Part 3 (1/2)

What puzzles me is that even after eight years of deception and betrayal, the official Palestinian mind finds itself incapable of saying what a disaster Oslo was and instead wants it brought back. That's like asking the executioner if he wouldn't mind sharpening his axe a little before having another go. Of course, one needs to stay in whatever political game is going on, and of course, one must be able to respond directly to questions about agreements, truces, and so forth. But above all, what I find so dismaying is that our spokespersons show signs of being so totally remote from the daily horrors of life for average Palestinians that they never even mention it.

To them I want to say that no matter the occasion, no matter the question, no matter the newspaper or TV or radio journalist, every question must first be answered with a few basic points about the military occupation that has been in place for thirty-four years since 1967. This is the source of violence, this is the source of the main problems, and it is the reason Israel can never have real peace. Our entire political position must be based on ending the occupation, and this must take precedence over any and every other consideration. When Erekat or Shaath or Hanan Ashrawi or Khatib is asked something, for example, about the Mitch.e.l.l report or the Powell visit, the answer should always begin, ”So long as there is a military occupation of Palestine by Israel, there can never be peace. Occupation with tanks, soldiers, checkpoints, and settlements is violence, and it is much greater than anything Palestinians have done by way of resistance.” Something like that.

These estimable people have to remember that 99 percent of the people reading newspapers or watching TV news all over the world (including Arabs) have simply forgotten-if they ever knew-that Israel is an illegal occupying power and has been for thirty-four years. So we must remind the world of that over and over. Repeat and repeat and repeat. This is not a difficult task, although it is, I believe, absolutely crucial. To remind everyone repeatedly about the Israeli occupation is a necessary repet.i.tion, much more so than stupidly inconsequential and sentimental Israeli- and American-style remarks about peace and violence. Can we learn, or are we condemned to repeat our mistakes forever?

Al-Ahram, July 1925, 2001.

Al-Hayat, July 6, 2001.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The Price of Camp David.

In July 2000 Bill Clinton convened a meeting of the Israeli and Palestinian leaders.h.i.+ps at the presidential retreat in Camp David so as to finalize a peace agreement that he thought they were ready for. I emphasize Clinton's role in all this because it was characteristic of the man whom Palestinians had placed their hopes in, greeted in Ramallah and Gaza like a hero, and deferred to on every occasion, that he rushed together the two opponents, locked together for decades in a convoluted struggle, in order to be able for his own selfish purposes to say he had engineered a historical achievement.

Yasir Arafat didn't want to go. Ehud Barak was there mainly to extract a promise from the Palestinians that would end the conflict and, more important, end all Palestinian claims against Israel (including the right of return for refugees) once the Oslo process had been concluded. Clinton had always been an opportunist first and last, a Zionist second, and a clumsy politician third. The Palestinians were the weakest party; they were badly led and poorly prepared. Clinton surmised that because his (and Barak's) terms in office were ending, he could produce a peace ceremony based on Palestinian capitulation, a ceremony that would forever enshrine his presidency by erasing the memory of Monica Lewinsky and the developing scandal of Marc Rich's pardon.

This great plan, of course, failed completely. Even American sources recently made public support the Palestinian argument that Barak's ”generous offer” was neither an offer nor generous. Robert Malley, a member of Clinton's White Housebased National Security Council, has published a report on what took place, and although it is critical of Palestinian tactics during the Camp David summit, it makes clear that Israel wasn't even close to offering what the Palestinians' legitimate national aspirations required. But Malley spoke out in July 2001, a full year after the Camp David summit ended and well after Israel's well-oiled propaganda machine launched the by-now-standard chorus that Arafat had mischievously rejected the best imaginable Israeli offer. This chorus was abetted by Clinton's repeated claim that, whereas Barak was courageous, Arafat was only disappointing. And so the thesis has lodged in public discourse ever since, to Palestine's immense detriment. Unnoticed was the observation made by an Israeli information flunky that after Camp David and Taba, no Palestinians played a consistent role disseminating a Palestinian version of the debacle. Thus Israel has had the field to itself, with results in exploitation and backlash that have been virtually incalculable.

