Every clipping in this archive printed between 1980 and 1989: 138 of them, oldest first, as plain text that can be read, searched and quoted without running any code. Each entry links to its own record, where the scan is.
· The Wichita Eagle · page 1
Is Zionism Racism?
The United Nations Says So
By Bernard D. Nossiter, N.Y. Times News Service
“UNITED NATIONS, N.Y. — Almost unnoticed late last year, the General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution proclaiming ‘The Inadmissability of the Policy of Hegemonism in International Relations.’… Tucked into the resolution was a far more notorious phrase. The resolution ‘resolutely condemns’ among other things ‘racism including zionism.’ The uncapitalized ‘z’ is a device to express contempt. The document was adopted by a vote of 111 to 4 (Australia, Canada, Israel and the United States dissenting), with 26 abstentions, mostly Western European democracies. It marked the first explicit appearance of the famous Zionism-racism formula in the Assembly since 1975. Yehuda Blum, the Israeli delegate, termed the action a monstrous perversion, an obscenity and a specimen of ‘the lies told in the United Nations that have turned this forum into the laughingstock of international society’… For a handful of Arab nations outraged at Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Arabs, the formula describes reality. For most Third World countries and the Soviet bloc, which regularly vote for the device, it is politics.… William Korey, director of international policy research at B’nai B’rith, said: ‘The Zionism-equals-racism resolution has had the effect of promoting, sustaining and legitimizing anti-Semitism in various parts of the world… Because the U.N. is regarded in broad regions of the globe as a source of fundamental judgments about political reality, especially in Third World areas, to that extent the resolution has a profound and deleterious impact on attitudes toward Jews.’ An attempt to delete the words ‘including zionism’ from the condemnation of racism lost, 79 to 26, with 33 abstentions.”
The U.N. General Assembly condemned Zionism
The formula came back in 1979 inside a resolution about hegemonism, with a lower-case z that the correspondent reads as contempt, and almost nobody noticed. The attempt to strike the two words failed by 79 to 26. This is the short version of a piece that ran at greater length in Miami two days later.
By Bernard D. Nossiter, The New York Times News Service
“On its face, the juncture of Zionism and racism makes little sense, at least according to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary… The UN formula appears to mean that Israel is a state founded on a belief of Jews that they are biologically superior to Palestinian Arabs and others. In the world after Hitler no charge could be more morally damning.… It is clear that for most of those who regularly support the equation it does not have a biological meaning. Indeed, they are far from clear about what they do mean. Biyagamage Jayasena Fernando, delegate of Sri Lanka, which introduced the UN resolution, said: ‘There are problems in my mind. Racism is an ethnic thing. Zionism is a political thing, political security… Our Arab brothers feel this is a form of racism. I’m sorry to say I haven’t taken the trouble to analyze and come to a conclusion.’ So Sri Lanka can be described as a consensus supporter of the equation. B. Akporode Clark, the influential delegate from Nigeria, was just as blunt… ‘Israel is a petulant child, maximizing her relations with South Africa. It’s done in order to spit in the face of the Africans. It’s politics. You use any means to build support for your cause.’… ‘Arab friends insist on our support for their formula,’ he explained. ‘Whether it is accurate or not, it might produce the desired results. That’s politics, isn’t it?’… Brazil’s delegate, Sergio Correa da Costa, also betrays uneasiness over his vote… ‘It was politically inspired,’ he replied. ‘Politically it meant some alignment with the Arabs . . . . Brazil is so vulnerable and dependent on Arab oil.’… Mahmoud Mestiri, who served as Tunisia’s delegate until recently, was almost dismissive about the equation. ‘If Zionism is the establishment of the State of Israel, then everybody is a Zionist,’ he said… ‘Many Arabs want to retain it as a negotiating asset,’ he said. ‘To rewrite it has no meaning. The only thing you can do is forget about it.’ For Mansur Rashid Kikhia of Libya the formula equating Zionism with racism is literal truth. He said: ‘It describes reality, the facts.’”
PLO, early to label Zionism racist, was allowed to enter UN debates
A New York Times correspondent went and asked the delegates who kept voting for it what they thought it meant. The delegate for the country that introduced the 1975 resolution had not worked it out. Nigeria called it a good abstraction. Brazil explained that eighty per cent of its oil came from the Arab world. Tunisia wanted it kept as a bargaining chip. Eleven years later, when the vote to repeal came, Sri Lanka voted against repeal and Tunisia did not vote at all.
“On the parched hills of Hebron, on the West Bank of the Jordan River, Kiryat Arba’s stone-hewn apartment towers rise into the clear desert air. The fortress-like quality they create is appropriate: Kiryat Arba is ringed by barbed wire. Israeli soldiers man the checkpoints and prowl the yard at night. Established in 1969 by a band of orthodox Jews under Rabbi Moshe Levinger, Kiryat Arba, population 1,500, is the largest of 40 fortified settlements that now dot the West Bank. The settlers journeyed there after the Israeli army occupied the West Bank following the Six-Day War in 1967. They were seeking a messianic kingdom on land that was once part of ancient Israel, land that they claim was given to them by God and to which their return is divinely ordained… In recent months, a wave of violence, triggered by opposition to the Palestinian autonomy talks, has erupted in Kiryat Arba and spread down the slope into Arab Hebron and across the entire West Bank. Forty women and children marched from Kiryat Arba to Hebron last April and occupied a building. They threatened to take over whole areas of Hebron, claiming, correctly, that some of it had been Jewish property before 1929. That year, the English, governing under the British Mandate, evacuated the Jews in an attempt to end violence between Jewish and Arab settlers. Last June a goon squad from Kiryat Arba was arrested for riding around Nablus in a sound truck, exhorting the Arabs to flee. A similar gang broke into an Arab house in Hebron last July and beat up the residents. Then, in September, 70 Kiryat Arba residents tried to confiscate an Arab field. Israeli troops sent to break up the occupation were met by a barrage of flaming tires and fire bombs… Eliakim Haetzni, a lawyer and key activist of the ‘Eretz Yisrael’ movement, insists that the violent incidents are isolated aberrations, and that relations between residents of Hebron and Kiryat Arba are excellent. ‘If the Palestinian Arabs hated us,’ Haetzni asked, ‘why would they come up the hill to build our synagogues, work in our factories and tend our gardens? The Palestinians see us as neighbors, not as a threat.’… Rabbi Meir Kahane, former head of the Jewish Defense League in the United States and now head of Israel’s Kach Party, thinks that Haetzni’s good-neighbor policy is ‘crap.’ ‘You can’t buy Arab love with indoor toilets and good health care,’ he said. ‘Israeli Arabs and West Bank Arabs identify with the PLO. Moreover, they multiply like rabbits. At their rate of growth, they will take over the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) in 25 years. I am not prepared to sacrifice Zionism to democracy. There is only one solution: The Arabs must leave Israel.’ When asked how he would implement such a policy if he were prime minister, Kahane, who is running for a Knesset seat in May, said, ‘I’d go to the Arabs and tell them to leave. I’d promise generous compensation. If they refused, I’d force them out.’… ‘Arabs can live on the West Bank,’ said Gush leader Levinger, ‘but they will have no political rights.’ Mamoun el Sayyed, the editor of El Fajar, an Arab-language newspaper published in East Jerusalem, summed up the Arab attitude toward Kiryat Arba: ‘Haetzni reminds me of a liberal plantation owner in the American South prior to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Rabbi Levinger is writing his own version of the Nuremberg laws. Kahane is inclined toward deportation and genocide. Do I think Kiryat Arba is a cancer in the heart of my homeland? Of course, and so does every Arab in Palestine.’ Despite a recent Israeli Supreme Court order to evacuate a similarly controversial West Bank settlement near Nablus that had been illegally seized from Arab landowners, the Israeli Housing Ministry plans to settle an additional 50,000 Jews in Kiryat Arba by the mid-1980s. ‘We will never leave Kiryat Arba,’ one mother said as she cradled her infant close to her. ‘Not the Israeli High Court or the Arabs will ever move us. Like the Zealots who defended Masada against the Romans, we will resist, if necessary, to the bloody end.’”
A Palestinian editor answering three settler leaders in their own paper’s words, and using “genocide” of Kahane’s program in 1980. The reporter had spent five years in the Middle East and was living in Madison, Wisconsin.
Israelites Claim Arabs Have ‘Fared Well’ Under Jewish Rule
United Press International, Ara, Israel
“The grim-faced soldier motions each car past the roadblock with a cursory glance and an absent wave of his submachine gun. Occasionally, he orders a vehicle to pull over for inspection. The stopped cars carry Arab passengers… ‘We’re always being stopped and checked on the roads and it’s humiliating,’ said Mahmoud Woshahy, 23, an Israeli Arab… ISRAELI ARABS see themselves as second class citizens in a state founded and governed by Jews, a people particularly aware of persecution. Yet barely a whisper of dissent rippled among the Jewish majority when one of its military leaders, Maj. Gen. Avigdor Ben-Gal, defined the Arabs in Israel as ‘a cancer in our body only waiting for a chance to jump at our throats and strangle us.’… ‘I am an Israeli citizen but in practice I am nothing,’ Woshahy said. He is from Ara, a hilly village of ankle-twisting dirt paths 40 miles northeast of Tel Aviv. ‘In my heart I am a Palestinian.’… ‘If we needed this land, we confiscated it from the Arabs. We had to create a Jewish state in this country, and we did,’ Gur-Arye said candidly. ‘I don’t apologize for what happened 32 years ago. We didn’t start the war.’”
CHILDREN PLAY ON UNPAVED STREETS OF ISRAEL · Israeli Arabs Say Their Towns Get Little Attention
A wire survey of the Arab citizens of Israel, printed in Texas. The line that matters is not the general’s; it is the clause in front of it. The paper reports that the remark passed without objection, and then moves on to budget figures. Also on the page: a Nazareth of 45,000 with a budget of $3.6 million against a largely Jewish Acre of 35,000 with $7.3 million, and a Haifa lawyer’s count of land seizures in 470 of 570 Arab villages. The masthead carries two papers and two dates, the Tyler Courier-Times of 26 March and the Morning Telegraph of 27 March; the later date is recorded here.
Israel deports 3 Palestinian West Bank leaders after ambush
Associated Press, Hebron, Israeli Occupied West Bank
“The Arab mayor of the occupied city of Nablus, Bassam Shakaa, said: ‘We are now in the struggle for the Palestinian nation.’”
Thirty-one days later the Journal Herald reported that Bassam Shakaa had lost both legs and Karim Khalaf a foot in coordinated car bombings, and in 1983 the Associated Press called those bombings the most notorious unsolved case in the territory. The archive holds the sentence and what followed it.
Thousands attend funeral for Israeli killed in attack
Associated Press
“HEBRON, Occupied West Bank (AP) — Thousands of Israelis went to the occupied Arab city of Hebron Monday for the funeral of a U.S.-Israeli Vietnam War veteran killed last week in a Palestinian guerrilla ambush… ‘We must expel all the Arabs from here,’ said extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane. ‘It’s either them or us,’ he told Israel Radio.”
The dateline reads HEBRON, Occupied West Bank. The word occupied is in the dateline, in the body twice more, and the paper calls Kahane an extremist in its own voice. Seventeen years later the same town would be datelined without it.
Zionism Equated With Racism By Some Women at U.N. Conference
United Press International, Copenhagen
“COPENHAGEN, Denmark (UPI) — An Indian delegation today presented a motion to the U.N. Decade For Women Conference equating Zionism with racism in the second such resolution in two days. The Indian delegation presented a motion calling for the elimination of ‘imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, Zionism, racism, racial discrimination, apartheid, hedgemonism and foreign occupation’ to be included in the conference’s final resolution. The Cubans proposed a similiar amendment Thursday specifically linking Zionism with racism. However, the Cubans withdrew their motion today in favor of the Indian one. The Israeli delegation has vowed to leave the meeting and return home if the resolution is passed, conference sources said. The Indian proposal was supported by the so-called Group of 77 nations… The Cubans allowed the Indians to take over their amendment because the Indians chair the Group of 77 and would be better able to get all group member nations to vote for the amendment… The agenda for the assembly sets aside two days, July 24 and 25, to take up the question of Palestinian women. Walkouts by Palestinian delegates and their supporters, prompted by speeches by Egyptian first lady Jihan Sadat and an Israeli representative, have already disrupted the conference twice.”
Five days before this, the Associated Press had moved a photograph of Leila Khaled arriving in Copenhagen for this same conference, captioned terrorist now a delegate. Two days of the agenda were set aside for the question of Palestinian women. Five years later, at the conference that closed the same Decade in Nairobi, Israel refused travel permits to five Palestinian women invited to attend and the formula nearly collapsed the final document. The paper spells hedgemonism and similiar.
“Israeli denies torture charges. An Israeli delegate to the U.N. Decade for Women Conference likened Palestinian charges of Israeli torture to the Nazi ‘big lie’ technique and said the only Palestinian women in jail are those convicted of terrorist acts. Israeli delegate Tamar Eshel began her angry refutation yesterday after May Sadegh, the leader of the Palestinian delegation, charged at a news conference that Palestinian women were tortured and sexually abused in Israeli jails. Ms. Eshel said the allegations were ‘the most preposterous accusations which only remind me of the (Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph) Goebbels technique of the big lie — just keep repeating it and some are sure to begin believing it.’”
The charge is reported only as the thing being denied: the Palestinian delegation leader is named and her accusation summarized in one clause, and the rest of the item is the refutation.
“Republican candidate Ronald Reagan says the Carter administration is wrong in saying Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank are illegal. Reagan said in Los Angeles that the settlements ‘are entirely legal’ under U.N. Resolution 242, adopted after the 1967 Israeli-Arab war… Reagan said, ‘All people — Moslem, Jew and Christian — are entitled to live on the West Bank until a determination is made’ on the future of the area. U.S. administrations since the mid-1960s, both Democratic and Republican, have consistently declared that the Israeli settlements were not legal, pending a final peace settlement.”
The paper puts the change on the record in its own copy: every administration since the mid-1960s had said the opposite.
Correction: {'note': 'Slide 11 captions this scan as the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 11 January 1978. It reports the Reagan-Carter campaign, so it is the 1980 Houston paper.'}
“RAMALLAH, Occupied West Bank (AP) — Palestinian writers and artists are accusing Israel of cultural oppression. They cite the recent closing of the only art gallery on the West Bank, the confiscation of a number of books on a list of banned publications… ‘Carry On’ to express the Palestinians’ determination to endure Israeli occupation, said Suleiman Mansour, a 35-year-old painter whose works were on display Sept. 22 when Israeli troops closed ‘Gallery 79’ in Ramallah. Mansour, who was trained at the Israeli Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, is one of the best-known Palestinian artists. His painting of an old Arab carrying Jerusalem on his back was issued as a poster with the title ‘Carry On’… Mansour said, however, that he consciously avoided political statements in the works he showed at Gallery 79 so that it could remain in business… The book remains on sale openly in some West Bank stores, perhaps because Israeli troops haven’t gotten to them yet. At one bookshop in Ramallah the proprietor showed a reporter a whole shelf of ‘banned’ works, including ‘Sunflowers’ and a book by Felicia Langer, an Israeli Communist lawyer, on the 1979 legal fight against the deportation of Mayor Bassam Shakaa of the West Bank town of Nablus… A few years ago, Miss Kalifeh was cited in an Israeli Foreign Ministry pamphlet as an example of the cultural freedom permitted under Israel’s occupation of the West Bank since 1967. Even though her earlier novel ‘Cactus’ said harsh things about Israel, it was published and sold freely, a Foreign Ministry pamphlet said. The writer admitted that she once felt oddly demoralized because the Israelis permitted more freedom than the Palestinians would have had in any Arab country. ‘They made us feel they were so strong that they didn’t care what we did,’ Miss Kalifeh said. ‘But now they are starting to worry, because even though we are weak, we are drawing the attention of the world. The world wants to know more about the Palestinians, and this is why they (the Israelis) need the iron fist — they are insecure.’”
Suleiman Mansour at 35, three years after the Pasadena show and eight before he stands outside Ketziot prison. The writer Sahar Khalifeh, printed here as Miss Kalifeh, describes being cited in an Israeli government pamphlet as proof of the freedom she was being permitted, and says the permission ended when the world started paying attention.
“Map shows border shared by Israel and Lebanon.” The map marks Sidon, Tyre, the Litani River, Taibe, Adeisseh, Kiryat Shemona, Maroun Er-Ras, Yaroun, Alma Chaab, Metulla, Ghajar, Kibbutz of Misgau AM, Ramim and the Golan Heights.
The clipping is the headline and the map; the body of the story is not on this scan.
· estimated · Sioux City Journal · Sioux City · page 1
Representatives of six Sioux City Jewish organizations raised $2,500 for the development of colonization in Palestine
Sioux City Journal
“Representatives of six Sioux City Jewish organizations raised $2,500 for the development of colonization in Palestine after an address here by Joseph Baratz of the World Zionist Action Committee.”
A one-sentence item in a looking-back column, reprinting a local notice from an earlier year. The word used for the project is colonization.
“He had founded the most acclaimed writing program in the nation, the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She had helped found the most influential journal among Chinese intellectuals outside mainland China, the Free China Fortnightly. But it took a barbecue on the banks of the Iowa River for Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh to collaborate on an idea: to bring foreign writers from around the world, no matter what their political viewpoint might be, to the United States… Now, 14 years later, the International Writing Program has become a United Nations of sorts for writers. Each autumn, writers from countries that otherwise don’t communicate with one another travel to Iowa to discover each other and America. Writers from South Africa and Nigeria, from China and Taiwan, from Israel and those from the land they call Palestine have met in Iowa City. ‘I am here without a machine gun, but with a pen,’ Sahar Khalifeh, a Palestinian writer from Jerusalem told a gathering recently in Houston. She is participating in this fall’s four-month international workshop in Iowa, along with 33 writers from such countries as Poland, Hungary, Argentina, Indonesia and Japan. ‘The U.N. could not bring Israel and Palestine together. The Writing Program has,’ says Khalifeh, who has seen some of her books banned in Israel. Since the program’s inception, cooperation among writers has been the Engles’ goal. ‘We insist that the program be non-political,’ Engle said recently while in Houston. ‘We don’t try to persuade them to change their minds.’ The non-political approach seems to have worked. Many Communist and Third World writers have participated in the Iowa program, including noted Polish writer Waclaw Sadkowski and the People’s Republic of China’s famed poet Ai Qing. Among major countries, only the Soviet Union has not participated… ‘Writing is the least dramatic of all the arts,’ Engle said in explaining the difficulties in raising funds. ‘A writer sits at a desk, scratching, trying to get the right words. It’s not a fascinating sight. But after a symphony is over the music disappears into thin air. Writing lasts for 1,000 years.’”
The archive’s third clipping of this novelist in three years: her fiction printed in Des Moines in 1979, this in Houston in 1981, and the Baltimore Sun in 1980 on her books being banned. The paper writes “the land they call Palestine,” and two paragraphs later she is a Palestinian writer from Jerusalem. This scan was labelled 1991; the masthead reads Monday, Oct. 26, 1981, and the date here follows the masthead.
By Arthur Max, Associated Press, Ramallah, Occupied West Bank
“RAMALLAH, Occupied West Bank (AP) — Israeli soldiers patrolled this restive Palestinian town today in a show of strength that blocked a planned business strike. But in nearby Jerusalem most shops were shut. Troops in the streets of Ramallah carried truncheons and equipment to force open locks of shuttered shops. When stores opened and life appeared normal, most troops withdrew. In Jerusalem, which unlike the West Bank of the Jordan River is under police jurisdiction rather than military occupation, shopkeepers responded to the call by West Bank unions to strike, and most Arab schools closed shortly after they opened. ‘We are acting with the utmost restraint, both toward those who closed their stores and toward those who opened them and need our protection,’ said Jerusalem Police Chief Rahamim Confort. ‘But we will act to nip any disorders whatsoever in the bud.’ No effort was made to force the shops to open, but two youths were arrested for unfurling a Palestinian flag in Arab Jerusalem… West Bank leaders reject the form of autonomy offered by Israel as a cover for continued occupation and say they want full Palestinian statehood. Last night Israeli occupation authorities summoned the rector and board of governors of Bir Zeit College and warned them against permitting more anti-Israeli activity on campus… Bir Zeit spokesman Albert Aghzarian said: ‘Once again, this national Palestinian university has been singled out for collective punishment as part of a larger political scheme to deny the Palestinian peole its rights to self-determination.’… Israel Radio said Al Fajr, an Arab daily published in Jerusalem, was closed for 10 days for violating military censorship, and the editor of another daily, A-Shaab, was arrested. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon told a news conference yesterday that Bir Zeit was closed because he could not allow a campus to shelter ‘people who stone cars or block roads.’”
The dateline is Ramallah, Occupied West Bank, and the phrase Israeli occupation authorities is in the paper’s own sentence. Two youths arrested for unfurling a flag, two newspapers shut or their editors arrested, and Sharon’s reason printed last. “peole” is the paper’s.
“JAFFA, Israel — The weathered houses still stand today, bizarre American frontier relics with wooden sidewalks and hitching posts, sagging like tired western movie props against the stone mansions that distinguish this ancient port city. And to this day, the Arabs here still refer to the small quarter tucked behind one of Jaffa’s busiest streets as ‘America’ — for the American pioneers who came here to live after the War Between the States. Even in 1866, the Christian colonists were not the first Americans to settle in the Holy Land. Fifteen years earlier, another group of Americans established the very first U.S. colony abroad on a remote hilltop in what is now the heart of Tel Aviv. Disease, drought, and murderous Bedouin raids wiped out the first colony in a Middle East version of the failure of Jamestown… It was a chapter fueled by a singularly American religious fervor that wrapped the Holy Land in an otherworldly mist — and that blindly ignored the reality of Palestine’s Malaria-infested swamps and scorching climate in the backwaters of the Ottoman Turkish Empire… The first group of about 100 colonists landed on the shores of Jaffa in 1851, led by Clorinda Minor, a Philadelphian and a member of the Christian Adventist sect, which prophesied doom and salvation through a new life in the Holy Land… Melville recorded a conversation with one of the colonists, a Mr Dixon who proudly boasted he was ‘permanently settled on the soil of Zion, sir’ Melville then asked Dixon if he employed any Jews. In retrospect, Dixon’s reply provides an ironic counterpoint to the Zionist movement that would establish the city of Tel Aviv 50 years later. ‘No. Can’t afford to have them,’ Melville quotes Dixon as saying. ‘Do all my own work with my son. Besides, the Jews are lazy and don’t like to work.’ On Jan. 11, 1858, the Bedouins attacked the colony, murdering Frederick Steinbeck, the great-uncle of John Steinbeck. The Arab marauders also raped the American author’s grandmother and his great aunt, and pillaged the colony. At the time, it was one of the worst attacks on Americans abroad in U.S. history.”
