COMMENT
Comment the Progressive Eyeless in Gaza In 1967, when most of the Western world was celebrating the "miracle" of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, Isaac Deutscher, an astute and prescient...
...You can drive yourself victoriously into your grave...
...It has said so for some time...
...The Boesky sentence does provide some visceral satisfaction: The rich crook, at last, is suffering like the poor one...
...The U.S...
...These can be removed from the missiles and recycled on other deadly nuclear weapons that are left untouched by the accord...
...What makes the situation so bizarre is that Israel's supposed enemies in the Arab world are also, to a greater or lesser extent, America's allies and beneficiaries of its largess...
...Boesky, like 80 to 90 per cent of the prison population, poses no threat to society...
...The perpetual state of hostilities in the Middle East cannot be terminated by negotiations between Israel and third parties, as the Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt made eminently clear...
...Long Before Dawn You work hard, you reap the rewards, your family prospers, you feel virtuous and self-sufficient, you dream the American dream...
...To its substantial Arab minority—including not only the people of the Occupied Territories but also the Arabs who hold nominal "citizenship" in Israel itself—Israel is a racist regime that enforces its blatantly discriminatory diktat by military force...
...There is a way off the nuclear treadmill, however...
...But it is, and always has been, the only sensible measure to end the madness...
...Prosecutors claimed that the sentence against Boesky will have an important deterrent effect on other white-collar criminals...
...Since the PLO is the voice of the Palestinians, it is sterile for the Israeli government to insist that it "will not negotiate with terrorists," leaving no room for the PLO in any peace process...
...It isn't...
...If that message were delivered in clear and unmistakable terms, Israel would have no choice but to examine the realities and act on them...
...The PLO speaks for the Palestinians...
...Egypt, with $2.3 billion in U.S...
...But even such an apparently far-reaching agreement would provide little comfort...
...The Soviet Union unilaterally stopped nuclear testing for more than a year when Gorbachev came to power...
...The Reagan Administration appears willing to consider signing a treaty to reduce strategic nuclear arms by half at an upcoming summit in Moscow...
...Seriously...
...Imagine how wretchedly they would have done in the ratings if they had been compelled to compete with Saturday-afternoon bowling...
...But because sending people to prison is barbaric...
...But everything will not be all right...
...To arrive at a settlement will entail difficult decisions, protracted negotiations, and unpleasant sacrifice...
...Ultimately, eyeless in Gaza, it can drive itself victoriously into its grave, pulling the pillars of the temple down on its enemies and on itself...
...The Palestinians will not go away...
...Ban Nuclear Testing Mikhail Gorbachev is back in Moscow, and Ronald Reagan is back in bed...
...One thousand organizers...
...The Census Bureau reports that two million adult Americans worked year-round at full-time jobs in 1986 and still lived in poverty...
...there is no evidence to support it...
...Possibly, it is time to revive serious consideration of a dream that was nurtured by at least some of the early Zionists—creation of a secular, binational state in Palestine...
...They should be out in the community, performing socially useful activities...
...Government and the American Jewish community must seize the moment if the peace process is to begin in the Middle East...
...Israel receives by far the largest sum of U.S...
...There was a time when Israel prided itself on its "democratic army...
...As an American vassal, however, Israel can be counted on to render special services—arms aid, for example, to the contras and various right-wing regimes in Central America...
...When the pent-up bitterness and frustration of young Palestinians in the Occupied Territories erupted in rioting late last year, the devastating impact of decades of military domination went on display for the whole world to see...
...The INF treaty, we were told endlessly, was just "the first step" toward further reductions in nuclear arsenals...
...The PLO leadership is ready to talk peace...
...And before Ronald Reagan's signature was dry, U.S...
...If Ronald Reagan were sincere in ending the nuclear arms race and eliminating the threat of nuclear war, he would sign a comprehensive test-ban treaty...
...That may be unfortunate—certainly the PLO and its various constituent organizations have committed acts of unconscionable cruelty and have often pursued policies that proved tragically counterproductive...
...Though the treaty bans medium-range nuclear missiles, it does not ban the warheads on the missiles...
...But the United States never followed suit...
...What was most dismaying in the recent disturbances, however, was neither the heavy-handed response of Israeli troops nor the callous disregard for civil procedure...
...In the national ratings, the candidates were decisively outpulled by such gripping fare as Moonlighting, Jake and the Fatman, Thirtysomething, and The Law and Harry McGraw...
...The fate of the Palestinians cannot be decided by consultations with Washington or Moscow or Damascus or Amman...
...It is no answer to trot out once again the irrelevant arguments that there is no Palestinian nation or that it has no claims to the land...
