Who walked away from what

"Barak offered the Palestinians 97 percent of the West Bank, and Arafat walked away from the negotiations." How many times have you read this? For supplementary dramatic effect, it is often added "... without even bothering to make a counterproposal." The formula is indefatigably repeated with minor variations. Sometimes it's 93 percent, or 94, 95 or 98 percent (curiously, 96 percent is never mentioned), but the basic idea is that a generous offer was made and the Palestinians seized yet another opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Did they? First off let us take a look at the claim that they made no proposal of their own. This does not seem to be true. In an interview, Israeli negotiator Shlomo Ben Ami had this to say:

[A]t Camp david I did chance to see some sort of Palestinian map. It was a map that reflected a concession of less than 2 percent on their part in return for a territorial swap in a 1:1 ratio. But the territories they wanted from us were not in the Halutza dunes, they wanted them next to the West Bank. I remember that according to their map, Kochav Yair, for example, was supposed to be included in the territory of the Palestinian state; they demanded sovereignty over Kochav Yair.

No matter how deep in his statement he tries to bury the word "map," the concrete fact is that this man did get to see one -- detailed enough to grasp which towns would be in the Palestinian state and which ones wouldn't. Only, he didn't like the proposal.

Of course, one may say that a negotiation is a negotiation, and you've always got to make concessions. But this particular negotiation was a land-for-peace one: this may be construed as all of the land for all of the peace, not some of the land for all of the peace. The Israelis telling the Palestinians "we'll give you most of your land but we'll retain this or that territory that used to be yours" is like the Palestinians telling the Israelis "we'll stop suicide bombings, but from time to time we'll throw a rocket or two on Sderot." Renouncing 2 pct of your own territory in exchange for a full commitment to peace looks to me a good enough concession.

But even if you disagree with that, is it true that Barak offered upwards of 90 pct of the West Bank to the Palestinians?

The maps would suggest otherwise. Here's what was offered at Camp David (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE):



Green is Palestinian, pink is Israeli, pink with horizontal lines is an Israeli-controlled security zone. Does green look like 93-98 percent to you? Nor does it to me. If I were a mathematician I would be able to make calculations and find out exactly what portion of the map would correspond to the Palestinian State.

But without getting into that detail, anyone who sees this map immediately realizes it's an unacceptable vision of a Palestinian state. It's not contiguous, to begin with: a wide corridor of Israeli settlements, running from west to east, cuts off the northern part from the southern section. Also, there are two settlement wedges that cut deep into Palestinian territory reaching the settlements of Shilo and Ofra, the latter of which was built on private Palestinian land by Israel's own admission. So that in practice, the northern section itself would be divided into three cantons with only partial contiguity.

How much of a land grab does this amount to? While Israel never gave official figures, after the negotiations failed Ehud Barak wrote an article in the New York Times in which he outlined what was needed for Israel's security. Wrote Ehud:

What Israel ought to do now is take steps to ensure the long-term viability of its Jewish majority. That requires a strategy of disengagement from the Palestinians -- even unilaterally if necessary -- and a gradual process of establishing secure, defensible borders, demarcated so as to encompass more than 80 percent of the Jewish settlers in several settlement blocs over about 15 percent of Judea and Samaria, and to ensure a wide security zone in the Jordan Valley.

Now annexing settlement blocs containing about 80 percent of the 180,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank was official Israeli policy all along during Camp David. This article clarifies, at last, the amount of land involved: 15 percent of Judea and Samaria, not 3 to 7 percent. Add to that the "wide security zone," and at the very least 20 percent of the West Bank would remain under Israeli control.

Small wonder the Palestinians walked away. The gulf between their offer of a 2 percent land concession and the Isreali demand of 20 percent was just too deep to be resolved in that negotiation.

However, the negotiations continued, and in December 2000-January 2001 Barak made a second offer in Taba. Here's the map (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE):



Now this looks like a 93-97 percent proposal. The settlement blocs are limited. There's territorial contiguity. The security zone in the Jordan Valley is gone. Why, then, did Arafat walk away from the Taba negotiation?

The answer is that he didn't. It was the Israelis who suspended the negotiations. On February 8, 2001, Barak's media advisor made a statement that:

Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak clarified this evening that the ideas which were brought up in the course of the recent negotiations conducted with the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, including those raised at the Camp David Summit and by President Clinton towards the end of his term in office, are not binding on the new government to be formed in Israel.

Thus, there was an offer rejected by the Palestinians, but it was not of 93-97 percent of the West Bank; and there was a 93-97 percent offer, but it was not rejected by the Palestinians. This can be summarized in the following table:

Negotiation site	What was offered	Who walked away
Camp David	80-85 pct	the Palestinians
Taba	93-97 pct	Israel

By freely mixing the events that happened in Taba (i.e. Barak's 93-97 pct offer) with those that took place in Camp David (i.e. Arafat walking away from the negotiation), the Zionists manage to tell yet another half-truth that amounts to a full lie.