“Horatio Vester, 80, who still runs the hotel, with his wife Val, in a recent photo.” Photo for the Tribune by Howard Simons
American colonies in Palestine thirty years before the first Zionist congress, told in 1981 as American history. The Arabs of Jaffa still call the quarter America.
Even Israelis protest West Bank university shutdown
A rare Arab-Jew agreement
By Munir Fasheh
“THE ISRAELI military government, on Nov. 4, ordered the closing, until Jan. 4, of Bir Zeit University, the main Palestinian university in the West Bank. The acting president, Dr. Gabi Baramki, the entire administration and a number of faculty members and students, including all members of the student council, were placed under either house or town arrest, and others were imprisoned. Later, some were freed… Closing Bir Zeit, the most influential and well-known of the five Palestinian universities in the West Bank, is equivalent to closing the top 20 percent of the universities in the United States, deporting their presidents, putting hundreds of administrators and faculty members under arrest and jailing thousands of students… In 1974, Bir Zeit was closed and its president, Dr. Hanna Nasir, was deported. No educational institution in the West Bank, including elementary schools, has escaped closure at one time or another; some, like Abudis University, have been shut permanently. Bir Zeit started in 1924 as a small private school, added its first freshman year in 1951, and by 1973 was a full four-year institution… About 40 percent of the 1,800 students currently enrolled are women… Bir Zeit students, who have grown up in the shadow of the occupation, do not live in an abstract world… In addition, because of the loss of most of their land, Palestinians have increasingly turned to education as their only hope for survival. Any measure against Palestinian educational institutions threatens the existence of Palestinian society itself. The most serious measure so far has been Military Order 854 (July 6, 1980). One provision requires that every faculty member and student, before applying to any university in the West Bank or Gaza, must apply for a permit from the military government. What a credential to require for an education!… On Nov. 7, for example, about 100 professors and students from Hebrew University marched in the West Bank to support Bir Zeit and protest Israeli treatment of the university. In October, a Hebrew University committee asked that Order 854 be rescinded; it released a report that, with previous closures in mind, said that closing a university is an act of collective punishment… For Israeli Jews to stand firmly against the military occupation and its policies is, however, the beginning of a real basis for Jews and Arabs to live together in peace. The main crime of Bir Zeit University is simply that it is Palestinian. For the Israeli government to demand that Bir Zeit not be Palestinian is like telling a bird not to fly.”
A Palestinian writing under his own name in an American daily in 1982, and the paper prints his credentials at the foot: he had taught mathematics at Bir Zeit since 1962 and was dean of students from 1979 to 1981. The pull-quote the paper chose is his complaint about Arab institutions, not about Israel: “But no head of an Arab academic institution has yet raised a voice for Bir Zeit’s academic freedom.”
“For all their apparent differences, Todd Piker, who is a country potter, and Samia Halaby, an abstract painter with a highly intellectual approach to her work, have far more in common than the fact that both are currently showing their art in SoHo galleries. Piker grew up, gently and with privilege, in an upper-middle-class Port Washington neighborhood. Halaby was born in 1936 in Jerusalem, which, as a Palestinian, she and her family soon had to leave. What they share in common is the indelible marks their childhoods made upon them… Piker is relaxed and ambitious and was willing to take the enormous risk of opening his own pottery eight years ago at the age of 21; Halaby is angry and vigilant, but her work probes for ideas that will make sense of her world… She is becoming more reckless and determined in her own life, too. A year ago last May she received notice her contract would not be renewed as adjunct professor after nine years at the Yale School of Art. And she is fighting it. ‘I never was an activist in the Palestinian cause,’ she said. ‘But there is a connection between my experience of having to leave my home and my dolls in Jerusalem in 1948 and my sensitivity to discrimination. At Yale I was a woman and a Palestinian and I spoke up.’”
The Yale non-renewal documented as it happened, inside an art review. The byline is printed “Amel Wallach”; the critic is Amei Wallach. The review pairs a Palestinian painter’s dispossession with a Connecticut potter’s comfortable childhood as two kinds of formative memory, and gives them equal billing. Photo credit: Newsday / Naomi Lasdon.
The same day and the same event as the Star-Ledger (CP-1982-002), and the only difference is what the dead boy was doing. Here the troops fire into protesters, which says there was a protest and that it was fired into. The Star-Ledger called the same thing Arab unrest.
Both papers that carried this on 14 April 1982 name who fired. What they disagree about is what the event was. Here the killing and the seventeen wounded happen in Arab unrest — the last three words make the Arabs the setting the shooting took place in. The Bryan College Station Eagle the same day had the troops firing into protesters (CP-1982-001). The boy is not named in either headline.
Elana Levy, Ron Shuffler, Gary Weinstein, Daniel Hakim, Carole Resnick, Allen Miller, Andy Mager, Ingrid Fischman, Laura Wilansky, Sandee Resnick and Deborah Weissman, Syracuse
“We are outraged as human beings — and feel a pressing responsibility to publicize our outrage as Jews — at the genocidal war which Israel is presently waging against the Palestinian, Lebanese and other Arab peoples. Estimates at the number of Lebanese and Palestinians, mainly civilians, killed in the last couple of weeks range from ten to fifteen thousand, with close to a million newly created refugees. Is this Israel’s Final Solution to the Palestine Question: Genocide? As citizens of the United States we demand that our government immediately end all military and technological assistance to the Israeli government. Without U.S. military aid the Israeli government could not have waged this brutal attack, inflicted with U.S.-made fighter planes. We support Mideast negotiations which recognize the right of self-determination for all the parties involved, including the legal representative of the Palestinian peoples, the Palestine Liberation Organization. We ask all peace-loving people to express their outrage at the brutal attacks waged by the Israeli government. With great sadness that this letter needed writing, we sign ourselves: Jews Against Genocide.”
Eleven named American Jews in Syracuse during the invasion of Lebanon. The paper set the headline, and set it bare. Three other letters run on the same page, one of them headed “Lebanon for Lebanese” and one by a Presbyterian minister headed “Road to Peace?”
“WASHINGTON — King Hussein of Jordan yesterday rejected declarations by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon that Jordan is a Palestinian state and should become the permanent homeland of the Palestinian people. Hussein, interviewed on ABC’s ‘This Week,’ said Palestinian territory must include land now occupied by Israel in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. Hussein, who said that he does not rule out the possibility that the West Bank could be a separate Palestinian state apart from Jordan, said his country has given the Palestinians a temporary home ‘awaiting resolution of their problem on their legitimate soil.’ Sharon, on a three-day tour of the United States, repeatedly has said that Israel would never agree to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. He also has stressed that he believed 75% of what is now Jordan was once Palestine, making Jordan the proper Palestinian homeland. He reiterated that view yesterday in appearances on both CBS’ ‘Face the Nation’ and the ABC program. ‘The majority of the Palestinians are living in Jordan,’ Sharon said on CBS. ‘Jordan, as a matter of fact, is a Palestinian state. So we are not planning to establish a Palestinian state. There is a Palestinian state.’… More than 700 U.S. and Canadian Jewish leaders applauded his remarks at the Washington Hilton… Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij and Rashi Shawa, ex-mayor of Gaza, said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ that Israeli talks with Palestinians in occupied territories are an illusion. They added that Palestinians talking with the Israelis are ‘actually nobody whatsoever — they are collaborators with Israeli authorities.’ Freij, who said he was barred by the Israeli government from traveling to the United States for the TV appearance, said that it is an open secret that the United States collaborated with Israel in its invasion of Lebanon. ‘I am blaming the United States for what befell the Arab women and children and civilian people in Lebanon,’ Freij said.”
Two Palestinian mayors on Meet the Press, one of them barred from flying to the studio, printed beside Sharon saying Jordan already is Palestine.
Geoffrey Godsell, Christian Science Monitor Service
“Some analysis and the Begin government’s actions in Lebanon as only first steps toward a wider goal. All current evidence indicates that the men running Israel are outmaneuvering the United States in purposefully implementing their blueprint for a greater Israel in the Middle East… The Begin government has clearly spelled out — specifically or by implication — some of the main features of its blueprint for greater Israel. The operations in Lebanon are merely the first step. The overall features include: Destruction of both the military and political power of the hard core of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon. Annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip — or Judea and Samaria, as the Israelis call them — so there can be no question of a Palestinian state alongside Israel on the West Bank of the Jordan… Yuval Ne’eman, leader of the Tehiya Party with a seat in Begin’s Cabinet, spelled it out in the Aug. 1 Observer: ‘This war is in two parts: One is what is happening up there in Lebanon, and the other is to create a situation in which there would be practically nowhere, no place left, to create a Palestinian state other than in Jordan — where there is one already.’… Israel might conceivably act as midwife for a partition of Lebanon between Syria and Israel. In that case, the southern part of Lebanon might become an Israeli puppet Christian state, possibly under the presidency of right-wing Christian Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel.”
A cabinet minister saying in print that one aim of the Lebanon war is to leave nowhere for a Palestinian state to be. The page it runs on is otherwise a lumberyard advertisement: Gross Lumber Company Hot Summer Specials, a grinning sun, and fencing clearance at $13.25.
“WASHINGTON — A small dam of words burst last Sunday and the wave that washed over the Arab-Israeli dispute rinsed a large rock that lies in the path of peace. Careful words from a king and crafty words from a Palestine Liberation Organization operative revealed deep Arab disagreement even about what the word ‘Palestine’ designates. On ABC’s ‘This Week With David Brinkley’ Bassam Abu Shareef of the PLO said ‘an’ aim of the PLO is establishment of a state on ‘part of’ — on ‘any’ part of — Palestine. A state on the West Bank and Gaza would be ‘satisfactory.’ Question: ‘Does this mean that (the PLO) can accept the simultaneous existence of Israel as a Jewish state?’ Shareef: ‘This is the PLO program. It was very clear, and although many people decided not to read it carefully because they don’t want to read it carefully, we now read it to you carefully.’ Oh? What ‘PLO program’? Not the Palestine National Charter adopted in 1968, the first point of which is that Palestine is an ‘indivisible’ part of the Arab world, and the second point of which is: ‘Palestine, with the borders it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.’… Dishonesty revealed: Shareef’s statement, another example of PLO ‘moderation’ for American media, refers to the PLO’s 10-point program adopted in 1974. It held that ‘any’ liberation of Palestine is but a step toward the destruction of Israel (point four) and — note well — the overthrow of the Jordanian regime (point five). When Shareef was asked if the PLO’s argument about title to the West Bank is not ‘as much with Jordan as it is with Israel,’ he said: ‘Well, who told you that we differentiate greatly between Begin and Hussein?’ There, suddenly, the mask of moderation slipped, the dishonesty was revealed. Shareef was immediately followed on ABC by Hussein. He was asked about recent statements by Israel’s foreign and defense ministers (Shamir and Sharon) that Jordan is a Palestinian state. Before considering his answer, consider this: The first modern use of the word ‘Palestine’ to designate a specific territory was for the territory mandated to British when the Ottoman empire collapsed in 1918. The League of Nations’ mandate designated land on both sides of the Jordan River — all that is now Israel and Jordan — as Palestine. Later, Britain separated Transjordan (now Jordan), restricting the name ‘Palestine’ to the West Bank and what is now Israel. But remember what Hussein never forgets: the PLO charter endorsed the original, inclusive definition of Palestine. Responding to Israeli statements that Jordan is Palestinian, ethnically (65-70 percent) and geographically, Hussein said, obliquely: Jordan has given ‘a chance to feel at home’ to ‘Palestinians awaiting a resolution of their problem, on their legitimate soil.’ By ‘Palestinian soil,’ he means everything west of the Jordan River… ‘Legitimate rights’: For 19 years (1948-67) Jordan controlled the West Bank that Hussein now calls ‘Palestinian soil,’ but made no move to offer it up to what Hussein now calls ‘legitimate Palestinian Arab rights.’ On ABC Hussein called it ‘inaccurate’ to say Jordan annexed the West Bank after the 1948 war. He said, ‘It was an Arab effort to save what could be saved of Palestine’ after the 1948 war. But no Arab nation supported Jordan’s annexation. The United States never recognized it. Only two nations — Britain and Pakistan — did… Hussein’s subtlety, even artistry, was on view Sunday. In September, 1970, his army killed many times more PLO members than Sharon’s army killed in Lebanon. Last Sunday, when an ABC correspondent said ‘the Palestinians’ were expelled from Jordan in 1970, Hussein deftly, almost unnoticeably rejected the equation of the PLO and ‘the Palestinians.’ He simply said: ‘Not many left Jordan in 1970. A very few did so....’ That is true. Most Palestinians are still there, in Palestine.”
A cartoon runs below the column, unrelated: a figure with a milkshake in each hand, captioned “A BALANCED DIET IS NOT A MILKSHAKE IN EACH HAND!” Signed Milton Davis.
A syndicated columnist arguing over what the word Palestine designates, and ending on the sentence that most Palestinians are still in Palestine. A PLO spokesman is quoted at length from American television.
Correction: {'note': 'arrived captioned Press & Sun-Bulletin 1945; the page’s own "Today in history" box reads Thursday, Sept. 2, 1982'}
“WASHINGTON — A small dam of words burst last Sunday and the wave that washed over the Arab-Israeli dispute rinsed a large rock that lies in the path of peace. Careful words from a king and crafty words from a Palestine Liberation Organization operative revealed deep Arab disagreement even about what the word ‘Palestine’ designates. On ABC’s ‘This Week with David Brinkley’ Bassam Abu Shareef of the PLO said ‘an’ aim of the PLO is establishment of a state on ‘part of’ — on ‘any’ part of — Palestine. A state on the West Bank and Gaza would be ‘satisfactory.’ Question: ‘Does this mean that (the PLO) can accept the simultaneous existence of Israel as a Jewish state?’ Shareef: ‘This is the PLO program. It was very clear, and although many people decided not to read it carefully because they don’t want to read it carefully, we now read it to you carefully.’… When Shareef was asked if the PLO’s argument about title to the West Bank is not ‘as much with Jordan as it is with Israel,’ he said: ‘Well, who told you that we differentiate greatly between Begin and Hussein?’ There, suddenly, the mask of moderation slipped, the dishonesty was revealed… The first modern use of the word ‘Palestine’ to designate a specific territory was for the territory mandated to British when the Ottoman empire collapsed in 1918. The League of Nations’ mandate designated land on both sides of the Jordan River — all that is now Israel and Jordan — as Palestine. Later, Britain separated Transjordan (now Jordan), restricting the name ‘Palestine’ to the West Bank and what is now Israel. But remember what Hussein never forgets: the PLO charter endorsed the original, inclusive definition of Palestine… On Monday, the Reagan administration declared that Jordan is not a Palestinian state. But on Sept. 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan said: ‘Israel and Jordan are the two Palestinian states envisioned and authorized by the United Nations. Jordan is now recognized as sovereign in some 80 percent of the old territory of Palestine.’… Most Palestinians are still there, in Palestine.”
The third printing of the same George Will column of 2 September 1982 in this archive, under a third headline. The masthead is not on this clipping, so the paper is unidentified.
Correction: {'note': 'arrived captioned Elmira Star-Gazette 1948; it is the same syndicated column of 2 September 1982'}
“WASHINGTON — A small dam of words burst last Sunday and the wave that washed over the Arab-Israeli dispute rinsed a large rock that lies in the path of peace. Careful words from a king and crafty words from a Palestine Liberation Organization operative revealed deep Arab disagreement even about what the word ‘Palestine’ designates… The first modern use of the word ‘Palestine’ to designate a specific territory was for the territory mandated to Britain when the Ottoman empire collapsed in 1918. The League of Nations’ mandate designated land on both sides of the Jordan River — all that is now Israel and Jordan — as Palestine. Later, Britain separated Transjordan (now Jordan), restricting the name ‘Palestine’ to the West Bank and what is now Israel. But remember what Hussein never forgets: the PLO charter endorsed the original, inclusive definition of Palestine… For 19 years (1948-67) Jordan controlled the West Bank that Hussein now calls ‘Palestinian soil,’ but made no move to offer it up to what Hussein now calls ‘legitimate Palestinian Arab rights.’… Hussein’s subtlety, even artistry, was on view Sunday. In September 1970, his army killed many times more PLO members than Sharon’s army killed in Lebanon. Last Sunday, when an ABC correspondent said ‘the Palestinians’ were expelled from Jordan in 1970, Hussein deftly, almost unnoticeably rejected the equation of the PLO and ‘the Palestinians.’ He simply said: ‘Not many left Jordan in 1970. A very few did so. . . .’ That is true. Most Palestinians are still there, in Palestine.”
A cartoon runs above the column: two soldiers marked MARINES standing in the bottom of a deep spiral pit, captioned “All quiet on the Mid-East front.”
The same George Will column of 2 September 1982 appears three times in this archive under three different headlines. Below it on this page, an unrelated editorial on space warfare reprinted from the Wheeling, W.Va., News-Register.
Page 12-A, Sunday morning, 19 September 1982. Sabra is named, and what happened there is a stench and a scream — the headline gives the reader the senses and not the event. On the same morning the Morning Union in Springfield ran Arab refugees massacred across the top of a page (CP-1982-011). Five days later a Richmond editorial named the beneficiary (CP-1982-015).
· The Atlanta Journal and Constitution · Atlanta · page 1
‘A hellish sight . . . like Jonestown’
“DEATH IN BEIRUT: Lebanese man cycles through Palestinian camp at Sabra, in west Beirut, as bodies lie in street.” The Associated Press
Page 16-A of the Sunday paper: one photograph across the page, its caption, and a headline set larger than the caption. The story it introduces is not on this clipping. The same Associated Press photograph ran in The Morning Call the same day.
Lebanese civilian cycles through Palestinian camp at Sabra, passing two of hundreds of corpses
“Lebanese civilian cycles through Palestinian camp at Sabra yesterday, passing two of hundreds of corpses.”
“Lebanese civilian cycles through Palestinian camp at Sabra yesterday, passing two of hundreds of corpses.” Associated Press
The same Associated Press photograph that the Atlanta Journal and Constitution ran the same morning under a different caption. This one counts them: two of hundreds.
Sunday 19 September 1982. The verb is massacred, in the top line, with nobody attached to it. The people are Arab refugees, which is what they had been since 1948. The Abilene Reporter-News the same morning put the same camp on page 12-A as an eyewitness piece about a smell and a sound (CP-1982-008).
“JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government knew for at least 36 hours that Lebanese Christian Phalangists were killing Palestinians in west Beirut refugee camps but took no action to stop the slaughter, Israeli newspapers claimed today. The reports were rejected by Minister Without Portfolio Yitzhak Modai, who said the Israeli army ‘acted as soon as it learned of the action, Friday afternoon.’… Modai told Israel radio that the Israeli army intervened to stop the massacre Friday afternoon. ‘If they didn’t intervene then, it would have been much worse,’ Modai said. He said Israeli troops knew the Christian Phalangists were entering the camps, largely inhabited by Moslem Palestinians, but did not know there would be a massacre. ‘If they had the vaguest idea that this was the intent, they would have stopped it beforehand,’ he told Israel radio.… Yedioth Ahronoth’s Eitan Haber wrote that the government permitted Phalangist militiamen to enter the Sabra and Chatilla camps on Thursday. ‘On Thursday and Friday morning ministers and officers knew of the massacre and took no steps to stop it,’ Haber wrote. ‘For 36 hours, the Phalange killed everybody in their path.’ ‘Though the government knew on Thursday night,’ Haber wrote, ‘it didn’t raise a finger nor did it do anything to prevent the massacre until Saturday morning.’ Between 300 and 1,500 Palestinians were killed, according to various estimates. ‘On Friday morning, I knew about the massacre in the camps and reported to a senior officials,’ Zeev Schiff, Israel’s most respected military affairs commentator, wrote in Haaretz.”
“Two Palestinian women wept in Sabra Palestinian refugee camp in west Beirut.” AP Laserphoto
The accusation and the denial ran in the same column. Both are here. The papers making the accusation are Israeli: the independent Haaretz and the conservative Yedioth Ahronoth, with Davar of the opposition Labor Party.