I was well aware of the damage being accordingly done to the intifada as a result of Israel's self-portrayal as a rejected peace-lover last autumn and winter. I made phone calls to members of Arafat's entourage urging them to convince their leader of how Israel was making use of Palestinian silence, which it quickly established was the verbal equivalent of Palestinian violence. Word reached me that Arafat was adamant, that he refused to address his people, the Israelis, or the world, no doubt hoping that fate or his own miraculous powers of noncommunication would affect the Israeli disinformation campaign. In any event, my urging did absolutely no good. Arafat and his numerous lackeys remained ineffective, uncomprehending, and of course largely silent.

We must blame ourselves first of all. Neither our leaders.h.i.+p nor our intellectuals seem to have grasped that even a brave anticolonial uprising cannot on its own explain itself, and that what we (and the other Arabs) regard as our right of resistance can be made to seem by Israel like the most unprincipled terrorism or violence. In the meantime, Israel has persuaded the world to forget its own violent occupation and its terrorist collective punishment-to say nothing of its unstoppable ethnic cleansing-against the Palestinian people.

Indeed, we have made matters worse for ourselves by allowing the inadequate Arafat to come and go as he pleases on the question of violence. Every human rights doc.u.ment ever formulated ent.i.tles a people to resistance against military occupation, the destruction of homes and property, and the expropriation of land for the purpose of settlements. Arafat and his advisers seem not to have understood that when they blindly entered Israel's unilateral dialectic of violence and terror-verbally speaking-they had in essence given up their right of resistance. Instead of making clear that any relinquis.h.i.+ng of resistance had to be accompanied by Israel's withdrawal and/or equal relinquis.h.i.+ng of its occupation, the Palestinian people were made vulnerable by their leaders.h.i.+p to charges of terror and violence. Everything Israel did became retaliation. Everything Palestinians did was either violence or terror or (usually) both. The resulting spectacle of a war criminal like Sharon denouncing Palestinian ”violence” has been little short of disgusting.

Another consequence of Palestinian inept.i.tude was that it let the so-called Israeli peace activists off the hook, turning that sad collection of camp-followers into silent allies of Israel's lamentable Sharon-led government. A few brave and principled Israelis like some of the New Historians-Jeff Halper, Michel Warschavsky, and their groups-are an exception. How many times have we heard the official ”peaceniks” rant on about their ”disappointment” at Palestinian ”ingrat.i.tude” and violence? How rarely does anyone tell them that their role is to pressure their governments to end the occupation and not (as they always have) to lecture a people under occupation about their magnanimity and disappointed hopes? Would only but the most reactionary French person in 1944 be tolerant of German pleas to be ”reasonable” about Germany's occupation of France? No, of course not. But we tolerate the hectoring Israeli ”peace” proponents to go on and on about how ”generous” Barak has been, without reminding them that every one of their leaders has made his name as a killer or oppressor of Arabs, from 1948 to the present. David Ben-Gurion presided over the Nakbah; Levi Eshkol over the conquests of 1967; Menachem Begin over Deir Ya.s.sin and Lebanon; Yitzhak Rabin over the bone-breaking of the first intifada and, before that, over the evacuation of sixty thousand unarmed Palestinian civilians from Ramleh and Lydda in 1948; Peres over the destruction of Qana; Barak personally took part in the a.s.sa.s.sination of Palestinian leaders; Sharon led the ma.s.sacre of Qibya and was responsible for Sabra and Shatila. The real role of the Israeli peace camp is to do what it has never seriously done, which is to acknowledge all of that and to prevent further outrages by the Israeli army and air force against a dispossessed and stateless people, not to be free and easy with advice to Palestinians or to express hopes and disappointment to the people whom Israel has oppressed for over half a century.

But once the Palestinian leaders.h.i.+p forsook its principles and pretended that it was a great power capable of playing the game of nations, it brought on itself the fate of a weak nation, with neither the sovereignty nor the power to reinforce its gestures or its tactics. So hypnotized is Mr. Arafat with his supposed standing as a president, jumping from Paris to London to Beijing to Cairo on one pointless state visit after another, that he has forgotten that the weapons that the weak and the stateless cannot ever give up are their principles and their people. To occupy and unendingly defend the moral high ground; to keep telling the truth and reminding the world of the full historical picture; to hold on to the lawful right of resistance and rest.i.tution; to mobilize people everywhere rather than to appear with the likes of Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair; and to depend neither on the media nor on the Israelis but on oneself to tell the truth. These are what Palestinian leaders forgot first at Oslo and then again at Camp David. When will we as a people a.s.sume responsibility for what after all is ours and stop relying on leaders who no longer have any idea what they are doing?

