From the Editor

Missed Opportunities?

Oded Oren, a member of Barak's negotiating team at Camp David, went on public television the evening when the talks finally ended to quote Abba Eban's famous line that the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The real tragedy is that Israel never misses an opportunity to give the Arabs a new opportunity.

And Eban's premise was false. The Arabs seize opportunities that suit them, with the result that with each opportunity they "miss" by Israel's definition, they have nonetheless seriously weakened Israel. By embarking on Oslo (in which Arafat "seized" the opportunity Israel offered him to rise like a phoenix from the ashes in the wake of his disastrous support for Saddam in the Gulf War), Arafat obtained from Israel the territory for his soon-to-be-announced state without offering anything substantive in return. By going to Camp David, he wrested from an Israeli Prime Minister an incredible series of concessions and, regardless of what Barak says now, in future negotiations all those concessions will start out in Arafat's pocket. Arafat now holds over Barak's head the threat of his unilateral declaration of statehood on September 13 -- see the important article in this issue of Outpost on the implications for Israel.

Similarly Hafez Assad, by merely entering into negotiations with Israel on the Golan wrested vast concessions -- in brief, the entire Golan. Yes, in each case the Arabs "missed an opportunity" to finalize the promised territorial handouts, but the Arabs have the patience Israelis so woefully lack. They know that the next stage of negotiations start where the last left off. In retrospect, it may turn out that Camp David simply paved the way for Israel to open an internal "debate" on redividing Jerusalem, which will be finalized a little way down the road.

Israeli leaders typically assert that their massive concessions -- even if they produce no positive results -- are worthwhile because only when they have done everything conceivable for peace can they look their children in the eye when they send them into battle. Actually, by forever giving the Arabs new opportunities to destroy the state, they are playing an immoral Russian roulette with their children's lives. Sooner or later some set of concessions will become the final deadly bullet.

Orme-Speak

Thanks to Roger Gerber for drawing attention to one of the more absurd manifestations of the anti-Israel reporting that has for decades been a New York Times trademark. In the Times of July 17, reporter William A. Orme Jr. totally misreported the huge rally held at Rabin Square against Barak's "give it all away" negotiating posture at Camp David. So intent was Orme on projecting the image of a small gathering of unrepresentative extremists to New York Times readers that he simply, shades of Shimon Peres, recast a balky reality to suit his heart's desire.

Ha'aretz, the daily paper that views itself as Israel's New York Times, and has been a tireless standard bearer for the so-called peace process, reported (no doubt reluctantly) both in its headline and in the body of the text that "some 200,000 people" attended. The New York Times headline reads "Thousands of Conservative Israelis Protest Negotiations with Palestinians" -- hundreds of thousands have melted into thousands via the Times alchemy. The first line begins "Tens of thousands of Jewish settlers demonstrated here tonight..." While the "thousands" mentioned in the headline have now grown to "tens of thousands," Orme limits the demonstrators to settlers -- he does not even say "settlers and others," although there were large numbers of kibbutz members among those "others." While Orme proceeds to distort the makeup and nature of the rally (for example, he describes "the predominantly religious crowd" chanting "slogans of resistance" when, Gerber notes, the protest signs and speeches covered a wide gamut and did not speak of "resistance" at all), he is most eager to deny the very existence of the crowds. The gathering, writes Orme, "barely filled Rabin Square" -- Gerber contrasts this with the Jerusalem Post's report that demonstrators "filled the Square and spilled over into the side streets."

So bizarre was Orme's report that Aaron Lerner of IMRA (Independent Media Review and Analysis) actually interviewed him and he continued to deny the evidence of everyone else's senses -- shifting ground when pushed into a corner. Thus when Lerner pointed out that he had seen with his own eyes (and had himself

(Continued on p.11)

Outpost               - 2 -               August-September 2000