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Sean Gannon is a freelance writer and researcher on Irish and Israeli affairs, specialising in the relationship between the two countries. He is currently preparing a book on this subject and writing the chapter on Ireland for a forthcoming study on the interplay between Anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and antisemitism in Europe since 9/11.
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By Sean Gannon
August 14, 2003
On July 20th, the Palestinian Authority's State Information Service published its report into official incitement by Israel. Compiled for presentation to the joint Israeli-Palestinian committee established two months earlier to tackle the overall problem, it lists instances when it claims the State of Israel was guilty of inflaming domestic opinion against the Palestinian Authority in a manner liable to foment violence against it. But a cursory glance down the document exposes the hollowness of such a charge. True, its condemnation of Avigdor Lieberman's call for all Palestinian prisoners to be drowned in the Dead Sea is well founded; his remark was inappropriate and tasteless and unworthy of a representative of the state. But the Infrastructure Minister's invective aside, the evidence adduced to support the accusation that there exists an official policy of incitement against the Palestinians is very thin on the ground.
So thin, in fact, that the report's compilers are reduced to citing what amount to unremarkable observations on the political role of Chairman Arafat as instances of Israeli incitement. Included is President Katsav's comment that "the peace process will fade out as long as Arafat enjoys a high rank" as is Prime Minister Sharon's declaration that "Arafat undermines Abbas's government because he continues to control most of the Palestinian security forces and the finances of the PA." To define such statements as hate speech is to empty the expression of all meaning.
Coincidentally, one day after the release of the PA report, a study into incitement in official Palestinian textbooks was published by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace. The most recent of five such assessments, it concentrated on materials written for third and eighth grade students which were introduced into schools last November. It found that the books ignore UNESCO guidelines recommending avoidance of provocative phraseology and instead praise the virtues of jihad and shahadah, and urge the "liberation" of all the land of Palestine from the clutches of Jewish "oppressors" and "slaughterers." According to the Center's Vice-Chairman, the name 'Israel' does not appear on one single map in one single book and neither are there any references to the Oslo Accords. This is hardly a curriculum for coexistence.
A study in the current issue of the Israel-Palestine Journal further highlights the problem of Palestinian incitement. According to its author, Mohammed Dajani, the official print and broadcast media has, since September 2000, consciously pursued a policy of inflaming Arab opinion against the Jewish state; "violent news became 'headline news' while 'conciliation news' became 'no news' " in an effort "to stir reactions against Israel." And despite the recent reduction in levels, incitement is still continuing. For instance, Palestinian Media Watch last month reported on a televised high school graduation ceremony in which students sang of 'restoring Palestine' with stones, knives and "the sound of a sub machine gun." And just last week, the police closed down 'Camp Return' in the Western Galilee where up to 300 Israeli Arab children were taught to sing of being 'glorified in the blood of the martyrs.' To equate this poison with Israeli pronouncements on 'Palestine' is absurd.
And yet this is precisely what the Roadmap does through its call for a mutual moratorium on hate speech. In balancing its very proper demand that "all official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel" with one calling for a halt to official Israeli incitement against the Palestinians, the Quartet implies equivalence between Sharon's reasonable criticisms and Arafat's incendiary rants, between Jerusalem's statements of fact and Ramallah's incitement and lies.
It might be argued that such guilt distribution is an objectionable yet necessary part of any mediation program and has been part of international efforts at Middle East peace since the Mitchell Commission convened one month into the al-Aqsa war. Indeed, it was its report of May 2001 that first sought a balance of blame on incitement, calling on both sides to "abstain ... from hostile propaganda" and to make efforts to "identify, condemn and discourage [it] in all its forms."
And this is but one of the false equivalences which, fathered by George Mitchell and fostered by the Quartet, now form part of the Roadmap to Peace. For instance, Mitchell's recommendation that "both sides ... immediately implement an unconditional cessation of violence" foreshadows the equating of the Palestinian terrorist onslaught with the Israeli defensive reaction against it which resulted from the Quartet's attempts to make reciprocal the requirements of the Roadmap's Phase One.
But by far the most dangerous of these false equivalences is that implicitly drawn between the continuation of terrorism and the construction of settlements. For in his efforts to counterbalance the demands he made of each side, Mitchell offset his call for an end to Palestinian terror with one for an Israeli settlement freeze. And, here once again, the Quartet has followed his lead.
So Phase One of the Roadmap calls for the parallel "dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure" and the "dismantling of settlement outposts constructed since March 2001." It demands that the freezing by Arab states of "public and private funding ... for groups supporting and engaging in ... terror" be accompanied by the freezing by the state of Israel of "all settlement activity including natural growth." The result is that any concession by Israel on the settlement issue can only be interpreted as a quid pro quo for ending terrorism, a sort of 'no bombs, no bungalows' arrangement which equates the building of houses with the taking of lives. This has intolerable implications.
For in implying equivalence between them, the Quartet (following Mitchell) gives international sanction to the majority Palestinian view that the settlement enterprise constitutes, in essence, a type of violence against the Arab population of the territories. And if in this the Palestinians are correct, then their attacks on the settlers are no longer unwarranted acts of terrorism, but the mere countering of violence with violence; not unlawful acts of aggression but of legitimate, perhaps even proportionate, self-defense and deterrence.
Such a travesty of logic is the inevitable outcome of the Quartet's blame-balancing game, of its insistence that Israel can at best be only half-right on anything. On issues from incitement to the settlements, it is clear that there are now more than principles at stake in the fight against false equivalences. None must be let go unchallenged.
Views expressed by the author do not
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