A proverbial fig leaf

Is a new PA program to monitor Israeli incitement a bid to distract the world from terrorism?

By SAM SOKOL
A proverbial fig leaf (photo credit: SAM SOKOL)
A proverbial fig leaf
(photo credit: SAM SOKOL)
In a small building in an upscale neighborhood of the Palestinian Authority administrative center of Ramallah, Ghassan Khatib lounges in an overstuffed leather recliner and recites a litany of allegations regarding Israel’s efforts to incite its citizens to racism and violence. Khatib, the director of the Palestinian Government Media Center, is in charge of the PA’s public relations and in this capacity has initiated a monthly report, distributed to foreign diplomats and journalists, detailing Israel’s alleged infractions.
Khatib seems to take these infractions very seriously. “Incitement is leading to Israeli violence,” he says, stating that there has been an increase in anti-Palestinian attacks due to “the inciting rhetoric that you hear sometimes from politicians and religious leaders.”
However, even as Khatib speaks, flags bearing the image of arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti are flying in Al-Manar Square, the center of Ramallah’s main shopping district, only a short drive from his office in the PA Ministry of Information, highlighting what seems to be an alarming dichotomy between the PA’s official positions in English and its actions and statements in Arabic.
Barghouti, considered one of the masterminds of both the first and second intifadas and an immensely popular figure among Palestinians, is in jail for planning multiple terror attacks against civilians and recently called for “large-scale popular resistance” against Israel as a replacement for security cooperation and negotiations.
Palestinian cities and villages throughout the disputed territories are filled with such banners. In Nablus, also known as the biblical city of Shechem, posters promoting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades vie for space on crowded walls in the open-air market with those of Hamas, Fatah and other groups.
The visages of such figures as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein gaze blankly out of broadsheets, and images of young men bearing guns are ubiquitous.
And indeed, Khatib’s statements are somewhat ironic as the PA’s official media, as well as its educational system, are similar to these street posters in that they systematically promote a worldview in which terrorists and killers are to be feted and Jews demonized. Conspiracy theories abound on Palestinian television and the history of the Jewish people in the land is replaced in textbooks by a narrative claiming a Palestinian presence since the time of the Canaanites, according to reports by Israeli watchdog groups such as Palestinian Media Watch.
Itamar Marcus is the director of Palestinian Media Watch and has represented Israel in negotiations with the PA over the issue of incitement. Speaking to The Jerusalem Post from his downtown Jerusalem office, Marcus says he believes Khatib’s claims are merely the “response that we hear from Palestinians and their sympathizers around the world when they have no answers to the terrible demonization and hatred that PMW shows.”
Khatib doesn’t believe it, though.
“Palestinians,” he says, “have always objected to certain problematic Israeli behaviors or statements that had an inciting effect” but the Palestinian objections were “unsystematic” and unorganized.
Now, in light of “the larger picture in which in Israel today there is an increase in hatred, hostility and rhetoric of the kind that encourages violence and hatred and racism against Palestinians” it has become imperative, he says, to begin addressing the issue of Israeli racism head on.
Among the monthly incitement reports’ primary recurring objections is Israel’s “provocative denial” of Palestinian history.
“Distorting history for political purposes is profoundly disturbing,” Khatib tells the Post, “and in the context of the Middle East is an obvious incitement against those who wish to live in peace side by side.”
It is especially disturbing when practiced in schools, he says. He is bothered in particular, he states in one of his reports, by comments by Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who is accused of “rejecting Palestinian history” by downplaying the “Palestinian history” of Jerusalem.
Sa’ar is cited in the report as saying that “Jerusalem has never been the capital of other than the Jewish people.” Khatib finds this unacceptable.
It goes without saying, the report notes, that if the education minister holds these views, Israeli students would be indoctrinated in them via his education policies.
Among the alleged denials of Palestinian attachment to the land raised by Khatib is that “Israeli textbooks foster hate.” Citing an Israeli textbook that refers to the disputed territories as Judea and Samaria, Khatib wrote that “insisting on using the term ‘Judea and Samaria’ rather than West Bank or Palestinian territory is nothing but delegitimizing Palestinian rights and ignoring the existence of Palestine. It not only denies Palestinian rights to their land but contributes to unmaking Palestine in the minds of Israeli children by teaching in schools that the West Bank is theirs, and part of Israel.”
Commenting to the Post, Khatib elaborates that the PA “uses terms in a legal way that was agreed on, that were included in the agreements signed by the two sides.
The essence of our problem with the Israeli textbooks vis-à-vis maps is that we simply don’t exist. We as Palestinians, or Palestinian territories, we don’t exist in the Israeli maps and curricula.”
However, statements denying Israeli history abound on Palestinian television and radio, in official newspapers and in school books, says Itamar Marcus.
The PA Ambassador to Geneva, Ibrahim Kharisha, he points out, recently said on the official PATV television channel that “The Palestinians [were] in Palestine before the Jews came to us from Egypt, via Sinai.
Before Christianity sprouted in Palestine, and before Islam arrived from the Hijaz, Palestinians have been in Palestine. And everyone remembers that in 2010, we celebrated the 10,000th anniversary of the establishment of the Palestinian city Jericho.”
