On Thursday night, the Arab Students Association of Columbia U. held a discussion of Gaza, describing it as a prison. 150 people jammed into a classroom to hear the panel, with another 60 or so turned away. Panelist Andrew Whitley, a rep for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinian refugees, described the Israeli treatment of Gaza as "immoral, illegal and counterproductive," and was asked about the prospects for a two-state solution.
Whitley said that he was not supposed to express his own views on the subject, as there was an "official stance of the U.N." in favor of the two-state solution, but then he did not stop himself. "I personally think, having followed the issue for 25 years, the prospect is rapidly disappearing….The moment it could have been reached was some time ago." The effect of the Oslo accords was to push the prospect "into the long grass." Because Oslo allowed the creation of the Palestinian Authority and Israeli disengagement from Palestinian governance–the effect was to "postpone a Palestinian state forever."
In a sense Whitley is echoing Olmert, who said that Israel was finished if it does not achieve a two-state solution now. A desperation I heard at the IPF conference in December.
Yesterday a friend sent me a letter that the head of AIPAC wrote to the New York Times in 1984. In the letter, Thomas Dine attacked the great Anthony Lewis, a former columnist for the paper, for characterizing the scholar Walid Khalidi as a "moderate."
This may be true, if the standard of comparison is Abu Nidal and Abu Musa. But Khalidi demands that there be an armed P.L.O. West Bank state, [emphasis Weiss’s] with 250 tanks, that Jerusalem be turned over to Arafat and that Moscow be a party to the arrangements. Nor can we find a place where he calls on the P.L.O. to renounce terrorism.
I bring up Dine’s letter in connection with Whitley’s comments for a number of reasons. First, there was a time when the Israel lobby was dead set against a Palestinian state. Dine’s letter is evidence of the ferocity of that opposition. You will see that the Soviet threat is offered as a reason not to allow the Palestinians a state. Israel was our client in the cold war in ’84; as now it is our oasis of democracy in the Middle East in the war against terror. So the American public is manipulated on one warlike ground, then another. And since the end of the British mandate in ’48, the Palestinians have had no state to call their own. And young Jews in the U.S. are now questioning the idea of a two-state solution, with its arbitrary separation of peoples and inequitable division of land and water.
Note that Dine’s target in this letter is Walid Khalidi. Khalidi is said to be a leading scholar. In his landmark book of ’06, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe credits Khalidi’s book, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 as a seminal moral work of documentation. The history of the Nakba was of course cleansed from the American mind. And now even young Jews are hungry to learn it. But for the Israel lobby in ’84, these ideas were a form of terror.
