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February 3, 2012
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Victoria Kim: Immigrant-smuggling ring used black drivers to avoid racial profiling
February 2, 2012
Jim Carney: Wrong number call may have saved her life
Reza Kahlili : Ex-CIA spy in Iran's Revolutionary Guard: What Obama doesn't grasp about striking deals with Tehran
Tina Susman: For woodchuck rescuer, every day is Groundhog Day
February 1, 2012
Brian Bennett: US officials see increasing threat of domestic attack from Iran
Emily Brandon: How to Take Advantage of New 401(k) Fee Disclosures
January 31, 2012
January 30, 2012
Paul Richter and Ramin Mostaghim: Misreading Teheran's limits -- deadly and economically devastating as they may be -- is a risk administration, Europe seem willing to take
Suzanne Bohan: Warning: Nap-deprived tots missing more than sleep, study finds
Meg Handley: Banks Revamping Rewards Programs to Woo Customers
January 27, 2012
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Yochonon Donn: In liberal New York City, fervently-Orthodox Jews may soon be getting a district to call their own
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Katy Hopkins: New budget rules may affect how much money you get for college
January 26, 2012
Ed Koch: To the New York Times, calling for the murder of Jews by those capable of having their incitement taken seriously isn't news
Jeannine Stein: Mental illness struck one in five U.S. adults in 2010: Report
January 25, 2012
Richard Simon: House passes two bills endorsing the use of religious symbols at military memorials
Fred Weir: Putin: Multiethnic Russia cannot survive as a US-style 'melting pot'; must find its own way
Susan Johnston: 5 Sneaky Coupon Strategies Consumers Should Watch Out For
January 24, 2012
Carol Clark: The price of your soul: How your brain decides whether to 'sell out'
Caroline B. Glick: America lost most in 'Arab Spring'. Sadly, many voters still don't grasp the extent
Warren Richey: Drug criminal scores win in GPS ruling from conservative-leaning high court
Erika Bolstad: Black conservatives gather to talk about gaining strength
January 23, 2012
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Ali Safi: U.S. envoy gives Taliban terms for peace talks
January 19, 2012
January 18, 2012
January 17, 2012
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January 12, 2012
Warren Richey: Landmark Supreme Court ruling a 'resounding win' for religious groups
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January 11, 2012
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Tom Hussain: Pakistan -- recipient of more than $21 billion in civilian and military aid -- speeds pursuit of Iranian pipeline, defying US
David G. Savage: High court signals it won't be loosening TV's 'indecency' rules
Stephen Ceasar: Oklahoma's Islamic law amendment can't go into effect, court rules
January 10, 2012
Reza Kahlili: From an ex-CIA spy: US must exploit new split in Iran's Revolutionary Guard
Karen Kaplan: Study: Nicotine replacement products ineffective when used in real-life situations
January 9, 2012
Michael Doyle: Put through legal hell over dream home, couple fought back hard --- all the way to Supreme Court
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Jewish World Review
Nov. 18, 2004
/ 5 Kislev, 5765
No seeds for Middle East peace
By
Suzanne Fields
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
When my father died a decade ago an American friend planted 100 trees in Israel as a memorial: "For life, for hope, in honor, in memory." Even before Israel became a modern state in 1948, Jews from all over the world contributed money to plant trees in Israel as a gesture both practical and sacramental.
As a little girl, I urged my parents' friends to drop coins in a blue and white box that sat in our foyer for contributions to plant trees in Israel. "We can make the desert green," I told them with the earnestness of a child. At our synagogue we were told that every planted tree was touched by human hands. That was important after 6 million Jews had died in the Holocaust. The trees symbolized fertility, growth and replacement. Tradition told us that trees were originally planted in ancient days as commemoration of the first temple in Jerusalem.
Seen from the air, Israel is a plaid of fields and forests of green, claiming a promise for the future. What a pity that Muslims have no such promise for the state of Palestine. With the death of Yasser Arafat, the world is reminded of how his ideology of hate was as dry and as barren as the infertile desert. He delivered only terror, suicide bombers, death and destruction, soaking the land with blood. No flowers bloomed.
Mr. Arafat professed that what he wanted to plant were seeds of peace, and gullible if well-meaning judges gave him the Nobel Peace Prize, a gesture of hope in the face of bitter experience. His deathbed became a scene of farce, with speculation not on what the Palestinians could do with the money he had collected over the years but how much his spoiled wife could spend in the shops of Paris. The estimates of the money Mr. Arafat had put away in Swiss and Caribbean bank accounts ran to the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Palestinians stuck in the miserable refugee camps were always instruments only of Mr. Arafat's power. Better for him that the Palestinians should live in poverty than in a state where they could flourish and prosper. Palestinian poverty became a public-relations weapon.
The generous offer made at Camp David in 2000, the best his people could ever expect — 97 percent of what he had asked, by one estimate — was turned down in an exercise of breathtaking cynicism. Cruel though he was to the Israelis, his abuse of power was even more hurtful to his own people. He deprived them of a peace delivered through politics unaccompanied by death and destruction. He nevertheless manipulated world opinion with a boffo performance before a world eager to be manipulated.
"The very fact of his longevity gives the lie to Arafat's contrived image of noble weakness," observes Mario Loyola in the Weekly Standard. "He survived in a political landscape of thugs and murderers because they all knew that he was one of them. A weak man would not have survived." When leftist students here and in Europe were left as rebels without a cause with the end of the Vietnam War, the Palestinians replaced the Viet Cong as romantic revolutionaries. Hatred is a powerful narcotic for intellectuals, particularly those who live comfortably in the embrace of the campuses. Anti-Semitism lost its cachet at the end of World War II, but anti-Zionism neatly replaced it beneath what Bernard Lewis, the Middle Eastern scholar, called "the veil of respectability." Although anti-Zionism is not always the equivalent of anti-Semitism, sometimes it is. Mr. Arafat manipulated that, too. In 1975, a year after he addressed the United Nations with a pistol strapped ostentatiously to his hip, the delegates adopted a resolution declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." In 2001, 3,000 non-governmental organizations at the United Nations World Conference on Racism declared Israel to be a "racist apartheid state" and guilty of "war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing," deleting all clauses that opposed anti-Semitism.
At Mr. Arafat's death Jacques Chirac, the president of France, celebrated him as "a man of courage and conviction," showing no shame in a country where Frenchmen are still being exposed as having willingly participated in the Holocaust.
The man of "courage and conviction" planted no trees, but poisoned a generation deprived of a hope for peace.
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© 2004, Suzanne Fields. TMS
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