Working in Jordan during al-Nakba

According to my wife, the news about the 60th anniversary of the creation of Israel is sparse. Where a report exists, the accounts lean toward celebration. Here in Jordan, where many people still wait for the day when they can go back to a house that was stolen from them long ago, this anniversary is as much to celebrate as Columbus Day is to Native Americans.

Since I first began traveling to Jordan to research the effects of educational interventions here, I have had my eyes opened to the bias in the American media about the Israeli-Palestinian (or should I say, Palestinian-Israeli?) conflict.

It seems to me that our undying, uncritical relationship with Israel, which refuses to tie funding to human rights policy (like it does with any other country who receives our largesse) runs the great likelihood of undermining the very security that the United States wishes for Israel.

I insert here some quotes from newspapers in Jordan, with the aim of letting people see an alternate perspective. Good example: When asked why many Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist, a common response is to turn the criticism on its head. The regular treatment of the Palestinians like dogs is a refusal to allow them to exist. The Jewish people have been in this area for less time than the Palestinians (read your Bible! The Jews stormed into the land and claimed divine authority to kill every man, woman, child and animal that they saw. The reason given for the conquest of the Jewish people was that they did not carry out the extermination of the people who were in the land first completely and without mercy.), and when they have been there, it has been a contentious relationship. Hear in these articles both a sorrow that their people are treated so poorly and without sympathy, and a true desire to just live in peace and raise their families.

This from Amnesty International's report released a few months ago:

"Israel has plunged the Palestinians into unprecedented levels of poverty and despair through 40 years of occupation, yet failed to ensure its own security...The Israeli barriers [which have been built on Arab lands] defy the International Court of Justice and separates Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank...Palestinians are also restricted by more than 500 checkpoints and blockades as well as a network of roads reserved solely for settlers and linking settlements with Israel proper. These policies are aimed at benefiting continuously expanding but unlawful Israeli settlements while causing the virtual collapse of the Palestinian economy...Israeli actions have resulted in widespread human rights abuses and have also failed to bring security to the Israeli and Palestinian civilian population." The report called on Israel to lift the blockades and other restrictions on Palestinians and ensure its actions target specific security threats rather than punish entire communities. Finally, it urged the Jewish state to stop building the barrier inside the West Bank, remove the parts it has already built there, gradually scrap all its settlements, and end its policy of demolishing Palestinian homes, declaring this set of policies to be a "modern-day apartheid."

How many Americans have heard this report?

Here's more to think about:

This morning, over breakfast, I read an article in the Jordanian Times, describing a recent expose from Britain about a 1976 rescue of passengers of a hijacked Air France flight at Entebbe, Uganda. Turns out the hijacking was rigged. It was Israelis dressed up as Palestinians, making demands. When the Israeli military showed up on the scene and "rescued" the passengers, it was seen as another reason for supporting Israelis over Palestinians.
I quote: "What was the objective of the Israeli role in the hijack? According to Colvin (then first secretary at the British embassy in Paris), the operation was designed to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization's standing in France and to prevent what Israel saw as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans."
The article goes on to describe other incidents which were later exposed as Israeli plots to make the Palestinian cause look bad. Then, of course, the Jordanian opinion I have heard so frequently here, which in the US is never stated, because it would be viewed as anti-Semitism:
"While it could not be proved that Israeli operatives played a direct role in the September 11 murderous suicide hijackings that resulted in the death of nearly 3,000 people in the US, strong evidence has emerged that Mossad (The Israeli secret service) had penetrated the group which carried out the attacks and provided vital assistance to facilitate the operation. That should explain why the US air defence failed to respond immediately to the hijackings and the entire anti-hijack operational network of the US failed to mobilise itself and take countermeasures...
"The exposure of the Israeli role in the 1976 hijack should serve as a reminder to all those who harbour hopes of a just and fair peace between the Arab world and Jewish state of how tough and deceitful it could get when it is pressed to accept the minimum conditions for peace; there would be dramatic and stunning incidents designed to divert world attention and to strengthen Israeli negotiating positions...
"The Arabs face the challenging mission of being able to outguess and outwit the Israelis at every stage, and this is no easy task."

This opinion reminds me of the liberation front in El Salvador, when I went there. They claimed that the Salvadoran army, with funding from the US government, would routinely pose as Liberation Army personnel and attack its own people, in order to make the case for continued funding and support from world leaders.

Perhaps this is just what people who are fighting for their lives say? I don't know, but it sure is an interesting perspective, and one that I hear over and over and over.

Pass it on to anyone you think might be interested in hearing another side.

Listen, I'm not an anti-Semite, and I think that Israel has a right to be there. But so do the people who were there in 1947. And everyone has a right to speak out against their oppression. Clearly, if you start watching the disproportionate response from Israel to Palestinian, followed by the blame of the Palestinian side as "terrorist," you will see how frustrating it must be for what will soon be a not-so-silent majority. Not to mention how infuriating it must be to be called an anti-Semite, when you are yourself a Semite!

In the words of a writer of a recent editorial here, "The Jews did not survive extermination only to entrench themselves behind walls of their own making. They survived in order to resolve what for too long has looked like an insoluble conundrum: legitimising Jewish statehood in the eyes of those who consider themselves its victims."

When I speak with Palestinians here, they are angry, but they are also ready. Ready to stay alive, and coexist, if only the other side would stop looking at them out of the corner of their eye, with all the rationality of a paranoid schizophrenic. Israel "must ultimately free itself from the albatross around its neck and relinquish the occupied territories." The cushion of the West Bank and Gaza is not working, is it?