...those are the parties that must arrive at the means of making peace...
...there's nothing like a common heritage of oppression to spur the drive for nationhood, as Israelis ought to know...
...Government abstained from a recent U.N...
...It is Israel and its blind defenders who now constitute a rejectionist front, declining every opportunity to enter into peace negotiations with the Palestinians themselves...
...Israel subjects its Jewish majority to arbitrary and capricious state censorship and secrecy...
...Nor because white-collar crime is pardonable...
...As a rule, former terrorists become the eminently respectable heads of government in newly independent nations...
...Israel's catastrophically large military budget would be insupportable—Israel's economy would be hopelessly bankrupt—were it not for U.S...
...None of this is meant to suggest that there is an easy solution to the Middle East dilemma once the parties accept realities and enter into good-faith negotiations...
...Short of genocide—a final solution that appeals to some Israelis of the Kahane persuasion—the Palestinian people will not be eliminated from the region, nor will they relinquish their claim to a piece of its territory and their yearning for self-rule...
...He isn't...
...foreign aid—$3 billion a year, 60 per cent of it for the military...
...Except for the most recalcitrant elements of the Arab "rejectionist front," most Arabs came to terms long ago with the fact of Israeli existence...
...taxpayers and the American Jewish community...
...The alternative is to do what Israel has been doing for decades—temporize and, when problems arise, resort to the gun and the iron fist...
...Free Ivan Boesky...
...When the U.S...
...Even today, Israel and its friends—including most particularly the Government of the United States—like to point to the Zionist state as "the only democracy in the Middle East...
...have bitten off much more than they can swallow," Deutscher warned...
...When the State Department mildly criticized the shooting of Palestinian demonstrators by Israeli soldiers—suggesting that rubber bullets and water hoses would have been preferred—Jewish leaders went to Washington to voice their concern...
...Security Council vote censuring Israel instead of exercising its usual veto, that was enough to arouse indignation in the Israeli government and alarm among U.S...
...if only enough heads were cracked, enough bullets fired, enough "troublemakers" expelled or imprisoned, everything would be all right...
...It speaks, at least, for the overwhelming majority of Palestinians residing in the West Bank and Gaza...
...At that, the candidates were lucky to have gone up against the inanities of prime-time television...
...It can continue to rely on force, to diminish its humanity, to devastate what remains of democracy, while remaining blind to the realities...
...Obviously, the most likely solution would center on creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with a compromise arrangement of some sort for the status of East Jerusalem...
...If such claims ever had any basis in fact, they were undermined long ago by the steady corruption of civil life that infects every garrison state...
...One week after the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, the Pentagon announced that the United States had resumed manufacturing nerve gas, ending an eighteen-year moratorium on production of chemical weapons...
...foreign aid, is second...
...Among the realities still to be dealt with are these: 'When [the Israelis] arrested all these people last week, they said they were just arresting the "organizers...
...That hardly seems likely...
...This is not a new idea...
...just ask Menachem Begi n or Yitzhak Shamir...
...It no longer suffices to cite old quotations from PLO leaders and other Arab spokesmen threatening to "drive Israel into the sea...
...The deterrence argument is myth...
...The demeanor of the "democratic army" in Gaza or Ramallah is indistinguishable from the performance of South African troops in Soweto...
...The financial speculator, sentenced to three years in prison for conspiring to file false stock-trading records, should be let go...
...assistance...
...In the aftermath of the ugly December violence, television viewers around the world were treated to still another repellent spectacle: manacled and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners, some of the thousand and more seized during the riots, beingjostled into kangaroo military courts for instant trials and drumhead sentences...
...The vast majority of the prisoners in the United States, including Ivan Boesky, should not be serving time behind bars...
...Until he does so, the nuclear treaties he signs will be defective, if not dishonest...
...Botha in Pretoria: It was all the fault of "outside agitators" aided and abetted by the sensationalist press...
...war strategists were hatching ways of getting around the treaty, dusting off plans to update short-range nuclear systems and to supplement America's arsenals with other nuclear weaponry...
...They should have gone to Israel to voice their outrage...
...Twenty years later, the festering crisis in the Middle East claims as its victims not only the oppressed and impoverished Arabs who continue to live under the boot heel of Israeli occupation, but also—as Deutscher predicted—the state of Israel itself...
...Zionist organizations...
...Two dozen Palestinians lost their lives to the bullets that the Israeli government deemed an appropriate response to Arab taunts and stones...
...But to make either suffer behind bars is equally unjust...
...That's an increase of 52 per cent over the number of working poor a decade ago...
...Dream on...
...Beneath the fog of euphoria surrounding the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) treaty that was signed in Washington in December, a few facts lurk...
