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CyberGnu
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of the Virtual Serengeti
Apr 1999
time: 05:27
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Also:
quote:
Nonesense. The first intifada had already been waning and was all but over by 1991, two years before Arafat
became an issue.
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From the EB:
Negotiations, violence, and incipient self-rule
The intifada
PLO declaration of independence
‘Arafat sought to establish himself as the only leader who could unite and speak for the Palestinians, and in mid-1988 he took the diplomatic initiative. At the 19th session of the PNC, held near Algiers, Algeria, on Nov. 12–15, 1988, he succeeded in having the council issue a declaration of independence for a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. ‘Arafat proclaimed the state (without defining its borders) on November 15. Within days more than 25 nations (including the Soviet Union and Egypt but excluding the United States and Israel) had extended recognition to the government-in-exile.
The final weeks of 1988 opened a new chapter in Palestinian-Israeli relations. In December ‘Arafat announced that the PNC recognized Israel as a state in the region and condemned and rejected terrorism in all its forms—including state terrorism, the PLO's term for Israel's actions. He addressed a special meeting of the UN General Assembly convened at Geneva and proposed an international peace conference under UN auspices. He publicly accepted UN resolutions 242 and 338, thereby recognizing, at least implicitly, the State of Israel. Despite their ambiguities, UN resolution 242 (1967), which encapsulated the principle of land for peace, and resolution 338 (1973), which called for direct negotiations, were regarded by both parties as the starting points for negotiations. Although Israeli Prime Minister Shamir stated that he was still not prepared to negotiate with the PLO, the U.S. government announced that it would open dialogue with the PLO.
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Sirotnikov
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<--- Yes, It's a "kitty" in a boot.
Feb 2000
time: 07:27
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The "massacare":
quote:
IDF cameraman, five Palestinians killed in Rafah
By Amos Harel and Arnon Regular
IDF cameraman Cpl. Lior Ziv, 19, from Holon, was killed early yesterday and three other soldiers were wounded during an operation to destroy a Hamas smuggling tunnel in Rafah. Five Palestinians were killed and 30 others wounded in the operation.
The operation began late Saturday night when Givati brigade infantrymen and engineers in armored vehicles including tanks, under the command of Givati commander Col. Imad Fares rolled into the Sabora neighborhood of Rafah to find and destroy tunnels used for smuggling from Egypt into Rafah.
The incursion was met by unusually stiff resistance, including light weapons, anti-tank grenades, hand grenades, and home-made bombs. Early in the operation, soldiers killed and wounded some of the armed Palestinians. Ziv, a still photographer from the IDF Spokesman's Office was assigned along with a video photographer, Durel Gillerman, to an unit looking for tunnels. It is standard operating procedure for the cameramen to remain inside an armored vehicle until other troops clear the area of hostile elements.
But almost immediately after departing the armored personnel carrier, Ziv, who was wearing a flak jacket and a helmet, was shot in the head and died instantly. Gillerman was wounded. When two medics began attending them, they also came under fire - one was seriously hurt and the other lightly. All three were evacuated to Soroka Hospital in Be'er Sheva.
Elsewhere in the area, soldiers uncovered a large tunnel, 30 meters deep, 300 meters long and 60 centimeters wide, which they blew up with 200 kg of explosives. According to military sources, the tunnel was used by Hamas, and its opening was under the home of Hamas activist Naim Abu Ubeid. A smaller tunnel was also uncovered and destroyed.
During the operation, three houses were demolished, including one owned by Muhamed Abu Shimala, the current head of the Hamas military wing in Gaza. At first he was believed killed in the firefight, but later found he survived. He is considered behind the slaying of an IDF officer in Rafah in 1994, and was propelled to the leadership of the Hamas military wing after IDF successes against a series of predecessors.
Among the Palestinian casualties yesterday were known activists in terror groups operating from Rafah, as well as a 14-year-old boy.
The IDF operation prompted a Hamas response - two Qassam rockets fired at Sderot, slightly wounding an Israeli woman who suffered from smoke inhalation when the rocket started a fire in her apartment. A number of mortars were also fired at Gush Katif settlements, causing no casualties.
In a separate incident yesterday, a Palestinian teenager was killed by IDF fire near the village of Azun, east of Qalqiliya, when soldiers shot him after he was seen throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli cars.
South of Jenin, a landmine went off near an IDF patrol, causing no injuries.
In another development, Islamic Jihad claimed it was responsible for an attack on the settlement of Shaked, where three Israelis were wounded. The gunman, from Jenin, was killed by soldiers during the attack.