Knowing that such an Israeli objection to his statements would be inevitable, Khatib points out that “Israelis started to complain that Israel doesn’t exist in the Palestinian textbooks so we just wanted to remind them that we also don’t exist in their textbooks, so it doesn’t make sense to criticize the absence of Israel in our textbooks at a time when we don’t exist in any way in the Israeli textbooks.”
This, Marcus replies, is the Palestinians “trying to create a symmetry by pretending that Israel is doing the same thing.”
The use of the term Judea and Samaria is completely legitimate, Marcus believes, stating that they were the historic designation for these regions for thousands of years and are the best non-political terms to use in describing the disputed territories, whatever one’s political orientation or views on Palestinian statehood.
“The same sources that call Jerusalem ‘Jerusalem’ and Jaffa ‘Jaffa’ call these regions Judea and Samaria. So why doesn’t he stop calling it Jaffa if that’s what his problem is, using biblical terms?” Marcus asks.
“Nowhere in any accords does it say it can’t be called Judea and Samaria and, most important, this land of Judea and Samaria is, according to the Oslo Accords, to be negotiated. It’s not, even by the Oslo Accords, called Palestine, it’s called the Palestinian Authority. By him calling it Palestine, he is trying to impose a status that the Oslo Accords and no accord until now has given it.”
Citing examples from the PA media such as the Al-Hayat Al-Jadida newspaper calling pre-1967 Israel “Palestine occupied in 1948” and claims that Jesus was a Palestinian, despite the name Palestine only being imposed on Judea by the Romans 136 years after his birth, Marcus asserts that “one of the most important Palestinian endeavors today is what I would call replacement: to replace Jewish history with a fictitious and fabricated Palestinian history.”
When the PA claims the Western Wall was really where Muhammad tied his horse, that there was no Temple on the Temple Mount or that Rachel’s and Joseph’s tombs are really mosques and Israel declares that they are historically Jewish, Marcus alleges, the PA finds it easy to accuse Israel of incitement for calling the Arabs on their revisionist narrative.
“The Palestinians would like Israel to stop talking about its history because Israel’s history means that we have a historical connection to the land, and their basic ideology says that Israel has no connection and has no right to exist and they don’t want this claim to be challenged.”
Marcus brandishes a recently uncovered PA publication entitled Terminology in Media, Culture and Politics which seeks to instruct Palestinians to replace “the Israeli and American dissemination of poisoned terms.”
According to this book, using Israeli terminology “turns the essence of the Zionist endeavor from a racist, colonialist endeavor into an endeavor of self-definition and independence for the Jewish People.”
The book instructs Palestinians to refer to suicide bombings as “martyrdom-seeking operations” and reinforces Marcus’s contention that the PA is actively endorsing terrorism.
SOME OF the most high-profile cases that have cropped up recently have involved the PA’s celebrations of the life of the late Dalal Mughrabi, the leader of the Palestinian commando team that perpetrated the Coastal Road Massacre of 1978.
Landing on an Israeli beach, the Fatah squad made its way to the highway where it hijacked a bus, killing 38 people, including 13 children.
The PA’s official television station, PATV, earlier this year ran a special in which the killers were dubbed “heroes” and the Abbas mouthpiece Al-Hayat Al-Jadida likewise described the “heroism of Dalal Mughrabi.” Everything from town squares to summer camps have been named after Mughrabi, becoming a sore point between Israelis and Palestinians.
When asked about the PA’s continuing endorsement of Mughrabi’s crimes, Khatib, whose reports are filled with specific sourced examples of Israeli transgressions, states that he “doesn’t like to get into examples.”
“I think that there are things that can be considered incitement by one side and not considered incitement by the other side,” he says. “That is one of the reasons why this problem of incitement should be dealt with in a joint way. We have to have a debate that will end up by agreeing on what is incitement and what isn’t incitement.
I think that both of us can try to reduce incitement on this agreed basis.
“But getting into examples of things that might be seen as incitement by one side and in a different way by the other side and solving this issue by exchanging accusations, somebody will say that Dalal Mughrabi is a terrorist, then you will see a Palestinian bringing an example from the Israeli side that would counter this example.”
Bringing up this issue is “not a constructive way of dealing with the problem,” he explains. Anything else is point scoring.
The question is, if glorifying Mughrabi’s actions is not incitement, then what is? The only way to stop incitement by both sides is for “Israel to accept the idea of developing definitions of incitement that both Israelis and Palestinians can agree on with the help of a third party like the Americans,” he says.
“In my view,” he muses, “there is no difference in the theoretical definition of incitement you would probably hear from me and what you would probably be hearing from the Israelis, but when you go into the details, the specifics, the applications, then you will probably have different interpretations. So the two sides must work together on developing a common understanding of what is incitement and what is not incitement in order to apply it in a fair way.”
In fact, Israel, the US and the PA did form a trilateral committee to deal with this issue following the Wye Accord in 1998.
While the three parties did attempt to come up with a set of guidelines, their wrangling was ultimately inconclusive, with the Israelis withdrawing from the negotiations.
