No Sermon on the Mount

The U.S. news media coverage of the recent violence in the occupied Palestinian territories has been selective. For example, we read about the body count, but not the fact that the victims are almost exclusively unarmed Palestinians--rock throwing teenagers or bystanders killed by Israeli troops firing live ammunition.

We read about the intransigence of the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks, but not about Israel's refusal to implement portions of the agreement that they've already signed. We hear that the Palestinians won't give up Jerusalem to Israeli rule, but not that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has offered to share the city with the Palestinians--a completely reasonable plan, and one that will have to be implemented eventually, if peace is ever to come to this part of the world. The Palestinian delegation may have been ready to accept this offer; we may never know. The recent violence has turned the peace talks away from the subject of Jerusalem and focused them on bringing an end to the violence, instead.

We don't hear or read about many things that are important in understanding the ongoing conflict. Israel--particularly the Israeli military--are the biggest recipients of U.S. aid in the world. The Israeli military, which routinely engages in human rights violations in the occupied territories, has also drawn the condemnation of nearly every nation in the world (except the U.S.).

The U.N. has offered to oversee the peace talks. Israel has refused, turning instead to the U.S. The talks have been slow and unproductive. The current Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, was elected on a peace platform, and he has begun to make some concessions to the Palestinian negotiators. Hard-line conservatives in Israel are beginning to panic.

The conservative Likud party will be attempting to force Barak out of office after the Israeli Parliament reconvenes on October 30. But first, they must find a candidate among their ranks to replace him. Benjamin Netanyahu is the favored candidate; he runs neck-and-neck with Barak in the polls, but a recent fraud scandal has alienated him from many members of his own party. The second choice is Ariel Sharon. Sharon, who's less popular, is now locked in a power struggle with Netanyahu over leadership of the Likud party.

When Barak offered to share Jerusalem with the Palestinians, Sharon decided to make a gesture that would both sabotage the peace talks and draw more hard-liners to his side. Sharon assembled a massive, armed squad of "bodyguards" and an entourage of media people, then made a political visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, a site that is holy to both Muslims and Jews (Jews refer to it as the Temple Mount--site of the Biblical Jewish temples). Sharon and his troops occupied the mosque and declared his visit a demonstration of Israeli sovereignty over the site.

The response was immediate: scuffles broke out on the site immediately before and after his visit. Within a day of his visit, Israeli troops were firing on Palestinian protesters in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Appalled by both Sharon's action and the violence of Israeli troops, Israeli Arabs went on strike to show solidarity for the aggrieved Palestinians. Members of the current Israeli government lambasted Sharon, who was unrepentant--in fact, he was happy to see that his antics had produced the desired outcome. Israeli Jews were split: some supporting Sharon, while many others were sickened by his casual provocation of violence. After a week of mostly one-sided fighting (nearly all of it in the occupied territories) over 80 people--mostly Palestinians--were dead and more than 1,000 people injured.

This violence was not, as the U.S. media has portrayed it, just another irrational incident of religious squabbling. It had a calculated cause: one man's egotistical drive for power. It was fed by a deadly serious political struggle going on within the Israeli government that, of course, has received no airplay here in the U.S. Its victims are people who have no say over who rules them, who live under an illegal occupation, and who have been fighting for their political freedom with nothing but handfuls of rocks.

In all of the reporting on the recent violence, one fact was never mentioned: according to the Israeli/Palestinian peace agreement signed seven years ago, the Palestinians should have been free to declare their independence long ago. But as each year passes, they have put off announcing their independence in favor of good-faith negotiations with Israel. The question now is whether this patience has brought them any reward.