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  Fiery Forum in Jerusalem April 21, 2002 Reporter : Jim Waley  Jim Waley and a Sunday team managed to slip into the refugee camp, or what was left of it, in the West Bank city of Jenin this week ... avoiding the Israeli military on the outskirts of Jenin by using back trails to walk into the city. He discovered for himself what a UN envoy had said earlier, that the devastation of Jenin was "horrifying beyond belief.""It's the smell you notice first," Waley reported. "The stench of rotting corpses is overpowering. It clings to your clothes for hours." The devastation at West Bank's Ground Zero was far worse than he expected. He talked to a volunteer medical worker, Chivas Moore, who said she saw the bones of a victim being run over again and again by an Israeli military tank.  Jim Waley asked a forensic pathologist with Amnesty International, Dr Derrick Pounder, if he believed the allegations of executions committed by the Israeli military, being made by the residents of Jenin. "Yes, I do," he told Waley. They're consistent and they're credible." Dr Pounder had examined some of the bodies found in Jenin: "We found others, in terms of the shootings, appearances, which give cause for suspicion and require further investigation."The Israel military is openly contemptuous of the allegations. The general coordinating military action in the Palestinian territories, Major-General Amos Gilad, said: "There is no massacre. The allegations are false. It is a lie."  The fact that the two sides are so far apart in their versions of the truth was reflected earlier in the week when Jim Waley moderated a meeting between Israelis and Palestinians in the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, on the border between the Arab and the Jewish parts of the city. It was in room 16 at the same hotel, that the first secret contacts took place between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators almost a decade ago -- contacts that led to the Oslo peace accords. A peace that is almost dead after the events of the past few weeks. Sunday held the town meeting to see if there was any common ground left to resurrect peace, inviting Israelis and Palestinians from all walks of life, holding a wide range of views. Waley began by asking if there was anyone in the room, who believed there shouldn't be two separate states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side. An Israeli settler, David Wilder, raised his hand. Why? asked Waley. "It will put the existence of the state in jeopardy." A Palestinian lawyer, Michael Tarazi, said: "I fundamentally believe that a state defined by a certain religion and ethnicity is discriminatory in nature and that the only fair solution is one state where all people, Christian, Jews, Muslims, Arab, Israelis, can live as equal citizens."  Another Israeli settler, Eve Harrow, took a hard line: "... We have a population of Arabs living among us who, from birth, incite their children to hate Jews, to want to grow up ... and kill as many Jews as possible. It's also hapening now in the Israeli-Arab population. So it's very well to talk about psychological borders and buffer zones, but we are fighting now against people who hate us for being Jews, who want a one-state solution ... This is a war for our existence and I think until we get beyond that, there's really nothing else to talk about." Waley asked her: "How do you get beyond that?" She replied: "There has to be, first of all, the current regime of the Palestinian Authority has to go. They have and always will be a bunch of terrorists, and they're not good for anybody ..." Waley asked the Palestinians on the other side of the room: "A bunch of terrorists, is that what you consider yourselves?" Mariane Albina, a Palestinian aid worker, replied: "Well, many people might label me as a terrorist, simply because I believe in resisting the occupation, and, for example, I believe that the occupation is the biggest terror in the world. How can you say that Israel is a democratic country when, for example, it says in their basic law that they are a democratic and a Jewish country and how can a democratic country be in occupation and power?"  In a poignant moment of the meeting, Waley asked Arnold Roth, an Israeli software company manager, to tell his story: "You're an Australian and you would probably wake up in the morning every day and think about your daughter. Tell us what happened." Roth replied: "My daughter, whose photograph I've brought along here, was one of the 16 people blown to pieces last summer -- August -- in the terrorist attack on the Sparrow Pizza store in Jerusalem. It's terribly difficult for people like my wife and children and myself, to listen to analyses of the Middle East conflict which talk about people's hurt feelings and frustrations in some political sense. Terror is a tactic which simply can't be excused under any conditions, and yet, we hear the Arab leadership doing double talk about it all the time. I, at the risk of damaging my heart, would like to hear from the Arabs in this room, a disagreement among themselves. If those people would simply put up their hand and say: 'I don't agree, I don't agree with the other Arab next to me,' I think I might fall off my chair."Jim Waley took up the challenge: "Let's ask the Palestinians here. How many believe suicide bombings and terrorism can be justified if there is nowhere else to turn?"  A Palestinian student, Amar Abou-Ziad, replied: "I'm against suicide bombings. I mean, she (Ahuva Passow, an earlier Israeli speaker) was talking about going on a bus to the Hebrew University. That's where I study. I take the same bus. If someone decides to blow themselves up on that bus, I'm going to die and maybe she would die. So the person who is doing this is not going to make any difference, whether it's an Arab or a Jew. The objective of these people doing the suicide bombings is to destory any hope for a peace process ..."If you missed the town meeting this morning, it's worth reading the entire transcript. But in spite of the depressing news this week out of Jenin and the West Bank, and the failure of the Powell peace mission, there was a hopeful note from our broadcast this morning. Jim Waley asked both sides at the end of the meeting: "I just want to wrap it up by asking you, can anyone from outside knock your heads together and say: 'For God's sake, try and solve this problem'."  Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer, answered: "There was recently an initiative by the Saudi Government that was adopted by the entire Arab world, and it's very simple. It says to Israel: 'Withdraw from all of the territories that you occupied in 1967 and you will have peace, security and normalisation.' So you're hearing it from the Arab world. You've heard it also from the United Nations. What else do you need?"Raia Rotem, an Israeli teacher, added this comment from the other side of the room: "There should be some kind of international interference here and then this is the only way. I'm not talking about army. I don't know what form or shape, but the international community has to decide that this is a ticking bomb, this situation is a ticking bomb and they have to come here and bang our two heads together and force us to make peace."  Jim Waley summed up: "I'm not sure we're going to win the Nobel Peace Prize but I hope we've managed to lift the lid, a little bit, on what is a very complex and protracted issue." Click here to read the full transcript of the debate. |
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