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panag
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MY WORDS ARE BACKED WITH BIO-CHEMICAL WEAPONS
Oct 2000
time: 07:27
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quote:
Originally posted by Sirotnikov
The "massacare":
quote:
IDF cameraman, five Palestinians killed in Rafah
By Amos Harel and Arnon Regular
IDF cameraman Cpl. Lior Ziv, 19, from Holon, was killed early yesterday and three other soldiers were wounded during an operation to destroy a Hamas smuggling tunnel in Rafah. Five Palestinians were killed and 30 others wounded in the operation.
The operation began late Saturday night when Givati brigade infantrymen and engineers in armored vehicles including tanks, under the command of Givati commander Col. Imad Fares rolled into the Sabora neighborhood of Rafah to find and destroy tunnels used for smuggling from Egypt into Rafah.
The incursion was met by unusually stiff resistance, including light weapons, anti-tank grenades, hand grenades, and home-made bombs. Early in the operation, soldiers killed and wounded some of the armed Palestinians. Ziv, a still photographer from the IDF Spokesman's Office was assigned along with a video photographer, Durel Gillerman, to an unit looking for tunnels. It is standard operating procedure for the cameramen to remain inside an armored vehicle until other troops clear the area of hostile elements.
But almost immediately after departing the armored personnel carrier, Ziv, who was wearing a flak jacket and a helmet, was shot in the head and died instantly. Gillerman was wounded. When two medics began attending them, they also came under fire - one was seriously hurt and the other lightly. All three were evacuated to Soroka Hospital in Be'er Sheva.
Elsewhere in the area, soldiers uncovered a large tunnel, 30 meters deep, 300 meters long and 60 centimeters wide, which they blew up with 200 kg of explosives. According to military sources, the tunnel was used by Hamas, and its opening was under the home of Hamas activist Naim Abu Ubeid. A smaller tunnel was also uncovered and destroyed.
During the operation, three houses were demolished, including one owned by Muhamed Abu Shimala, the current head of the Hamas military wing in Gaza. At first he was believed killed in the firefight, but later found he survived. He is considered behind the slaying of an IDF officer in Rafah in 1994, and was propelled to the leadership of the Hamas military wing after IDF successes against a series of predecessors.
Among the Palestinian casualties yesterday were known activists in terror groups operating from Rafah, as well as a 14-year-old boy.
The IDF operation prompted a Hamas response - two Qassam rockets fired at Sderot, slightly wounding an Israeli woman who suffered from smoke inhalation when the rocket started a fire in her apartment. A number of mortars were also fired at Gush Katif settlements, causing no casualties.
In a separate incident yesterday, a Palestinian teenager was killed by IDF fire near the village of Azun, east of Qalqiliya, when soldiers shot him after he was seen throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli cars.
South of Jenin, a landmine went off near an IDF patrol, causing no injuries.
In another development, Islamic Jihad claimed it was responsible for an attack on the settlement of Shaked, where three Israelis were wounded. The gunman, from Jenin, was killed by soldiers during the attack.
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hi ,
funny how no-one uses the word " massacare " when 6 Israeli civilians are murdered at home , ....
even more funny is that some news channels from small countries have the camera guy as a palestinian victim , ....
have a nice day
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Sirotnikov
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<--- Yes, It's a "kitty" in a boot.
Feb 2000
time: 07:27
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Haaretz:
quote:
A man in his prime
By Yossi Klein
It's not easy to draw a portrait of a refugee, because by definition, a refugee changes according to where he is. Mahmoud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, who is about to become the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, is first of all a refugee and then a pragmatist. Abu Mazen - whose first-born son, Mazen, an engineer, died a year ago at the age of 42 in Qatar of a heart ailment - has gone through many places in the course of his 68 years. Like every refugee, Abu Mazen also carries his birthplace, Safed, in his memory. As a pragmatist, though, he knows where to draw the line that separates nostalgia, which attracts him to the city, and reality, which prevents him from even visiting it.
The status of refugee is an important biographical detail in the life history of a Palestinian politician, but pragmatism can define him as a Palestinian leader. Like every refugee, Abu Mazen has many stations in his life: Damascus, where he fled with his family, studied at the university (law) and taught in elementary school; Moscow, where he submitted his doctoral thesis, which dealt with the Holocaust, and more specifically with the connection between Nazism and Zionism; Tunis, where he resided as one of the leaders of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization; Qatar, where his family ran its business; and Abu Dhabi, where his daughter-in-law and his grandson live today.
Abu Mazen continues to travel between Gaza and Ramallah, in both of which he has homes, as befits the divided character of the state he is going to administer, and in addition, he has a house in Morocco, for the sake of the security that a refugee searches for all his life.
