Jewish, Arab peace activists urge more aid to Palestinian Authority

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Two local peace activists — one Jewish and one Palestinian — urged the Bush and Sharon administrations to help short-circuit terrorist attacks by helping the Palestinian Authority beef up its economy and security apparatus.

In a joint appearance Nov. 7 before South Mountain Peace Action, an anti-war organization based in Maplewood, Mark Rosenblum, founder and policy director of Americans for Peace Now, and Rafi Dajani, executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine, said they speak for mainstream Jews and Palestinians in the United States and the Middle East who favor serious negotiations and mutual concessions to bring about a two-state solution in the Middle East.

Leading off the far-reaching forum at the Maplewood Women’s Club, Dajani said the election of Mahmoud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority, the ceasefire that has brought a relative calm after the height of the second Intifada, and the withdrawal of the Israeli presence from Gaza have “all failed to live up to their potential for kick-starting serious movements and progress towards peace and a two-state solution to the conflict, which a majority of Israelis and Palestinians favor.”

Citing a recent public opinion poll, Dajani said a vast Palestinian majority “does not want a return to armed conflict and favors the disarming of Palestinian militant groups as part of a process of establishing law and order and a central authority.”

But he noted that in Gaza “lawlessness is rampant and the Palestinian president is stuck,” because the United States and Israel demand that Abbas tighten security. Abbas, meanwhile, “feels he cannot take action against militant groups without delivering something to his people.”

Dajani said that “asking President Abbas to disarm his opponents without providing him the tools to do so and without giving him and his people a future sense of their independence in a viable state is neither realistic nor achievable.”

Dajani also urged Israel to help revitalize the Palestinian economy by loosening its control of the West Bank and Gaza borders. “It is Hamas, and not Israel, that benefits from Palestinian poverty and frustration,” he said.

Agreeing with much of Dajani’s words, Rosenblum, a history professor at Queens College, said the Palestinians “need to feel it pays for them to be pragmatic, that it pays in economic terms, in security terms, in mobility terms.”

Rosenblum said Abbas and his associates are “democratic doves, against armed struggle and against violence. But they have not an uphill but an up-mountain struggle. [The problem] is how to rein in the loose cannons after four suicide attacks that have occurred since the relative calm.

“Mahmoud Abbas must be prepared to be evaluated based on what his capacities are, and his capacities are quite feeble at the moment.”

Rosenblum was also critical of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s declaration that he would not ease restrictions on Palestinian society and would stop official contact with the Palestinian Authority if the terrorist group Hamas were allowed to run in Palestinian elections.

“This is a fool’s paradise,” said Rosenblum. “The trick is to make demands of Mahmoud Abbas that are not within his capacity. Otherwise you are designing a test that any professor can design, [one] which he knows every one of his students will fail.”

When a question-and-answer period began, a woman dressed in an orange sweater and baseball cap — a color favored by those who opposed the dismantlement of the Jewish settlements in Gaza — rose from the second row to defend Israel’s security fence.

“I was there,” she said. “I fought with these people. The wall is being built for security reasons, not to separate Israel from Palestine.”

As Dajani rose to the podium, saying he wanted to respond, she said, “I’d like to hear your lies. Yes.”

Others in the audience told her to be quiet, and, after a brief back-and-forth exchange, SMPA chair Paul Surovell invited Dajani to respond.

“The issue is not whether Israel has a right to build a barrier. The issue is where the barrier is being built,” Dajani said. “You may not agree that it is being built in Palestinian land but the vast majority of the international community, a great segment of the Israeli public, and all Palestinians consider that Palestinian land. So the barrier is illegal to the extent it is being built on Palestinian land. Has it saved Israeli lives? No doubt. But in the long term, I believe, the more it is built on Palestinian land, the more it is going to breed the frustration and the anger that fuel the violence against Israelis.”

“They should be thrown into the sea,” the orange-clad woman said of the Palestinians, as she stormed out of the meeting.

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njjewishnews.com.

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