The More Things Change...
Howie Beigelman
The More Things Change...
Howie Beigelman
(Howie Beigelman is an attorney and freelance writer in New York.)
An opinion piece on Friday's (March 16, 2001) New York Times Op-Ed page left me stunned. Believe you me, it takes a lot for The Paper of Record to stun me, accustomed as I am to the Gray Lady's Middle East coverage. But Allegra Pacheco's op-ed "Palestinians in a State of Siege" was breathtakingly unbalanced, biased and unfair.
Ms. Pacheco's opening sentence reads "On any given day or night, 200,000 Israeli settlers move freely in and out of the West Bank and Gaza to go to work, shop, run errands and attend school or university."
Ms. Pacheco has apparently missed the news reports of Israeli schoolchildren being maimed and blown to bits as a rocket propelled grenade pierced their bus's bulletproof armor. I'll repeat that. Israeli schoolchildren now travel in bulletproof school buses. That's free movement? Absent from the piece is any acknowledgment that Israeli civilians traveling "freely" to work, home or school are shot at by snipers and must dodge Molotov cocktails and large and deadly rocks.
As an aside, the media is mistaken in their belief that it is not at all dangerous to get hit by a thrown rock. The obvious case of Cain & Abel aside, I direct the chattering class to the recent tourist in New York, who after being bashed in the head with a rock spent a significant amount of time hospitalized. The press focused on the mentally ill attacker, whose presence on the streets of fair Gotham resulted from a supposed misguided policy of Rudy Giuliani. But I'll repeat the pertinent part. Someone got bashed with a rock and almost died.
So it takes incredible gall, given the injuries and deaths that Arab terror has brought on Israeli's who travel the roads in fear to state they may "move freely".
Ms. Pacheco proceeds to blame the Israeli army for the closure necessitated by acts of terror that take place too often on Israel's streets.
The cause of all this suffering is not an act of nature. It is collective punishment that the Israelis can reverse at any time.Correct. It's no act of nature. It is a reasonable, if unfortunate defense taken by those who wish not to see the too familiar pictures of burning cafes, crumpled buses and still warm corpses of Israeli civilians murdered in cold blood as they - what were those words in Ms. Pacheco's opening sentence "go to work, shop, run errands and attend school or university". If terrorist snipers and suicide bombers routinely infiltrated the United States from Toronto, I doubt Ms. Pacheco would protest a decision to seal the Canadian border, even to the thousands who must cross the border for work. Rather, I suspect that Ms. Pacheco, like many fair minded, tolerant, and politically correct journalists would support that closure in order to insure peace and security in the United States.
But Ms. Pacheco doesn't end there. She continues with the following charge.
Since most Palestinian officials received special exemptions from closure restrictions, the authority made only half- hearted demands over the years to end them. Some even profited from the closure through exclusive permits from the Israelis to import goods and maintain monopolies over basic goods in Palestinian markets. However, for Adel T'nuh and the remaining 99 percent of the Palestinians, closure simply made life worse and a real peace more elusive.Brilliant! The Palestinian Authority, the most corrupt political organization since pre-war Chicago, has profited from this closure. Arafat and his cronies make millions, while "their people" suffer. Their people, indeed. The Palestinian leadership, which views children as cannon fodder for the CNN cameras, has no qualms using average Palestinians as pawns furthering their selfish ends. Fancy villas, slush funds, and bribes to Saddam Hussein are all paid for courtesy of the US taxpayer. The average Palestinian never sees that money. The twenty million dollars Arafat gave to Saddam "just in case" he flees to Iraq in exile would have gone a long way in supporting Adel T'nuh, his four children and millions of other Palestinians.
It's always easier to blame democracies than tyrants. Easier, and plain silly. For decades Palestinians have lived in squalid refugee camps. Arab oil profits have financed airline skyjackings, attacks on American embassies and the cowardly - and deadly attack on the USS Cole, by way of example. Instead, that money could have and should have been building homes, schools and a Palestinian economy and infrastructure. But let's blame Israel?
Just in case you thought it couldn't get any better, read on.
Israeli officials admit that the closure in all its forms cannot protect Israel from suicide bombers or other potential attacks.That's a ludicrous expansion of that lesson every fourth grader learns upon bringing chewing gum to class: If you don't have enough to share with the whole class, don't share at all. Ms. Pacheco would have us believe that if doctors can't save every life, they ought not to save any. If police can't catch every criminal, they shouldn't catch even one.
As always, the last line is the best.
The closure policy has instead solidified an apartheid-like system of separate rights and privileges for Jews and Palestinians.The logical leap here is astounding. During apartheid, South Africa's white rulers discriminated against black citizens for no other reason than their being black. Apartheid, at least as I understand it, wasn't instituted to stop suicide bombers and snipers from blasting up Johannesburg's white neighborhoods. In no uncertain terms, the closure and separation between Israelis and Palestinians is solely due to Palestinian perpetration of terrorist acts that cause death and injury to Israelis.
The closure, and any suffering or hardship it causes can end at any time. Anytime that is, that the Palestinian Authority asserts control over the mobs that roam the territories they supposedly administer. Anytime that is, that the members of Hamas and Arafat's own personal bodyguard's, Force 17, cease to provoke, incite, and participate in terrorist activity. But in order to do that, the Palestinian Authority will need to take a break from lining their pockets with money that once belonged to the US taxpayer and was intended to implement a job creation and infrastructure program. They will also need to cease to terrorize and persecute their internal Palestinian political opponents. It might help if they would stop running summer camps that teach children how to kill Jews. It also might be useful if they would cease the destructive teaching of hate that is in the Palestinian media and textbooks.
The real cause, and the real blame for anything tragic in this situation lies squarely with the Palestinian leadership. They have not lived up to any of their obligations since the now infamous handshake on the White House lawn. They have not advanced one iota to prepare their people for peace. They continue to advocate and sponsor the use of violence as a political tool.
To them, Ms. Pacheco says nothing. That is, even for the Times, nothing short of stunning. Oh, and stupid.
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