Kid from Safed
Mahmoud Abbas was born in 1935 in the Harath al-Joura neighborhood at the edge of the wholesale market in Safed. His family lived above the dusky shop run by his father, where one could get sunflower seeds in sacks, conserves in tins and vegetables by weight. However, his father's main source of income was the flock of sheep he kept in the village of Zangariya (where Moshav Elifelet is today). The sheep's milk from which the Abbas family made a living and from which they produced the renowned Safed cheese, was also the material that prevented the dissolution of the relations between Jews and Arabs - slightly more than 1,000 Jews who were crowded into the Jewish Quarter, and more than 20,000 Arabs in Safed and the surrounding villages.
The Arabs wanted to sell their dairy products and the Jews wanted to buy them, but the Jews, because of the kashrut (dietary) laws, could eat only cheese that was produced by other Jews. The result was the burgeoning in Safed of an industry of cheese-makers who purchased the milk in the villages and processed it into the cheese that they sold in Haifa and Jerusalem. Along with the cheese, another industry also flourished: protection money. The Jews bought the right to carry out commercial transactions in the Arab villages in return for payment to the city Arabs.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Aryeh Bandareli's father was a wholesaler of cheese who wandered among the villages. His son, like other veteran residents of Safed, begins by presenting his genealogy: He is the scion of a family that has been in Safed for six generations. He then recalls the blend of revulsion and pleasure in the damp, dank smell of the cellars in which the Safed cheese was stored until it matured. The cheese business, he says, created a "type of relationship - between the suppliers and the producers."
A "type of relationship"? Today, on the porch of his apartment on Mount Canaan, Bandareli looks out over the red roofs of Biriya, which was the rural suburb of Safed, and explains that those relations were based on "interests."
Mohammed Abbas, Abu Mazen's father, visited their home, but the Bandarelis were not invited to his home. He never met Mrs. Abbas and he did not play with the boy Mahmoud, who is three years his junior. It was only when he went to their places as his father's messenger that he would meet him. Still, along with the cool correctness of the business relations, there were also flickers of good-neighborliness: On the last day of Pesach, the merchant Abbas would place on his protege's table a tray holding thin pitas draped with a towel, cheeses and sweets, and he would be reciprocated with nuts, almonds and a little matzo that remained in the house.
Despite the mutual "vested interests," the friction between the suspicious majority and the hyperactive minority engendered tense relations. It was only the British and the cheese business that prevented a deterioration into a frontal clash. According to Bandareli, the tension was expressed in the form of harassment by Arab youngsters, who threw stones at the Jews, cursed them and started up with girls. Was Mahmoud Abbas also involved in this activity? No, Bandareli says, he was too small and he did not join the gang that was led by a certain Walid Kadoura, who was the son of the Arab mayor and a "big thug" in his own right.
The old house as a Safed legend (1)
In conversations with Safed old-timers, the phrase "Safed legend" comes up occasionally, but as an expression of disparagement. A Safed legend resembles the truth but is different. A Safed legend is born of the wind and is carried for years on its wings. In time it becomes covered with the dust that rises from the shabby alleys and becomes like them, elusive and secretive. The house of Abu Mazen is a widespread Safed legend.
Newspapers that are happy to turn every legend into reality treated it as the solid truth, and ever since, it has been recorded in the city's history as such. "You're looking for Abu Mazen's house?" someone in City Hall asks me, flashing an ironic smile at the piquant paradox. "Go to the local Likud branch on Jerusalem Street." Nine years ago, when he was chairman of the Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu dedicated the branch and asked those present chivalrously "to play down the past of the building and emphasize its future as the center of Likud activity in Galilee."
The elderly gentleman wearing a large white skullcap who pauses for a moment to smoke a cigarette in the sun while leaning on the brick wall of the real Abbas house, also enjoys the humor of the legend and directs me to the building that houses the Likud party's local branch.
To know what the Abbas house looked like, you have to strip away in the imagination the ugly plaster and the solar heater that suddenly sprang up. You have to find the arches behind the rectangular frameworks of the windows and ignore the pile of junk in the corner of the inner courtyard. You also have to ignore the additions and the awnings and another room or two, and the rectangular sign that states, in pretty lettering, that this is not the local branch of the Likud but a kollel - a yeshiva for married men.
A young man with curly sidelocks, prayer vest fringes flapping and glasses on his forehead, comes out of the building to the inner courtyard in order to fill a pail with water from the sink. Not far from the sink, in the center of the tiled courtyard, is a magnificent cypress tree. "You can't miss it," Bandareli tells me in English as he directs me to the house. "The cypress is the best sign."