Al-Ahram, July 1925, 2001.

Al-Hayat, July 23, 2001.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Occupation Is the Atrocity.

In the United States, where Israel has its main political base and from which it has received over $92 billion in aid since 1967, the terrible human cost of Thursday's Jerusalem restaurant bombing and Monday's Haifa disaster settles quickly into a familiar explanatory framework. Arafat hasn't done enough to control his terrorists; suicidal Islamic extremists are to be found everywhere, bringing harm on ”us” and our strongest allies, driven by sheer human hatred; Israel must defend its security. A thoughtful individual might add: these people have been fighting tirelessly for thousands of years anyway; the violence must be stopped; there's been too much suffering on both sides, although the way Palestinians send their children into battle is another sign of how much Israel has to put up with. And so, exasperated but still restrained, Israel invades unfortified and undefended Jenin with bulldozers and tanks, destroys the Palestine Authority's police buildings plus several others, and then sends out its propagandists to say that it has sent a message to Yasir Arafat to curb his terrorists. In the meantime, he and his coterie are begging for American protection, doubtless forgetting that Israel is the one with U.S. protection and that all he will get, for the six thousandth time, is an injunction to stop the violence.

The fact is that in America, Israel has pretty much won the propaganda war, and America is about to put several million more dollars into a public relations campaign (using stars like Zubin Mehta, Itzhak Perlman, and Amos Oz) to further improve its image. But consider what Israel's unrelenting war against the undefended, basically unarmed, stateless, and poorly led Palestinian people has already achieved. The disparity in power is so vast that it makes you cry. Equipped with the latest in American-built (and freely given) air power, helicopter guns.h.i.+ps, uncountable tanks and missiles, and a superb navy as well as a state-of-the-art intelligence service, Israel is a nuclear power abusing a people without any armor or artillery, without an air force (its one pathetic airfield in Gaza is controlled by Israel) or navy or army, with none of the inst.i.tutions of a modern state. The appallingly unbroken history of Israel's thirty-four-year-old military occupation (the second longest in modern history) of illegally conquered Palestinian land has been obliterated from public memory nearly everywhere, as has been the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the expulsion of 68 percent of its native people, of whom 4.5 million remain refugees today. Behind the reams of newspeak, the stark outlines of Israel's decades-long daily pressure on a people whose main sin is that they happened to be there, in Israel's way, is staggeringly perceptible in its inhuman sadism. The fantastically cruel confinement of 1.3 million people jammed like so many human sardines into the Gaza Strip, plus the nearly 2 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank, has no parallel in the annals of apartheid or colonialism. F-16 jets were never used to bomb South African homelands. They are against Palestinian towns and villages. All entrances and exits to the territories are controlled by Israel (Gaza is completely surrounded by a barbed-wire fence), which also controls the entire water supply. Divided into about sixty-three noncontiguous cantons, completely encircled and besieged by Israeli troops, punctuated by 140 settlements (many of them built under Ehud Barak's premiers.h.i.+p) with their own road network banned to ”non-Jews,” as Arabs are referred to, along with such unflattering epithets as thieves, snakes, c.o.c.kroaches, and gra.s.shoppers, Palestinians under occupation have now been reduced to 60 percent unemployment and a poverty rate of 50 percent (half the people of Gaza and the West Bank live on less than two dollars a day); they cannot travel from one place to the next; they must endure long lines at Israeli checkpoints, which detain and humiliate the elderly, the sick, the student, and the cleric for hours on end; 150,000 of their olive and citrus trees have been punitively uprooted, 2,000 of their houses demolished, and acres of their land either destroyed or expropriated for military settlement purposes.

Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began late last September, 609 Palestinians have been killed (four times more than Israeli fatalities) and 15,000 wounded, a dozen times more than on the other side. Regular Israeli army a.s.sa.s.sinations have picked off alleged terrorists at will, most of the time killing innocents like so many flies. Last week fourteen Palestinians were murdered openly by Israeli forces using helicopter guns.h.i.+ps and missiles; they were thus ”prevented” from killing Israelis, although at least two children and five innocents were also murdered, to say nothing of many wounded civilians and several destroyed buildings that were part of the somehow acceptable collateral damage. Nameless and faceless, Israel's daily Palestinian victims barely rate a mention on America's news programs, even though-for reasons that I simply cannot understand- Arafat is still hoping that the Americans will rescue him and his crumbling regime.