On the ambiguity of the English language

As a native speaker of Spanish, I find certain subtle distinctions missing in English. Take, for instance, the verb to know; it may mean "to know a fact" or "to know someone." Spanish differentiates between both meanings, the words used being saber and conocer, respectively. Similarly, the verb to ask may mean "to ask a question" (Spanish: preguntar) or "to ask for something" (Spanish: pedir), and the verb to cry may mean "to cry out loud" (Spanish: gritar) or "to cry with tears" (Spanish: llorar). The native speaker of English may not even understand the need for separate words to cover the different meanings, but to someone who comes from another language the absence of these distinctions is startling.

In this post, I would like to discuss yet another English word that has separate and not necessarily related meanings: antisemite.

Before I continue I must say I don't dispute I'm an antisemite under the current definition of the word. Of all the peoples in the world, I want to deny the Jews, and only the Jews, the right to self-determination in their ancestral land. To that effect, I have singled out Israel for demonization (again: under the current definition of this word), and I have never written a single word about the plight of the Tibetans in China.

Of course, I could argue (wicked people always argue things) that I would deny other peoples self-determination under similar circumstances. I would oppose, for instance, the Gypsies returning to the place in Northern India they're supposed to come from and creating a country after displacing 700,000 Sikhs (or whatever). To give a real, not hypothetical, example, I opposed the Afrikaners' right to self-determination in South Africa after they grabbed the best lands for themselves and dumped the blacks into the bantustans of Venda, Ciskei, Transkei and Bophuthatswana. But these are moot points. Apartheid South Africa doesn't exist anymore, no member of the British nobility has ever promised the Gypsies a national homeland and the Brits have ceased to control India in any event. So that in practice my only problem is with the Jews' self-determination (as is currently exercised) and I'm an antisemite under the definition of several international bodies. There's no disputing that.

However, the word antisemite had an earlier meaning which continues to be in use. Many people, especially the younger generations, will be surprised to learn about it, but it's actually still being used. An antisemite used to be someone who hated the Jews as a whole. Those people would oppose having a Jewish neighbor, or their children marrying Jews. They would try to avoid working with Jews, they would never lend them money (allthough they might take loans from them), and they would support different forms of social and economic discrimination against Jews. Under the proper circumstances (war, invasions, crises, etc.), they would torch synagogues, loot Jewish property and actually kill Jews, or help those who undertook the killings.

These paleo-antisemites (let's neologize a bit) have by no means ceased to exist. Curiously, many of them don't oppose Jewish self-determination in Israel. In fact, I know quite a few Argentinian antisemites who would be very happy to see all Jews emigrating to Israel after having their citizenship revoked and their property confiscated.

Well, and here's my proposal: English needs separate words to describe these two different groups of people. It might be antisemite and contrasemite, for instance. Or antisemite and antihebrew. Or (gasp!) antisemite and anti-Zionist. With regard to the latter proposal, I don't oppose the word antisemite being used to describe me, and anti-Zionist to describe someone who beats a Jew because he's a Jew. (That is, I don't want to deprive anyone of the pleasure of calling me an antisemite; I don't mean to deny the Jewish people this right as well.)

But one thing is certain: the same word can't be used to describe both us, the ones who want to deny the Jews, and only the Jews, the right to self-determination, and them, the ones who only want to burn down synagogues, stab Jews and drive them out of their countries. It's simply not fair to them.

Who celebrated on 9/11?

Of course, all those Palestinians in the street did. And no, it wasn't a doctored video, nor were they images from an event that had happened years before. On the day of the destruction of the Twin Towers, the Palestinians (some Palestinians, anyway) celebrated and handed out candy and there's no disputing that (well, actually I'm not sure about the candy, but candy handout allegations are a staple of reports on Palestinians celebrating atrocities).

But apart from them, did anyone else celebrate?

Well, I can think of quite a few people. In my country, Argentina, many people reacted with feelings that ranged from approval to outright exultation upon seeing the towers fall. I was perplexed to watch the newscasts that afternoon and learn about the "deep grief" of the Argentinian people at the news, and their solidarity with the Americans. My foot. But then I remembered that Argentina is a civilized country where the truth is conditioned by political correctness. That's why there was no candy handout, and not a word on the newscasts about the Argentinians' true opinions about the attack -- opinions anyone who listened to conversations in bars could have reported.

But more to the point, there were Israelis who were very happy that the World Trade Center had been attacked.

Although it may sound like one more conspiracy theory to claim that five Israelis were seen filming the burning towers and celebrating, in this particular case it looks like it really happened. Two of the Israelis were suspected of being spies. One of them, Sivan Kurzberg, was photographed by his colleagues smiling with the towers in flames in the background and holding a lit lighter in his hand, as is customary in pop music concerts when a performance is particularly enjoyed.

Of course they were private individuals; no one's claiming that they were sent by the Israeli government to record the incident. But the question remains, how could any Israeli be happy that Israel's foremost ally was attacked? What explanation could there be?

Enter Binyamin Netanyahu, former PM of Israel and a firm candidate in the upcoming elections. On 12 Sep 2001, he had this to say on page A22 of the New York Times:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, “It’s very good.”