The cypress, unlike most of its kind, is not tall and thin; it is thick and splits into two trunks that carry their high, sharp tops straight into the sky. The split cypress is far taller than the turret of a nearby mosque, which shoots out of the asphalt hill in which it is planted, the vestige of the construction boom that seized the city for a very brief moment. Next to the cypress, between piles of junk and rags, there is also an old olive tree. The tree is scrawny and gray, but it will always be there, like the Hasid in glasses who examines me with hostility as he holds the full pail in his hand.
But is this the Abbas house? "It is not the house at all," insists a friend of the family dryly when I described the building to him. "The house is totally destroyed."
In September 1994, shortly after he returned to the country after about 50 years in exile, the refugee Mahmoud Abbas decided to visit his boyhood home. There is no knowing what he expected. It's possible that the adult Abu Mazen wanted to yield to the final, destructive discovery that the dream had in fact been shattered and the house was no more.
He will not forgo the symbolic meaning of the right of return, warns Ron Pundak, who knows Abu Mazen from the period in which they worked together on the Oslo document. But he has forgone its practical meaning. Speaking a few months ago at the Yarmuk refugee camp in Syria, he said, "You will not return to the house or the neighborhood or the village in which you were born. Those houses, the neighborhoods and villages no longer exist. New towns were built on your land, and Jewish babies were born in your houses. You will join a Palestinian minority, for whom the language of the state is not its language, nor its culture, nor its flag, nor its anthem. Places of work will not await you, nor will faces eager to welcome you."
He told his friends that organized visits should be arranged for the refugees so that they can see the new reality with their own eyes. This is what he himself apparently did. Abu Mazen, like the old refugee women who carry with them a rusty key to a door that was wrenched from a house that was long since demolished, wanted to see the place he lived until the age of 13.
The house as a Safed legend (2)
In September 1994, Abu Mazen wanted to prove to himself that the saying about the buried past and the rosy future is absolutely palpable. When he crossed the Jordan River via Allenby Bridge, he thought the pacific and highly publicized return would continue in the visit he would make to the house where he was born. Ze'ev Perl, though, had different ideas. Perl was the mayor of Safed for 10 years and is the sixth generation of his family in the city. At the time of Abu Mazen's planned visit, Perl was no longer the mayor, but he "organized," as he puts it, a unanimous resolution of the municipal council according to which "Abu Mazen is not wanted here."
"Those who grew up in Safed want Safed," Perl explained, and the mayor, Moshe Hani, from the National Religious Party, strengthened Perl's simple logic, noting, "There is a great deal of ferment in the public," and that for his own good, Abu Mazen should refrain from visiting the city in which so many victims of the 1974 terrorist attack at Ma'alot live. Abu Mazen, taking the advice of the national chief of police, turned his car around, though this did not prevent about 200 people, including the city's rabbis the victims of Ma'a lot, from gathering for a demonstration at the junction.
"We sang songs and it was all very nice," Perl recalls.
The majority in Safed is of Perl's opinion. "It's the mentality of old-time Safedians," Bandareli explains. "We are a very extreme town." The current mayor, Oded Hameiri, told a local paper about a month ago, "I hope Abu Mazen has absorbed the wisdom and the moderation of the old-timers in Safed," and invited him to visit the city.
One autumn afternoon, a few weeks after the demonstration organized by Ze'ev Perl, Abu Mazen was in the Mercedes of MK Ahmed Tibi, who was then the Israeli adviser of Yasser Arafat. (A Safed legend has it that the former mayor, Perl, and MK Aharon Nahmias were with them in the car.) They drove to what was once the village of Harath al-Joura, where there are now a few abandoned stone houses alongside makeshift dwellings that were built on their foundations. Across from the sports center built by the National Lottery is the turret of a mosque that thrusts out of the asphalt and two towering tops of cypress trees shooting out of the mass of stone.
Tibi parked the Mercedes in a kind of small asphalt parking space, and he and Abu Mazen then stood next to the kollel. Abu Mazen pointed to the towering two-trunked cypress and to the small mound of ruins. He showed Tibi where his house was. After a brief, mute stay they got in the car and went to an expensive restaurant called Bat Ya'ar, to eat away the memory.
Flashback: May 1948
Because it was not possible to interview Abu Mazen for this article, it is impossible to know whether the excellent food in Bat Ya'ar also erased the memory of the night between May 7 and May 8, 1948. Bandareli calls it "the night of miracles."
It was a night of pouring rain, and the Davidka, the mortar that was really no more than a hollow pipe that made a thundering noise when fired, had let loose two or three shells at the Arab neighborhoods before it blew up. Bandareli explains that the noise was so loud, and the flashes so threatening, and the memory of the rain that washed across Hiroshima after the A-bomb was dropped so fresh, that the Arabs were convinced that they were being attacked with "the Jewish A-bomb" and fled.
