[oman-l] Urge your local paper to run this article (fwd)

[E]

Please delete my name from this mailing list. What started out as a
very pleasant mail list with articles on a very unique and pleasant
country, i.e. Oman, has now degenerated into a forum for filth, as 
evidenced by a very recent mailing and now, politics as evidenced by
the attached article. 

Edgar F. Cook
> 
> The following article appeared on the SaudiList... I thought that it might
> be of interest to some on this list.
> Thanks.
> 
> Abdulla
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 4 Jun 1998 21:23:22 -0400
> From: Abdulfattah Zahed <bz936@torfree.net>
> Reply-To: Saudi Arabia mailing list <saudi-l@haynese.winthrop.edu>
> To: Multiple recipients of list saudi-l <saudi-l@haynese.winthrop.edu>
> Subject: Urge your local paper to run this article
> 
> From: zahi damuni, zdamuni@classic.msn.com/ Alhambra,
> alhambra@globedirect,com (.com)
> 
> Dear Friends,
> 
> We need to act quickly!!!
> 
> A version of the following piece (see below) ran in the Baltimore Sun
> (Sunday, May 31,1998). It was just put out over the LA Times - Washington
> Post wire.
> As I understand it, this means that hundreds of papers around the country
> have access to it.
> I suggest we contact our local papers (the opinion page editor,
> particularly
> the Sunday editor) and urge them to publish this piece.
> 
> If they do not have access to the wire, you can e-mail them the article
> (see
> below).
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---
> -------------------------------------------
> Celebrate 50 Years? Of What?
> by Sam Husseini
> 
> It was the most loving fax I've ever received. I had just come back to the
> office from asking Benjamin Netanyahu a few questions at a press
> conference
> during his visit in January. I was astonished to learn that my dad, now in
> Amman, Jordan saw it on CNN International. "You were fantastic," he wrote
> me.
> 
> I was thinking of dad -- and the fact that he and 700,000 other
> Palestinians
> were forced from their homes 1948 -- as I asked the Israeli leader if it
> was
> not time that Israel acknowledged this wrong that it has committed. The
> most
> he conceded was that the Palestinian people have indeed suffered because
> of their own bad leadership.
> 
> During Netanyahu's visit earlier this month, the Israeli Prime Minister
> managed to squabble with the Clinton administration possibly the most
> pro-Israeli in history.  He rejected even the paltry pullback from 13
> percent of the West Bank the administration favors. Palestinians are to be
> denied even the slightest face-saving deal. Rather, they will, if Israel
> gets its way, be subjugated to Bantustans -- dense population areas and
> limited control of areas surrounding them. Israel wants to continue to
> control the population flow from various cities and most of the land and
> the
> water resources in the West Bank. As Netanyahu stalls for time, he
> confiscates more Palestinian land, heaps more injustice upon an injured
> people and sows the seeds of more Palestinian resentment.
> 
> The inability of the Clinton administration to make any sort of progress
> prompted the French and the Egyptians to call for an international peace
> conference. That could put the issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
> were it was 50 years ago: In the hands of the United Nations.
> 
> I talked to dad on his birthday -- April 9, but it was low key. Neither of
> us mentioned it, but it was 50 years to the day after the massacre of Deir
> Yassin, a village near Jerusalem, virtually the only massacre of
> Palestinians by pro-Israeli forces that has any recognition, but it is
> only
> one of many, including one where my father was in a village called
> Eilaboun
> in the Galilee. Last time I was in the Mideast, I visited the towns and
> villages where he was in 1948 and he put some flesh on events that he had
> hinted at for years.
> 
> One evening we walked around Terra Sancta College where my father was a
> boarder at the end of the British mandate, in a largely Jewish part of
> Jerusalem. On a similar evening in 1947, he was puzzled when he heard
> jubilation and dancing in the streets. Another student said that the UN
> apparently made a decision the Jews liked. The UN had voted to partition
> 
> Palestine. They had good reason to celebrate. The Jewish state was
> allocated
> 56 percent of Palestine, even though Jews only owned 6 percent of the land
> and made up one-third of the population and most of them were mandate-era
> immigrants.
