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You lost your home, your business, your school, your country. You would feel bitter— there is nothing mysterious about that—and you would feel desperate. Terrorism is a reXection of that desperation. I do not favor terrorism, and I do not excuse it, but let’s be honest: If the situation were reversed, Jewish boys would be doing what Arab boys are doing. Jewish terrorists did it in 1946 and 1948. They killed women and children in Jerusalem, they blew up the King David Hotel, they destroyed Arab villages. The way to end the terror, the way to heal the breach, is Wrst of all to recognize (as Chaim Weizmann, the Wrst president of Israel, recognized from the beginning of Zionism) that this is a struggle of right against right, that there is an Arab side and a Jewish side, that we must Wnd a way to live together. We must begin to see the problem through their eyes, and thus have the right to ask them to see it through ours. I want to see Israel live. If we do not pursue the path of reconciliation, the Jewish people will be transformed in the span of a generation; we cannot harden our hearts against our Arab brothers and remain the kind of people we have been proud of being for 2,000 years. We will begin to turn our backs on everything we have been proud of, everything that the Bible and the Prophets stand for. It would not be the Wrst time. Every time God has given the Holy Land back to us, we have gone after strange gods. Now we are in danger of bowing down to the idols of militarism and force and realpolitik. Isaiah says, “Israel shall be redeemed by justice,” and for me, this time around, that means justice for the Arabs as well as for the Jews. —I. F. Stone, independent journalist and critic of U.S. foreign policy, published I. F. Stone’s Weekly. A Palestinian Versailles Edward W. Said december 1993 Now that some of the euphoria has lifted, it is possible to look at the agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization with the common sense it requires. What emerges from such scrutiny is a deal that is more Xawed and more weighted against most of the Palestinian people than many had Wrst supposed. The fashion show vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasir Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people’s rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a twentieth century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance: All these only temporarily obscure the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation. 306 part 15 upholding human rights So Wrst let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles. To go forward in the march toward Palestinian self-determination—which has meaning only if freedom, sovereignty, and equality, and not perpetual subservience to Israel, are its goals—we need an honest acknowledgement of where we are. The primary consideration in the document is Israel’s security, with none to protect the Palestinians from Israel’s incursions. In a mid-September press conference, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was straightforward about Israel’s continuing control over sovereignty; in addition, he said, Israel would hold the River Jordan, the boundaries with Egypt and Jordan, the sea, the land between Gaza and Jericho, Jerusalem, the settlements, and the roads. There is little in the document to suggest that Israel will give up its violence against Palestinians or compensate the victims of its policies for forty-Wve years. Neither Arafat nor any of his Palestinian partners with the Israelis in Oslo has ever seen an Israeli settlement. There are now more than 200 of them, principally on the hills, promontories, and strategic points throughout the West Bank and Gaza. An independent system of roads connects them to Israel and creates a disabling discontinuity between the main centers of the Palestinian population. Was there a single Palestinian watching the White House ceremony who did not also feel that a century of sacriWce, dispossession, and heroic struggle had Wnally come to naught? So far from being the victims of Zionism, the Palestinians saw themselves characterized before the world as its now repentant assailants, as if the thousands killed by Israel’s bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, schools in Lebanon, its expulsion...

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