Generations of living as close neighbors did not melt the walls of suspicion, lack of knowledge, fear and hatred between Jews and Arabs in Safed. In 1948 the Arabs thought the end of the world was nigh, but the Jews, too, thought that defeat was at hand.
"In Safed there is once more sadness and gloom," Yehezkel Hameiri wrote in his book about the city, "a feeling of approaching defeat ... If reinforcements are not sent immediately, we would be better off surrendering, before we become as lambs to the slaughter in the hands of the Arabs." But the Arabs, unorganized, believing in the calls of the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and shocked by the horrific noise made by the Davidka, fled through Wadi Miron.
Bandareli, ill and tired but lucid and focused, moves heavily to the window of his porch at the edge of Mount Canaan. Looking at the splendid view, he shows me the channel in the wadi, there, between two plump hills, in which a lengthy column of Arab refugees made its way, "like arrow of ants." Their flight was undertaken in panic, "the food was still hot in the pots." Bandareli describes the looting perpetrated by the Jewish soldiers, "especially the Palmach [pre-state commandos]". He himself made do with books that he grabbed from the Scottish church and with "a few eggs and chickens" that he was asked to bring - explicitly! - by his mother. His father, Yosef Bandareli, who was the custodian of the abandoned property, asked his mother over the bowl of chicken soup where the chicken had come from. "Fregt nisht," she replied in Yiddish - don't ask.
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Sirotnikov
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<--- Yes, It's a "kitty" in a boot.
Feb 2000
time: 07:27
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quote:
There is no knowing what conclusions were burned into the memory of the 13-year-old Mahmoud Abbas who saw his distinguished father and his brother, the neighbors, old people and children, fleeing in panic from their beloved homes and carrying only a suitcase or a burlap sack in which their whole world was packed. Did he cry? Did he hate? Has he forgotten? The years dull the memory but do not annul it, and so, about 12 years after the frightened flight, the Bandareli household received a telephone call from an Arab merchant in Haifa who was a friend of the family, who sent regards from Mr. Mahmoud Abbas.
About 25 years after that, when the Oslo accords were misleading everyone into thinking that peace was only weeks away, a reporter from a local paper in Nazareth interviewed Bandareli about the life of the Abbas family in Safed. In the course of the interview, Bandareli took a phone call from Abu Mazen himself, who was in Tunis, inviting him to visit. Tunis? Bandareli said, astonished, in his excellent Arabic. It could be in London, too, Abu Mazen said, at my expense.
Bandareli did not visit Abu Mazen. But four years ago, Menahem Margalit hosted him at his Haifa home. Margalit ("Sixth generation!") is seven years older than Abu Mazen. His family lived in the Arab Quarter on the upper part of the hill at the bottom of which the Abbas family lived. Margalit's father, Avraham, ran the dairy that used the milk produced by the Abbas family flock. Margalit called upon him to console him on the death of his son and gave him a copy of a drawing of Harath al-Joura as a keepsake. The most recent phone conversation between Margalit and Abu Mazen took place a few weeks ago. Margalit declines to say what they talked about.
"He is not in the most comfortable situation," he says.
Anyone who is not a refugee will not understand Abu Mazen's desire to return to the place from which he was kicked out and to connect with those who did the kicking. Maybe he was driven by a need to prove that that night, between the seventh and the eighth of May, 55 years ago, hurt him but did not destroy him. Be that as it may, the story of his life as it has been told to date is fragmented and filled with unexplained lacunas of time. The Palestinian Authority has not yet prepared his official biography.
From Safed the family fled to Damascus, where the young Abbas completed high school. He obtained his first degree, in law, from the University of Damascus, and he made a living in the same city by teaching in elementary school. He obtained his doctoral degree from Moscow University. By the end of the 1950s he was among the founders of the Fatah movement and a member of its central institutions. He established his family basis in Qatar; he married a Safed-born refugee and they had three sons, Mazen, Yasser and Tarqo. In Qatar he worked initially as a personnel director in the public service and afterward became a businessman who made a fortune, which to this day means he is not dependent on politics for his living.
In 1988 he was elected to the PLO executive committee and given the portfolio of the territories. After returning to the territories in the wake of the Oslo accords, he was elected secretary of the Central Committee and deputy to Yasser Arafat. His first connections with Israelis - not as part of a nostalgia trip but as an official representative of the PLO - dated back to January 1983 in Tunis, and took the form of meetings with Israelis from the Council for Israel-Palestine Peace, led by a group of "formers": the former major general Matti Peled, the former director-general of the Finance Ministry Yaakov Arnon, and the former Knesset member Uri Avnery. "From his point of view, we were a doorway to the establishment," Avnery says.