A Washington Post editorial, reprinted, beside an editorial cartoon of an Israeli tank sinking in Lebanese quicksand
From the Washington Post
“Questions from Shatila and Sabra. Shatila and Sabra, the refugee camps in West Beirut savaged over the weekend, are the latest obscure place names to be burned into our collective consciousness by the Middle East tragedy. Killers gunned down some scores if not hundreds of unarmed and apparently undefended children, women and old men, all of them apparently Palestinians who had survived weeks of Israeli fire on their miserable homes during the city’s earlier siege. Pure vengeance seems to have been the single motive for the carnage, for there had been no complaint from any quarter that PLO guns were parked among these civilians. A more tragic demonstration of why a political solution must be found to the Palestinian refugee question could scarcely be imagined. The prime responsibility must fall, of course, on those who did it. The gunmen appear to have been drawn from the ranks of the largely Christian Phalangist militia of Maj. Saad Haddad, the renegade Lebanese officer set up as a fireforce by the Israelis some years ago, and the Christian Phalangist militia, also with Israeli ties, that was commanded, until his recent assassination, by Bashir Gemayel. At this point it is impossible to know whether the killing was done in specific retaliation for Gemayel’s murder (some 26 others died in the explosion that took his life, by the way) or in a spree of generalized revenge and bloodletting or by way of advancing the political objective of removing the Palestinian refugee presence from sensitive areas of Lebanon. Nor is there much likelihood of a reliable future accounting, given the pervasiveness of mass murder in Lebanon’s recent history, and the lack of any system whatsoever for bringing the perpetrators of political violence to justice. The Israelis, however, cannot avoid their own measure of responsibility. Their officials say now that the restraints placed on them by American diplomats and Moslem Lebanese politicians kept the Israeli army from imposing the firm presence in West Beirut that would have forestalled this tragedy. This is a lame evasion. The Israelis invaded West Beirut last Wednesday — an operation that entailed shelling of the two camps where the massacre later was to take place — precisely to fill what they insisted was a vacuum of authority created by the death of Bashir Gemayel. By their invasion they made themselves accountable for its consequences. Whether there was a degree of actual Israeli complicity in the events in Shatila and Sabra will no doubt be argued over for some time. Even if there was none, the Israelis still will not be absolved on the larger question. Notwithstanding their insistence that they were going into West Beirut to protect people, moreover, no physical signs had been reported of any trouble in that part of the city before the Israeli army entered. At the least, it appears, their entry created the conditions in which the massacre took place… In retrospect, another painful question arises. Where was the international peace-keeping force? The answer is known. The Americans, French and Italians sent in their men for the limited purpose of covering the evacuation of the PLO fighters from Beirut, and once that operation was completed, they pulled them out. Was that a mistake? Should the force have been left in place to protect civilians, especially Palestinian civilians, who had been left with no military protectors of their own?… It is part of the somber picture that must be contemplated as the dead of Shatila and Sabra are mourned.”
An editorial cartoon runs above the piece: an Israeli tank sinking into a swamp lettered LEBANON, its crew calling “QUICKSAND!” Signed Marlette, 1982.
A Washington Post editorial reprinted in Honolulu. It says the massacre cannot be excused by the absence of PLO guns among the civilians, and it puts the question to the Americans as well.
A Palestinian woman grieves over the bodies of her relatives in the Sabra refugee camp of West Beirut. In background, a Red Cross worker sprays disinfectant.
“A Palestinian woman grieves over the bodies of her relatives in the Sabra refugee camp of West Beirut. In background, a Red Cross worker sprays disinfectant.” UPI photo.
Twelve rows of bodies under blankets, a Red Cross worker with a sprayer, and a woman kneeling beside one of them. The caption gives her a nationality and a relationship and no name. The verb for what was done to the people in the picture does not appear.
Five days after the camps, a Virginia paper putting a state in the headline as the party that wanted the outcome. Nothing in this archive from that week goes further. Compare the two headlines of 19 September, which name no one at all (CP-1982-011, CP-1982-008).
Militiamen unleash hatred, slaughter hundreds in Palestinian refugee camps
“MASSACRE. Bodies of Palestinians sprawl in street at Sabra camp as defense workers wear gas masks to take them away. Deadly drama in Beirut — 48 hours of terror. Militiamen unleash hatred, slaughter hundreds in Palestinian refugee camps.”
“Bodies of Palestinians sprawl in street at Sabra camp as defense workers wear gas masks to take them away.” United Press International. A corner flash on the page reads “MASSACRE.”
The clipping is the photograph, its caption and the headline stack; the story below was not clipped. The paper set a corner flash reading MASSACRE across the top of the picture.
“Like the United States, Israel is held by its own people and by the rest of the world to exacting standards of honest and humane conduct even in the emotional circumstances of war. It is a heavy burden, yet one neither nation could put aside without losing its character and sense of mission. We Americans felt the anguish of blood on our hands during the dark days of Vietnam, most particularly when details of the terrible massacre at My Lai came to light. Out of this came a willingness to face the full consequences of a misguided policy, a readiness to set our priorities aright, a determination to recapture our sanity. Now Israel must take this same hard road or find itself isolated among nations, its security undermined. Whatever excuses or equivocations may be heard from the Begin-Sharon government, the tragedy that befell Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatilla camps outside Beirut must be confronted by the Israeli people. Prime Minister Menachem Begin misleads himself if he believes a full state inquiry into the massacre near Beirut would be an admission of Israel’s complicity. On the contrary, the denial of an inquiry would be taken by the rest of the world as an admission of guilt. Nobody is accusing Israeli soldiers of gunning down unarmed men, women and children. What needs to be established clearly is precisely which Israeli leaders knew what and when. Americans know all too well that the search for justice after a vast crime against humanity is painful and far from conclusive or satisfying. In the case of My Lai, Lt. William Calley was the sole person prosecuted while higher-ups in positions of responsibility were never really called to public account. But there was a public trial and an airing of the facts. Surely a raucous, instinctive democracy like Israel can and must do the same if the damage to its name is to be repaired. It is not our purpose to join in the clamor for the resignation of the Begin-Sharon government. That is a matter for the Israeli people to decide, preferably after a full but prompt state inquiry. That the president of Israel has demanded such an inquiry, that two prominent members of the Begin Cabinet have resigned and Israeli newspapers are demanding the truth is testament to Israel’s strength, not its weakness. Perhaps out of the Sabra-Chatilla tragedy will come a return to reason and proportion in Israel’s relations with its neighbors. Israel could do worse than learn from the American experience.”
An American editorial reaching for My Lai as the comparison, and naming what it thinks the comparison shows: one lieutenant prosecuted and the higher-ups never called to account.
Those lucky enough to have lived tell consistent tale of death camps
Sadness of survivors
Christopher Young, Southam News, Beirut
“BEIRUT — Survivors of Sabra and Chatilla had to be either lucky or smart. Arabia Hussein was a bit of both. A large woman of 32 but looking much older, she has eight children — and she and her husband managed to save them all. She is full of anger. It is focused specifically on the Israelis, even though they did no killing, also on the Americans, the French and the Italians, the providers of the multinational force who went away and left the Palestinians to their fate, and on U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Israeli Prime Minister Begin personally. The two names ring though the language barrier in Arabia’s flaming rhetoric as she tells what happened, suckling child no. 8 at the same time. While the world of international politics wrestles with how the Beirut massacre is to be investigated, survivors are telling a rather consistent story. When I went back to the camps last weekend, a week after I had walked their silent streets past the bodies of the murdered people, I found the neighbors and kinfolk ready and anxious to talk about it. ‘That’s my home,’ said one old woman, waving her hand at a pile of rubble two-and-a-half metres high among some blasted trees. ‘I’m not sad for my house,’ she said, beginning to weep. ‘I’m sad for all the people who died.’ She burst into uncontrollable sobbing and could not continue. But let Arabia Hussein speak, because she is clear about times and days and because she embodies the tragic cycle of driven people and religious hatred that caused this tragedy. Arabia was born and lived all her life in Chatilla refugee camp. Her parents were refugees from Palestine, and they ended up here, her mother pregnant with Arabia, two years after the first Arab-Israeli…”
“Group of Palestinian women weep outside the ruins of their homes in Beirut’s Sabra refugee camp, where the search still goes on for those who disappeared in last week’s bloody massacre when Phalangist forces entered the camp after Palestinian fighters had quit.” UPI
A survivor given her name, her age, her children and her anger, and the reporter says why he is letting her speak at length. The clipping is cut before the end of her account.
“Tel Aviv—The Foreign Ministry said yesterday that Israel is gratified by U.S. support in opposing Israeli expulsion from the U.N. General Assembly and technical conferences of the world body. ‘Israel is very appreciative and very pleased with the American approach to the problem,’ a ministry spokesman said. Any formal Israeli statements on the subject would be made by Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, currently in the United States, he added. Secretary of State George P. Shultz said Saturday that Washington would withdraw delegations and withhold payments to the General Assembly and the International Telecommunications Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, if those groups voted to expel Israel. In Nairobi, the balloting on the Algerian-sponsored resolution to expel Israel from the communications conference was scheduled for today. Chief U.S. delegate Michael Gardner said he has sent copies of Mr. Shultz’s statement to the heads of all delegations. A commentary from the Soviet news agency Tass claimed Washington was backing Israel in the U.N. dispute because Tel Aviv was working to impose America’s ‘imperial designs’ on the Middle East. ‘Gross blackmail—that is how, and in no other way, one can qualify the latest demarche of the United States toward the United Nations,’ the Tass commentary said. Arab nations have spearheaded the drive to oust Israel in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon June 6 and the massacre of Palestinians by Christian militiamen in two Beirut refugee camps September 16-18. Many Arabs blame Israel for the massacre because Israeli troops allowed the Christians to enter the Sabra and Shatila camps, ostensibly to rout Palestinian guerrillas.”
The camps are named in the last paragraph, and what happened there is given as what Arabs say.
Correction: {'note': 'The scan has no masthead. It arrived captioned as the Roanoke Times, 2012. The story refers to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon on June 6 and the camp massacres of September 16-18 as recent, to Shultz speaking on Saturday and to a Nairobi vote scheduled for today, which places it in the last days of September or the first days of October 1982. Neither the paper nor the exact day can be confirmed from the clipping.'}
“IS JORDAN REALLY PALESTINE? Ariel Sharon says yes. King Hussein says no. The State Department agrees with Hussein. It provides no evidence to support the king. But neither does the king; he just says it’s ‘ridiculous.’ Until recently, Hussein and the department saw no need to respond to the question, which had lingered at the edges of the Middle East debate for years. Now that the issue is joined, perhaps it will no longer be ignored. This is progress, since the matter is fundamental to resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli problem. Is Jordan Palestine? In 1920, the World War I Allies conferred on Britain a mandate to govern Palestine, an area on both sides of the Jordan River that had been part of the Ottoman Empire. This mandate, confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922, remained unchanged during the League’s lifetime. Though the mandate incorporated Britain’s 1917 commitment to provide a homeland in Palestine for the Jews — the Balfour Declaration — the mandate did not provide a homeland for Arabs living there, though it did protect their ‘civil and religious’ but not political rights. Two months after the League approved the mandate, the British colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, changed the rules and the picture. He created the Emirate of Transjordan, installing the Hashemite Abdullah, Hussein’s grandfather, as emir of all the land east of the Jordan River… However, Britain did not free Transjordan — an area constituting nearly 80 percent of Palestine — from the mandate. The people on the East Bank — like the Arabs and Jews on the West Bank — were all considered Palestinians, traveling with Palestinian passports and subject to British control. Moreover, according to Sir Alec Kirkbride, England’s East Bank representative, who later served for years as Abdullah’s adviser, Transjordan was ‘intended to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the National Home for the Jews in Palestine, which (Britain was) pledged to support, became an accomplished fact. There was no intention at that stage of forming the territory east of the river Jordan into an independent Arab state.’ Indeed, Churchill persuaded the Zionists to suspend Jewish immigration to the East Bank on the ground that this would mollify West Bank Arabs and thus make easier a Jewish homeland west of the Jordan. Obviously, the West Bank Palestinian Arabs were not mollified; if anything, their appetites were whetted for the whole of Palestine… Is Jordan Palestine? Yes, but not all of mandated Palestine. Israel holds a little more than 20 percent of the mandate’s Palestine, including the 5 percent known as the West Bank and Gaza. Jordan is not only de facto Palestine because all who have lived there except for Bedouins and the king’s family are Palestinian; it is de jure Palestine. Does all of this history matter? Of course. It’s fundamental. Palestinians are a nation without a state. Jordan is a state but not a nation. Let Hussein declare himself the king of Palestine, and the world will see the problem for what it is — a border issue between two nations, Israeli and Palestinian — who share the same land. And border problems get solved. When a people believe its nationhood has been ripped off, nothing can be settled.”
A columnist arguing the Jordan-is-Palestine case and, in the middle of it, recording that under the mandate everyone on both banks was considered Palestinian and carried Palestinian passports.
Israeli columnist outwits military censor with fictional story
Associated Press, Tel Aviv
“This article was subject to Israeli military censorship. Tel Aviv (AP)—In what fellow journalists called an ingenious story that evaded military censors, an Israeli columnist informed readers of a major war debate in the cabinet by transposing it to Poland in 1922. Amnon Abromowitz, who writes for the daily Maariv, learned two weeks ago that his government had nearly launched a new offensive in Lebanon. But military censors refused to let him publish it on national security grounds. So Mr. Abromowitz bypassed the censors by resorting to ‘historical fiction,’ using details of the real story to concoct a mythical Polish cabinet debate 60 years ago. What really happened, reported a week later when the government relaxed censorship on the event, was that on October 4 the cabinet defeated by one vote a proposal to attack Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon in retaliation for a guerrilla attack that killed six Israeli soldiers. The move was proposed by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon the day after the attack. But those who knew how to decode Mr. Abromowitz’s column knew about the vote three days after it took place. ‘I think the public had a right to know how close the cabinet was to launching an action that could have led to a new conflagration,’ Mr. Abromowitz said in an interview. ‘It was my duty as a journalist to get the story out, so I wrote it as though the whole thing happened in Poland 60 years ago.’… It turned out that Mr. Abromowitz’s description of the meeting, and the lineup of ministers in the final vote, closely corresponded to Israeli reality. ‘A lot of reporters phoned me when they read the story,’ Mr. Abromowitz said. ‘They wanted to know whether they had understood me correctly, and whether I could confirm the whole thing. All I could say was that I had nothing to add to what I wrote.’ Confronted with censorship since the Jewish state was established in 1948, local and foreign reporters sometimes must go to extreme and offbeat lengths to get suppressed stories into print… Although censorship applies almost exclusively to national security matters, violators face tough punishment. All outgoing reports are monitored and foreign correspondents risk losing accreditation.”
A dispatch about censorship, carrying a censorship notice in its own first line, describing how reporters got around censorship.
“JERUSALEM (UPI) — An American Jewish nurse who struggled to save Palestinians shot in the refugee camp massacres says she testified before an Israeli commission investigating the massacres because she ‘can’t sleep at night.’ Testifying Monday was Ellen Segal, a nurse from Washington, along with Dr. Paul Morris, a Briton, and surgeon Suee Chai-ang of Singapore. All were volunteers at the Gaza Hospital in the Sabra refugee camp. The medical workers were the first non-Israeli witnesses to testify before the commission… ‘I feel it was my duty to say what I heard and what I saw,’ Miss Segal said after the hearing. ‘I can’t sleep at night unless I tell people what happened there and what perhaps Israel’s involvement was, or was not, in this.’… Miss Segal testified that Israeli soldiers had been perched on a tall building overlooking the Chatilla camp and must have known about the slaughter. They could have stopped it, she said. ‘I feel that it is impossible the Israelis could not have seen from the top of that building what was going on and had to hear what was going on,’ she said. But in testimony Sunday, Maj. Gen. Amir Drory, Israel’s top army commander in Lebanon, said that he had been unable to see anything amiss from an observation post at midday Sept. 17, when he first had received reports that the militiamen might be killing civilians.”
An American Jewish nurse volunteering testimony to Israel’s own commission of inquiry, and the Israeli general’s answer from the day before, printed under it.
“TEL AVIV, Israel — An Israeli soldier whose identification tags were found in the Sabra refugee camp after the Palestinian massacre there testified Tuesday that he was never in the camp and thought the tags were taken there by someone who found them. Sgt. Benny Chaim told the judicial commission investigating the massacre he was wounded when Israeli forces pushed into west Beirut on Wednesday, Sept. 15, the day before the slaughter of the refugees began in the Sabra and Chatilla camps. Chaim said the dog tags were in his field jacket when he was wounded. He said a medic cut the jacket off him and threw it aside because it was burning and contained grenades. ‘I personally do not know how my documents got from the site of my injury to inside the refugee camp,’ he said.”
The Kahan commission in session, reported as a short wire story: a soldier explaining how his identification came to be inside the camp.
‘Ideological exclusion’ has always been un-American
Shearer and Glen, Washington
“WASHINGTON — Mahmoud Darwish, 40, a Palestinian poet now living in Paris, received an invitation to read from his work at a Nov. 28 New York City benefit for UNICEF. Despite his three-week visit to America last year, however, he was unable to obtain a three-day visa because of ‘28.’ ANGEL RAMA, 56, a renowned Latin American literature specialist who has lived and taught in the U.S. for large parts of the last 13 years, won a tenured professorship from the University of Maryland in 1980. But when he sought permanent residency here at the university’s insistence, Uruguayan-born Rama found ‘28’ in his way. South African Dennis Brutus, 58, is a tenured professor at Northwestern University who, after a decade of annually renewing his visitor’s visa, also sought permanent residency recently. But the State Department denied his request. This time, too, ‘28’ was the reason… Subsection 28 is an obscure provision of U.S. immigration law which permits the State Department to withhold entry or permanent residency from any alien alleged to hold beliefs considered contrary to the American political system. Arbitrary in practice and anti-democratic in purpose, it’s not an issue in landmark immigration law reforms facing the House this week. But it deserves to be. Passed during the heyday of Wisconsin’s Sen. Joseph McCarthy as part of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, Subsection 28 has enabled anonymous bureaucrats to classify thousands of left-wing writers, artists and others as ‘pro-communist’ or ‘subversive’ on the basis of weak allegations or associations.… In fact, of approximately 140,000 requests to have the provision waived over the last five years, only 136 have been denied, according to an INS official. Yet these seemingly benign statistics belie the extent to which U.S. authorities successfully employ the rule for political ends. Simple delay tactics can often prevent an appointed visit without delaying a visa per se. Darwish, who might have received clearance after a 21-day review by the INS, is one exemplary victim of this practice… THIS PROBABILITY has prompted reform efforts in the past and underpins an attack on Subsection 28 planned by Rep. Ted Weiss, Democrat of New York. But if not now, when? The blackballing and punishment of individuals for their thoughts remains an affront to American ideals and is clearly hypocritical in the context of our democratic proselytizing. At some point, we owe ourselves and the world an admission that ‘ideological exclusion’ is as un-American today as it was 30 years ago.”
A poet refused three days in New York to read at a children’s charity benefit, under a clause of the McCarran-Walter Act written at the height of McCarthyism. The archive now holds seven moments of Mahmoud Darwish’s life taken from American newspapers across forty-one years: arrested in Israel in 1967 among fourteen named men, refused a visa here in 1982, his portrait illustrating a review of Edward Said in 1986, his poem printed as a threat in 1988, his own question about what a poet does on an executive council, his resignation from the PLO reported inside an arts dispatch in 1994, and his death in a Houston hospital in 2008 in six printings.
· The Philadelphia Inquirer · Philadelphia · page 1
Survivors: Israelis watched massacre
Three say up to 10 soldiers were in the Shatila camp
Scheherazade Faramarzi, Associated Press, Beirut
“BEIRUT, Lebanon — Contradicting official testimony in Israel, some of the survivors of the Palestinian massacre in September say Israeli soldiers were in the Shatila refugee camp during the killings. Three Palestinian women — Ektefa Shallah; her daughter, Jamila, 16; and their neighbor, Amenah Khalifa — said the Israelis tried to protect women and children during the slaughter Sept. 16-18 by Lebanese Christian militiamen… Informed of the women’s statements, an Israeli military command spokesman in Tel Aviv reiterated the Israelis’ previous statements that no Israeli soldiers were in the Shatila and Sabra camps before, during or after the massacre. Israeli government policy forbids identification of the spokesman… Mrs. Shallah, 44, said she first saw an Israeli soldier standing with a Phalangist militiaman in a narrow passageway outside her concrete-block house, 175 yards from the western edge of Shatila… Mrs. Shallah and her neighbor said that a few minutes later Mrs. Khalifa’s husband, two teenage sons and three other men were lined up against a wall and killed by Lebanese militiamen… ‘The other one [the Phalangist militiaman] wanted to kill me. He killed the children standing behind me. He cut a woman’s stomach and took the baby out,’ Mrs. Shallah said… ‘We were put next to about 30 corpses,’ she said. ‘In front of me, a 2-month-old baby was wrested from his mother’s lap… Those who were shooting [to kill] were Phalangists, but there were Jews among them. I saw them with these eyes. I am not lying.’… The final death toll in the Shatila-Sabra slaughter remains uncertain. Germanos has said that 328 Palestinians were killed, and 991 people are listed as missing.”… ‘When they [the Israelis and the Lebanese] talked to each other, they spoke in Arabic, but the Jews had a heavy accent,’ Mrs. Khalifa said. ‘The Jews asked a Phalangist man, “What did you do to them?” … The Phalangist man said, “I machine-gunned them, all of them.” … He then told the Jews, “Come on, shoot them. Finish them” — meaning us. One Jew said: “No baby. No madam. You’ve killed their men. We want to interrogate them.”’ When Jamila, who does not speak Hebrew, was asked how she knew they were Israelis, she replied: ‘How shall I say? They were speaking Hebrew, and who are the Hebrews? They are Israelis.’”
Jamila Shallah (left) and her mother, Ektefa, give their account of the September slaughter. Associated Press.
The square brackets in the quotations are the Inquirer’s own. The Israeli denial ran in the same column and is here with the testimony.
Course supported by history: Let Palestine be Palestine
Stephen Chapman
“‘Two million Palestinians already have a homeland in Palestine.’ So says a group called the Jordan is Palestine Committee in ads in The New York Times. It takes the same view as the Israeli government: The Palestinians already have a Palestinian state, namely Jordan. This fiction helps to justify Israel’s expansionism and its resistance to Palestinian self-rule. But it is nonetheless a fiction… In any case, the Palestinians don’t regard themselves as Jordanians. The two groups are ethnically distinct. Moreover, though a third of the world’s Palestinians live in Jordan, the bulk of them regard Palestine as their home and themselves as refugees… Accusing the Arab countries of failing to resettle the Palestinian refugees overlooks the crucial point, which is that the Palestinians don’t want to be permanently resettled in those countries. They want the opportunity to go back to Palestine, preferably to an independent Palestinian state. If the Arab world has done too little for the Palestinians, that merely strengthens their claim to a state of their own… Those who fled to escape the fighting in 1948 and 1967 had their homes expropriated by Israel and were forbidden to return. Having forced millions of Palestinians to become refugees, Israel now uses their residence in Jordan to justify making them permanent refugees… The only obstacle is the existence of 4 million Palestinians who insist on their right to just what the Israelis have — a sovereign homeland in Palestine.”
A syndicated American columnist in 1983 answering the Jordan-is-Palestine advertisement point by point. The paper ran a line of it as a pull quote.
