Regional peace conference will compromise Palestinian

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"The appeal for mutual recognition and for a peace conference to set up a Palestinian 'rump state' will do no service to the 8 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 1988 By On Jan. 10, 1988, Al-Fajr, a Jerusalem Palestinian weekly, published an ad signed by prominent Jews and Arabs living in the United States which called for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In the ad the signatories offer their political perspective for "resolving the violence" in Palestine. They write:

"We Jews and Arabs believe that continuation of the occupation will only lead to more violence. We support a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to ensure both Israeli and Palestinian national rights. So do a growing number of Israelis, including former Defense Minister Ezer Weissman.

"We call for an end to the occupation through the convening of an international peace conference on the Middle East with the participation of all parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict, including Israel and the In an interview with the Reuters press service on Jan. 18, Hanna Siniora, editor of Al Fajr, specified how Israeli and Palestinian "national rights" might be ensured at such an international peace conference.

Siniora called for "an association among Israel, Jordan, and a Palestinian state like that of the Benelux countries - with a demilitarized West Bank as the Luxemburg."

"Palestinians, including Arafat, would accept autonomy as an interim step toward independence," Siniora said. "Autonomy is a step that would lead eventually to negotiations between the state of Israel and the P.L.O., ending in a Palestinian state emerging as a result of those negotiations."

Siniora met with Secretary of State George Shultz in Washington on Jan. 28 to discuss this proposal.

The call for a Middle East peace conference has likewise been endorsed by a number of presidential candidates, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

"Overtures from Arafat for talks with Israel ought to be welcomed," Jackson said. "When the United States gives up the right to talk to the Palestinians, it gives up its right to protect Israel."

Jackson said that ever since his meeting with Arafat eight years ago, he has realized that it would be possible "to move the P.L.O. from its position of destruction and •. Palestinian struggle (continued from preceding page) torture is the standard procedure imposed on prisoner.

Since 1967, for example, in Gaza and the West Bank, 300,000 Palestinians have been through Israeli prisons, and torture is institutionalized and constant. This has been acknowledged by most of the established newspapers in Europe, and Amnesty International has documented it thoroughly. In fact, the Amnesty report of October 1986 was particularly detailed.

Amnesty reports, "Israel brutally tortures Arab prisoners, violates their basic human rights, detains them illegally, expels them over the borders, and thwarts any attempt to publicize the truth with regard to these matters."

The report is very specific and detailed as to the methods that are employed. People are beaten all over their body, deprived of their sleep. Sacks are put on people's heads. Electric torture is applied routinely.

Weissman: There was a report, I believe in yesterday's New York Times, about five schoolchildren who were treated this way. These were children ages 10 to 14 who were taken and beaten up.

Schoenman: Children as young as 8 have been held in prisons under these conditions and tortured. These are not random acts, aberrant acts on the part of particularly sadistic prison guards. It is institutionalized. It is systematic. frustration to one of mutual recognition." (San Francisco Examiner, Jan. 20, 1988)

Defusing the powder keg The strategy of the United States and Israel has always had one core objective: the eradication of the Palestinian resistance.

In the aftermath of the recent Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza, a growing wing of the U.S. ruling class has joined the call for the establishment of a Palestinian "mini-state" in the West Bank as a means toward accomplishing this objective and preventing the "destabilization" of the entire Arab East.

George Ball, who served as under secretary of state under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, recently spelled out how the United States and Israel should approach an international peace conference. Ball's article, which is titled "Peace for Israel hinges on a state for Palestinians," states the following:

"Israel's security worries largely But met by writing stringent, enforceable safeguards into a formal treaty, denying the new [Palestinian] state any armed force of its own and limiting the numbers and kinds of weapons available to its police. "As a further safeguard, the settlement could require installation of surveillance posts larger, more numerous and more effective than those now functioning in the Sinai under Israel's peace agreement with Palestinian people."

Egypt." (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 17, 1988)

Ball explains that the establishment of what he openly admits would be a "rump Palestinian state in the West Bank" is a matter of urgency. "If the United States does not seriously seek to bring the parties together," Ball warns, "the...warfare in the Holyland will spread and intensify; sooner or later, the neighboring Arab states-even Egypt-will be dragged into the maelstrom."