> 
> We visited Tiberias, where my dad was born. We saw the lovely stone house
> he
> was raised in, now abandoned, overlooking the Sea of Galilee. I had
> visions
> of it becoming a museum for what happened in 1948 -- before it is
> demolished
> to make room for another hotel. Despite my prodding, my dad, hardly a shy
> man, did not want to try to get into the house.
> 
> My dad told me of his earliest memories of his own father, who was
> vice-mayor of Tiberias, gerrymandering election maps. But a Christian, no
> matter how adept at dividing up districts, could not secure reelection
> without substantial Jewish and Muslim support. There certainly were
> prejudices, but the intermingling of the faiths contradicts the "ancient
> hatreds" mantra we hear so often. Two of my uncles nursed by neighbors,
> since my grandmother had problems lactating. One had a Muslim wet nurse,
> another was breast-fed by a Jewish neighbor. We went to a gaudy hotel not
> far from the house and got a room at about the same level as the house.
> They
> gave us the tourist rate, since we "weren't from there."
> 
> I resented much of what I saw, but my dad chummed around with the clerk,
> who
> was an Israeli Arab. Later, I would complain about the price of film in
> Israel -- my dad was amused, "they steal the whole country from us and
> you're upset about a roll of film?"
> 
> He wasn't seeking justice he just wanted to enjoy his special place.
> Swimming in the lake, I saw my dad as a child, telling me of his exploits
> with friends, catching crabs, stealing fruit from nearby orchards and
> other
> devious deeds I never dreamed of as a kid.
> 
> We went to a lawyer's office and he showed us the land records with my
> grandfather's name, "Yousef Habib Husseini" in English, crossed out as
> owner
> and the "Israeli Authority of Construction" written in Hebrew. My father's
> claim to the property of his parents, though fully documented have been
> rejected by the Israeli authorities who regard him as an "absentee," and
> thus not a legitimate inheritor. Never mind that he was made an "absentee"
> at the point of a gun. This even as the World Jewish Restitution
> Organization gets restitution and ownership of Jewish owned property in
> Europe.
> 
> Tiberias fell to Israeli forces fifty years ago. It was then that my dad
> and
> his younger brother went to the small village of Eilaboun where they had
> relatives. Today, my extended family there are educated, but they retain a
> simplicity I haven't experienced elsewhere. They are technically Israeli
> citizens, but since they are not Jewish, are distinctly third class
> citizens. They and other Christians and Muslims cannot buy or lease land
> on
> 90 percent of Israel, controled by quasi-governmental organizations such
> as
> the Jewish National Fund -- even land confiscated from my family.
> 
> The "who is a Jew" debate only matters because Jews in Israel are granted
> rights that others, like my relatives, are denied because of their
> religion
> 
> -- Christianity. Yet we are constantly told that Israel is a democracy.
> They
> even do not dare go on picnics on Independence Holiday for fear of attacks
> from Jewish extremists this after 50 years of being Israelis.
> 
> Dad showed me the square where the massacre at Eilaboun took place. On
> October 30, 1948, most everyone from the village was in the church as the
> Arab irregulars were withdrawing. The bombing from the Israeli forces came
> closer and closer until finally, a loud voice in the village yard adjacent
> to the church said "He who wants to live let him come out." They rushed
> outside with hands held high. The Israeli soldiers occasionally shot those
> coming out of the church. The priest, with a white flag in hand, watched
> in
> horror.
> 
> Fourteen civilians from the village were put on a truck and lead the
> convoy
> going north -- to Lebanon. They were told that they were at the front
> incase
> of land mines. The Israelis proceeded to force the rest of the people,
> young
> and old to walk. When they wanted people to stop, the Israeli soldiers
> would fire, sometimes into the crowd. A three year old girl was shot in
> the
> arm as her mother was carrying her. My dad, then 16, jumped on top of his
> 10
> year old brother, who was very frail because of rheumatic fever figuring
> that only one body would be exposed. When his father later found out about
> this, it was the one and only time my dad saw grandpa cry.
