20 - 26 September 2001
Issue No.552
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 September 2001 Issue No.552 |
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The time to act is now
Without an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Sam Bahour* and Michael Dahan* foresee a plague on all our houses
It is impossible to comprehend fully the tragedy resulting from the attacks in New York City and Washington DC. Are there any words in the collective human lexicon to describe horror of this magnitude? Our thoughts and prayers join those of millions around the world, which are directed to the victims and their families. Yet there are those who are more than willing to make cynical use of this catastrophe in order to advance political and military agendas.
Politicians in Israel, most notably Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, as well as other leaders within the Likud Party, have sought to use the circumstances to suggest that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority are somehow connected to these incidents. They are consciously abusing the tragic circumstances of the bombing to call for even more vigourous punishment against the Palestinian people, all of course under the flag of the "war against terrorism."
But out of this cataclysm there is still a chance to move forward. It was Nelson Mandela who stated that "we must use time wisely, and forever realise that the time is always ripe to do right." Rather than use the deaths of thousands of people in the US to justify further aggression against the Palestinian people, we believe that this is an opportunity for both sides to return to the negotiating table, and perhaps make real progress in ending 34 years of illegal Israeli occupation. Such progress is the proper condolence message the Middle East could send in memory of those whose lives were lost: to take a bold step forward and end the suffering of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. To take this opportunity to do the right and just thing.
This is indeed an historic opportunity -- to move back from the abyss, to clean the slate, to move forward. Having looked into hell on earth, reasonable people can only seek to end further suffering. Doing so in our part of the world means ending the occupation completely and totally, dismantling the settlements, and moving forward, to final status negotiations. Only in this way can we really fight terrorism: by removing the root causes of political violence. Only in this way can we end this conflict. Any other option will bring a plague, at the very minimum, on both our houses, Palestinian and Israeli alike.
* Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American living in the besieged Palestinian city of Al-Bireh in the West Bank. Michael Dahan is an Israeli-American political scientist living in Jerusalem.
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