“Newspapers often refer to violence against settlers as ‘pogroms,’ a word usually used to describe anti-Semitic actions against Jews… The Jerusalem Post said vigilantism must be eradicated, for it makes ‘a mockery of Israel’s pretense to dispense equal justice in the (occupied) territories.’”
A news agency, inside a news story, stopping to tell readers how newspapers use a word and what that word ordinarily means. It is not a stylebook entry and should never be described as one. Six years later a settler leader would use the word exactly as described, in the Miami Herald. The parenthetical “(occupied)” is the wire’s own insertion into a quotation that did not contain it. The story is one of four printings in this archive about the Karp report.
“Is there already a Palestinian state? A group called the Jordan Is Palestine Committee says that Jordan is a de facto Palestinian state, and has taken out ads in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune to air its case. One of the ads quotes King Hussein of Jordan, who said in 1981, ‘The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.’ Tribune columnist Stephen Chapman doesn’t deny the statement, but claims that when Hussein made it he was ‘speaking metaphorically. If Arafat and Hussein believed it literally,’ Chapman continues, ‘there would be no argument and thus no need for these ads.’ Perhaps one should just blindly accept Chapman’s interpretation, even though it denies decades of history. After all, this is the Mideast: If water can change into wine, perhaps statements can be transformed into metaphors. Compounding the problem, the ads fail to mention a very important fact: Jordan is an artificial country, carved out of the Palestine Mandate by Britain after it took over the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Even Jordan’s ruler, Abdullah, predecessor of Hussein, was an outsider who was given the newly created emirate as a reward for not attacking the French in Syria… But even though they bought off Abdullah, England did not free Transjordan—which constituted nearly 80 percent of Palestine—from the British Mandate. The residents of both the East and West Banks continued to travel under Palestinian passports, subject to British rule… More to the point, Sir Alec Kirkbride, England’s East Bank representative, said Transjordan was supposed to serve as ‘a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the national home for the Jews in Palestine became an accomplished fact. There was no intention at that stage of forming the territory east of the river Jordan into an independent Arab state.’ It was for that reason that Sir Winston Churchill persuaded the Zionists to suspend Jewish immigration to the East Bank. Viewed in this context, the ads are stronger in their contention that there already is a Palestinian state. The ads center around the following points: Jordan occupied almost 77 percent of Britain’s original Palestine Mandate. Three-fourths of Jordan’s government appointments, including nine Cabinet posts, are held by Palestinians. Half of Jordan’s prime ministers since 1950 have been Palestinian. Jordan’s first king, Abdullah, wanted to call his land ‘the kingdom of Palestine.’ Of course, all of this leads one to ask a key question: If Jordan is indeed Palestine, as the evidence indicates, why is it ruled by the Hashemites, who are not indigenous to the area, instead of Palestinians? To Hussein, as to Abdullah before him, this is a dangerous question. Abdullah had annexed the West Bank in 1949, claiming the territory on the grounds that both banks are Palestinian. A year later, however, Abdullah issued a decree forbidding the use of the word Palestine in royal documents. Many Palestinians opposed his rule, and he didn’t want to give them ideas. Abdullah’s fear of Palestinians was justified. He was murdered by a Palestinian in 1951, and was succeeded by his grandson, Hussein, after his son, Talal, Hussein’s father, was declared non compos mentis… It is this fear of the PLO and a Palestinian state that makes strange bedfellows of Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Both realize that a Palestinian state, no matter where it would be set up, would constitute a danger not only to Israel but to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. Is Jordan Palestinian? Definitely. Is Jordan Palestine? Yes, but the Palestinians, the Arab nations that support them and the Soviet Union would rather focus their claims on that 23 percent of the Palestine Mandate that is now called Israel. Until the Palestinians realize that 77 percent of a loaf is better than none, there will be no Palestinian state—just violence as usual.”
The Jordan-is-Palestine case argued in the Tribune, answering the Tribune’s own columnist, who is also in this archive arguing the opposite. The author is identified as a former city editor of Chicago’s Jewish newsweekly.
Anchorage, 1983. Homeland is the word, and it is used plainly: they are longing for one, which means they had one. The rest of the sentence is about morale, so what the headline finally reports is a feeling rather than a claim — but the noun underneath it does the work.
Education more than anything else distinguishes Palestinians
“Education more than anything else distinguishes Palestinians. Already the best-educated Arabs before what they call ‘al nakba’ — the disaster — the Palestinians since 1948 have placed such priority on education that they now may have a higher percentage of their population in universities than Israel does.”
The earliest use of the word in this archive. It arrives already quarantined: quotation marks, a translation, and "what they call."
David K. Shipler, New York Times News Service, Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Israeli-Occupied West Bank
“Her name is Amal Abu al-Jamiyya. Amal means hope. She has never seen a Jew without a gun… ‘Because I don’t know her,’ Amal declared, ‘and she doesn’t know me.’ … She never told him about having been in Auschwitz. Later, when her colleague asked why, she said, ‘It would have been unfair. He was behind bars, and I was free.’”
An eleven-year-old is named, aged, described and quoted at length, which this archive has very little of. The second passage is Cordelia Edvardson of Svenska Dagbladet, a survivor of Auschwitz, interviewing the PLO officer Salah Taamri about whether the Ansar prison camp was Auschwitz, and withholding the one fact that would have ended the conversation. The headline the paper put on the reporting is Cultural-hatred roots run deep, over a story whose own first sentences say the camp has been under military occupation since six years before the child in it was born. The story’s dateline says Israeli-Occupied West Bank; the AP photograph beside it is captioned Hebron, West Bank.
Control of Palestinian Expression Is Invisible Part of Gaza Conflict
The Washington Post
“Control of Palestinian Expression Is Invisible Part of Gaza Conflict. The conflict goes on in numerous, non-violent ways. It includes the closure or publication restrictions by Israeli mil…”
The clipping is the headline, the credit line and the first two lines of the story; the rest was not clipped.
Israel’s new U.N. ambassador says ‘Arab decade’ in Middle East is over
Frank P. L. Somerville, Religion Editor of The Sun
“The new Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told applauding Orthodox Jews at a convention in Baltimore yesterday that a dramatic shift in United States Mideast policy had resulted from the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. ‘The Arab decade is over,’ Benjamin Netanyahu triumphantly told his audience of nearly 1,000 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, where the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America has been meeting since Thursday. Security considerations prevented him from being specific about new ‘strategic’ measures for the ‘common defense’ of Israel and the U.S., Mr. Netanyahu said. But he assured his listeners that ‘important things are happening.’ The ambassador said three major shifts in the Middle East during the last two years, largely brought about because of the strength and stability of Israel ‘in the shifting sands’ of that turbulent region, are now having profound effects on international policy in Washington, London, Tokyo, the capitals of Africa and elsewhere. These changes, he said, were: ‘The decline of Arab oil.’ The Arab oil countries, facing the pressures of international conservation efforts and competition, were done in ‘by their own greed,’ he said. African nations which were once ‘seduced and intimidated by the Arabs’ are ‘coming back to Israel through the back door.’ ‘The decline’ of the Palestine Liberation Organization. This ‘did not happen accidentally,’ Ambassador Netanyahu said. ‘We smashed the PLO.’ One important result, he said, is that ‘no longer is the PLO able to say it represents the Palestinian Arabs’ — a fact, he suggested, that ‘bodes well’ for the future of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. And most important of all, ‘the shift that has taken place in U.S. policy in the Middle East.’ Although the United States ‘unintentionally became exposed — as a country — to Arab terrorism’ in Lebanon, the ambassador said, the ‘tragic attacks’ on the American embassy in 1983 and 1984 have taught the Reagan administration a valuable foreign-policy lesson: that such terrorism is not aimed exclusively at Israel… At least privately and seriously, according to the Israeli ambassador, ‘no one at the U.N. talks about Israel as a pariah state any more.’”
“Rabbi Chaim Goldzweig of Chicago (left) and Rabbi Menachem Genack of Englewood, N.J., meet at the convention of Orthodox Jews.” The Sun / Barbara Haddock
Netanyahu in Baltimore in 1984, saying the PLO can no longer claim to represent the Palestinian Arabs. The page around him sells table pads, stacking stools and Ralph Lauren sweaters.
“…vehemently denied. ‘The primary objective was to secure peace for the Galilee. It is intolerable for people to live underground for fear of Katuysha (rocket) attacks,’ Netanyahu said, despite rather widespread agreement that the PLO had for a year prior to the 1982 invasion abided by a cease-fire. ‘The invasion smashed the PLO infrastructure even though we had underestimated it. Lebanon’s political polity was never a consideration or a primary objective. The PLO is today divided and scattered. Syria is at odds with the (Yassir) Arafat faction and both the PLO’s political strength and its strength on the ground have been smashed. It is a defeated, though not extinct, force in the region,’ Netanyahu said. Reminded that in the past two weeks there have been several Katuysha attacks launched from Jordan on Galilean settlements, Netanyahu chuckled. ‘Yes, King Hussein is doing a minuet with the PLO. He gives them public support. And he may make an occasional concession and allow them to use Jordan as a base for some minor terrorist operations, but privately he does not support them.’… On the issue of the Israeli-occupied West Bank — Netanyahu vehemently decries the use of any terms other than Judea and Samaria for the area — the ambassador takes a hard line. There will be no Arab sovereignty on the West Bank. Period. Netanyahu insists there is the broadest possible consensus in Israel in this regard. Making all the usual historical Jewish claims to the area and rejecting any Palestinian national rights on the West Bank, Netanyahu supports the current government policy: Jordan is Palestine. Jews have every historical, political and legal right to settle the West Bank, said Netanyahu, a native of Tel Aviv who grew up in Jerusalem. While Arab states quibble over Palestinian rights, the Israeli settlements are carrying out a fait accompli on the West Bank. And with the PLO smashed in Lebanon, the issue of who controls the area is all but moot. ‘Jordan is Palestine, and Palestine is Jordan,’ Netanyahu insists, although Hussein, a minority Hashemite ruler who hardly needs 750,000 West Bank Palestinians pouring across the Jordan River, would undoubtedly disagree. ‘The Arabs already have 80 percent of old Palestine and we hold 17 percent (within the pre-1967 borders). There is no reason to create a 22nd Arab state at the expense of the one Jewish state. What we are arguing about are borders between the Jewish and an Arab state. There is no reason why justice should demand the border be on either the east or west bank of the Jordan,’ he said. On the basis of security alone, Netanyahu said Israel can never give up the West Bank. Israel’s eastern front will remain in IDF hands. That is not negotiable. ‘We simply can’t survive giving up Judea and Samaria. The real challenge to peace is not our occupation, but would be our giving up the region. We didn’t occupy the area before 1967 and there was no peace. Since 1967, however, King Hussein has not been tempted to invade and has remained out of the subsequent wars.’ Netanyahu said Israel’s far left wants to solve the problem of trying to assimilate three-quarters of a million Arabs by giving up control of the territory. On the other hand, the far right wants to keep the territory but drive the people off the land. Neither is acceptable to the ambassador, though he was unwilling to speculate on a permanent political solution beyond the status quo, except to say the two peoples will have to live together on the West Bank as they do in the rest of the country. Netanyahu said the key to peace rests not in illusory visions of a Palestinian state, but in the Arab realization that Israel is on the West Bank to stay. Only when that realization dawns can a peace plan can be negotiated. ‘Is the so-called Palestinian problem the key to peace in the Mideast? In the Arab world comprising 21 nations, there is almost continual warfare. Virtually every year since the establishment of the state of Israel, there has been at least one conflict between Arab states — conflicts that have nothing whatever to do with Israel or the Palestinians. Lebanon is a microcosm of the Arab world — an almost permanent state of war with family, tribal, religious, sectarian and national conflicts. There simply is no tradition of the non-violent settlement of conflict,’ Netanyahu said. ‘The key to peace? When do the Arabs make peace with each other?’… ‘Israel’s real crime has nothing to do with the Palestinians. What we are guilty of is being the only non-Arab, non-Moslem people who have succeeded in defying the Arab dominance of the southern Mediterranean in creating a non-Arab national entity.’”
“Spare tank supplies assembled on a helicopter pad are readied for shipment back to Israel at the start of the Israeli pullout from southern Lebanon. Soldiers in the background wait for the trip home.”
Netanyahu as ambassador to the U.N., interviewed at length in 1985, setting out the Jordan-is-Palestine position and refusing the term West Bank. The reporter notes in his own voice where the claims are disputed.
“NAIROBI, Kenya (UPI) — Israel has denied travel permits to five Palestinian women in the occupied Arab territories who were invited to attend the U.N. Decade for Women conference, a PLO representative said today. The General Union of Palestinian Women, the women’s branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said Israel barred the women in response to a request by the Reagan administration. Salwa Abu Khadra, who heads the group, told reporters at the PLO headquarters in the Kenyan capital that the women live in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip… ‘Security Reasons’. Khadra said their applications to travel to attend the U.N. conference and the non-governmental meeting that started today were turned down because of ‘security reasons.’… ‘Mr. Reagan himself is involved in the action of depriving some groups of women from coming here to share in the conference. It is all part of their strategy to bar our women. Israel decided to go along with the action requested by the United States,’ Khadra said. Khadra identified the women as Samiha Khalil, president of the Family Resurgence Society in El-Bireh; Zahira Kamal, a teacher and general-secretary of the Union of Women’s Work Committees in Jerusalem; and Siham Barghuti, Ni’mah al Helon and Amal Wahdan, all women social workers and women’s rights activists.”
The earliest security-reasons clipping here, and the phrase is already in quotation marks. Six Palestinian women are named in it; the record had held two.
“NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Kenya’s host delegation negotiated a compromise Friday on a resolution that had threatened to undo the U.N. Decade for Women conference on its final day by equating Zionism with racism. The new language struck the word Zionism from the resolution, which was adopted by consensus of the 3,000 delegates with the grudging acquiescence of Israel’s enemies and praise from its friends. Alan Keyes, the only male U.S. delegate, told the conference the Americans accepted the resolution after insisting the reference to Zionism be stricken. His comments drew catcalls and some applause. ‘We reject the obscene notion that Zionism is racism,’ Keyes said. ‘No matter how much that slanderous lie is repeated, no amount of reiteration shall ever lend it any truth whatever.’ Zehdi Labib Terzi, the Palestine Liberation Organization observer at the United Nations, said the PLO would accept the language to save the conference, but stood by its belief that Zionism and racism were synonymous. ‘After hearing some threats and blackmail in this forum, we understand exactly what the circumstances are. But we are willing to accept the amendment made by the host country,’ Terzi said.… The delegates had adopted 94 of 372 paragraphs of a proposed document — called Forward-Looking Strategies — mapping the course of women’s advancement to the year 2000. Then the Zionism issue threw the session into disarray Friday night and forced it past a midnight deadline for adjournment and an end to the decade the United Nations dedicated to women’s issues.”
Three weeks before this, the archive holds a wire story reporting that Israel had refused travel permits to five Palestinian women invited to this conference, for security reasons. Here is the conference itself, ending past midnight, with the word struck out and a document about women’s advancement to the year 2000 left ninety-four paragraphs into three hundred and seventy-two. Neither story mentions the other.
United Press International, Hebron, Occupied West Bank
Boxed explainer beside the headline: “SOURCE OF FRICTION IN AN ANCIENT LAND. Differences of religion, language and national identity keep bitter dispute going. Moderate Israelis don’t want to see Arabs pushed out of area Jews seized in 1967.” And in the copy: “an Arab city in the Israeli-controlled West Bank… ‘We will continue with additional actions until there are thousands of Jews in Hebron. We have a timetable.’”
Four inches apart on one page: the dateline says the territory is occupied, and the box explaining why any of this is happening answers ancientness and difference. Nothing in the box is false. A reader would come away believing they had been told the cause, and the cause they were given is one nobody is responsible for.
“Ten years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution branding Zionism as racism. Adoption of this resolution was tantamount to declaring Israel an illegitimate state based on an illegitimate philosophy… By an almost unbearable coincidence, the resolution was passed on the anniversary of Kristalnacht, Nov. 10, 1938… Now 37 years later, in the very institution established to eliminate violence from international life, the Jewish state was marked for destruction.… To appreciate the full significance of the Zionism-is-racism resolution, it is necessary to understand the meaning of ‘racism’ and ‘aggression’ in U.N. usage. In the language of the United Nations, ‘racism’ is the ultimate political crime, the ultimate violation of human rights. A state based on racism is then an outlaw state, unworthy of membership in what is euphemistically termed the ‘family of nations.’ A racist state has no rights at all, not even the right to defend itself.… Thus, the Zionism-is-racism resolution declared open season on Israel. Henceforth, Israel would be fair game for armed ‘liberation.’… the Soviet Union has played a substantial role in the campaign to delegitimize Israel by co-sponsoring the original Zionism-is-racism resolution and 10 years later, at the Nairobi conference on the Decade of Women, is still pushing that famous equation.”
A former American ambassador to the United Nations marks the tenth anniversary and sets out, more plainly than anyone else in this archive, why the word mattered: in that building racism is the charge from which no state is permitted to defend itself. Her example of where the formula had surfaced most recently is the women’s conference at Nairobi. She spells it Kristalnacht.
Palestinian artist, Dutch Jewish film maker make film about homecoming
The film is a human look at the state of Israel and the Palestinian issue.
Barbara Karkabi, Houston Chronicle
“Kamal Boullata emerged from an afternoon at the Rothko Chapel with a gleam in his eye and the hope that one day he might be able to create a similar spot in his hometown, Jerusalem… ‘I want it to have the same feeling of peace and meditation that the Rothko Chapel has, and, of course, it should be non-denominational,’ said the 43-year-old Palestinian artist and writer, who says that he was raised a Christian, but is culturally a Moslem and existentially a Jew… Boullata has lived in the United States for almost 20 years, since the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, but he returned in 1985, accompanied by a Dutch Jewish film maker and his crew, who filmed the story of his homecoming. The resulting full-length, non-fiction film, Stranger At Home, was shown in Houston last week in conjunction with an exhibition of his art work currently on display at the University of Houston… ‘One cannot think about being Palestinian, without being aware of Jews. We’re very much tied together,’ said Boullata… ‘The price of making a film in my own life was hell personally. My wife dropped out after the second day because she couldn’t take it,’ Boullata said. ‘I had not realized it would be so intense.’… Still, he admits, he probably would never have returned to the city of his birth if it hadn’t been for van den Berg’s encouragement. For that he is grateful. He found Jerusalem to be at once different and the same from the city he left 20 years ago. ‘Of course, there are things that have changed. But, one night I took Lilly and walked around the old city of Jerusalem with my eyes closed. I knew it so well, I was able to find my way,’ he recalled. ‘I have always thought that Jerusalem was not so much a place as it was a time.’… ‘I would like to think so. If Jews and Palestinians can’t get together on something as simple as this, then maybe there is no hope, after all,’ he said.”
Fourteen years after the Charlottesville interview and eighteen years out of Jerusalem. Money from the sale of his prints went to a scholarship endowment for two Palestinian students a year. Photo credit: Timothy Bullard / Chronicle.
“As an American Jew and a Zionist, I confess to being impressed and intrigued, as well as troubled, by the voice of Edward W. Said in ‘After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives’ (Pantheon: $14.95; also available in hardcover, $22.95). Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University and a familiar figure in the Western media, was born in Jerusalem, reared in Cairo, and now lives in the United States. He is a self-described Palestinian nationalist with a mastery of Western culture, an accomplished intellectual who puts his considerable analytical and rhetorical skills at the service of his people. ‘After the Last Sky’ is an important book, potentially an influential book, and necessarily an unsettling one. The book is presented as Said’s musings over the black-and-white images of Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, who has documented the lives and landscapes of Palestinian Arabs in Israel and the Arab world. Said’s method — and, more to the point, his mission — is to explain and enlarge upon these commonplace images of Arab life: the household, the mosque, the marketplace, the fields, the refugee camp… ‘Why these natives in their untidy backwardness could not impress the Zionists, much less the rest of the world, with their presence is something I still cannot really understand,’ he writes of the Arab population of Palestine during the formative years of Zionist settlement and early Jewish statehood. ‘It is as if the Zionist web of detail and its drama, in alliance with our own inability and recalcitrance to dramatize and speak about ourselves, screened the Palestinians not only from the world but from ourselves as well.’ Said writes movingly of the experiences and emotions of Palestinian Arabs in Israel and in the manfa (‘exile’) or ghurba (‘estrangement’). (Significantly, he explicitly refuses to use the word ‘diaspora,’ although he ponders the provocative phrase which characterizes Palestinian Arabs as ‘the Jews of the Arab world,’ and claims — outrageously, I must say — that ‘the Holocaust has victimized us, too.’) He moves easily between Western and Arab culture, citing Yeats, Kafka and Melville as readily as Mahmoud Darwish and other Palestinian poets, scholars and writers.… What is troubling is Said’s persistence in characterizing the Palestinian Arabs as victims… without ever owning up to the moral or practical implications of the Palestinians’ choice of terrorism as so frequent a mode of expression for their rage and aspiration… ‘awdah (return) is crucial and stands at the very heart of our political quest for self-determination,’ he writes… When a man as attuned to Western sensibilities as Said expresses such sentiments, the prospect of any meaningful encounter between Arab and Jew seems very remote indeed.”
“Mahmoud Darwish, Paris, 1984.”
A book review that states its own standpoint in its first six words, which is rarer in this archive than any of the arguments that follow it. The passage Said is quoted on is close to the reason this collection exists: that the Palestinians were screened from the world, and from themselves. The photograph chosen to illustrate a review of Said’s book is of Mahmoud Darwish, whose poem an American wire story would print as a threat eighteen months later and whose obituaries this archive holds five printings of.
Denied an identity, Gazans losing hope in land of despair
A year before the intifada, a Florida paper putting the thing itself in the first two words: denied an identity. The sentence has no one denying it, and the last four words turn the place into a mood. But the claim in the opening is the one this whole archive is about, and it was printable in Palm Beach in December 1986.