Holocaust researcher
The meetings held in Tunis were secret and no minutes were taken, but even then Avnery discerned in Abu Mazen a great thirst to know what was going on in Israel. He considered himself an expert who understood what made the society here tick. For example, he was certain - and still is, Yossi Beilin believes - that the Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern descent) in Israel are the bridge to peace with the Palestinians, as together they can forge an alliance of the downtrodden against the Ashkenazi establishment. I tried to disabuse him of that notion but I couldn't, sighs Beilin, who worked on a peace plan with Abu Mazen. In 1983, Abu Mazen took part in a conference held in Toledo, Spain, which left-wing Mizrahim also attended.
"He no longer labors under that delusion," Avnery says. "The outcome of the elections showed him that he was wrong."
But Abu Mazen's true interest lay elsewhere, in the Holocaust. The title of his doctoral thesis was, "The Other Side, the Secret Relations between the Nazis and the Zionist Movement." "The number of Jewish victims in the war could have been six million," he wrote, "but it also could have been less, perhaps even less than a million. But the debate over the number of victims does not detract from the baseness of the crime that was perpetrated against the Jewish people."
In one of their meetings, Abu Mazen asked Avnery for "all the books that were written in Israel about the Kastner affair" (referring to the trial of Israel Kastner, a prominent member of Mapai, the precursor of the Labor Party, in 1955 for collaborating with the Nazis in the extermination of Hungarian Jewry). Avnery believes that the considerable interest Abu Mazen shows about this subject stems from frustration, misunderstanding and an attempt to resolve the contradiction between the bitter fate of the Jewish people in the Second World War and the use the same Jewish people make of the Holocaust to justify their wrongdoing against the Palestinians. The conclusion: The scale of the Holocaust attributed to the Jews is inflated, and the Zionists themselves are responsible for this tendentious inflation.
It is no easy task to uncover the written source for Abu Mazen's view of the relations between the Nazis and the Jews. Internet sites that reflect right-wing views cite his doctoral thesis, prepared for Moscow University which he attended in the early 1980s. The thesis was published in book form in 1984.
There is no sign of this book on the Amazon Website, but a quotation from it, relating to the number of Jews who perished in the Holocaust, was made available to me:
"World War II resulted in the deaths of 40 million people from different parts of the world. Ten million Germans died, the Soviet peoples lost 20 million, and Yugoslavia, Poland and other countries also lost vast numbers in that war. Rumors at the end of the war suggested that six million of the world's Jews were among those victims in the genocidal war which first targeted the Jewish people and then devastated other European nations. The fact is that no one can confirm this number nor deny it. In other words, the number of Jewish victims in the war could be six million people, but it could also be far fewer, perhaps even less than one million. The controversy over the number of Jewish victims does not in any way detract from the heinousness of the crime that was committed against the Jewish nation. The killing of a human being, any human being, is a crime that should not be accepted by the civilized world, and humanity cannot condone it.
"Many scholars discussed the figure of six million victims and came up with extraordinary conclusions that make the total number of victims just hundreds of thousands. The famous Canadian writer Rojeh Dilorm comments on the issue of the number of Jewish victims saying: `There is no proof that the number of Jewish Holocaust victims in the Nazi concentration camps reached four or six million victims. The Zionists first spoke about 12 million victims that were exterminated in those camps. Then they made the number much smaller and reduced it to six million victims, then reduced the number again and arrived at four million victims. It cannot be true that the Germans killed and exterminated more Jews than their number in the world at that time. The fact is that the real number is far less than the alleged millions.' Historian and writer Raul Helmberge [sic - presumably he means Raul Hilberg] believes that the number is not more than 896,000 victims."
In a March 19 opinion column for the online site of the right-wing American magazine National Review, entitled "Laundering Abu Mazen - A Holocaust revisionist, a conspiracy theorist, and a promoter of terrorism," Nissan Ratzlav-Katz (who is opinion editor for an Israeli news site) quotes Abu Mazen's doctoral thesis as saying that the Zionist movement "led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule ... to expand the mass extermination." Zionists, Abu Mazen contends, according to Ratzlav-Katz, collaborated with the Nazis to murder Jews, in order to gain sympathy for the creation of the State of Israel.
The Website of the Anti-Defamation League quotes Abu Mazen's response to accusations that he is a Holocaust denier, in an interview to the daily Ma'ariv: "When I wrote `The Other Side' ... we were at war with Israel. Today I would not have made such remarks. ... Today there is peace and what I write from now on must help advance the peace process."
