Daily Dispatch · 7 December 2001
CP-2001-006
Opinion cartoon: Arafat, Hamas and Sharon
OPINION · Friday, December 7, 2001 · Arafat has never been a ‘partner in peace’
Jonah Goldberg, Tribune Media Services. Cartoon by Mike Shelton, The Orange County Register.
A warning about this one
The column makes sweeping claims about Palestinian broadcasting, schools and media. They are transcribed here as a specimen of what a syndicated American opinion page carried in December 2001, not because the archive can confirm any of them.
Transcribed from the clipping
“Say you’re having an argument with your neighbor. He thinks your fence extends a couple feet onto his property. You agree in principle to talk about moving the fence. But you insist that before you both sit down to hash things out, he’s got to stop kneeing you in the groin… Now, doesn’t that sound reasonable?
That, in effect, was Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s so-called ‘hard line position’… The 1993 Oslo peace accords identified Arafat, ludicrously, as a ‘partner in a peace.’… So Israel gave Arafat control of 98 percent of the Palestinian population and authority over Gaza, the West Bank and other strategically critical areas… The Israelis are systematically destroying the symbols of Arafat’s authority: his beloved helicopters, his airport, his police stations.
The message: what Israel grants a partner in peace, it can take from an enemy in war.”
Context added by this archive
The phrase this archive follows for thirty years, in an opinion headline, with the quotation marks placed around partner in peace to mark it as someone else’s idea. What the column argues, in its own closing line, is that the relationship was always conditional: “what Israel grants a partner in peace, it can take from an enemy in war.”
The opening analogy makes the land a fence dispute between neighbors and the occupation a knee to the groin, in that order. Above it, a cartoon whose third panel replaces the man with the word HAMAS.
Cite this clipping
"Opinion cartoon: Arafat, Hamas and Sharon," Daily Dispatch, 7 December 2001, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2001-006. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2001-006
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2001-006.
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