The "maelstrom" that this imperialist spokesperson so strongly fears is the The study that Mya Shone and I did for the United Nations—which is going to be published in an enlarged version called "Prisoners of Israel"-documents the sustained nature of the torture in prison after prison, not only in the West Bank and Gaza, but in the pre-1967 prisons of Israel as well.

Weissman: Why is it that there has been such a conspiracy of silence in this country about the real situation in Israel?

Schoenman: In the United States there has been a particular effort to preserve the myths about Zionism and about Israel because of the indispensable role that the Israeli state has played for U.S. imperialism in the region.

After all, over $90 billion have been supplied to Israel since 1948. The Israeli state is really a complete creature and extension of U.S. imperialism in the region. The established press has been extremely careful to promote myths about the presumptive Israeli democracy and to keep from the public the apartheid nature of the state and its brutality toward the Palestinian population.

It's been very difficult in the United States, as you are aware, to puncture the myths about the Zionist state because any attempt to discuss dispassionately the actual behavior of the Israeli state is met with charges of antiSemitism. People are intimidated and afraid to discuss what they would not hesitate to discuss in Chile or Bulgaria or South Africa. It is a form of intellectual terrorism.

Weissman: uprising in wis.

emancipation of the Arab masses of the region from the Israeli colonial-settler state; from the feudal sheiks of the Gulf and Arabian peninsula; and from the Egyptian regime, which has reduced the workers and peasants of Egypt to a level of poverty unknown even under King Farouk. "Crackpot realism"

The appeal for mutual recognition and for a peace conference to set up a Palestinian "rump state" will do no service to the Palestinian people.

Those who call for mutual recognition argue that there are two peoples and that each should be entitled to national rights— that is, a state. The Palestinians, it is implied, should close the book on pre-1967 Israel and settle for a statelet on the West Bank and Gaza.

Others who hold this position have argued on the basis of "realism" that only by accepting the fact of the Israeli state can the Jews be induced to support the idea of Palestinian statehood.

These views are based upon a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict and of the dangerous consequences of such advocacy.

Peace is inconceivable between a racist Israeli enclave —where even the "socialist" Mapam Party excludes Palestinians from full membership in its kibbutzim-and the Arab peoples of the region.

No Palestinian could recognize Israel in good faith. Some 90 percent of the land in Israel is administered by the Jewish National Fund under rules which require that those who lease or settle land prove that they descend from a Jewish mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.

If, in the United States, we had to prove the absence of Jewish maternal ancestry to enjoy elementary rights no one would doubt the racist character of such a state.

Not one Zionist grouping supports even a "separate but equal" Palestinian state. Even the best of them insist that Israel maintain its full military might while the Palestinians are disarmed.

The Labor Alignment and Likkud reject even this. To advance the view that a Palestinian state would be permitted by any Zionist government is to succumb to what C. Wright Mills called "crackpot realism." As to the illusion that the recognition of received what I would say is a qualitatively different coverage by the establishment media. It seems to be much more sympathetic to the conditions of life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

We're seeing things in the United States that only people who wanted to know about before would have known about. Is that your perception as well? And if it is, why is this so? Is policy changing?

Schoenman: I think what you're saying is correct. There has been a tremendous amount of press coverage that has shown the face of Zionism to the world in a way that hasn't happened before. But that is a function of the magnitude of the uprising. It's the self-activation of the Palestinian masses which has forced upon the established media the reality of the conditions under which the Palestinian people live.

The specter of revolution in the entire region of the Arab East is haunting the ruling class in the United States. I think that the Palestinian upsurge is inducing them to report things by way of sending a message to the Zionist rulers that they've got to cut some sort of deal.

The Zionists are receiving pressure to concede some little "Bantustan" [rural slums in South Africa where Blacks are confined] in the West Bank to the Palestinians, the better to quiet this uprising on the part of the population.

I don't think, however, that the accede even to this modest demand.

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rapprochement with Israel WHY ARE OUR TROOPS KILLING PALESTINIAN KIDS ON THE WEST BANK?

JAGGERMAN BOSTON GLOBE. OUR SOLDIERS ARE DEFENDING THEMSELVES AGAINST ROCK-THROWING MOBS BUT THESE ARE SCHOOL CHILDREN THEY AREN'T PLO GUERRILLAS! from Egypt to the Gulf.

It was but a few years ago that no Palestinian nationalist would dare associate AND THEY WON'T BE favor of the "mini-state" proposal. The