Living, like me, in the hypocritical civilized world, Netanyahu immediately understood the potentially catastrophic consequences of his Freudian slip in terms of PR. So that the NYT story goes on to inform us:

Then he edited himself: "Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy." He predicted that the attack would "strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror."

He elaborated on the idea a bit more unabashedly in April 2008, when talking not to the Western press, but to Israeli students, before whom PC is not so conditioning:

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv on Wednesday reported that Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan university that the September 11, 2001 terror attacks had been beneficial for Israel.

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

So that we have a few irrelevant Palestinians in the street celebrating 9/11, and a very relevant Israeli politician also celebrating 9/11, but you've always heard about the former in the US media, and never about the latter (except in the chaotic first week, in which Netanyahu's words slipped into the NYT's print edition). After dismissing the antisemitic theory that the Zionists have any control of any kind over what the press reports, I'm left wondering what the reason could be for the unequal treatment of equally jubilant reactions to the fall of the Twin Towers.

Celebrating one's own terrorists

A few weeks ago the Arab terrorist Sami Kuntar was released by Israel in exchange for the remains of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, two Israeli soldiers kidnapped and killed by Hizbullah. There has been much rage in Israel about the hero's welcome that Kuntar (who killed a 4-year-old girl by crushing her skull with his rifle's butt) received in Lebanon (although it must be noted that in Lebanon it is denied that he murdered the girl).

And all would be OK if it were not for the accompanying assertion that while the Arabs honor their terrorists, Israel doesn't. "Where are the official honors for Baruch Goldstein?," the reasoning goes.

In the first place we must observe that Israel is a country with an army. When you're a people without planes or tanks, it's quite hard to make a murder look like collateral damage. When you've got an army it's much easier. To put it crudely, any Israeli pilot, or soldier on a tank, can intentionally kill civilians and then claim he was targetting something else. It's his word against the Palestinians', and it is quite possible --I'm not saying certain, but possible-- that some of the soldiers who get military honors in Israel (who knows, maybe even Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser) are actually cold-blooded murderers.

But of course the point can be made that, in any event, Israeli soldiers are not honored in the knowledge that they willingly killed someone innocent.

However, before the creation of the State, certain Jews were involved in serious terroristic activity, willingly killing civilians. The Palestine Post archives can help us in finding a few examples. There, you can access scanned versions of all issues of what now is the Jerusalem Post.

For instance, on 19 Feb 1948 we find on the first page:



The bomb at the marketplace on the weekly market day was later claimed by the Irgun, a Jewish terrorist group.

On 1 Apr 1948, also on the first page, we can read:

As can be seen, the Stern gang, another Jewish terrorist group, was responsible for the mining of this train.

On 14 Dec 1947, among many stories of attacks against Arab civilians reported on the first page, we read:



This attack on a crowded lane between a movie theater and a café was perpetrated by the Irgun (in the article called IZL, Irgun Zvai Leumi).

But of course, we know that both the Irgun and the Stern gang were repudiated by the Israeli society, weren't they?

Nope.

In 1980, the State of Israel honored the terrorists that killed 40 Arabs on a train and 6 Arabs in a marketplace and another 6 Arabs in the street (among countless other atrocities) by awarding them State ribbons. Here's the Lehi (Stern gang) ribbon:



And here is the Irgun ribbon:



So that Israel honors its own terrorists, just like the Palestinians do; it only hopes people won't notice. But in the Internet world, with all that scanned evidence scattered all over the web, relying on the people's bad memory may not be so good an idea.

What is Hasbara?

The word Hasbara means "explanation" in Hebrew. In actual English usage, it refers to the efforts by the Israeli government, pro-Israel pundits and a considerable bunch of useful idiots (mostly bloggers) to justify Israel's behavior and slander the Palestinians, the Arabs in general, and, if necessary, the 1.3 billion followers of the Muslim faith.

Hasbara employs the usual techniques of all propaganda efforts: half-truths, decontextualized quotes, false claims made in the cynical hope that the readers won't bother to check them out, invalid analogies, and so on and so forth. One of its procedures is to tell a lie enough times that people will begin to believe it's true. Just like Goebbels did. Oh, I'm mentioning a Nazi in some vague connection with Israel; I'm an antisemite. By the way, the default method of Hasbara is calling all critics of Israel antisemites.

When one has been observing the Hasbara gang for some time, one (me!) realizes that they restrict themselves to performing a limited set of tricks over and over again, and it becomes easy to defeat them. I have exposed those tricks repeated times on Hasbara blogs. In some cases I was eventually blocked from participating; in other cases I was met with more than my share of ad-hominem attacks; in one case (this) I was politely treated as a human being with a different opinion.

One day I found I had gathered quite an impressive file of counter-Hasbara arguments, and I decided to start my own blog, which I did in my mother tonge, Spanish. Here's the English version, which will consist mostly (but not exclusively) of translated versions of the original Spanish-language articles from my other blog.