“NEW YORK — The General Assembly’s finance committee has approved a $50 million budget increase, despite objections from the United States, the Soviet Union and other major financial contributors. The vote Monday, 82-14 with nine abstentions, comes at a time Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar is trying to cut costs to get through the 1986-87 budget year… In other U. N. news, the Security Council voted 14-0 Monday to deplore the killing and wounding of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank. The United States abstained from the vote. All other members of the Security Council voted in favor. The measure called on Israel to abide ‘immediately and scrupulously’ by the 1949 Geneva Convention on protecting civilians in occupied territories, and to release any people arrested in violation of the convention during recent demonstrations at Bir Zeit University. Palestinian news reports said a 12-year-old Palestinian boy died earlier Monday after being shot in his head by Israeli soldiers in the Balata refugee camp. An Israeli military spokesman said it is not clear who killed the boy. Last week, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 14-year-old Palestinian in the same camp and two 22-year-old students at Bir Zeit University. The Security Council resolution urged all concerned parties ‘to exercise maximum restraint to avoid violent acts, and to contribute toward the establishment of peace.’ To overcome U. S. objections, the resolution’s non-aligned sponsors dropped the word ‘condemns’ so the resolution read the 15-nation council ‘strongly deplores the opening of fire by the Israeli army, resulting in the death and the wounding of defenseless students.’ U. S. sources said the American delegation could not support even the amended resolution because it felt Israel did not bear full responsibility for the violence. During two days’ debate, Israeli Ambassador Benjamin Netanyahu accused the Palestine Liberation Organization of inciting shooting. He insisted Israeli soldiers reacted to restore law and order. U. S. Ambassador Vernon A. Walters abstained while occupying the chair as this month’s council president.”
“Javier Perez de Cuellar”
A 12-year-old and a 14-year-old killed in Balata, and two students at Bir Zeit, reported inside a story about the United Nations budget. The word the sponsors removed to get the resolution past the United States is printed: “condemns.”
Four words, and the only thing in them a reader can count is nothing. The Buffalo News the same day gave the same protest a crowd of a thousand, the word peacefully, three dead and the people who killed them (CP-1986-003). Both papers name Israel; one of them tells you what happened.
1,000 March Peacefully to Protest Killing of Three Arabs by Israelis
Eleven words that leave nothing out: how many marched, how they marched, how many were killed, who they were and who killed them. It is the most complete headline of its kind in this archive and it ran on the same day as the Press of Atlantic City’s four-word version (CP-1986-002). Peacefully is doing work here that the reader would otherwise have to be told to assume.
Six months before the uprising. A state is the subject, the verb is stifles, and what is stifled belongs to the Palestinians. Every part of the sentence is assigned, which is rare enough in this archive to be worth saying.
“JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli soldiers fatally shot a Palestinian woman and wounded four other people today during protests that swept the occupied territories, a hospital spokesman and Palestinian news reports said… In Ramallah, soldiers fired on hundreds of students who blocked a main road with stones and burning tires, killing one person and wounding four who were rushed to the Ramallah Hospital, the Arab-owned Palestine Press Service said. The dead woman, identified by the hospital as 35-year-old Amayat Hindi of Ramallah, was shot while on her way to pick up her small children from school, the Press Service said. She wanted to bring her children home because of the protests, the agency said.”
Two months before the intifada and before Hamas was founded. The headline says a woman was killed; the first line of the story says who shot her.
Strife continues in 12th day of Palestinian protests
Egypt: Israelis killing innocents
The Associated Press, Cairo and Jerusalem
“CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — Egypt accused Israeli troops yesterday of indiscriminately shooting innocent Palestinians in the occupied territories and said their actions threatened prospects for peace in the Middle East… ‘President Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian people have followed the bloody events taking place in the occupied Arab territories of Gaza and the West Bank with deep concern and strong resentment,’ said the statement, read by Information Minister Safwat el Sherif. ‘This is because Israel is using methods of repression and persecution, showing no regard for the lives of innocent people — old men, women and children — and violating its international obligations in a grievous manner that threatens the Middle East peace process.’”
“Palestinian youths gather behind a makeshift roadblock yesterday in an East Jerusalem neighborhood after throwing rocks.” And: “Palestinian protests in the Gaza Strip spread north to East Jerusalem yesterday. Four policemen were hurt.” Associated Press.
The charge is printed, and the first word tells the reader who is making it. Attribution is what lets a paper print a sentence like this one: Israelis killing innocents arrives as Egypt’s position rather than the paper’s. Thirteen days into the first intifada.
“JABALIA, Occupied Gaza Strip (AP) — This crowded refugee camp, the largest and most densely populated in the Gaza Strip, has become a center of resistance in the last two weeks of anti-Israeli rioting and bloodshed. Residents say they have nothing to lose by throwing stones at Israeli soldiers armed with submachine guns. Many here have lived in squalor for decades. ‘When my sons go outside to demonstrate, I’m afraid for them, but I’m not going to stop them,’ said Neama Khalil Abu Sisi, 55, whose son, Hatem, 17, was killed in a clash with soldiers the previous week. Yesterday, about 30 camp youths confronted a dozen soldiers, throwing stones from behind barricades of burning tires and defiantly raising the outlawed Palestinian flag. In what appeared to be a well-rehearsed game, the soldiers advanced slowly, firing shots in the air. The protesters retreated into narrow side alleys. Minutes later, a group of soldiers dragged a Palestinian teen-ager into an army base inside the camp. The boy’s mother followed a few yards behind, shouting at the soldiers… Jabalia is the most densely populated of the eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, and it is the only one to have an Israeli army base within its boundaries. The camp was set up in 1948. The stone huts built then as temporary shelters have long since turned into permanent housing… About 60,000 members of the Gaza Strip’s 100,000-strong labor force work in Israel. Jabalia has been the site of daily violent clashes since Dec. 8 when an Israeli truck slammed into two vans carrying Palestinian workers. Two camp residents were killed… The camp doctor said the army will not be able to quell the protests with force. ‘They (the camp residents) demonstrate because they have nothing to lose,’ he said.”
The same Associated Press copy as the Press & Sun-Bulletin the same week, under a different headline. The archive had held about a third of it.
Gaza refugee camp now center of resistance to Israel
Associated Press, Jabalia
“JABALIA, Occupied Gaza Strip (AP) — This crowded refugee camp, the largest and most densely populated in the Gaza Strip, has become a center of resistance in the last two weeks of anti-Israeli rioting and bloodshed. Residents say they have nothing to lose by throwing stones at Israeli soldiers armed with submachine guns. Many here have lived in squalor for decades. ‘When my sons go outside to demonstrate, I’m afraid for them, but I’m not going to stop them,’ said Neama Khalil Abu Sisi, 55, whose son, Hatem, 17, was killed in a clash with soldiers the previous week… ‘Camp residents compose the bulk of the resistance (to the Israeli occupation), and the Jabalia camp is more militant than any other place,’ said Faez Abu Rahme, a prominent Palestinian lawyer. There are two main reasons for the rising tensions in Jabalia, which lies two miles north of Gaza City and is home to 55,000 refugees. Jabalia is the most densely populated of the eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, and it is the only one to have an Israeli army base within its boundaries. The camp was set up in 1948. The stone huts built then as temporary shelters have long since turned into permanent housing… A camp doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said residents haul drinking water from three wells contaminated by sewage, and that there was an epidemic of parasitic diseases, including intestinal worms. Four doctors see 400 to 500 patients each day, he said. In the home of Mohammed Yousef Abu Sisi, father of the youth newly dead in violence, 13 people share four rooms. Mrs. Abu Sisi and her two daughters-in-law must wait their turn to cook for their families on a single-flame stove.”
Thirteen days into the first intifada, and the Associated Press sent somebody to the camp and printed what they found: three wells contaminated by sewage, four doctors seeing four to five hundred patients a day, thirteen people in four rooms, one stove. The dateline says Occupied Gaza Strip, which most American papers were not setting at the time. Four Palestinians are named in it — a mother, her dead son, a lawyer and a father — and the mother is the first voice in the story. Three American papers ran this dispatch on 20 December 1987 under three headlines. This one calls the camp a center of resistance to Israel; the Press & Sun-Bulletin called it defiance running high (CP-1987-006); the Staten Island Advance took the residents’ own words, ‘Nothing to lose’ in camps (CP-1987-011). The copy underneath is the same in all three, and what it reports is that the water was bad.
“Defiance running high at refugee camp. Battles with Israelis a fact of life at Jabalia.” The same Associated Press dispatch. It names Faez Abu Rahme, “a prominent Palestinian lawyer”: “Camp residents compose the bulk of the resistance to the Israeli occupation, and the Jabalia camp is more militant than any other place.” A camp doctor, speaking anonymously, “said residents haul drinking water from three wells contaminated by sewage, and that there was an epidemic of parasitic diseases, including intestinal worms. Four doctors see 400 to 500 patients each day.” It also visits the home of Mohammed Yousef Abu Sisi, father of the youth newly dead.
The same dispatch as the Courier Post. One headline says the camp breeds foes; this one says defiance.
The Associated Press, Jerusalem, and Karin Laub, Jabalia
“JERUSALEM — The violence wracking Israel’s occupied territories spread to Arab east Jerusalem yesterday, when mobs of Palestinian youths trashed Israeli buildings, stoned police cars and burned tires. Thirty-three Palestinians were arrested and four Israeli policemen were slightly injured, police said, in what was called the worst violence in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem in more than a decade. It was the 12th straight day of upheaval in land seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Military officials say 15 Arabs have been killed. Palestinian reports put the toll at 20… The Arab sector of the city, captured from Jordan along with the West Bank, is home to about 130,000 Palestinians… In the worst incident, about 40 youths smashed the glass storefront of Barclay’s Israel Discount Bank with rocks, tore apart the bank’s neon sign, then charged inside, smashing partitions and destroying equipment, witnesses said.”
The Associated Press dispatch from Jabalia ran in the next column of the same page; it is in the archive under the Courier Post, which ran it the same day. This record is the Jerusalem story only.
“…more were arrested or interrogated. According to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, it was the PLO that moved the Palestinian masses to the streets to protest against the Israeli occupation. By this claim, Shamir tries to discredit the PLO, by attributing this wave of protest to it and putting on its shoulder the responsibility for the deaths of Palestinians who are shot by the IDF. This while Shamir and his colleagues in the Israeli political leadership continue to declare that the PLO does not represent the Palestinian people, and that they refuse to talk to it or accept it as a partner in any peace talks. In fact, if the PLO was able to move the Palestinian masses to the streets to protest against the Israeli occupation, then it should be recognized as an effective leadership that has its roots deep within its own people. However, the issue is much deeper than this. During the last 20 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Israelis used all possible methods to liquidate the Palestinian national movement. More than 300,000 Palestinians have been in and out of Israeli jails, experiencing ill-treatment including humiliation and physical and psychological torture. More than half of the Arab lands have been confiscated. Thousands of houses have been demolished and thousands of Palestinians have been deported. The military administration of the occupied territories, now called the Civil Administration, is staffed by right-wing, nationalist fanatics, most of whom identify ideologically with…”
“An Israeli soldier kicks a Palestinian youth, who holds his head where he was just hit by a truncheon-wielding soldier.” Associated Press
A jump page headed PALESTINIAN / from 1C, so the piece is written by a Palestinian and began on the front of the section. It answers Shamir’s claim with his own contradiction: that the PLO both moved the masses and does not represent them.
“JABALIA, Occupied Gaza Strip — This crowded refugee camp, the largest and most densely populated in the Gaza Strip, has become a center of resistance in the last two weeks of anti-Israeli rioting and bloodshed. Residents say they have nothing to lose by throwing stones at Israeli soldiers armed with submachine guns. Many here have lived in squalor for decades. ‘When my sons go outside to demonstrate, I’m afraid for them, but I’m not going to stop them,’ said Neama Khalil Abu Sisi, 55, whose son, Hatem, 17, was killed in a clash with soldiers the previous week… The camp was set up in 1948. The stone huts built then as temporary shelters have long since turned into permanent housing. A stagnant, reeking pool surrounded by rusted car wrecks lies at the camp’s center… A camp doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said residents haul drinking water from three wells contaminated by sewage, and that there was an epidemic of parasitic diseases, including intestinal worms. Four doctors see 400 to 500 patients each day, he said. In the home of Mohammed Yousef Abu Sisi, father of the youth newly dead in violence, 13 people share four rooms. Mrs. Abu Sisi and her two daughters-in-law must wait their turn to cook for their families on a single-flame stove… There is little employment in the Gaza Strip. Most men rise before dawn to travel to Israel to dig ditches, lay bricks or prune trees. About 60,000 members of the Gaza Strip’s 100,000-strong labor force work in Israel. Abu Sisi, 55, works as a stone cutter in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, earning $19 a day. His son, Ghazi, 31, who holds a degree in accounting from Cairo University, is a day laborer in Tel Aviv… The camp doctor said the army will not be able to quell the protests with force. ‘They (the camp residents) demonstrate because they have nothing to lose,’ he said.”
A youth throws a stone at Israeli troops at the entrance to the refugee camp. Associated Press.
The Associated Press ran this from Jabalia on 20 December 1987 and it is in the archive twice: here, and in the Courier Post the same day under a different headline. It counts the camp’s water, its doctors and its wages, and it names the household it stands in.
Jabalia refugee camp a center of resistance to the Israelis
Karin Laub, Associated Press, Jabalia, Occupied Gaza Strip
“‘When my sons go outside to demonstrate, I’m afraid for them, but I’m not going to stop them,’ said Neama Khalil Abu Sisi, 55, whose son, Hatem, 17, was killed in a clash with soldiers the previous week… In the home of Mohammed Yousef Abu Sisi… 13 people share four rooms… Abu Sisi, 55, works as a stone cutter in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, earning $19 a day. His son, Ghazi, 31, who holds a degree in accounting from Cairo University, is a day laborer in Tel Aviv.”
The fullest portrait of a single Palestinian family in this collection: a mother, a father with his trade and his wage, a dead seventeen-year-old, and a thirty-one-year-old accountant carrying bricks. The camp is given as 55,000 people with four doctors seeing 400 to 500 patients a day.
“BERKELEY — In an unusual rally downtown yesterday, more than 100 Jews gathered at dusk to protest Israel’s persecution of Palestinians living in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank. It was unorthodox for Jews to speak against the government of their ‘Promised Land’ and was an unlikely sight to a group of young Palestinian immigrants, who happened to see the rally and stood on its fringes to listen. ‘We are outraged upon hearing the reports of continued repression by the Israeli authorities of Palestinian demonstrations against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip,’ David Cooper told 125 people carrying signs and lighted candles outside the BART station. At least 22 Palestinians have died and many more have been wounded, jailed or face deportation for protesting, he said. ‘We believe that sooner or later Israeli Jews must live in an Israel sitting beside a self-governed Palestinian state. . . . The longer this situation is deferred, the more violence will occur against Jew and Arab alike.’ George Atallah, a 25-year-old Palestinian who grew up in Old Jerusalem, said he left Palestine to study in the United States and later decided to stay. ‘There wasn’t a future there. If I went back, I knew I couldn’t get a job,’ he said. Atallah said he was pleased with the rally. ‘I’m glad to see there are some Jewish people who understand what it is like for the Palestinians living in the occupied lands. The Palestinians lost their dignity, they lost their freedom, they lost everything they have. And they will keep fighting until they win it back again.’ Speaker after speaker implored American Jews to speak out. ‘Many Jews feel they have to keep their discontentment with Israel within the family,’ said Larry Harris of the International Jewish Peace Union. ‘We as Jews have a responsibility for what our Jewish brothers in Israel do.’ Sam Saliba, 25, a Palestinian who now lives in Concord, said he was surprised by the Jewish protest. ‘I didn’t know there were Jews who knew how Palestinians felt.’… Protester Judi Hirsch said Israel does not need the occupied lands for ‘security’ against Arab invasion, it needs peace. ‘It is destructive for people who were oppressed to become the oppressors,’ Hirsch said… Most of Atallah’s and Saliba’s families remain in Israel. ‘It is their country. They will not leave,’ Saliba said. Atallah added that if a Palestinian state was formed, he would return. ‘It is my home, still.’”
“Mary Merrill sits in silent protest while others circle the area near Berkeley BART station.” By Angela Pancrazio / The Tribune
Two young Palestinians standing at the edge of a Jewish rally in California, both named, both quoted, on the last day of 1987.
Former Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman: 'No government in its right mind could possibly want the place. I'd give it back tomorrow if someone would take it.' Dr. Haidar Abed el Shafi, head of the Gaza Red Crescent Society: 'It is an occupation with a definite political program. The Israeli government considers the occupied territories as part of Israeli territory and looks on the local population as foreigners.'
Five words in a Maryland county paper. Somebody fires, the people fired on are protesters, and nothing softens either half. Compare the Star-Ledger in 1982, which put the same act in Arab unrest (CP-1982-002).
On the same page: “Israeli soldier wounds Palestine attacker in West Bank, army says”
Associated Press, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM (AP) — An Israeli soldier shot and wounded a Palestinian in the West Bank city of Tulkarem today after the man attacked an army vehicle and stabbed a female soldier, the army said. The Palestinian suffered moderate wounds, and the female soldier was slightly injured, said an army official. Israel radio said the female soldier was stabbed in the hand. Scattered demonstrations were reported throughout the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, a day after Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 25-year-old Palestinian and wounded seven others in the Gaza town of Khan Yunis. The Arab-run Palestine Press Service said a 20-year-old resident of the Nur Shams refugee camp near Tulkarem was shot in the head today by a soldier after the army dispersed stone-throwing demonstrators in the camp. It was not immediately clear whether the report referred to the same incident reported by the army… At least 24 Palestinians have been killed since Dec. 8, when the worst disturbances in Israel’s 20-year occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank broke out. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin vowed Tuesday that Israel would toughen measures to end the unrest in the territories, which Israel captured from Egypt and Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. The army detained more than 1,000 Palestinians accused of organizing protests, ordered nine of them deported, set up military courts to try the detainees and poured thousands of troops into the territories. In New York, The U.N. Security Council voted Tuesday evening to approve a resolution calling on Israel to refrain from deporting Palestinians. Israel said it would ignore the vote, which was approved by the United States. Israel’s crackdown did not cool tempers in Khan Yunis, a small town of dilapidated houses, bad roads and open sewers. Arab merchants on Tuesday kept their stores shut. Bands of young boys, most between the ages of five and 14, patrolled intersections and stopped cars to check the identity of passengers… Tuesday’s trouble began around noon when a group of women began a protest march from the home of Hassan Abu Shakra, one of nine Palestinians ordered expelled, the army spokesman said. Hundreds of Khan Yunis residents joined the women, while mosques played music over loudspeakers to encourage marchers, the spokesman said. The crowd threw stones at a group of soldiers, striking one soldier in the face. An officer hurled tear gas grenades and fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd. When those methods failed, the spokesman said, the officer shot live ammunition at the legs of demonstrators, wounding three. At the refugee camp, soldiers tried to stop stone-throwing protesters with tear gas, a water cannon and warning shots. When that failed, an officer used live ammunition. One Arab was killed and four others were wounded. The spokesman stressed that the soldiers fired after other measures failed to disperse the demonstrators. Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Mordechai, in charge of troops in Gaza, visited the scene and concluded in an initial investigation that the soldiers acted properly in both cases, he said. Israel condemns U.N. vote on deportations. UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Israel condemned the Security Council for challenging its plan to deport Palestinian activists and said it would ignore the resolution, even though it was approved by its chief ally, the United States. ‘Frankly, we were disappointed with the American vote,’ Israeli Ambassador Benjamin Netanyahu said after the resolution was adopted Tuesday evening. ‘We think this was a day of hypocrisy in the United Nations.’ Netanyahu said the resolution will encourage ‘the forces behind the violence’ in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He accused the council of playing a ‘rigged game,’ adding: ‘We’ve never had a Security Council convene to condemn the murder of a Jew. Not once.’ But he also praised the United States for seeing that the resolution requested rather than demanded that Israel refrain from deporting Arabs. The United States, one of Israel’s closest allies and its staunchest defender at the United Nations, joined the other 14 council members in endorsing the resolution against the deportations in the occupied lands. The U.S. mission said it was the first U.S. vote against Israel in the council in six years… ‘The United States believes that such harsh measures are unnecessary to maintain order,’ U.S. Ambassador Herbert Okun said of the deportation order. ‘They serve to aggravate tension rather than create an atmosphere conducive to reconciliation,’ he added.”
“Ambassador Netanyahu”
A protest begun by women marching from the house of a man ordered expelled, and the army’s account of why live ammunition was fired at demonstrators’ legs. Beside it, the first American vote against Israel in the Security Council in six years.
January 1988, three weeks into the first intifada. The paper holds Iron Fist at arm’s length in quotation marks, and then sets its own verb outside them: the policy enslaves. And the last three words settle the question the rest of this archive spends a century circling — in their land. By June a Detroit paper was printing the same phrase with no marks at all (CP-1988-020).