On the other hand, Abu Mazen is not alone. In the face of the wrongheaded perceptions of the Palestinian expert on the Israeli society, we have the equally learned observations of the best of our experts. For example, about 18 months ago a former chief of the Mossad espionage agency, Shabtai Shavit, told the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth that Abu Mazen is actually an adherent of the Bahai faith. It turned out that the person whose job it was to know everything did not know a basic fact about one of his top enemies. Abu Mazen, a Muslim and the descendant of a leading Muslim family, asked for, and received, an apology, albeit only from the newspaper and even that in very understated language.
There is nothing like the Shavit case to show that in Israel, Abu Mazen's portrait is painted in colors deriving more from wishful thinking than from proven facts. At the same time, it appears that our information about the personality of the future prime minister of the Palestinian Authority resembles in its scope the information that he himself has about the essence of his position. The post of prime minister was forced on Arafat by Israeli and American pressure. On the face of it, the idea is to make the PA more efficient, rid it of the corruption that is dominating it and make it "more democratic." In fact, those wielding the pressure want to erode Arafat's powers and status, through the person of Abu Mazen. The hope in Israel is that the appointment will at long last render the chairman "irrelevant."
His relations with Arafat are universally termed "complex and complicated." He himself attributes this complexity to his unwillingness, until now, to take an executive post in the PA. People who, like him, urge a "reexamination of the mistakes that were made," cannot be fondly viewed by the person mainly responsible for those mistakes.
The hope that poor health will accelerate the irrelevancy of Arafat does little to enhance the status of Abu Mazen, who is not a healthy person, either. Only 18 months ago he underwent surgery for prostrate cancer in the United States. Arafat will attend "the funerals of all his successors," Palestinian journalists joke.
Not Sari Nusseibeh
"Abu Mazen is a Palestinian patriot," says Ron Pundak, adding: "You won't hear the kind of remarks from him that you will hear from Sari Nusseibeh," the Palestinian intellectual who has co-authored a peace plan with Ami Ayalon, a former chief of the Shin Bet security service. Avnery says that Abu Mazen will have to prove that he is not a Palestinian Quisling. But no one, including Abu Mazen, can today gauge accurately the dynamics that the post of prime minister might set in motion. Who knows? Possibly the position will transform this polite, bland individual, who is not known for having political ambitions, into a groundbreaking leader of charismatic allure. Yitzhak Shamir, the prime minister in much of the 1980s, didn't have a very sweeping personality either. Give him a photo-op with George W. Bush and a few publicized meetings with Arik Sharon, and No. 2 will perhaps become a threat to No. 1.
In his own eyes, his political aspirations are perceived to be of relatively lesser value than his intellectual world. In an interview he gave Danny Rubinstein in Haaretz, in 1995, he said, "I prefer to be an adviser. ... I will not run for the PA Council [parliament]. I am working on a series of studies. ... I have material for dozens of publications."
The question of Abu Mazen's description as an intellectual sits uneasily with his Israeli acquaintances. Yossi Beilin, always courteous, barely gets himself to agree. Pundak, in response, philosophizes about the definition of an intellectual in the eyes of the society within which he is active, and leaves the question of Abu Mazen's intellectual world open.
Beilin first met him in 1993, at the White House on whose lawn Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands. Afterward they met in Morocco and Gaza. The result of these encounters was the "Beilin-Abu Mazen document," which tried to forge understanding in principle for a comprehensive agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Despite their years of working together, friendship in the usual sense of the word did not develop between them. Abu Mazen and Beilin did not visit each other in their homes - all their meetings took place in their offices.
Beilin, who does not often get excited or induce others to become excited, nevertheless succeeds in discerning "moistness in the eyes" of Abu Mazen. That is his description, in his book "Touching Peace," of Abu Mazen's reaction when the final stage of the Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement was completed.
Ron Pundak, who also took part in the talks, read and compared Beilin's book with Abu Mazen's book "The Road to Oslo." The Palestinian's book, he says, is much drier in tone and contains whole chapters that are transcripts of talks. According to Pundak, Abu Mazen is not one who gets into confrontations and slams doors. His reaction to serious clashes is an honorable retreat and a quiet distancing. He felt offended, for example, when he did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize along with Rabin, Arafat and Shimon Peres. "After all, I am Peres' counterpart on the Palestinian side," he complained to the Norwegian ambassador. Beilin and Pundak both angrily reject a comparison I try to draw between him and MK David Levy with his honor-drenched mannerisms.
