LOUISE WILLIAMS,
Sir, - On your Opinion and Analysis page of April 30th, Tom Cooney argues strongly against a UN inquiry into what happened at Jenin. His piece, however, relies much more on opinion than analysis. The article was inaccurate and contained several unsubstantiated claims. Here are just a few that I want to point out.
He states that Kofi Annan has an "animus" against Israel, based on videos allegedly suppressed by Annan - but does Tom Cooney have any evidence or research to back up this claim or his conclusion? Later he goes on to claim that the presence of Jewish settlements in the West Bank has not injured Arabs "ethnically or economically". It's unclear what he means by "injuring Arabs ethnically" but his claim that the presence of settlers does not harm the Palestinian economy is false. Take for example the vegetable market in the centre of Hebron near the neighbourhood inhabited by 600 Jewish settlers and protected by Israeli soldiers.
Over the last five years this market has frequently been closed down by Israeli soldiers who claim that it is a security threat to the settlers. This closure denies farmers and traders the opportunity to do business. The frequent closures were having a detrimental effect on the Palestinian economy, even before the second intifada started. There are thousands of similar examples all over the West Bank and the Gaza strip of how the presence of settlements has eroded the Palestinian economy, a state of affairs which has only got worse since the second Intifada broke out, with the Israeli army repeatedly invading Palestinian-controlled West Bank towns.
"All the Arabs just want to drive us into the sea" is a phrase you often hear Israeli settlers say. Tom Cooney claims something similar in his last paragraph - "Arafat's terror tactics are intended to liquidate Israel," he states.
There's no doubt that some Palestinian suicide-bombers are intent on destroying Israeli lives. But the Palestinian leadership is weak, corrupt and much more interested in staying in power than in going to war with its infinitely better-armed neighbour. If Arafat were offered a land for peace deal which allowed his people to live in viable, land-linked areas, while saving his face, this Intifada would soon be over.
But as long as analysis of the conflict focuses on his alleged support for terror against the state of Israel, a peace deal will never be signed. - Yours, etc.,
LOUISE WILLIAMS,
Harolds Cross,
Dublin.
... ... * ... * ... * ... ...
Sir, - There is so much with which to take issue in Raymond Deane's letter (April 26th) that I will confine myself to exposing only the most glaring of errors and the most specious of reasoning contained in it.
Firstly, in spite of what Mr Deane and indeed many anti-Israeli activists aver, Resolution 194 was not passed by the United Nations Security Council but the General Assembly; this distinction is important as, while Security Council resolutions are binding, those passed by the General Assembly are more in the nature of recommendations or suggestions and therefore not part of international law. Security Council Resolution 194 was passed in 1964 and concerns the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus. Furthermore, UNGA Resolution 194 (iii) nowhere asserts an "inalienable right of return" for Palestinian refugees, one of the reasons that it was rejected by the Arab states in 1948. One section, number 11, of this 15-section resolution discusses the repatriation of those "wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours" as one of a number of options including resettlement elsewhere and compensation.
Finally, Israel's admission to the UNO was not "premised on its acceptance" of the resolution as Mr Deane claims. The May 11th 1949 article of accession merely states that the General Assembly, in deciding to admit the Jewish state, has "taken note of the declarations and explanations" concerning the implementation of UNGA resolutions 181(ii) and 194 (iii) made by the Israeli representative Abba Eban to the Ad Hoc Political Committee on Palestine one week earlier. These declarations could hardly be construed as betokening a future Israeli acceptance of a right of return for those who fled or were driven out in 1948. On the contrary, Eban there stated that the Arab nations bore full responsibility for the plight of the refugees and that his government believed that their resettlement on Arab soil should constitute the "main principle of solution" to the problem. The extent of Israel's contribution to such a solution depended, he added, entirely upon the "formal establishment of peace and relations of good neighbourliness" in the region. Thus, far from being contingent on its acceptance of section 11 of Resolution 194, Israel's admission to the UNO was effected in spite of an almost outright rejection of it.
Secondly, the State of Israel is not, as Mr Deane claims, in breach of Security Council Resolution 242.
The resolution calls for the "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied" in the 1967 war and not "the territories" or "all of the territories" as is often claimed. This is a not a mere semantic quibble; the absence of the definite article before the word "territories" was deliberate, a Russian-sponsored draft which included it being rejected at the time. The framers of the resolution did not envisage that Israel would withdraw to the "unsatisfactory" pre-war borders, but to "secure and recognised boundaries". The 1949 armistice demarcation line was neither secure nor, at Jordan's insistence, a recognised international border; it remained, in effect, a mere line separating two armies, a point reiterated by Lord Caradon, the sponsor of the final draft, in an interview in 1973: "I know the 1967 border very well. It is not a satisfactory border, it is where troops had to stop in 1949, just where they happened to be that night, that is not a permanent boundary."
Israel was, however belatedly, in the final stages of negotiating these "secure and recognised boundaries" when the intifada was launched in the autumn of 2000.
Thirdly, Mr Deane is quite incorrect in saying that the generosity of the Israelis under Ehud Barak is a myth which has been "comprehensively exploded" by Bob Malley and others. Malley's criticisms of the conduct of the Camp David summit are nowhere near as one-sided as Mr Deane seems to believe and while his article provides a more nuanced account of events than was previously available, it is hardly a paean to Chairman Arafat. Furthermore, Mr Malley's views are at odds with those of his boss during the summit, Bill Clinton, who in June 2001, named Arafat as the reason for failure. Others involved in the negotiating process have since shared their recollections of what happened, some of which have served to illustrate just how far the Israelis travelled down the road of meaningful compromise. For instance, Shlomo Ben-Ami, in detailing the evolution of Ehud Barak's position on the main issues involved, from the Stockholm meetings of May 2000 to the ill-fated Taba talks of January 2001, left no doubt about the fact that historic concessions were offered and rejected. In an exhaustive interview published six months ago, he laid full responsibility for the breakdown of the process squarely with Chairman Arafat.
Notwithstanding such errors, Mr Deane is in addition guilty of quite defective reasoning in some of his argumentation. If, as he states, it is wrong to use the word "terrorist" to describe those who have attacked and killed Israeli soldiers, what does he propose that we call those members of the LTTE, ETA or the Shining Path who have killed thousands of policemen and soldiers in their respective countries over the decades? What of the INLA and the IRA in Northern Ireland? Does the labelling of the murderers of men such as Stephen Restorick as terrorists "rob the word . . . of all meaning"? Furthermore, to attack an Israeli journalist such as Mr Horowitz for his non-use of the expression Haram al-Sharifwhen referring to the disputed acclivity is akin to criticising a Palestinian writer for non-use of the equivalent Hebrew term, Har Habayit. I take it that Mr Deane is then equally critical of this paper's Irish journalists who, in my experience, refer exclusively to "Derry" and never to "Londonderry". To my knowledge, such references are never taken as evidence of ultra-Republican sympathies.
Similarly, Mr Horowitz's use of the term "Temple Mount" should not be taken as proof of an extreme and unquestioning Zionist ethic. Under his editorship, the Jerusalem Report has been at the forefront in promoting the peace process in the Middle East. His disillusionment with Chairman Arafat and the Palestinian leadership is indicative of the anger and frustration felt by many on the Israeli left with the actions of their "partners for peace" since September 2000, actions which have almost destroyed the liberal left as a meaningful political and moral force in Israeli life. Thankfully, it is making the first tentative steps towards a comeback for, without men like Mr Horowitz, there will never be peace in the region. - Yours, etc.,
SEAN GANNON,
Letterfrack, Co Galway.