“…authorities seem to be encountering is that many Palestinian youths are not afraid of any Israeli threats. Arab residents of the occupied territories are not permitted to possess firearms. The military high command confirmed that one Palestinian had been shot and killed and seven others wounded when Israeli soldiers shot at protesters throwing stones at an Israeli patrol in the Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis. U.N. officials in Gaza City said at least 12 people had been wounded in the incident. The Palestine Press Service, an East Jerusalem news agency that closely monitors events in the occupied territories, placed the number of those killed in the Khan Younis disturbance at two. Military officials said they feared that the Khan Younis demonstration, in which scores of Palestinian youths hurled stones at a small Israeli squad patrolling the town, signaled the start of a second wave of violence after the deployment of about 12,000 additional troops, the arrests of 1,200 protesters and deportation orders against nine alleged inciters. The United States has warned that the expulsions violate international law and would incite further protests in the territories. [In Cairo, Egypt, riot police used batons and tear gas to disperse hundreds of Egyptian students demonstrating Tuesday against Israel’s crackdown on Palestinians, The Associated Press reported.] The Arab mood in the territories appeared to turn from exhaustion to rage Sunday when an Israeli soldier, hit by a stone during a protest in the West Bank village of El Ram, five miles north of Jerusalem, chased a 14-year-old boy into a house and started shooting, killing a 25-year-old woman as she hung laundry in her courtyard. The killing triggered protests throughout the West Bank and Gaza Monday that troops quelled with rubber bullets and tear gas… Under a curfew order, military authorities forbade the 11,000 residents of the Tulkarem refugee camp from leaving their houses Tuesday until further notice. Throughout the occupied territories, where a partial commercial strike has been in effect for more than two weeks, Israeli soldiers forced merchants to open their shops by threatening to weld their shutters closed if they refused… ‘One morning, a person wakes up and discovers that he is out of punishments,’ wrote the respected Haaretz newspaper columnist Yoel Marcus. ‘This could happen in any household when a parent discovers that his severe punishments have stopped working and his children are no longer afraid. This is a moment of terrible crisis for the parent, when he discovers he has lost his authority. This is more or less the situation of the state in terms of its relationship with the territories. For the young Palestinians there, being sent to jail carries the same prestige as an Israeli being sent to an elite army unit.’ Palestinian analysts said the defiance of Arab youth in the territories also had stripped the older generation of Palestinians of their authority, with sons rejecting the more moderate views of their fathers. On Tuesday, a group of prominent East Jerusalem Palestinians said they would call on the 1.4 million residents of the territories to begin a non-violent campaign of civil disobedience against the Israeli occupation. The campaign will include refusal to pay taxes to Israeli occupation authorities, a boycott of Israeli products and the wearing of black as a sign of mourning for those killed in the rioting, said Hanna Siniora, the editor of the East Jerusalem daily Al Fajr.”
Three different counts of the dead at Khan Younis in one column — the military high command’s, the U.N.’s, and the Palestine Press Service’s. A 25-year-old woman is killed hanging laundry and is not named. The story is a jump from page 1A.
Choke off is a verb about a throat, and the paper chose it for a camp. The line beside it says what that means in practice: the supplies are not getting to Khan Yunis. The camp’s name is in the smaller line and not in the headline.
Two clauses, and the second one is the number. One person killed, and a quarter of a million people confined to their houses as the response — printed as a single line of news in a small Pennsylvania daily five weeks into the first intifada. The person killed has a nationality and nothing else; nobody in the sentence does the killing or imposes the curfew.
Correction: {'note': 'arrived dated 5 January 1988; the page line on the scan reads “The Daily News, Lebanon, Pa., Friday, January 1?, 1988”. The day’s second digit is clipped by the edge of the scan, but 5 January 1988 was a Tuesday, and the only Friday in that January with a two-digit day beginning in 1 is the 15th. Corrected to 15 January 1988.'}
Calling it ‘West Bank’ or ‘Judea and Samaria’, ‘occupied lands’ or ‘administered territories’
Marcus Eliason, Associated Press, Jerusalem
“When Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told an audience he was switching from ‘Judea and Samaria’ to ‘the West Bank,’ it was a verbal bombshell in a country where words often are ideological badges… The government needed a name that would cover all captured lands, but did not like calling them ‘occupied’ because Israelis prefer not to think of themselves as occupiers. Thus ‘Administered Territories’ was born… Referring to Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza as Palestinians suggests to many Israelis a sympathy with their dreams of having their own state. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, and others who deny the authenticity of Palestinian nationhood, tend to speak of ‘Palestinian Arabs.’ To Israelis, who is a Palestinian is almost as vexing a question as who is a Jew. The late Golda Meir insisted there was no such thing as a Palestinian nation. She often recalled that, when Britain ruled the country, her citizenship too was ‘Palestinian.’”
The news agency explaining its own trade’s vocabulary. The page carries a map keyed OCCUPIED BY ISRAEL, naming Hebron, Halhul and Kiryat Arba, and a second Associated Press story from Jabaliya, Stones, not toys, for Arab children, which names four Palestinians — Ashraf, 12; Suheir, 9, who carries perfumed toilet paper against tear gas; Mohammed, 5; and Ashraf’s 60-year-old grandmother Nama. It ran beside a Doonesbury strip and a column of celebrity gossip.
Readers hot over Israel's role in Gaza and on West Bank
The Jan. 8 Herald Examiner contained an Op-Ed column, “No Palestinian homeland, then more riots,” by Edward Said, a member of the Palestine National Council, the political face of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Said’s recounting of the history behind the issue started with 1971. From 1949 through 1967, however, Gaza was under Egyptian rule. The economy was a shambles, as no Arab was allowed into Egypt to work. Gaza was an Arab ghetto where poverty and disease were rampant. At that time the only national movement in Gaza was the Fedayeen, who used Gaza as their base for terrorist attacks against Israel. From 1967 to the present, Gaza has been under Israeli rule. Some 30,000 Arabs travel daily into Israel to work.
“Palestinians riot in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.” Herald Examiner.
A full page of letters. Eight readers signed: Si Frumkin of Studio City, Stephanie Glick of Northridge, Amy Cohanim, Jacob Gendelman, Gene Galvin, Christopher D. Pascal and Alexander H. Pope, all of Los Angeles, and Jim Gregory of Joshua Tree. The transcription here is the opening of the first, by Si Frumkin, answering an Op-Ed the paper had run on January 8. Edward Said had a byline in an American metropolitan daily in January 1988.
U.S. report alleges Israeli repression in occupied areas
By Walter Friedenberg, Scripps Howard News Service
“WASHINGTON — The State Department’s annual global human-rights report says Israeli Jews enjoy democratic rights, but that the Israeli government subjects Palestinians in the occupied territories to repression, arbitrary detention and lethal force by the army… The annual report, titled ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1987,’ covers 170 countries — all but the United States… Israel is described as a model parliamentary democracy with free elections, an independent judiciary and elected legislature that may limit the government and bring it down by a vote of no confidence. But Israel’s military administration in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured in the 1967 Middle East war, comes in for sharp criticism. Under the category of ‘political killing,’ the report lists 47 Palestinians killed last year and 300 wounded by the Israeli army or other security forces, the majority by the use of ‘lethal force’ against demonstrators… Palestinians are subject to pre-occupation Jordanian law as amended by Israeli military regulations, while Jewish settlers are subject to Israeli law and administration. This ‘dual system’ means Palestinians are ‘usually treated less favorably’ than Jewish settlers on a broad range of issues, including due process, freedom of movement, land use and social services. While Hebrew-language newspapers submit only military security articles to censors, the Arabic press must submit all items for censorship. Several Arabic papers and news services were closed for six months to two years. Nine Palestinians were deported in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention governing occupied territories. More than 120 Palestinians were detained as long as six months without charges.”
ISRAELI POLICEMAN ORDERS ARAB AWAY FROM REFUGEE CAMP — The man was attempting to visit his family in a West Bank camp
In February 1988 the United States government published a finding that the territories ran on a dual system under which Palestinians were usually treated less favorably than settlers in due process, movement, land and social services. In December 1988 an American columnist wrote that the resolution calling Zionism racism was integral to the United Nations’ enterprise of delegitimizing Israel, and the Republican platform promised to cut American support for the United Nations until it was repealed. Same year, same government, two documents that never meet.
“JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian protester in the West Bank today, Arab hospital officials said, as demonstrations heated up before the arrival of Secretary of State George Shultz. The army said it was checking the reported death. If confirmed, it would be the 64th Arab killed by Israeli gunfire since the current wave of unrest began Dec. 8. The Arab-run Palestine Press Service identified the victim as Issam Said Abu Khalifeh, 18, and said he was killed during a demonstration at the Jenin refugee camp. Hospital officials said he was shot in the head and chest.”
Four sentences, and two things this archive counts. The headline names who fired, which most of the death headlines here do not. And the dead man has a name — supplied not by the American agency but by a Palestinian one, which the copy is careful to call Arab-run.
“UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United Nations voted 143-1 for the United States to submit to binding arbitration on whether it can shut down the PLO observer mission. The United States did not vote, and Israel cast the only negative vote. Israeli Ambassador Benjamin Netanyahu said the Palestine Liberation Organization is a terrorist group that has no place in the United Nations. The assembly also voted 142-0 for a resolution asking the World Court in the Hague for a ruling on whether the United States has the right to refuse arbitration. The arbitration would be conducted by an independent three-member panel. The United States, which has not yet moved to close the mission, said it considered the emergency assembly meeting ‘premature and unnecessary.’”
A hundred and forty-three votes to one, with the United States abstaining from a vote about itself.
Israel considering sealing off areas for security reasons
Dan Fisher, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM — Top Israeli officials are weighing a proposal to seal off the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip this week as part of security precautions against demonstrations planned for Wednesday by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, a senior security source said Sunday. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the proposed ban would prevent residents on both sides of the so-called Green Line from crossing it. The invisible boundary divides the territory Israel held before 1967 from the West Bank and Gaza Strip areas that it occupied after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs live as Israeli citizens inside Israel and 1.4 million are either stateless or hold Jordanian citizenship in the territories. Israeli Arabs have declared a general strike for Wednesday as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian uprising that has rocked the West Bank and Gaza Strip for nearly 16 weeks. The date, March 30, also commemorates protests in 1976 against Israeli land confiscations that left six Arabs dead. The self-styled Unified National Leadership for the Uprising in the Occupied Territories has also called for a general strike that day and for ‘huge demonstrations against the army and [Jewish] settlers.’ Fearing that the so-called ‘Land Day’ protests may lead to widespread violence, authorities are reportedly planning a long list of countermeasures. Israel Radio reported that Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Police Minister Chaim Bar-Lev briefed their fellow cabinet members on some of those measures during a regular meeting of the government Sunday. The briefing was held in the framework of the Ministerial Defense Committee, whose deliberations were secret. It was not clear whether the proposal to seal the borders of the occupied territories was aired in the cabinet. However, the senior security source confirmed that ‘there is a proposal like that. It is one of the proposals. But nobody decided until now.’ The source added that a decision is expected by tonight. He added that it is not clear whether the ban would also exclude news coverage inside the occupied territories. Meanwhile, Israel said its troops shot three Arabs in the West Bank village of Meithalun on Sunday after Palestinians attacked with iron bars and a car, but villagers accused the soldiers of firing at cars carrying wounded people. Israeli soldiers killed a fourth Palestinian in the West Bank town of Salfit, while trying to rescue an Israeli tour bus that blundered into the Arab community. Sunday’s deaths raised to 118 the number of Palestinians killed in 15 weeks of violent protests against Israel’s 20-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to U.N. figures. One Israeli soldier has been killed. Earlier this month, the authorities imposed a ban on travel by Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza Strip in hopes that it would impair coordination of anti-Israeli protest actions. Israel Radio reported Sunday that many Israeli Arabs have been detained or interrogated in the northern part of the country in the last two days. Police sources denied the allegation and said that the only Israeli Arabs held were those who had been involved in illegal disturbances during the last three months, state radio added.”
The army’s account and the villagers’ are printed one after the other, and the paper does not choose between them. The running toll is the United Nations’: 118 Palestinians, one Israeli soldier.
Violence intensifies in West Bank, Gaza; four killed
The Washington Post, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM — The occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, sealed off to forestall violence on this traditional day of Arab protest, were swept yesterday by unrest as Israeli soldiers fatally shot four Arabs and injured 60 others in some of the worst violence since the Palestinian uprising began 15 weeks ago. Despite government claims that restricting residents and closing off the area to journalists would inhibit violence, military officials said there were major incidents in at least 23 locations. Witnesses said the army in the West Bank used more aggressive tactics and more firepower against rioters than in the past. Three soldiers and three Jewish settlers also were reported injured. ‘There is no question that there were more clashes, they were more violent and more spread out,’ said a military spokesman of yesterday’s violence, which brought to at least 116 the number of Palestinians killed since Dec. 9. One Israeli soldier has been killed. By contrast, hundreds of thousands of Israel’s Arab citizens inside the so-called ‘green line,’ delineating Israeli proper from the West Bank, staged a generally nonviolent general strike, and thousands demonstrated peacefully to mark Land Day, which commemorates the killing of six Arab protesters by Israeli police in 1976. The army further tightened its grip on news from the territories by closing down the Palestine Press Service, an Arab-owned, Jerusalem-based news agency of activist journalists that served as a major source of quick information and reports to foreign correspondents and Western diplomats in Israel. The violence began before dawn this morning outside the West Bank village of Deir Abu Mashal near Ramallah, according to the army’s account. A military jeep was disabled by spikes hidden on the main road and ambushed by stone throwers. The soldiers claimed pistol shots were fired at them from nearby trees. Soldiers claimed they were attacked by an ax and club-wielding mob when they chased demonstrators into the village. They reported one soldier was hurt but because of press restrictions its account could not be verified.”
Land Day, 1988. The paper says plainly that it cannot check the army’s account because of press restrictions, and reports in the same column that the army had just closed the Palestinian news agency the correspondents relied on.
Netanyahu resigns as U.N. envoy; protests Shultz-PLO meeting
To seek Knesset seat
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Tel Aviv
“TEL AVIV (JTA) — Benjamin Netanyahu, who resigned last week as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in order to run for the Knesset, began his election campaign as a militant Likud-Herut hard-liner only minutes after tendering his resignation to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Dropping his role as diplomat, he launched blistering attacks on the United Nations, where he had served since 1984; on the American Administration, which he accused of active engagement in direct negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization; on Secretary of State George Shultz’s Middle East peace plan, and on his erstwhile colleague, Yossi Beilin, the political director general of the Foreign Ministry. Foreign Ministry officials, who are aligned with Peres and his Labor Party, sharply criticized Netanyahu. He only waited a few minutes before changing from the coat of a diplomat to one of a political hack,’ a former colleague said. He was denounced for his attacks on former colleagues and the surprise and haste with which he quit his U.S. post at a time when Israel has been under constant attack by the Arab bloc and their allies for its policies in the administered territories. Netanyahu is considered close to Premier Yitzhak Shamir and is very popular among conservative thinkers, particularly those in the Shamir-Moshe Arens camp… While Netanyahu’s entry into the political arena was greeted enthusiastically by Likud Knesset members, some Herut old-timers appeared to resent his instant leadership within the party ‘without having to go through the lengthy term of work in the local [party] branches.’ Netanyahu is likely to get a spot among the first 10 names on the Likud election lists, which virtually assures him of a seat in the next Knesset. Some observers suggested that the haste of his resignation might indicate a Likud decision to call for early elections. Netanyahu, who said when he announced his resignation that he hoped for a place on the Likud list in the Knesset elections scheduled for next November, charged that Shultz had been influenced by ‘all sorts of Arabist officials in the State Dept.’ He said that the secretary, who is now in Israel to resume shuttle diplomacy in the region, had ‘crossed the Rubicon with his very dangerous’ peace plan and his meeting last weekend with two members of the Palestine National Council which Israel, unlike the United States, does not differentiate from the PLO. Netanyahu accused Beilin, a close associate of Peres, of drumming up support for the international conference idea which is part of the Shultz plan and is favored by the Labor Party. He had good words only for former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who he said had warned Beilin that acceptance of an international conference meant shoving Israel back to its pre-1967 borders. According to Netanyahu, Beilin’s response to Kissinger was, ‘So what?’ Beilin promptly denied the charge… The 38-year-old former envoy had high praise for the ‘greatest [American] columnists, senators and the Jewish might’ in the United States who opposed the Shultz peace initiative. Many of those senators and columnists are of a far right-wing, conservative bent.”
“Benjamin Netanyahu announced his resignation as Israel’s envoy to the United Nations last week.”
A Jewish news agency reporting the start of Netanyahu’s domestic political career, and printing the criticism of him from his own foreign ministry.
Feeling they’ve been forgotten sparks Arab to rebel in Gaza
The Associated Press, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM (AP) — Palestinians say a feeling they have been neglected by the world and other Arabs, statements from Israel and day-by-day frustrations of occupation led to the rebellion in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The spark was a traffic accident Dec. 8 in which an Israeli army truck killed four Arabs near the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip… Anger had been building among Palestinians because they felt abandoned by Arab nations and the world community… ‘It was clear to us that we had been put on the shelf,’ said Saeb Erakat, a political science professor at An Najah University in the West Bank. ‘The message (of the uprising) is that we don’t wish to become Israelis. We are not a mere community or a minority living in greater Israel. We are a people… and we demand our liberty and our right to self-determination.’ Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir rubbed salt in the wound by noting publicly that the Arab summit put the Iran-Iraq war ahead of the Palestinian issue… An example of the harder line could be found in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, an Israeli Arab living in Paris who had favored Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. Many saw his poem ‘Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words’ as a demand for all of Israel, not just the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. About the Israelis, it says: ‘O those who pass between fleeting words, Carry your names, and be gone; Rid our time of your hours, and be gone; Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea and the sand of memory.’ Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian intellectual who advocates a negotiated settlement, said many want all of Israel included in a Palestinian state just as some Israelis want all the land for the Jewish state. ‘The question is whether both sides are ready to settle for less than what they want,’ he said. He said most Palestinians are ready for a two-state solution, but this feeling is ‘like a comet that comes close to the earth. If one wants to use it, one has to grab it while it is there.’ He also cited the cumulative affects of 20 years of occupation on the new generation, noting that half the people of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are under 20 years old and 77 percent are under 28. For them, he said, leadership status is ‘determined by how many times you have been in jail, how bad was the interrogation and has anybody in your family died fighting.’ ‘The more “yeses” to such questions the more of a leader you became within your neighborhood or community,’ he added.”
The poem itself, printed in an American paper in April 1988 and read as a demand for all of Israel. Twenty years later this archive holds four obituaries of its author in which Adel Usta, a specialist on his work, says the poem was misunderstood and mistranslated, and in which Yitzhak Shamir is reported reading it aloud in the Knesset as proof that Palestinians would not live alongside Jews. Darwish is described here as an Israeli Arab living in Paris. Saeb Erakat appears as a political science professor, years before he became the chief negotiator. The page carries a self-storage advertisement: Now Open, one month free.
“DAMASCUS, Syria — Amid chaotic scenes of scuffling and emotion, Khalil Wazir, the assassinated second in command of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was buried Wednesday alongside hundreds of Palestinians who have died in their struggle for a homeland. But intensive diplomatic efforts failed to make Abu Jihad, or Father of Struggle, as he was known, as immediately useful to the Palestinian cause in death as he had been in masterminding activities inside the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza strip… Hanni Hassan, one of Arafat’s closest political advisers, told reporters that for Arafat to have attended the funeral would have been a ‘political event’ and Syria’s invitation for all Palestinians to return for the occasion, including those long blacklisted, ‘was not a political invitation.’” — and, in the adjoining columns, the local story the photograph belongs to: “Steven Lenoff, a Congregation B’nai Torah member who attended the rally, said ‘It’s better than desecrating a synagogue. At least he has the guts to do it in the open instead of these spineless jellyfish who come out in the middle of the night.’ The grafitti was written sometime between 1 p.m. Saturday and 8:30 a.m. Sunday. Though Boca Raton police detectives are investigating the incidents, no suspects have been reported. A new phenomenon about the Boca Raton desecrations, Lenoff said, was that they contained a political reference to the slain PLO leader. ‘Previously, graffiti was anti-Semitic in the religious and racist sense,’ he said. Boca Raton Mayor Emil Danciu also spoke at the rally, saying, ‘I am apologizing for the citizens of Boca Raton to the Jewish community … let’s overcome this by loving each other more.’… Mordechai Winyarz, rabbi at the Boca Raton Synagogue, said after the rally, ‘Most of the speakers tried to emphasize that this was an isolated act of anti-Semitism. I disagree. I believe there is enormous anti-Semitism in this country and it will emerge in the future. Everything is not fine for Jews. Everyone does not love us.’”
“Alan Darman protests outside the B’nai Torah synagogue.” Staff photo by Tracey Trumbull. The hand-lettered sign reads STOP THE GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE.
The placard is the reason this page is in the archive. The page it is printed on is a report of swastikas painted on a synagogue, and a rabbi saying the desecration was not isolated. Both are here. “Grafitti” is the paper’s.
Palestinians march from Daley Plaza to demonstrate outside the Israeli consulate in Chicago
“Palestinians march from Daley Plaza to demonstrate outside the Israeli consulate in Chicago earlier this month.” Tribune photo by José Moré
“Palestinians march from Daley Plaza to demonstrate outside the Israeli consulate in Chicago earlier this month.” Tribune photo by José Moré
A photograph and its caption. A Palestinian flag and a hand-lettered placard reading “too Much Ask For” are visible above the crowd, and a portrait is carried on a board. Most of the marchers photographed are women and children.
Arabs, Palestinians and Jews face each other in debate
moderated by James Goodman
“The main problem for Palestinians today is not so much centered on how much territory they will regain. The main problem is that I as a Palestinian have constantly been seen by the West as a refugee or a terrorist or an Arab — never really addressed as a Palestinian… the facts about the Palestinian — the human side — have not been presented in this country.”
Excerpts from a two-hour debate between members of Rochester’s Arab and Palestinian community and members of its Jewish community, printed at length. Abraham Kharroubi, 44, born in what is now northern Israel, names the mechanism; across the table Kilimnick describes it from the other end — “Palestinians in my mind have not only been Palestinians but terrorists… But I’m just saying this is the perception” — and says he now understands there is another story. The paper printed both without adjudicating. Also named: Basem Ashkar, 40, born in Jerusalem, a supervisor at Ragu Foods; Nabil Kaylani, 47, professor of international relations.