Nor is this all. Israel's plan is not just to hold land and fill it with dreadful, murderous armed settlers who, defended by the army, wreak havoc on Palestinian orchards, schoolchildren, and homes; it is, as the American researcher Sara Roy has named it, to de-develop Palestinian society, to make life impossible so that they will leave, or give up somehow, or do something crazy like blow themselves up. Since 1967 leaders have been jailed and deported by the Israeli occupation regime, small businesses and farms made unviable by confiscation and sheer destruction, students prevented from studying, universities closed. (In the mid-1980s Palestinian universities on the West Bank were closed for four years.) No Palestinian farmer or business can export to any Arab country directly; their products must pa.s.s through Israel. Taxes are paid to Israel. Even after the Oslo peace process began in 1993, the occupation was simply repackaged, only 18 percent of the land given to the corrupt Vichy-like Authority of Yasir Arafat, whose mandate seems to have been only to police and tax his people for Israel's sake. After eight fruitless immiserating years of the Oslo negotiations, masterminded by an American team of former Israeli lobby staffers like Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, Israel was still in control, the occupation packaged more efficiently, and the phrase ”peace process” given a consecrated halo that allowed more abuses, more settlements, more imprisonments, more Palestinian suffering to go on than before. Including a ”judaized” East Jerusalem, with Orient House occupied and its contents looted or carted off (there are invaluable records, land deeds, maps that, in a repet.i.tion of what it did when it stole PLO archives from Beirut in 1982, Israel has simply stolen), Israel has implanted no less than 400,000 settlers on Palestinian land. To call them vigilantes and hoodlums is not an exaggeration.

It is worth recalling that a couple of weeks after Ariel Sharon's gratuitously arrogant visit to Jerusalem's Haram al-Sharif on September 28, 2000, with a thousand soldiers and guards supplied by Prime Minister Barak, Israel was condemned for this action by a unanimous Security Council resolution. Then, as even the merest child could have predicted, the anticolonial rebellion broke out, with eight killed Palestinians its first victims. Sharon was swept to power essentially to ”subdue” the Palestinians, teach them a lesson, get rid of them. His record as an Arab-killer goes back thirty years before the Sabra and Shatila ma.s.sacres that his forces supervised in 1982, and for which he has now been indicted in a Belgian court. Still, Arafat wants to negotiate with him and come perhaps to a cozy arrangement with him so as to safeguard the very Authority that Sharon is systematically dismantling, destroying, razing to the ground.

But Sharon isn't a fool, either. With every Palestinian act of resistance, his forces ratchet up the pressure a notch higher, tightening the siege more, taking more land, making more and deeper incursions into Palestinian towns like Jenin and Ramallah, cutting off more supplies, openly a.s.sa.s.sinating Palestinian leaders, making life more intolerable, and redefining the terms of his government's actions: that it once made ”generous concessions” while ”defending” itself, that it ”prevents” terrorism, that it ”secures” areas, that it ”reestablishes” control, and so on. Meanwhile he and his minions attack and dehumanize Arafat, even saying that he is the ”arch-terrorist” (although he literally can't move without Israeli permission), and that ”we” have no war with the Palestinian people. What a boon for that people! With such ”restraint,” why should a ma.s.sive invasion, carefully bruited about to terrorize the Palestinians even more s.a.d.i.s.tically, be necessary? Israel knows that it can retake their buildings at will (witness the wholesale theft of Jerusalem's Orient House, plus nine other buildings, offices, libraries, and archives there and in Abu Dis), just as it has all but eliminated the Palestinians as a people.

This is the real story of Israel's pretended ”victimization,” constructed with such premeditated care and evil intent for months now. Language has been sundered from reality. Pity not the inept, clumsy, pathetic Arab governments that can and will do nothing to stop Israel: pity the people who bear the wounds in their flesh and in the emaciated bodies of their children, some of whom believe that martyrdom is the only way out for them. And Israel, stuck in a futureless campaign, flailing about mercilessly? As James Cousins, the Irish poet and critic, said in 1925, the colonizer is in the grip of ”false and selfish pre-occupations that stand in the way of its attention to the natural evolution of its own national genius and pull[ed] from the path of open rect.i.tude into the twisted byways of dishonest thought, speech, and action, in the artificial defense of a false position.” All colonizers have gone that way, learning or stopping at nothing, until at last, as Israel turned tail from its twenty-two-year occupation of Lebanon, they exit the territory, leaving behind an exhausted and crippled people. If this was supposed to fulfill Jewish aspirations, why did it require so many new victims from another people who had nothing to do with Jewish exile and persecution in the first place?

