Moderates try to bridge Arab-Israeli gap

The last of three articles on the people of the Israeli-occupied territories focuses on each side's moderate factions.

By John P. Wallach / Hearst News Service

Moderates try to bridge Arab-Israeli gap — Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 6 April 1988 — Seattle Post-Intelligencer · 6 April 1988

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JERUSALEM — While Palestinians and Israelis wreak violence upon one another, there are those on each side trying to reach out across the growing abyss that divides their two peoples.

They are the moderates, those who reject the policies that have led to warfare between stone-throwing Palestinian youths and gun-toting Israeli troops in the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel captured in 1967. According to rough estimates, they may represent 40 percent of the Israelis and perhaps half of the Palestinians.

These are the Israelis who reject their government's contention that sovereignty over the occupied land must remain forever in Israeli hands. These are the Palestinians who reject the Arab belief that the territories can be “liberated” only by force.

It is not easy being a moderate of any shade in this land where death and terror and rigid political stances have ridden high since the uprising began four months ago. Consider the example of Ziad Abu Zayyad, 48, a Palestinian journalist who publishes a weekly newspaper in Hebrew called Gesher.

The name means bridge, and Zayyad, who started the paper in 1986, says he hopes to convince readers that “neither the Arabs nor the Jews can solve their problem by defeating the other side” and that “there is no option except a peaceful political settlement.”

Gesher publishes editorials by Palestine Liberation Organization leaders and eyewitness accounts of Palestinians being beaten by Israeli troops in order, Zayyad says, “to expose the Israelis to what they don't find in their own newspapers.” Zayyad has tried to circulate his paper widely, but newsstand owners won't accept it.

They have been pressured, he says, by Orthodox Jews and what he calls “nationalist fanatics” who see the paper as a devious effort to turn the Israeli public against the government. So Zayyad distributes his paper by mail, and it has a circulation of only 1,200 inside Israel. Palestinian moderates also face pressure from other Palestinians.

Hard-liners have broken bones of some moderates for meeting directly with Israelis. Still, Zayyad travels to kibbutzim, Israeli collective settlements, to engage in panel discussions with their leaders. “Maybe we in the occupied territories could learn something from the Israelis about their suffering in the Nazi period,” he says.

“If you tell ordinary Arabs that the Israelis are afraid of the Arabs, they'll never believe you.” Zayyad advocates either the creation of a “democratic state in all of Palestine where Arabs and Jews would owe their loyalty to the state and not (to any) religion” or the creation of a separate Palestinian state.

How this transcription was made

One scan of a full newspaper page, read at 8x-10x. Masthead strip reads "A8 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Wednesday, April 6, 1988". The excerpt runs from the dateline through the end of column two and stops at a complete sentence; the article continues through columns three and four with material on Yehoshafat Harkabi, which is summarized in `notable` rather than transcribed. A Weight Loss Clinic advertisement occupies the lower right of the page and is not part of the article. The boxed line placed in `dek` is strictly a series note set in a rule box above the byline; it is the only text occupying the deck position and it describes this article, so it is recorded there, but Maria should know it is an editor's series note rather than a written deck.

Cite this clipping

"Moderates try to bridge Arab-Israeli gap," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 6 April 1988, p. A8. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-119. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-119