...And the old weapons, without periodic testing, become unreliable as well...
...That is our nation's gift to those who honor the work ethic...
...The logic of the nuclear arms race is inexorable: If one category of weapons is banned, the superpowers will hustle to build up other categories...
...This too is a solution of sorts...
...Head cheerleader Ronald Reagan has turned the American dream into a nightmare, and he lied when he told us it's morning again...
...Without testing, the arms race stops dead in its tracks...
...And unless one chooses to recruit cartographers from the ranks of religious zealots, the Palestinians' claim to the land is at least as valid as Israel's...
...Comment the Progressive Eyeless in Gaza In 1967, when most of the Western world was celebrating the "miracle" of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, Isaac Deutscher, an astute and prescient observer, was moved to recall a German saying: "Man kann sich totsiegen...
...That's a comprehensive nuclear test ban...
...And again, the credit for that belongs largely to the Israeli government, which has stifled and suppressed every form of political activity in the Occupied Territories, so that no alternative leadership could develop...
...If numbers of missiles and warheads are reduced, the superpowers will scramble to develop a new weapon that can outmatch those that have been banned...
...Certainly, the legitimate interest of Israel in having secure and defensible borders must be taken into account...
...What gave the deepest cause for concern was the series of depressingly familiar excuses and rationalizations put forward by Israel and its die-hard defenders...
...All-Star Wrestling So lofty is the level of debate among the herd of candidates seeking the Democratic and Republican Presidential nominations, so incisive are their analyses of the domestic and foreign problems confronting the nation, so astute are their proposed solutions to those problems, that when the full field gathered one December evening on network television, hardly anyone bothered to tune in...
...To ignore the Palestinians' interests and desires will not diminish but intensify their commitment to the struggle for national liberation...
...Israel has the power, at least for some time to come, to humiliate the Palestinians and hold the Arab nations at bay...
...There is a state of war between the Palestinian people and the state of Israel...
...In seizing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with their million-and-a-half Palestinian inhabitants, "the Israelis...
...Until Israel and its friends are willing to come to terms with some essential realities and act on them, the crisis in the Middle East will intensify, jeopardizing not only the stability of the region and the welfare of its -people, but also the peace of the entire world...
...Putting him in the slammer serves no purpose but vengeance...
...In ten years they will just have to put a wall up around the whole West Bank and Gaza Strip to arrest all of the organizers.' —Palestinian journalist Ibrahim Karaeen Eastern Airlines gave thirty-day suspensions without pay to four flight attendants who refused to work on a December 14 flight from Denver unless their aircraft was de-iced...
...Israeli soldiers, unrestrained by the presence of television cameras, behaved with a degree of brutality that even Israel's most ardent partisans had to find embarrassing...
...By official admission and with official sanction, Arab detainees are subjected to what a recent Israeli government report called "physical pressure" and what the rest of the world recognizes as torture...
...No new weapons systems can be built, because there can never be any assurance that they will work...
...Not because he is innocent...
...The December summit has passed, and the arms race remains...
...Indeed, as a recent study by the Natural Resources Defense Council has noted, it could inspire a new generation of nuclear weapons with an even greater lethal potential...
...They must tell the government of Israel that its continuing commitment to perpetuating the status quo by military force has become financially, politically, and morally too burdensome to be sustained...
...For there should be no doubt about this: Israel could not sustain its intransigence for even a few months were it not for the support it receives from U.S...
...The "only democracy," like any police state, flouts the civil liberties of its subjects...
...A family of three supported by a person who labors full-time at the measly minimum wage of $3.35 an hour falls short of the official poverty line by nearly $2,000 a year...
...Lest anyone conclude that Americans simply prefer entertainment programming to serious politics, the ratings services reported that even Mikhail Gorbachev's interview on NBC drew a larger share of the audience than did the Presidential candidates' dog-and-pony show on the same network...
...Sooner or later, most empires find themselves negotiating with terrorists—as the British did in Kenya and the French in Algeria and the Dutch in Indonesia and the Portuguese in Angola...
...But the PLO is the voice, and the only voice, of the Palestinian people...
...Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin sounded for all the world like Richard J. Daley in Chicago, or George Wallace in Montgomery, or P.W...
...If there was no Palestinian nation before 1948—a dubious but arguable proposition—Israel can take the credit for helping bring one into being...
...The United States, Israel's main (and sometimes only) ally, could play a critically important role in initiating the process that will eventually bring peace to the Middle East—not by imposing or even proposing a solution from Washington, but by ceasing to be an instrument for perpetuating the current state of hostilities...
Vol. 52 • February 1988 • No. 2
