By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources (www.originalsources.com)
October 19, 2000
One of my readers sent me an article entitled "Another Summit" from The News International, (http://www.jang-group.com/), a Pakistan publication, which suggests that the primary goal of the president's "peace-making" at Sharm el-Sheik in Egypt was actually:
"a desperate attempt by President Bill Clinton at damage control than any real effort at peace-making.""At home his vice-president Al Gore is going through the last stage of the presidential campaign and the images of bloodshed on television screens from renewed violence in the Middle East in the past three weeks, reinforcing the failure of the Camp David summit talks in July, do not do his ratings any good. The notion that US diplomatic efforts have proved futile are a hole in the heart of President Clinton's foreign policy achievements the Democrats are trying to cash.
"It is perhaps no coincidence that the emergency summit ended--with President Clinton claiming that both sides had agreed to 'concrete measures' to end the violence--just hours before the third and final presidential debate between Al Gore and George W Bush went on the air. The fact that the American President wanted to paper over controversy and contention and present a positive image was evident when the summit concluded with only President Clinton making the final statement and the usual question-and-answer session was shelved. Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat were sitting quietly by, not even speaking to each other throughout the ceremony.
"Given this background to the Sharm el-Sheik summit, the prospects of the verbal agreement actually ending violence and bringing calm in the Middle East do not seem very bright. As per the agreement, Palestinian and Israeli leaders are now supposed to issue public statements unequivocally calling for an end to violence and take immediate measures to halt the current confrontation; a fact-finding committee on the events of the past several weeks will be set up by the US with the Israelis and the Palestinians in consultation with the UN; and the US will consult with the two sides within the next two weeks about how to move forward."
"But moving forward seems unlikely. In some ways the Middle East peace process has actually moved three months backwards--to the Camp David impasse in July. In many other ways it has fallen back to the times when there was no peace process, only hatred and mistrust. The setting up and eventual implementation of the fact-finding committee, if not done quickly, will prove useless in preempting the outbreak of violence.
"No more productive will be attempts at brokering peace without cracking the real issue, which is that Israel should give the Palestinians back their land. The three bloody weeks are a pointer that the Palestinians' patience with the peace process is running out. Hollow accords that do not right the wrongs committed against them by Israel are sops that no longer do the trick."
The problem with that suggestion is the difficulty in deciding exactly who wronged whom, an issue that Arafat and his Muslim supporters simply refuse to address. The Palestinians lost the six day war in 1967 when they attacked the Jews with the intent of driving them out of the lands they had purchased over a period of more than 30 years. Jews have been returning to their ancient homeland from the late 1800s to escape pograms in various European countries. They BOUGHT the properties they occupied from the Turks, who then occupied the desolate area at the time. Millions of dollars, was poured into the restoration of the land contributed by the World Zioist Oranization, which was largely funded by the Rothchild family.
By 1914, over 90,000 Jews lived in Palestine and in 1917, after the Turks had been driven from the land by the British army, the Balfour Declaration was adopted by Britain which announced the establishment of a Jewish Homeland. By 1947, survivors of the Holocaust in Europe were risking their lives running the British blockade to get into Israel. When I went, by ship, to South Africa in 1947, the first mate was a Jew who had survived the Holocaust and had captained ships running the blockade to bring Jews to Israel. He said to us, in talking about his experiences, that "the soil of Europe burns to soles of our feet."
By 1956, more than 90% of the 1,718,000 population in Israel were Jews and the Arab Nationalism, which was largely financed and encouraged by the Soviet Union in an effort to draw them into the Soviet orbit, prompted the Arabs to close down or blow up every major oil line in the Middle East, except the American-owned Tapline. The United Arab Republic's Gamal Nasser consulted with the Soviets before and after he seized control of the Suez Canal to prevent any supplies to reach Israel.
Israel surprised the world by invading Egypt, occupied the Gaza strip, the Sinai Peninsula and drove within 18 miles of the Canal. The Israelis said they took action because of repeated border raids by troops of Egypt and Jordan. Both Britain and France quickly joined in support of Israel. Eventually Israel withdrew from the Sinai, giving it back to Egypt, but remained in the Gaza strip.
By 1967, when the Six Day War took place, the population of Israel, thanks largely to continued immigration, had reached 2,643,000, mostly Jews. There were only 220,000 Muslims, 59,000 Christians and 31,000 Druse. However, the Muslims were still determined to "drive out" the Jews. With a Soviet Styx missile, the United Arab Republic sank the Israeli destroyer Elath.
On May 18th Gamal Nasser, supporting the "right" of Syria to attack Israeli farmers, demanded that the 3,400 UN Emergency Force withdraw from the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula. The UN's Secretary General, U Thant, agreed, the Suez was occupied by Nasser's troops, closing it again to Israeli use.
Israel responded by fully mobilizing, bringing Moshe Dayan, hero of Suez in 1956 back as Minister of Defense and on June 5th bombed and strafed airfields in Iraq, Jordan, Syria and the U.A.R., basically destroying the Arab air force. This, naturally, totally infuriated the Arabs.
Today, the population of Israel has more than doubled, to 5,643,966 people, 82% or 4,628,052 of whom are Jews. Only 14%, or 790,155 are Muslims. The remaining population is mostly Christian, 2% and Druze, 2%.
The other important factor in all this, of course, is the fact that today, unlike 1956 or 1967, because of Clinton and Gore's environmentalism, America is far more dependent on oil for the Middle East. We were far more dependent on domestic oil supplies from America's own oil wells when Arabs were blowing up oil wells in 1956. Israel, which has transformed the Negev desert with millions of trees planted over the and literally billions of dollars supplied largely American taxpayers, German reparations, and voluntarily by American Jews, has made literally been "a miracle of 20th century ingenuity" as the World Book Encyclopedia puts it. "Seldom, if ever before, in history had a people worked with such energy to build a modern industrial nation on the ruins of the past."
This is the land that Arabs want the Jews to leave for them to enjoy. Most of the time the media reports the story in such a way that many people actually believe that the Arabs are the majority in Israel and the Jews somehow just stole their land from them. Actually, of course, most of the Jews living in Israel today are living on land that was totally barren and largely without water 50 years ago. It was a desert made to bloom through modern power and irrigation plants, new agricultural methods, mechanized equipment, chemical fertilizers, crop rotation, experimental seeds, etc. It is a land that didn't exist fifty or one hundred years ago.
Will the peace accord hold? There is not much hope that it will. For example, Speaker of the "People's Assembly" in Syria, said that peace cannot take place unless "Israel pulls out of the Syrian Golan to the June 4, 1967 lines, withdraws from the other occupied Arab territories and recognizes the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital in implementation of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and Madrid's terms of reference, namely the 'land for peace' principle."
If it doesn't hold, Clinton's timing, of course, puts the major decision on what to do about it takes place within less than a week of the Election. Could it all point towards war in Israel as the REAL October surprise?
Keep tuned. We'll soon find out.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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