“Even before I started speaking with The Elkhart Truth reporter Tom Price, I said to him, ‘Usually the American media twist the words and facts about the Palestinians and even they put words in our mouths.’ But in spite of that, in Sunday’s edition (May 8) what I feared, happened exactly, which again made me less confident in the American media. Following I will state what has been changed or quoted out of context and I trust this time The Elkhart Truth will publish it accordingly. 1. The title: I did not and will never say that ‘Israel is disaster.’ I said that this year is the 40th year of Al-Nakba, ‘the disaster’ for the Palestinians since they had lost their land and were converted to refugees or living under the Israeli occupation and power. 2. The Palestinians of today are not the Philistines which are mentioned in the Bible since the time of Abraham. They only took their name from the old Philistine. It was the Roman Emperor Hadrian who called the land Palestine in A.D. 135, and then the population was called Palestinians after the naming of the land itself. I believe the Palestinians are those people who remained in the land after the Jews were banned from the country by the Romans. 3. To us, the 1967 war is not the ‘six day war’ as the Israelis call it, it is the 1967 expansion war by Israel. 4. I did not say I am without a country. I said I am without a state in my country where Palestinians are treated as foreigners even in their own homeland. 5. The Elkhart Truth wrote ‘Salem rejects that (peace proposals) outright.’ Again that is not the case. I said Palestinians are ready to accept any peaceful proposal that addresses our right for self-determination. In fact, the Palestinian people are sick and tired from bloodshed and war and they are crying for a peaceful settlement for their dilemma. 6. I never used the word ‘curse’ when I spoke about the Jews. The word was put in my mouth, although it is not part of my vocabulary at all. 7. I question and reject the unconditional support which the Fundamental Christians are giving to Israel. I consider myself as a brother in faith with any Christian and I call the Fundamental Christians to consider the rights of the Palestinian people too. 8. I do not believe that the Jews are chosen or were chosen by God for any merit of them. God in the Old Testament chose the Jews to be a light for the nations. But today, according to the New Testament there is neither Jew nor gentiles, and all are one in Christ. 9. I do not advocate non-violent protests only because I am a Christian since Palestinian Muslims also advocate nonviolence. I advocate nonviolence basically because it is more effective, disarming and peaceful. 10. I did not say that I am willing to let Israel keep the old city of Jerusalem. I said that Israel wants all of Jerusalem to be their capital, while the Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be their capital. So in order to resolve this, I said that each side should compromise and each people should have the right of access to their holy shrines. 11. I did not say that I agree or advocate stone throwing per se. I said that Palestinian children, as other children in the world, have the right to enjoy life instead of throwing stones and get killed. But since the whole world is ignoring our right for freedom and a state, and because the uprising made the world at least to recognize our problem and aspiration, then in this context, I do see stone throwing as justifiable.”
A Palestinian in Elkhart, Indiana, correcting his own local paper point by point after it interviewed him — eleven numbered corrections, including the headline, a word he says was put in his mouth, and the name of the year. He opens by saying he warned the reporter this would happen. The paper printed the correction.
Nine-month-old Arab girl among injured as Israeli troops break up demonstrators
An infant identified by her age to the month, which is the paper insisting she be counted. The verb given to the troops is break up, the kind of verb used for furniture and crowds, and the thing broken up is demonstrators. So the sentence contains a nine-month-old who was injured and no act of injuring.
Slain Palestinian reporter was tortured, brother says
Bernard Edinger, Reuters, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM — Palestinian journalist Hassan Abdel Halim, found dead last week after disappearing while researching fraudulent land purchases on the West Bank, was kidnapped and tortured before he died, his brother said yesterday. Also yesterday, Israeli police retracted their statement made Monday that it appeared Halim had been killed while making a bomb. Halim’s decapitated and decomposed body was discovered Friday by Arab shepherds at Beit Horon, near the West Bank town of Ramallah. Police Deputy Superintendent David Cohen, who is heading the investigation into Halim’s death, said police were not ruling out the possibility that he was abducted and murdered. ‘He was definitely killed by a bomb. The rest we don’t know and all possibilities remain open,’ Cohen said. He said police who told reporters Halim was killed while making a bomb had been misunderstood. The journalist’s brother, Mohammed Abdel Halim, told a news conference there were signs of torture on the body when it was discovered — burns, missing teeth and missing fingernails. He said Halim, 36, had been wearing different clothes when he disappeared two months ago than when his body was found. Cohen said the mutilations could have been caused by the explosion that pathologists say killed Halim. Palestinian journalists said yesterday they suspected Arab middlemen working with Israeli contractors of having killed Halim because of his investigations of allegations that Arab land was being fraudulently purchased for Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Halim had been reporting for the East Jerusalem newspaper Al-Fajr, which is openly supportive of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat. Police charged two Israelis this month with swindling potential Jewish buyers of land in the West Bank. At the news conference yesterday, Ziad Abu Ziad of the Arab Journalists Association of the Occupied Territories said: ‘What we are asking the police is to study whether Hassan’s death was not stage-managed, whether the bomb was not planted on him and then detonated.’ The Palestinian reporters said that Halim was partially blind and that it was inconceivable that he had been handling explosives.”
A Palestinian journalist killed while investigating land sales, and the police account retracted within days. His brother, his colleagues and the police are all quoted, and they do not agree.
Students, Army Clash; West Bank Schools May Close Again
Daily News Wire Services, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM — Israel arrested two Palestinian reporters and a writer in a continuing crackdown on Arab journalists, Arab newspapers reported today… Ahmed Hassan Hawari, 17, was killed when he was shot in the head by an Israeli officer in the village of Sebastiya near Nablus. The army said he was about to throw a cement block at troops from a terrace when he was shot… The east Jerusalem newspaper Al Shaab said the army arrested Bader Taleb Yassin Meky, a sports reporter for the paper, at his home in Jericho. Al Ittihad, another Arabic-language paper, said Samir Subayhat, a freelance reporter from the West Bank town of El Bireh, and Muhammad Ayub Abu-Hadrus, a writer and teacher from the Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis, were seized at their homes. A spokesman for the army said he could not confirm the reports or explain why the writers were arrested. At least 30 journalists have been arrested and 20 of them have been jailed without charges or trial for up to six months, according to Al Haq, an Arab human rights organization.”
I did not speak to a single person - Israeli or Palestinian - who is optimistic about the future. Most feel that the worst is yet to come.
“I did not speak to a single person — Israeli or Palestinian — who is optimistic about the future. Most feel that the worst is yet to come.”
A pull quote set in a box on the same page as the iron fist headline (CP-1988-020). The reporter is the only person in it, and the finding is that nobody they met could see a way out. Printed in Detroit in June 1988, six months into the first intifada.
Israel's iron fist policy deals a damaging blow to peace hopes
Iron fist printed flat, in a paper’s own headline voice, with no quotation marks around it: by June 1988 the phrase had stopped being something Israel called its policy and become what the policy was called. The Herald Sun in January had kept the marks (CP-1988-005). What the headline measures the policy against is peace hopes, not the people it was applied to.
A masked Palestinian waves the Israeli-banned PLO flag during a protest in the Gaza Strip
“A masked Palestinian waves the Israeli-banned PLO flag during a protest in the Gaza Strip.” Reuter.
Two young men, one masked, one flag, one raised hand. The caption gives the flag a legal status — Israeli-banned — and the man neither a name nor an age. Same page as CP-1988-019 and CP-1988-020. The credit line reads Reuter, singular, as the agency styled itself.
“JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli troops clashed with Arab youths in at least seven towns and refugee camps in the occupied territories yesterday. Hospital officials and radio reports said a 17-year-old Palestinian was killed. An army spokeswoman denied the youth was shot by soldiers and said troops used only tear gas and rubber bullets to break up the protests. The death brings the number of Palestinians killed to 215 since an uprising against Israeli rule in the occupied territories began Dec. 8. Four Israelis have also been slain… In the West Bank town of Jenin, Nael Yousef Muhamad Hamaisi died of a gunshot wound in the head after a demonstration by students erupted into a stone-throwing clash with soldiers, Israel radio and hospital officials said… In southern Israel, about 50 Israeli writers and artists staged a demonstration near the Ketziot military prison, calling for the release of the 2,500 Arabs detained without trial, many of them held in the prison. ‘If the people got their rights then the artists, Jewish and Palestinian, would not have to come here,’ said Suleiman Mansour, a Palestinian artist. ‘We demand the release of Palestinian prisoners, but our biggest demand is self-determination and a state for the Palestinian people.’ Israeli author Amos Keinan said several of those jailed were Palestinian writers who were among the 25 Arabs and Jews signing a symbolic ‘peace treaty’ at a June ceremony in Jerusalem.”
Not an arts story. A painter’s argument about rights, reported from a protest outside a prison, inside a wire roundup of one day’s fighting. The headline names no killer; the Palestinian who died is named in the eighth paragraph.
Monday, July 11, 1988. The agent is named in the first two words, which most of these headlines do not manage. What the last four words do is supply the reason inside the same sentence: the man who was killed was in a mob, and the mob was throwing stones. He is also an Arab, six months into an uprising these same papers were already calling Palestinian.
“JERUSALEM (UPI) — Arab and Israeli moderates expressed shock and criticism at the arrest of a leading pro-PLO Palestinian who was given up to six months’ administrative detention for allegedly coordinating the nearly 8-month-old Palestinian uprising. Faisal Husseini, 48, the leading spokesman in the West Bank for the mainline Fatah movement of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was arrested Sunday during an early morning raid at his home in East Jerusalem, the third time he was put in administrative detention in less than two years. Police also raided Husseini’s Arab Studies Society and ordered it closed for one year, with a police spokesman saying the organization had served ‘to promote (Fatah’s) aims and attain the objectives of the uprising.’ Husseini, who has been out of prison for less than two months, also was accused of inciting and coordinating the nearly 8-month-old uprising in the Israeli-occupied territories. But police refused to give any specific examples of Husseini’s involvement. ‘I was shocked, really, when I heard the news in the morning,’ said Radwan Abu Ayyash, a prominent Palestinian journalist who also was recently released from administrative detention. ‘I think it is not fair. It shows that they do not want to deal with the moderates.’ Israeli elder statesman Abba Eban, who said he did not personally know Husseini, criticized the excessive use of administrative detention in his case, saying: ‘I much prefer that if anyone transgresses the law, then people should have their day in court. ... It’s like a Turkish party. They are out and in and in and out.’ Palestinian and Israeli sources said Husseini’s detention, during which he can be held initially without charge or trial for up to six months, shows that the government fears moderate Palestinians who envision a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ‘The road to peace is being obstructed by detentions, human rights obstructions,’ said Hanna Siniora, editor of the Palestinian newspaper Al Fajr. ‘(Husseini) should be encouraged instead of jailed.’ While some observers have argued that Husseini is merely PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s mouthpiece on the West Bank, others — including the Israeli government — believe he coordinates PLO activity in the occupied territories. It is the third time in less than two years Husseini has been placed under administrative detention. For five years before his jail terms he was forbidden outside his home from sunset to dawn and had to report to police weekly… Husseini, the son of Palestinian war hero Abdel Kader el-Husseini who was killed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, was released June 9 from nine months’ administrative detention. Under Emergency Security Regulations dating from the time of the British Mandate over Palestine, the military can detain anyone for up to six months without charge or trial. The detention order can be renewed… East Jerusalem merchant Mustafa Abu-Zahara also was placed under administrative detention Sunday.”
The archive already holds the death of Abdel Kader el-Husseini in April 1948 and the funeral that thirty thousand people attended. This is his son, arrested for the third time in two years under regulations inherited from the British Mandate. “Schocks” is the paper’s.
At least 244 Palestinians and three Israelis have died in the anti-Israel violence… Palestinians and United Nations relief officials said soldiers commandeered one ambulance attempting to enter Jabalia refugee camp under cover, while Israeli forces stopped another ambulance and began beating a 19-year-old Jabalia man who had been shot in the thigh. According to a U.N. report, the Palestinian was detained at army headquarters in Jabalia for an hour before U.N. officials intervened and took him to a hospital. An army spokesman said soldiers detained the 19-year-old for questioning and then took him for treatment. He denied that the Palestinian was beaten.
UPI, datelined Jerusalem. The army’s denial runs in the paragraph directly under the U.N. account.
“The covenant, dated Aug. 18 and issued under the name of the Islamic Resistance Movement/Palestine, appears at a time of growing tensions between the predominantly secular PLO nationalists and Palestinian religious fundamentalists. The fundamentalists are strongest here in overcrowded Gaza, where the uprising began and where it has been particularly violent. But in recent weeks they have also appeared to be gaining support on the West Bank of the Jordan River, long considered a secular stronghold. Late last month, the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym as HAMAS, enforced a full commercial strike in major West Bank towns against the wishes of the secular intifada leadership… Palestinian sources say that Israeli officials have encouraged such divisions as a means of weakening the Palestinian cause. The government has allowed some fundamentalists to operate semi-openly here in Gaza, for example, while cracking down on militant PLO factions. ‘I have my suspicions that over the last 10 years the Israelis tried to encourage fundamentalism as a power to curb nationalism,’ said Rashad Shawa, a former Gaza mayor and head of a prominent local clan. ‘But to their disappointment, [the various groups] joined hands against the Israeli occupation.’… ‘For me, a secular state is out of the question,’ said Sheik Akhmad Yassin, a prominent Islamic leader here. In an interview at his home in a particularly squalid Gaza neighborhood, Yassin, who is paralyzed from the neck down, said that creation of neighboring Israeli and Palestinian states ‘is not a satisfactory solution… The solution we are looking for is a unified Palestine.’… The new HAMAS covenant defines all of historic Palestine—including Israel and the occupied territories—as ‘an Islamic trust for all the generations of Muslims until the resurrection.’… The document describes HAMAS as ‘a humanitarian movement that protects human rights and is committed to Islamic tolerance toward other religions.’ It is not hostile, it adds, ‘to anyone who does not stand in its way. In Islam, followers of Christianity and Judaism can live in safety and security.’ However, the covenant cites well-known anti-Semitic tracts in condemning the Jewish national movement.”
September 1988. The intifada is nine months old and led by the secular PLO, and Hamas is still being introduced to American readers, by its acronym, as a new development. A former mayor of Gaza says Israel spent ten years encouraging the movement in order to curb nationalism. The covenant is quoted on tolerance and then on antisemitic tracts, in consecutive sentences, and the paper names them as antisemitic.
By Dan Fisher and Dan Williams, Los Angeles Times, Gaza, Israeli-Occupied Gaza Strip
“GAZA, Israeli-Occupied Gaza Strip — Neither the Palestine Liberation Organization nor anyone else has the right to endorse Israeli rule over any part of historic Palestine, according to an underground ‘covenant’ produced by an influential Islamic fundamentalist group here. The document, a copy of which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times, was apparently produced in answer to recent statements by PLO officials that they are preparing to implicitly recognize Israel as part of a move toward trying to create an adjacent Palestinian state. Both Israeli and Palestinian nationalist sources described the declaration as a threat to the extraordinary unity that has been shown by West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians during their nearly 9-month-old anti-Israeli uprising. By calling for ‘jihad,’ or holy war, as ‘the only solution to the Palestine problem,’ the covenant is seen as undermining support in the occupied territories for any moderate PLO political initiative… The movement, known by its Arabic acronym as HAMAS, enforced a full commercial strike in major West Bank towns against the wishes of the secular intifada leadership. A few days later, a second HAMAS effort to enforce a strike set off scuffling in the West Bank town of Ramallah between secular and religious activists.”
The same Los Angeles Times dispatch as the covenant story, in a Westchester paper on the same day, with the dateline spelled out: Gaza, Israeli-Occupied Gaza Strip. The headline puts holy war in quotation marks and calls the authors a group.
Islamic resistance covenant rules out deal with Israel
From Herald Wire Services, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM — The previously unpublished covenant of a growing Islamic resistance movement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip rules out any compromise with Israel and says the only solution to the Palestinian problem is Holy War. The 40-page document, obtained by Reuters news agency, cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic pamphlet used in Nazi German propaganda, to claim that Israel is plotting expansion from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq… The movement, known by the Arabic initials Hamas, has gained strength since a Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories began in December. Although its stronghold is Gaza, Hamas last month staged its first general strike in the West Bank in defiance of the largely secular underground Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, backed by the Palestine Liberation Organization… That pamphlet, a purported master plan for a Jewish world takeover regarded by Western historians as an anti-Semitic fraud, claims that Jews carry out human sacrifice and use children’s blood to bake unleavened bread for the Passover holiday… ‘The only solution to the Palestinian problem is by Jihad. All initiatives, conferences and proposals are a waste of time,’ it says. On Sunday, West Bank Jewish settlers demonstrated to demand government permission to shoot at Palestinian stone-throwers. Soldiers in the occupied territories shot and wounded three Palestinian protesters. At a Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir denied news reports that he had recommended expanding defense rules to allow soldiers and civilians to fire at stone-throwers in the territories, officials said. Jewish settlers have been demanding that both the army and settlers be allowed to open fire on Palestinians throwing stones. Only soldiers are allowed to shoot… Meanwhile, a staff member of the Palestinian newspaper al-Fajr said that Israeli security forces have raided its East Jerusalem offices and arrested managing editor Hatem Abdel-Qader. A police spokesman said Abdel-Qader was jailed without trial for six months on security grounds by order of Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin.”
The day after the Los Angeles Times page, the same covenant in Miami, with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion named and called an anti-Semitic fraud in the paper’s own voice. The last four paragraphs are about who is allowed to shoot at stone-throwers, and the last two are a Palestinian newspaper editor jailed for six months without trial.
“JERUSALEM — In the first serious split of the 9-month-old Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied territories, an emerging Islamic fundamentalist organization is challenging the protest’s clandestine ‘unified leadership.’ The Islamic fundamentalists, who promote an uncompromising war with Israel and are critical of the Palestine Liberation Organization, have held three days of general strikes in the past month independent of those called by the underground leadership’s leaflets, and there have been several street fights between supporters of the two groups over whether merchants should open or close. The emergence of the new organization, known as Hamas (or Zeal), an acronym for the Movement of the Islamic Resistance, not only poses a threat to the secular, PLO-oriented leadership of the uprising but has also complicated the efforts of several West Bank leaders to press Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership abroad to capitalize on their political gains by offering to come to terms with Israel… The underground leadership attacked the fundamentalist group by name for the first time in leaflet No. 25, now circulating on the streets. Hamas has become a major force in the Gaza Strip. Only a little over two years ago, rivalries in the Gaza Strip were so great that Islamic fundamentalists severely beat several members of leftist PLO groups with iron pipes and set fire to an office of the Palestinian Red Crescent. Its influence is still spotty in the West Bank, where many of the organizers are loyal to the PLO. But Palestinians said that its protest calls were likely to be heeded in traditionalist Moslem areas such as Hebron.”
The pull-quote set into the page reads: “The solution to the Palestinian problem will only take place by holy war. The initiatives and international conferences only waste time.” — Movement of Islamic Resistance.
Nine months into the uprising, Hamas is reported as a threat to the people leading it. The underground leadership attacks it by name for the first time in leaflet number twenty-five.
Fundamentalists seize role in Palestinian uprising
Growing influence of extremist Islamic Resistance Movement worries both Israel and the PLO
By Glenn Frankel, The Washington Post, Bireh, West Bank
“BIREH, West Bank — The quarter-mile-long stone wall outside the old Moravian Church leper colony has long been a favorite billboard for Palestinian sloganeers. But lately a new set of graffiti has appeared that, even by local standards, is harder-edged and more radical than most nationalist fare. ‘The end of Israel is a Koranic inevitability,’ reads one. ‘Yes to the revolution of the mosques… Let those calling for peace be silent… We will tell the sons of Zion that we will not forget Haifa and Jaffa. We are coming.’ Each slogan is signed by Hamas, which means ‘zeal’ and is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, the newest and most extremist of the underground Palestinian resistance groups to have emerged during the nine-month uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In recent years, the combination of fundamentalism and Palestinian nationalism has been a potent force in the poorer, more traditional Gaza Strip and was a major element in triggering the uprising last December. But Hamas is still a fledgling, but its growing influence not only in Gaza but in the wealthier, better educated and more sophisticated West Bank is a phenomenon that both Israel and secular activists of the Palestine Liberation Organization are watching with concern… Hamas is also opposed to an international peace conference, one of the PLO’s major proposals, because it believes a conference would result in territorial compromise and PLO recognition of Israel. Its hard-line stance is one of the factors limiting Arafat’s options. ‘The PLO first gained respect and support because it adopted the armed struggle,’ says Sheik Bassam Jarrar, one of the young imams of the West Bank who are considered spiritual leaders of Hamas. ‘But now that the PLO is giving up the armed struggle, its support is lessening.’… It has a vast, built-in communications network in the mosques that cover both Gaza and the West Bank. Within a week of the issuing of its covenant, the document was posted in mosques throughout the territories. Jarrar and other local imams preach to full houses each week. In the covenant, Hamas rejects compromise with Israel because it claims all of Palestine is an Islamic trust that cannot be yielded. It condemns the international conference proposal as ‘arbitration by unbelievers over the land of the Moslems.’ The only solution, it claims, is ‘jihad’ — Islamic holy war.”
“Palestinians throw stones at Israeli soldiers; Islamic fundamentalists are playing a greater role in the uprising and calling for a holy war.” The Associated Press.
Nine months into the intifada, a Washington Post correspondent standing at a wall in Bireh reading the graffiti to find out who is writing it. The sheik is named and quoted on why the PLO is losing support, and the map beside the story is credited to the Christian Science Monitor.
“JABALIA REFUGEE CAMP, Occupied Gaza Strip — Smoke from a burning tire splashes as orange and black streaks of protest against the gray morning sky. Open sewers turn unpaved streets to mud and fill the air with the stench of human waste. ‘Soldiers!’ shriek a group of children as they scatter down alleys. A jeep stops in the road. Five Israeli soldiers pile out and use M-16 rifles to force male passers-by to—”
The scan is 283 pixels wide across two columns and a map, so only the byline and the opening paragraphs have been re-read against it. The map beside the story is headed “Gaza strip.”
“The U.N.’s moral authority evaporated in the 1970s when it became dominated by radical Third World regimes… The U.N. should be called the U.R. — United Regimes. The United Nations has little to do with representing nations, properly understood as peoples united by political and cultural affinities. One reason U.N. hostility toward Israel is so unremitting is that Israel is a real nation with a representative regime. To most U.N. members, whose national cohesion is based on coercion, Israel is either unintelligible or a reproach. The PLO, an organization formally dedicated to the destruction of a U.N. member, was granted U.N. ‘observer’ status in 1975, the year the United Nations passed the resolution equating Zionism and racism. Actually, Zionism is an especially defensible nationalism… On the principle that the best defense is a good offense, President-elect Bush and his nominee for secretary of state, James Baker, should say to the United Nations: Go to Geneva — and do not return until you have rescinded the Zionism-as-racism resolution. That resolution is integral to the U.N.’s principal enterprise: the delegitimization of Israel.… The Republican Party platform of 1988 says: ‘The Republican Party reaffirms its support for recision of U.N. Resolution 3379, which equates Zionism with racism. Failure to repeal that resolution will justify attenuation of our support for the U.N.’ If the United Nations wants to squander more millions on a Geneva homage to Arafat, let the sum be deducted from U.S. obligations… Now, exactly who favors cutting Medicare to subsidize Arafat?”