With Arafat and Company in command, there is no hope. What is the man doing, grotesquely fetching up in the Vatican and Lagos and other miscellaneous places, pleading without dignity or even intelligence for imaginary observers, Arab aid, and international support, instead of staying with his people and trying to aid them with medical supplies, morale-boosting measures, and real leaders.h.i.+p? He must go. What we need is a unified leaders.h.i.+p of people who are on the ground, who are actually doing the resisting, and who are really with and of their people-not the fat, cigar-chomping bureaucrats who want their business deals preserved and their VIP pa.s.ses renewed and have lost all trace of decency or credibility. A united leaders.h.i.+p that takes positions and plans ma.s.s actions designed not to return to Oslo (can you believe the folly of that idea?) but to press on with resistance and liberation, instead of confusing people with talk of negotiations and the stupid Mitch.e.l.l plan.

Arafat is finished: why don't we admit that he can neither lead, nor plan, nor do anything that makes any difference except to him and his Oslo cronies who have benefited materially from their people's misery? He is the main obstacle to our people's future. All the polls show that his presence blocks whatever forward movement might be possible. We need a united leaders.h.i.+p to make decisions, not simply to grovel before the pope and the moronic George W. Bush, even as the Israelis are killing his heroic people with impunity. A leader must lead the resistance, reflect the realities on the ground, respond to his people's needs, plan, think, and expose himself to the same dangers and difficulties that everyone experiences. The struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation is where every Palestinian worth anything now stands: Oslo cannot be restored or repackaged as Arafat and Company might desire. It's over for them, and the sooner they pack and get out, the better for everyone.

Al-Ahram, August 1622, 2001.

Al-Hayat, August 20, 2001.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Propaganda and War.

Never has the media been so influential in determining the course of war as during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which, as far as the Western media are concerned, has essentially become a battle over images and ideas. Israel has already poured hundreds of millions of dollars into what in Hebrew is called hasbara, or information for the outside world (hence, propaganda). This has included an entire range of efforts: lunches and free trips for influential journalists; seminars for Jewish university students who, over a week in a secluded country estate, can be primed to ”defend” Israel on the campus; bombarding congressmen and women with invitations and visits; pamphlets and, most important, money for election campaigns; directing (or, as the case requires, hara.s.sing) photographers and writers of the current intifada into producing certain images and not others; lecture and concert tours by prominent Israelis; training commentators to make frequent references to the Holocaust and Israel's predicament today; many advertis.e.m.e.nts in the newspapers attacking Arabs and praising Israel; and on and on. Because so many powerful people in the media and publis.h.i.+ng business are strong supporters of Israel, the task is made vastly easier.

Although these are only a few of the devices used to pursue the aims of every modern government, whether democratic or not, since the 1930s and 1940s-to produce consent and approval on the part of the consumer of news-no country and no lobby more than Israel's has used them in the United States so effectively and for so long.

Orwell called this kind of misinformation newspeak or doublethink, the intention to cover criminal actions, especially killing people unjustly, with a veneer of justification and reason. In the case of Israel, which has always had the intention to silence or make Palestinians invisible as it robs them of their land, this has been in effect a suppression of the truth, or a large part of it, as well as a ma.s.sive falsification of history. What for the past few months Israel has successfully wanted to prove to the world is that it is an innocent victim of Palestinian violence and terror, and that Arabs and Muslims have no other reason to be in conflict with Israel except for an irreducibly irrational hatred of Jews. Nothing more or less. And what has made this campaign so effective is a long-standing sense of Western guilt for anti-Semitism. What could be more efficient than to displace that guilt onto another people, the Arabs, and thereby feel not only justified but positively a.s.suaged that something good has been done for a much-maligned and harmed people? To defend Israel at all costs-even though it is in military occupation of Palestinian land, has a powerful military, and has been killing and wounding Palestinians in a ratio of four or five to one-is the goal of propaganda. That plus going on with what it does, but seeming to be a victim just the same.