> 
> People walked all day with no food to eat. When a truck with some bread
> came
> by, and people rushed towards it, soldiers shot at them, killing a fifty
> year old man, Samaan Shufani, who was standing next to my dad moments
> earlier. Later, the Israeli soldiers took all the money from the men,
> strip
> searched them, and threatened to kill 10 men if the women didn't fork over
> 100 Palestinian Pounds. My aunt Julia came through -- as she would years
> later, having saved several of my grandfather's letters. The village later
> repaid her.
> 
> The 14 men on the truck included some distant (by my standards) relatives
> and they were eventually taken back to Eilaboun and shot in the town
> square. The other villagers were thrown on the Lebanese border. These were
> all relatively fortunate. My father was lucky because an uncle who was an
> officer in the Jordanian army took him in and he continued his studies in
> Terra Sancta Collage, which moved to Amman, Jordan. Other Eilabounites
> made
> their way back to their village the Israelis turned a blind eye to them,
> apparently in part because the church had protested the massacre of the
> fourteen villagers.
> 
> Hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians are to this day in refugee
> camps
> in southern Lebanon -- periodically getting bombed by Israel. As we drove
> around Galilee, we stopped at the village Lubya. Or rather, all that
> remains
> of it. It is one of 418 villages that were razed by the Israelis after
> they
> "ethnically cleansed" the 2000 inhabitants. All you see now are hints of
> rows of stones tracing the foundations of homes -- as well as some
> cactuses, the anti-theft system of village life.
> 
> Atrocities by Israeli forces were more than just flukes, but part of a
> sustained effort by the Israeli forces to drive non-Jewish Palestinians
> out.
> It's a picture of Israel that most Americans even more than Israelis
> shrink
> from, but it is the historical record.  Israel's "new historians" are
> noting
> often sugar-coating the crimes of Zionist forces that
> Palestinians have been noting for decades.  The former director of the
> Israeli army archives wrote that "in almost every Arab village occupied by
> us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined
> as
> war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes."
> 
> As Elie Wiesel and others condemn ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, they refuse
> to
> acknowledge that Israel has done basically the same. Ted Koppel has
> falsely
> claimed that the Palestinians left voluntarily in 1948. Michael Lerner of
> the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun has disavowed Jewish culpability in
> driving Palestinians from their homes.  Early in Schindler's List, a Jew
> is
> shown pleading with Nazis, saying that their seizure of his property
> violates the Geneva Convention. But Israel violates the very same laws as
> it
> continues to confiscate Palestinian land. Steven Spielberg joined in a
> recent celebration for Israel on CBS.
> 
> Nineteen forty-eight resonates for Palestinians not just because it was a
> catastrophic event, but because the process of getting Palestinians off
> their land has never really stopped. Through out the fifties and sixties,
> present-day Arab Israeli citizens lived under suffocating military
> mandates.
> Similarly, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have contended with
> Israeli military occupation government schemes permits, checkpoints,
> closures pressure them into leaving. Another mass exodus from the West
> Bank took place in the 1967 war, and Israel continued expelling political
> leaders and others into the 1990's.
> 
> In 1989, after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the Israeli Deputy
> Foreign
> Minister, said "Israel should have exploited the repression of the
> demonstrations in China, when the world attention focused on that country,
> to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories." That
> Minister was Benjamin Netanyahu.
> 
> The threat of another mass expulsion is useful to Israel as many
> Palestinians are accepting a peace based on anything but equality under
> the
> Oslo accords -- better to be subservient but still have a stake in your
> home
> goes the reasoning. What is needed first is to get rid of the myths. What
> is
> needed is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like South Africa's. Real
> peace can only come from facing the past.
> 
> Sam Husseini is former Media Director of the American-Arab
> Anti-Discrimination Committee.
> 
> Sam Husseini
> Institute for Public Accuracy
> 915 National Press Building
> Washington, DC 20045
> 202-347-0020; Fax: 347-0290