The honey trap
Abu Mazen is a pragmatist, the Israelis say. Correct, his Palestinian opponents say, but a failed pragmatist. Thus, he disclosed his readiness for compromise in the Beilin-Abu Mazen document even before negotiations had begun. At the time, the West Bank political scientist Dr. Khalil Shikaki called for Abu Mazen to be kept out of the negotiations, and Abu Mazen denied - not "denied," Beilin objects, let's say "rejected" - his part in authoring the document. Also held against him by Palestinians is his statement, in the midst of the military struggle, that he is against the use of violence in the intifada, contrary to the mood on the Palestinian street. For the sake of balance, it should be noted that some in Israel also consider him a dangerous criminal: "A veteran Holocaust denier and a defender of controlled terrorism," Israel Harel wrote of him in Haaretz.
Possibly Harel, if at all, would like to see as Palestinian prime minister a newer version of the "Arab dignitary," the type that used to frequent the corridors of the Military Government in the 1960s. Outwardly, Abu Mazen displays appropriate traits: he puts people at their ease, his English is not as fluent as that of Hanan Ashrawi and his gaze is not as ardent as that of Marwan Barghouti. Nevertheless, say Israelis who have met with him, the bland exterior should mislead no one. He will not be another "dignitary" but a tough Palestinian patriot who will conduct the negotiations tranquilly but will not hesitate to torpedo them.
Neither Beilin nor Pundak see his appointment and its implications as holding out hope for a dramatic turnabout. Beilin speaks of the honey trap that Sharon is now busy setting in place. Abu Mazen has already met with Sharon at the prime minister's ranch. Some attribute the meetings to Abu Mazen's pragmatism, others to Sharon's intriguing. Four months ago, Abu Mazen told a paper in Abu Dhabi, "Sharon is not cut out for political work."
Sharon will receive Abu Mazen, Beilin says. He will show him respect, but he will not stop the targeted assassinations and he will not lift the curfew. Imagine what the Palestinians will think of their prime minister if he allows the Israeli army to exile 3,000 men from their homes in his area of authority, and then Sharon will say, "What do you want, I tried."
Pundak is more concise: "Arik Sharon will screw everything," he says. What would they do if they were Abu Mazen? "I would not take the post unless there is a prior agreement with Sharon about the moves he will make," Beilin says. "To reach an agreement with Sharon?" Pundak laughs.
Palestinian journalists warn against any such possibility. They view the appointment, one goal of which is to rid the PA of the corruption that clings to it, as a possible overture to civil war, and they attribute such a scheme to Sharon and the United States. They are careful not to identify the appointment as an admission of Fatah's failure to administer the state in the making alongside the military struggle, but effectively concede that there is no choice but to accept the move. The Palestinian press admits that the demand for a less corrupt and more efficient leadership cuts across political boundaries on the Palestinian street.
"The Legislative Council - like other bodies, has become an impotent tool that serves the government instead of reviewing its activity and supervising it," it was written in the daily Al-Ayyam. "The Palestinian response to the despicable Israeli conspiracy is to enable the president [Arafat] to retain his powers," the paper warns elsewhere.
At the time this was written, Abu Mazen's appointment as prime minister had not yet taken effect. The short, bespectacled, mustachioed man in the gray suits has an excellent shield against all vexatious political demands: He can always get up and leave.
"I won't fall off my chair if that happens," Pundak says.
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Edan
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quote:
Originally posted by CyberGnu
Edan:
Umm... What was this supposed to prove? That CNN cares about their employees?
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Ahh, so when CNN covering up Saddams crimes in order to maintain close news connections with the country rather than pull out of the country and tell their viewers the truth why they pulled out - thats journalistic integritiy. But an Israeli newspaper that has an article about Abu Mazen that doesn't also mention the Palestinian deaths (which apparently took place sometime after the Abu Mazen incident since all the stories I can find about it were written after the Abu Mazen story broke) thats a vast Israeli conspiracy... Well, I'm sorry you don't like that some news articles only cover one issue, and that some news paper articles don't report news from the future.
quote:
In addition to Imrans comments, I should also add that the stories in NYT and Reuters are quite a bit more positive in general than the original post in this thread. |
Thats because they were written aboout 6-18 hours after the first article, and after Mazen agreed to meet with Arafat. Duh.
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gsmoove23
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quote:
I still want know why there were no elections in January as Arafat promised. Liar. |
Because Israel never pulled out, it was his prerequisite for elections. Why is democracy seen as so necessary. One problem at a time please, there is no reason to believe forced democracy will work or even result in more freedom. It can just as easily and more probably result in civil war and chaos. What it most definately will do is weaken the palestinians as it will be far easier to divide and conquer during any negotiations.
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21-04-2003 10:20
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Good to see that there are some sane people around 
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