Without any doubt, however, the extraordinary success of this unparalleled and immoral effort has been in large part due not only to the campaign's carefully planned and executed detail but also to the fact that the Arab side has been practically nonexistent. When our historians look back to the first fifty years of Israel's existence, an enormous historical responsibility shall rest d.a.m.ningly on the shoulders of the Arab leaders who have criminally-yes, criminally-allowed this to go on without even the most meager and half-hearted response. Instead, each of them has fought all of the others, or has relied on the hopelessly self-serving theory that by trying to ingratiate themselves with the American government (even becoming clients of the United States), they would a.s.sure themselves of longevity in power, regardless of whether Arab interests were being served or not. So deeply ingrained has this notion become that even the Palestinian leaders.h.i.+p has subscribed to it, with the result that as the intifada rolls on, the average American hasn't the slightest inkling that there is a narrative of Palestinian suffering and dispossession at least as old as Israel itself. Meanwhile Arab leaders come running to Was.h.i.+ngton begging for American protection without even understanding that three generations of Americans have been brought up on Israeli propaganda to believe that Arabs are lying terrorists with whom it is wrong to do business, much less to protect.

Since 1948 Arab leaders have never bothered to confront Israeli propaganda in the United States. All the immense amounts of Arab money invested in military spending (first on Soviet, then on Western arms) have come to naught because Arab efforts have neither been protected by information nor explained by patient, systematic organizing. The result is that literally hundreds of thousands of lost Arab lives have gone for nothing, nothing at all. The world's only superpower's citizens have been led to believe that everything Arabs do and are is wasteful, violent, fanatical, and anti-Semitic. Israel is ”our” only ally. And so $92 billion in aid since 1967 has gone unquestioningly from the U.S. taxpayer to the Jewish state. As I said earlier, a total absence of planning and thought vis--vis the U.S. political and cultural arena is hugely (but not exclusively) to blame for the astounding amount of Arab land and lives lost to Israel (subsidized by the United States) since 1948, a major political crime that I hope the Arab leaders one day answer for.

I recall that during the siege of Beirut in 1982, a large nongovernmental group of very successful Palestinian businessmen and prominent intellectuals gathered in London to establish an endowment to help Palestinians on all levels. With the PLO trapped in Beirut and incapable of doing much, it was felt that a mobilization of this sort might help us to help ourselves. I also recall that as the funds were quickly gathered, a decision was made after much discussion that fully half the money would go for information in the West; it was felt that since-as usual-Palestinians were being oppressed by Israel with scarcely a voice lifted in the West to support the victims, it was imperative that money should be spent for advertis.e.m.e.nts, media time, tours, and the like in order to make it more difficult to kill and further oppress Palestinians without complaint or awareness. This was especially important, we felt, in America, where taxpayers' money was being spent in subsidizing Israel's illegal wars, settlements, and conquests. For about two years, this policy was followed; then, for reasons I have never fully understood, efforts to help the Palestinians in the United States were abruptly terminated. When I asked why, I was told by a Palestinian gentleman who had made a fortune in the Gulf that ”throwing money away” in America was a waste. The philanthropy now continues exclusively for the Occupied Territories and Lebanon, where this a.s.sociation does much good but very little in comparison with projects funded by the European Union and numerous American foundations.

Some weeks ago the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), by far the largest and most effective Arab American organization in the United States, commissioned a public opinion poll on current American perspectives on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. A very wide and deep sample of the population was polled, with quite startling, not to say disheartening, results. Israelis are still believed to be a pioneering democratic people, even though no Israeli leader did very well in the poll. Seventy-three percent of the American people approve of the idea of a Palestinian state, a very surprising result. The interpretation of that statistic is that when you ask an educated American who watches television and reads elite newspapers whether he/she identifies with the Palestinian struggle for independence and freedom, the answer is mostly yes. But if the same person is asked what his idea is about Palestinians, the answer is almost always negative-violence and terrorism. Images of the Palestinians seem to be that they are uncompromising, aggressive, and ”alien,” that is, not like ”us.” Even when asked about the stone-throwing young people, whom we believe are Davids fighting against Goliath, most Americans see aggression rather than heroism. Americans still blame the Palestinians for obstructing the peace process, Camp David most particularly. Suicide bombing is viewed as ”inhuman” and is condemned universally.