Khatib says that the “the Israelis became less enthusiastic” about working with the Palestinians on this issue. The negotiations failed, Khatib claims, because “Israel hasn’t been cooperative.”
Marcus, who was a member of the Israeli delegation to the incitement committee, remembers things differently, countering that not only did Israel not “lose interest,” but that among the factors that ended the joint efforts on this issue was PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s decision in 2000 to launch the second Palestinian intifada.
Beyond that, however, he says that the meetings were “a farce.” Whenever he would present evidence of Palestinian incitement, he claims, Marwan Kanafani, the Palestinian negotiator, would engage in a protracted filibuster and “and ramble until, by the time he was finished, nobody could remember what I had even presented.”
Kanafani would say, recalls Marcus, that he had evidence of Israeli incitement but that he did not want to present it “because it’s not going to promote peace” and because “what we need for peace is to get rid of the settlements and what we need for peace is to have Israel leave Jerusalem.
That’s the real incitement that is undoing peace.”
When Marcus presented his report on Palestinian textbooks to the Americans, he says, one of the Americans noted that “when I read the report I wanted to vomit.”
“The Palestinians and Americans argued over whether the Palestinians would be willing to have their schoolbooks reviewed by the committee and the Palestinians refused. They said no one is going to tell us how to educate our children, this is our historical narrative, these are our messages, and they refused.”
The Americans then proposed the Palestinians study their own textbooks and issue a report. This, too, the Palestinians declined.
“Israel didn’t lose interest in solving the problem, we just realized that the Palestinians were not serious about dealing with the problem. I sometimes used to think the trilateral anti-incitement committee was not actually working to stop incitement but was working to bury incitement,” Marcus states.
While Khatib says that without a dialogue there are no agreed-upon standards, Marcus again disagrees.
“The PA has made three commitments to the international community that are repeated over and over again by the Quartet and by the Americans, and the Palestinians claim to have fulfilled these commitments.
They are to recognize Israel, to stop the incitement to hatred, second, and finally to stop violence.”
While Khatib neglected to mention it, the Palestinians did in fact accept a definition of incitement following the Wye Accords in the form of 1998’s Palestinian Presidential Decree No. 3, “Strengthening National Solidarity and Prohibition of Incitement.”
In this document, Arafat ruled that “The following acts will be deemed inappropriate and illegal throughout the Palestinian governorates: Incitement of race discrimination, encouragement of violent acts that are in violation of law, degrading various religions, committing violence or incitement to commit violence that harms the relationship with sisterly and foreign states, and the formation of illegal associations which exercise or encourage the commitment of crimes, disrupt normal life, incite masses to effect change by unlawful force, encourage social unrest, and instigate actions to violate treaties that the Palestine Liberation Organization has concluded with sisterly or foreign states.”
While Khatib says that when the PA “takes note of any accusation that comes from either foreign sources or Israeli sources on anything that might be considered incitement and deals with it immediately and tries to make sure that it’s not repeated,” since much of the incitement that bothers Marcus is broadcast on channels run by the Palestinian leadership, Israelis remain skeptical.
“Theoretically, half the PA leadership should be in jail or should be prosecuted under that decree – if the Palestinians had ever followed it,” Marcus says in a jab at Khatib. “A year ago Yasser Abed Rabbo, the chairman of Palestinian television, said it’s the mouthpiece to impact on people so that they will think in a certain way.”
Regarding Khatib’s claim that the Palestinians combat incitement, Marcus says that the reality is “just the opposite.”
When we pointed out that the mufti (the highest ranking clerical figure employed by the PA) was calling for the genocide of the Jews “by quoting the Hadith that says the hour of resurrection won’t happen until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them... the Palestinian Minister of Religion defended him.”
Whether or not there is an agreed-upon standard, Marcus says, incitement can be evaluated by the standard by which the US Supreme Court said that one can judge obscenity: “you know it when you see it.”
“When you teach young children and youth that suicide bombers are heroes and role models, and that word has been used many times, role models for their generation, it is the worst message that can be given to youth,” Marcus says. “You want to add nuance, now, and say that this is not incitement? “It’s irrelevant whether or not it’s incitement.
It is absolutely against any accord that we have with the Palestinians, it’s been condemned by all the international governments and condemned by the US.
You cannot glorify terrorists if you want to be part of a peace process. You cannot tell children that suicide bombers are role models for them if you want to have a peace process.”
Ultimately, the biggest difference between PA incitement and the Israeli incitement and racism included in the Palestinian reports is that most of the statements in the report were made by MKs and private citizens who were not speaking in any official capacity. Moreover, no matter how objectionable one might find these comments, not one Israeli official cited actively called for violence.
This, Marcus says, is crucial.
“At Palestinian Media Watch we only follow official statements, and to go to Facebook pages is really scraping the bottom,” he concludes.
In the end, when Khatib tells the Post that incitement “is harmful to the relation between the two sides” he is correct. However, it seems that his focus on Israeli incitement may just be a fig leaf to cover his own government’s failures in this area, and Marcus believes that peace demands that he owe up to that fact.