Israel is faced with a difficult choice

by S. Amjad Hussain

THE debacle in Iraq has brought into sharp focus the festering Israeli-Arab issue that has been totally neglected for the past six years, thanks to George W. Bush. A recent book by former president Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, is an attempt to bring the issue back into public consciousness. Mr. Carter has known the Middle East conflict firsthand and was the first U.S. president to have successfully brokered a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. The book reveals for the first time the horrible oppression and persecution of the Palestinian people.

The response of the Jewish lobby and its friends in this country has been predictable. Mr. Carter has been called anti-Semitic and an enemy of Israel. He has also been labeled a bigot, a liar, and a plagiarist. Jimmy Carter has the honesty, integrity, and compassion (both for Jews and Palestinians) to be anything but all that. This says more about the intellectual bankruptcy of his detractors than the honesty and integrity of the former president.

Mr. Carter used the word apartheid in describing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian lands. Naturally the word invokes the image of the white supremacist regime in South Africa. And there are parallels.

It is apartheid when an occupying power deliberately isolates the native population by fencing them in, passes discriminatory legislation against them, controls their movement in and out of their homes, institutes a dual education system, uses disproportionately different scales to fund Jewish settlers and Palestinians, controls water and food distribution, and empowers Jewish settlers to deal with Palestinians any way they wish.

This view was further strengthened when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert brought the Yisrael Beitenu Party into his coalition government and appointed Avigdor Lieberman as deputy prime minister and minister for strategic threats. Mr. Lieberman advocates forceful expulsion of all Palestinians from occupied territories and Israel.

Mr. Lieberman is not alone in his views. Gamla, an Israeli organization founded by Jewish settlers and former Israeli military officers, has published detailed plans for the “complete elimination of the Arab demographic threat to Israel.”

This, according to the plan, would translate into forcibly expelling all Palestinians, whether they are living in occupied territories or in the state of Israel, within a period of three to five years. For this plan to succeed it needs “only a modicum of support from its closest ally, the United States.”

Considering that the Bush Administration has always capitulated to the dictates of Jewish organizations, including the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, this scenario is not farfetched.

Unlike in Israel, where a healthy and robust public debate on the Palestinian issue has been the norm, no such public discourse has been possible here in the United States. In a knee jerk response, Jewish leaders in this country are always ready and willing to curb and suppress any dissenting voices by using the all-too-convenient label of anti-Semitism. The treatment meted out to Mr. Carter has been dished out to all others who have advocated an even-handed policy in resolving the Palestinian issue.

In an interview on National Public Radio recently, Mr. Carter claimed considerable Jewish support for his views on Palestine. Unfortunately, that support has not been out in the public domain. That the policies of Israel in occupied territories are discriminatory and inhuman are known to Jewish communities. Yet there have been very few voices from these communities raised in public against these policies.

Except for discussion and deliberation in some moderate-to-liberal Jewish publications, there is hardly any discussion or debate at the community level. So it is left to the likes of Abe Foxman of the Anti-Discrimination League and Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School to set the tenor and tone of this one-sided debate and to decide what is kosher and what is not.

The resolution of the Palestinian issue is the sine qua non for a peaceful Iraq. A just resolution will placate Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia and in turn their warring proxies in Iraq. Efforts to de-link the Palestinian issue from Iraq are bound to fail. The road to peace in Iraq, as indicated by Jim Baker’s Iraq Study Group, would have to pass through Jerusalem.

Israel has a choice, albeit a difficult one. It could continue the apartheid in occupied lands and in return accept an ongoing low-level violence by Palestinians against its citizens, or it could start treating Palestinians as human and give them their land back.

Dr. S. Amjad Hussain is a Toledo surgeon whose column appears every other week in The Blade.
originally published in the Toledo Blade at http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070129/COLUMNIST12/701290326/-1/COLUMNIST