The repeal campaign, three years before it succeeded, written as an ultimatum and carrying the Republican platform language that made it policy. It runs beside a Jeff MacNelly cartoon in which men labeled THE EXPERTS study a wall sprayed WE RECOGNIZE ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO EXIT and reassure each other that it must be a typo.
Hits home is a phrase for news arriving somewhere, and here it arrives at the people it is about — as though the uprising were weather that reached the West Bank rather than something the people of the West Bank were doing. Printed on the first anniversary.
Israeli security forces monitor an East Jerusalem thoroughfare as a Palestinian woman walks to the Al-Aqsa Mosque
“Israeli security forces monitor an East Jerusalem thoroughfare as a Palestinian woman walks to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where Muslims pray each day.” Photo: ROB RITZENTHALER.
Two files of soldiers with batons down both sides of a lane, and a woman in a white headscarf walking between them with a man behind her. The verb the caption gives the soldiers is monitor. The woman is going to prayer, which the caption explains happens every day, as though the daily thing in the picture were the praying.
“STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — PLO leader Yasser Arafat arrived in Sweden today for a meeting with a group of American Jews arranged by the Swedish government. The five-member Jewish delegation was mostly from the International Center for Peace in the Middle East, a coalition of leftist groups in Israel and abroad. The group’s members urge Israel to negotatiate directly with Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization with a view toward relinquishing at least some of the Arab territory captured in the 1967 Mideast War. The Israeli government refuses to talk to the PLO and has urged its Jewish supporters in the United States not to do so. The international chairman of the peace center is Israel’s former foreign minister, Abba Eban. Its Israeli branch includes prominent members of Eban’s left-leaning Labor Party. The Swedish Foreign Ministry said the U.S. delegation was headed by Rita Hauser, a New York lawyer and chairman of the peace center’s American branch. Other members were Drora Kass, the center’s executive director; executive board member Stanley Sheinbaum, an economist and publisher from Los Angeles; Menachem Rosensaft, president of the Labor Zionist Alliance and chairman of the Network of Children of Holocaust Survivors; and Professor Avraham Udovitch, chairman of the department for Near East Studies at Princeton University. Arafat’s delegation included Mahmoud Darwish and Yasser Abed-Rabbo, both members of the PLO executive committee, his spokesman Bassam Abu Sharif and Akram Haniyeh, a former Palestinian journalist who was expelled by Israel. Arafat, after being greeted at the airport by Foreign Minister Sten Andersson, boarded a helicopter at Arlanda International Airport bound for Haga Palace, a government guest house… The Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem telephoned the Swedish ambassador to lodge an official protest over the government’s invitation to the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization.”
Eleven months after asking what a poet does on an executive council, here he is doing it: Mahmoud Darwish named second in Arafat’s delegation to Stockholm, in a small Illinois daily, in the week before the PLO recognized Israel. Beside him is Akram Haniyeh, identified here as a journalist Israel expelled — and the same man who, twenty years later, sat at Darwish’s bedside in the Houston hospital where he died. The paper’s spelling, negotatiate, is kept.
Two Palestinians killed, 22 hurt in occupied lands
Death toll now 10 from Israeli attack on Lebanon base
“Hosni Abu Sido, was one of a group of teen-agers who threw gasoline-filled bottles at a patrol yesterday morning several hours after a curfew was lifted and residents were allowed out of their homes… he tried to stab a guard with a homemade knife while he and other inmates in Gaza City’s prison were taken out on a daily walk, the army said… All 650,000 residents of the Gaza Strip were under curfew yesterday to prevent violence marking the first anniversary of the upris—… lence in memory of the Palestinians killed in the uprising, which began Dec. 8, 1987… Lebanon requested an urgent meeting of the U.N. Security Council to debate the attack, which drew sharp condemnation from the United States and Britain.” The line across the top of the page reads “BATTLE FOR PROMISED LAND 11A.”
A strip cut from the top of a page: the headline, the line beneath it and the first lines of four columns, each broken off. Hosni Abu Sido is named in the first of them.
Intifadah has shown Palestinians their own strength
A Boston paper, one year in, writing the uprising as something that happened to the Palestinians rather than something done to them — and the thing it did was show them what they had. The same edition carried two of them killed by Israeli troops (CP-1988-031). The paper spells it Intifadah; the Times Colonist the same day spells it intifada (CP-1988-032).
The home of the Abu Ayash family in the West Bank village of Beit Ummar was destroyed
“The home of the Abu Ayash family in the West Bank village of Beit Ummar was destroyed by a Molotov cocktail. Graffiti on the remains reads ‘Palestine is our homeland, our home is not made of stone.’”
“The home of the Abu Ayash family in the West Bank village of Beit Ummar was destroyed by a Molotov cocktail. Graffiti on the remains reads ‘Palestine is our homeland, our home is not made of stone.’” Globe photos / Thea Breite
A photograph and its caption; the story is not on this clipping. A tent stands beside the rubble, and the family’s own words are painted on what is left of the wall.
Israeli troops kill 2 Palestinians, wound 17 in day of unrest
Israeli troops kill, which is plain, and then the deaths happen in day of unrest, which puts them inside a condition rather than at the end of an act. The same paper on the same day ran a column headed Intifadah has shown Palestinians their own strength (CP-1988-029).
Israelis aim to suppress Palestinian national identity
the intifada
A standing section head reading the intifada, in lower case, a year after the word arrived in English — a paper had decided its readers knew it. Underneath, a headline that names the aim and not the incident: what the suppression is aimed at is an identity. Compare the Boston Globe the same day, which spelled it Intifadah (CP-1988-029).
PALESTINIANS, carrying their outlawed flag, face Israeli soldiers
Newsday photo by Mark Hinojosa
“PALESTINIANS, carrying their outlawed flag, face Israeli soldiers” — Newsday photo by Mark Hinojosa.
Four young men in keffiyehs, one flag, a road sign in Hebrew, Arabic and English behind them. The caption says their flag and then says it is outlawed, which are the two halves of the whole argument in six words. The photographer is credited; nobody in the picture is named.
Correction: {'note': 'arrived uncaptioned, paired with a Miami Herald piece of 20 December 1987 and a Times Colonist piece of 11 December 1988; the date is uncertain'}
A Pennsylvania paper, on the day before Christmas week, putting the United States in the subject position and justice for Palestinians in the object. The same page carried the sentence the visitors had been asked to bring home (CP-1988-035).
The plea was for us to bring back the message to the United States that the Palestinian people want to live in peace ... sharing the benefits, beauty and riches of that Holy Land.
“The plea was for us to bring back the message to the United States that the Palestinian people want to live in peace… sharing the benefits, beauty and riches of that Holy Land.”
A pull quote set in a box beside the editorial on the same page (CP-1988-034). What the travellers were asked to carry back was not a demand but a description of what living there would look like. The verb the Palestinians are given is plea.
“JERUSALEM — Israel’s deputy foreign minister Thursday sought to tie the PLO to the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and blamed the U.S. decision to talk to the guerrilla organization for encouraging international terrorism. The statement by Binyamin Netanyahu, a leading member of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud bloc, follows repeated Israeli criticism of the United States for including Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Middle East peace process. Talks ‘sending message to PLO’. ‘By having these kinds of talks . . . you are sending a message, a very clear message, that terrorism pays,’ Netanyahu said. ‘The American talks with the PLO have seriously weakenened the American effort against terrorism.’ He said suspicion in the Dec. 21 Pan Am bombing focused on groups experienced with the type of explosives used in the blast, including the PLO and Syria. However, he said he had no firm information on who was to blame for the bombing, and an Israeli security expert said Arafat’s mainstream PLO faction was ‘not a likely candidate.’ Netanyahu’s comments echoed Shamir’s, who suggested Tuesday that Washington’s decision was encouraging renewed infiltration attacks along the Israeli border. Shamir said the American move ‘encouraged the tendency of violent acts against Israel.’ Israel hopes talks canceled. A government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said this week that a major Israeli foreign policy goal would be to reverse Washington’s decision to talk to the PLO. On Thursday, Netanyahu called the PLO ‘the foremost practitioner of aviation terrorism.’ It was responsible for the first airliner hijacking, the first destruction of a passenger plane in flight and the first gun and grenade attack on passengers, he said. ‘I say the PLO, I mean Fatah, I mean Arafat,’ he said, referring to the PLO chief’s mainstream guerrilla group… Expert doubts Arafat involved. Ariel Merari, an Israeli terrorism expert, told reporters at the news conference that he doubted the mainstream PLO would have carried out the attack when Arafat is making statements about peace with Israel. ‘I don’t think the present political situation is such that the PLO would sponsor such an attack,’ he said. ‘My guess is at least for a while they’ll refrain from international terrorism because it is politically counterproductive.’ Merari, director of a project on terrorism at Tel Aviv University, said earlier he believed the Pan Am attackers probably were radical PLO factions opposed to Arafat’s more moderate stands.”
The accusation and the Israeli expert’s doubt about it, at the same news conference, in the same story. “Weakenened” is the paper’s.
“Making his point: PLO leader Yasser Arafat shows the V-sign during his press conference in Helsinki Tuesday. Arafat rejected an Israeli idea of holding Palestinian elections in occupied territories.” Associated Press.
A month after the PLO recognized Israel at Geneva. The caption calls the territories occupied without quotation marks and without attribution, in the paper’s own voice — which is the thing this archive tracks across the dateline fold. The photograph is of a man making a V-sign; the caption says he is making his point.
Israeli officials play down offer from Shamir to withdraw troops
Herald Wire Services, Hebron, West Bank
“‘If the army withdraws from the cities, we expect the most horrible things, riots and demonstrations of thousands,’ Rabbi Moshe Levinger… told Foreign Minister Moshe Arens… ‘They [the Palestinians] will go out from the cities and conduct pogroms,’ said Levinger, who is under investigation in the slaying of a Hebron shopkeeper during a stone-throwing incident… More than 70,000 Jewish settlers live among the 1.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”
One of two printings of the same Associated Press dispatch, the same morning. This one is datelined HEBRON, West Bank. The other, in Worcester, is datelined HEBRON, Occupied West Bank. Six years earlier a wire story had stopped to tell readers that newspapers use pogroms of violence against settlers; here is the word in a named speaker’s mouth, about violence that has not happened. Palestinians are the subject of every paragraph and not one is quoted.
“‘If this (withdrawal) proposal is accepted, terrible things will happen… There will be riots and demonstrations by tens of thousands (of Palestinians)… They will go out from the cities and conduct pogroms’… In the West Bank, a Palestinian was killed in a clash with troops, bringing the Palestinian death toll in the uprising to 371.”
The same Associated Press dispatch as the Miami Herald printing, the same day, and the clearest instrument in this collection. Three things differ: this dateline says Occupied and Miami’s does not; this printing carries a man’s death and a running count of 371 that Miami does not carry at all; and the same quotation appears here as tens of thousands where Miami has thousands. Whether a reader understood a settler leader to have predicted riots by thousands or by tens of thousands depended on which paper they held.
This is what happens to an “occupied,” disarmed people
Paul Wilhelm, Cedar Ridge
“— this is what happens to an ‘occupied,’ disarmed people and their country…rocks vs. bullets. How dare we accuse others of terrorism when we allow the Israelis to do this day after day without demanding these atrocities be stopped. I say stop foreign aid to Israel now and quit accusing others of terrorism — looks like we joined that club long ago — with the aid of the Israelis using our money.”
A reader’s letter, signed and datelined to a small California town. The clipping begins mid-sentence: the first part of the letter is not on this scan.
Five words and two numbers. No one fires, no one is wounded by anything, and nowhere is named. The Sacramento Bee printed the same day’s events on page A24 as Violence peaks in Gaza Strip; 3 Palestinians killed, 138 hurt (CP-1989-006) — one more injured person than this paper counted, and a place. Neither headline has anybody doing it.
Violence peaks in Gaza Strip; 3 Palestinians killed, 138 hurt
Page A24, Sunday 7 May 1989. Same day as the Hawaii Tribune Herald (CP-1989-004), and the two papers differ by one injured person: 138 here, 137 there. The subject of the first clause is violence, which peaks by itself; the subject of the second is the three dead. The army is in neither clause.
Correction: {'pub': 'The Sacramento Bee', 'date': '1989-05-07', 'note': "the line above the picture reads 'A24 The Sacramento Bee - Sunday, May 7, 1989'; caption pairing swapped"}
“JERUSALEM — Israeli authorities arrested a Palestinian activist yesterday hours before he was to attend a meeting between Palestinian leaders and a visiting State Department delegation. Ghassan Al Katib, a political-cultural studies at the Zeit University, was arrested by soldiers and security police at his home in the West Bank city of Ramallah at 2 a.m. He was one of six Palestinians who had been invited by U.S. officials to a meeting later in the day to discuss Israel’s proposal for holding elections in the occupied territories. Mr. Al Katib, 37, is regarded as being close to the Palestine Communist Party, which is widely regarded as the most moderate of the major Palestinian factions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It has supported the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel and its renunciation of terrorism. Israeli authorities told U.S. officials that Mr. Al Katib was arrested for ‘security reasons.’ Israeli authorities told U.S. officials that Mr. Al Katib was arrested for ‘security reasons’ but gave no other information, a knowledgeable official said. The five other Palestinians showed up as scheduled for a meeting with Dennis Ross, chief of the State Department’s policy planning staff. Mr. Ross, who had returned to Israel after talks with Egyptian and Jordanian officials, commented only that he hoped there would be more meetings in the future. ‘Each of the Palestinians offered their own separate opinion,’ he said. As expected, the Palestinians expressed objections to the election plan offered by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and approved by Israel’s Cabinet on Sunday. Mr. Shamir’s proposal rules out the eventual creation of a Palestinian state or talks between Israel and the PLO. It offers a sketchy outline for elections in which Palestinians could choose representatives to negotiate limited self-rule and, eventually, to negotiate the permanent status of the territories. A’zedin Arian, head of the West Bank’s Red Crescent Society, Arab equivalent to the Red Cross, said that Mr. Shamir’s plan reserved all decision-making for Israel. ‘Democratic elections mean that we shall be the ones to determine the form of the elections, where they should take place, when, who shall be elected and who shall have the right to elect,’ Mr. Arian said. ‘We are not in favor of elections just for the sake of elections.’”
A man arrested at two in the morning hours before a meeting with American officials, and the reason given for it, printed as a pull quote in the middle of the story.
Israelis taking over jobs of Palestinians in Ashdod
Robert Ruby, Jerusalem bureau of The Sun
“ASHDOD, Israel — Instead of attending her usual classes at the local high school, Livnette Cecil and her friends were working yesterday at cleaning streets and picking up trash. All of Ashdod was proud of them. Their work was part of an experiment, city officials explained earnestly, an experiment at prohibiting Palestinians from working for the municipality and replacing them at any cost with Israelis, even if it means taking Israeli pupils out of school. ‘We’re trying to have a separation of forces,’ said David Artom, a city spokesman, using the language of warfare. The city is trying to keep Palestinians and Israelis apart by telling Palestinians they aren’t welcome here, at least not now… ‘They should be kept there until they calm down,’ said a woman who walked into the video store. By the standards of the moment, she was a moderate, disagreeing with Mr. Alfonta, the manager, when he suggested expelling all the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and West Bank. ‘We can’t put them on trucks,’ she said. ‘We’re not Hitler.’”
A staff correspondent walks around one Israeli town and writes down what people say. The reporter’s own sentence, not a quotation, is the one that says the city is telling Palestinians they are not welcome.
Israel to hold Moslem cleric under administrative detention
Marjorie Olster, The Associated Press, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM — Israel is holding a Moslem cleric kidnapped from south Lebanon two weeks ago under administrative detention orders normally used to detain Palestinians without trial, the army said today. The announcement of a six-month detention order against Sheik Abdel-Karim Obeid officially confirmed for the first time that Obeid is being held in Israel and not in the Israeli-controlled buffer zone in south Lebanon. But officials have not said where in Israel Obeid is held. The military censor, meanwhile, has asked police to open an investigation into a report in the Sunday Times of London that said two of three Israeli soldiers missing in Lebanon are dead, said Eitan Haber, spokesman for Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin… An army spokesman said Obeid, the Lebanese cleric kidnapped by Israeli commandos on July 28, is being held for a half-year under an administrative detention order signed by Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron. Under administrative detention, which Israel adopted from 1945 British emergency regulations, prisoners can be held up to one year without being tried or charged. Israel accuses Obeid of coordinating attacks by the Moslem fundamentalist Hezbollah on Israeli troops in south Lebanon. Administrative detainees are normally entitled to have a lawyer and appeal their detention. But the army spokesman, who is not identified under military regulations, would not say if these rights were extended to Obeid. Obeid’s abduction drew worldwide attention after a radical Shiite group in Lebanon claimed to have killed an American hostage because Israel refused to free the cleric. It remains unclear, however, if the hostage, Lt. Col. William R. Higgins, was killed after Obeid’s abduction or before. Israel has demanded the release of three Israelis missing in Lebanon as well as 16 foreign hostages in exchange for Obeid and other Shiite Moslem prisoners. Longest held of those hostages is Terry A. Anderson, chief Middle East correspondent of The AP, who has been held 4½ years… The story written by the paper’s London-based Middle East correspondent Marie Colvin said intelligence officers questioning Obeid have concluded that the two infantrymen died of wounds soon after their car was ambushed in south Lebanon in February 1986. Israel’s chief army spokesman, Brig. Gen. Ephraim Lapid, did not confirm or deny the report but said the government considers its soldiers to be alive and well unless it is given substantial documentary proof to the contrary. In another report on the hostage affair, The Independent of London said Monday that Obeid’s abduction had sabotaged sensitive overtures by Israel to Iran and the Hezbollah to free the prisoners… The team had ‘opened new channels with Iran and the Hezbollah via two Palestinian Shiites who have close links with Teheran,’ the paper said. Frustrated by the slow progress of negotiations, Israel kidnapped Obeid, it said… One security source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the report was ‘nonsense.’”
“OBEID”
The archive holds this for a sentence in the middle of it: administrative detention is described as the order “normally used to detain Palestinians without trial,” adopted from 1945 British emergency regulations. The army spokesman is, by regulation, not named.
“The saddest story of our times is the continued idiocy of United States policy in the Middle East. The Israeli government sponsors the kidnapping of a Moslem leader and commits murder in the process. Then the oppressed freedom-fighters execute a U.S. captive they are holding. And what is this country’s response? ‘But the Bush administration made clear Monday it did not hold Israel responsible for Higgins’ reported execution.’ (The Clarion-Ledger, Aug. 1). When a nation’s ‘friends’ in a war-zone seek to manipulate events to ensnare it in the morass of perpetual crisis, it is time for that nation to drop such false ‘friends.’ Israel was established in 1948. Yet in all the years before and after that incredible piece of political magic — the appearance of Israel and the disappearance of Palestine — only two U.S. presidents have shown any wisdom and backbone in formulating this country’s policy. Roosevelt said no to the founding of the state of Israel. And Eisenhower told Israel to get out of Suez in 1956. Since then, the moral and political idiots have ruled from the White House. The real problem lies in this and other nations’ support for a quasi-insane and immoral policy toward Palestine/Israel. Men and women of one religious persuasion, though natives of Moscow, Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Boise and New York, are granted rights of citizenship and ownership of all the land of Israel. Yet men and women of a different faith are denied those same rights, even then they are born in Jerusalem, Nablus or Nazareth. Meanwhile, what is the Mississippi delegation to Congress doing in making the local citizens’ desires known to the government? They’re doing just what you would expect senators and representatives from the poorest and most backward of the 50 states to do — either be quiet and fall in line or just ignore the true sentiments of their constituents. Check the recent actions of Sen. Trent Lott and U.S. Reps. Mike Espy and Sonny Montgomery as examples. Future generations — if there will be any future for us — will look back on our era and condemn us as the vacuous moralists and war criminals that we are. And it will all be due to our blind spot and support for the great crime of our century — the creation of Israel and the genocide of Palestine.”
A reader in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1989, whose argument runs through his own state’s congressional delegation. The paper put the word in the headline, in quotation marks.
The agent is in the last two words and attached to the noun rather than to a verb: people die in shootings that are Israeli. Nobody shoots. The girl is counted separately from the Palestinians and called Arab, so the headline uses two different words for the same people in eight words.
Quayle asks U.N. to repeal resolution on Zionism, racism
Associated Press, United Nations
“UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Vice President Dan Quayle said this week the United Nations should repeal its ‘odious’ 1975 resolution that equates Zionism with racism in an effort to promote the Middle East peace process. He also gave Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar a check for $65 million in partial payment of major U.S. arrears, an issue that has stirred anti-U.S. sentiment here. U.N. officials said the United States now owes $365 million for the regular budget and $153 million for peacekeeping. ‘Repealing this resolution would re-establish the stature and moral authority of the U.N.,’ Quayle said… Francois Giuliani, spokesman for the secretary-general, said it is up to the member states and General Assembly to decide. He said no resolution has ever been rescinded or repealed, but that the 159-nation General Assembly ‘can innovate if it wishes to do so.’ Resolutions are part of the permanent record and cannot be repealed or erased, U.N. diplomats said.… Quayle was asked how repeal would promote Palestinian rights. He said that renouncing the resolution would help human rights in the occupied territories and send a positive signal about the Middle East peace process… The General Assembly later adopted a package of pro-PLO, anti-Israel resolutions — an annual event.”
The vice president asks for the repeal and hands over a cheque for arrears in the same visit. The useful paragraph is the procedural one: at the end of 1989 no General Assembly resolution had ever been rescinded, and a spokesman had to explain that the body could innovate if it wished.
Part of Covering Palestine, an archive of 1262 newspaper clippings about Palestinians printed in 512 papers between 1799 and 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles. Nothing here was printed after 6 October 2023.