that is, to move inside Israel proper. The government has a moral responsibility to these Israelis since it enticed them to live in the territories to begin with.

It is time for the Israeli government to stop letting its “fear” of upsetting the settlers justify its policies, like delaying the establishment of a security fence or avoiding political negotiations with the Palestinians.

It is time for the Israeli government to cease putting the future of Israel at risk as a Jewish, democratic state by insisting on holding onto the settlements – and the 3.5 million Palestinians who live around them.

Patricia Barr is co-chair of Americans for Peace Now.

The Peace Now Survey Critique: Confimation of Pragmatic Settler Trend Does Not Mean What “Peace Now” Would Like it to Mean

By

David Bedein

-

August 2, 2002

As a journalist who has lived in and covered the Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Katif for the past 15 years, I can affirm the findings reported by Americans for Peace Now co-chairman Patricia Barr in her article published in the Forward of August 1, 2002, “Let My People Go From the West Bank and Gaza”, in which she quotes the findings of a Peace Now research study which found that “most settlers are more pragmatic, respectful of the democratic process and willing to accept reasonable compensation” if a peace settlement were reached that would require the abandonment of Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

From the wide range of interviews that I have conducted in almost all of the 144 Jewish communities that were established in Judea, Samaria and Katif I confirm that this pragmatic perspective as prevalent in these communities.

Indeed, the willing abandonment of 16 Jewish settlements in the Sinai in 1982 at the time of the peace treaty with Egypt stands as precedent which quietly influences public opinion at large throughout these Jewish communities.

It may therefore surprise the readership of The Forward to know that the vast majority of those who live in these Areas do indeed ascribe to the “Shem Tov-Yariv” formula from 1974, which postulates that territory acquired after the 1967 war can indeed be exchanged for peace.

However, Barr ignores the fact that the PLO and its Palestinian Authority, has never accepted the idea of a Palestinian Arab state that would be confined to west bank and Gaza, without including Jerusalem and the recognition Of UN resolution #194 that would allow 3.6. million Palestinian Arabs to exercise their “inalienable right of Return” to the villages that the Arabs lost in 1948.

Barr also ignores the fact that the PLO and the PA Definition of “illegal settlements” as those Jewish communities That were established in place of Arab villages. That settlement definition applies to 531 Israeli settlements that replaced Arab villages after 1948, not to the 144 Israeli settlements established after 1967, not one replaced even one Arab village,

Most importantly, Barr ignores the fact the PLO and PA are not ready to offering any peace treaty or peace settlement, which would be The only prerequisite by which any Israeli Jew would agree to leave Or abandon any Jewish community.

Instead, what Barr and her colleagues in Peace Now have been Suggesting is that Jews simply leave their homes and communities in Judea, Samaria and Katif without any peace settlement.

Barr and Peace Now therefore abrogate the Shem Tov Yariv formula of “territories for peace”.

Shortly before his death, retired General Aharon Yariv, the co-author of Shem Tov Yariv formula, criticized those on the Israeli left who invoke his formula to endorse unilateral relinquishment of territory.

As Yariv told me,”We favor territories for peace, not territories before peace”.

In other words, what the Peace Now survey shows is that the Jews who live in the settlements beyond the Green Line now ascribe to the Peace Now philosophy of “territories for peace” while Peace Now has abandoned its own ideology in favor of launching a worldwide campaign to expel Jews from 144 Jewish communities, without any premise of peace.

Israel Behind the News

“Put Arafat on Trial”

Don’t Confuse us with Facts – How Israeli Military Intelligence Botched Assessments of Arafat

The Refugees’ Choice: Another Look at UNRWA

Profile of Stanley Cohen, the Jewish Lawyer for the Hamas

Al-Jazeera vs. The Israel Government Press Office

Briefing with Defence Expert Richard Perle Concerning Saudi Arabia

300,000 Cars Stolen and Transferred to Areas Under the Control of the Palestinian Authority

Reviewing the US AID Report on Malnutrition

The Consistent “Peace Now” Position: Jews Must Leave Their Communities in Judea and Samaria

The Peace Now Survey Critique: Confimation of Pragmatic Settler Trend Does Not Mean What “Peace Now” Would Like it to Mean

Column from the Director