Many may not know who Samar Assad is, even in circles where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a common conversational topic. Her credentials are laid out by the Jerusalem Fund:

"Known for her informative research on Palestinian politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict, Assad served as communications advisor to the Palestinian Negotiations Support Unit in the West Bank from 2000-2001 before joining the Palestine Center in Washington, D.C. She was based in Jerusalem from October 1996 through June 2000, covering Palestine and Israel for the Associated Press prior to her work with the NSU. Before joining AP, Assad worked at the Jerusalem Bureau of the Los Angeles Times. She graduated from San Francisco State University in 1994 after studying journalism and international relations. Assad was raised in Ramallah."¹

So it does follow that she has both an intellectual and emotional connection to the current Israeli Palestinian conflict. Assad is a staunch critic of the Israeli government and its activities through the decades, with an especial emphasis on its treatment of the populations of the Palestinian territories from 1967 unto the present day. Despite the detailed quality of the works of Assad on these Near East affairs, she omits a very important factor. While describing in good detail the how of the actions of Israel in Palestine and Jerusalem, her work is consistently flawed for not detailing at all why Israel does what it does.

I. East Jerusalem

An ancient city, Jerusalem holds importance to the three major monotheistic faiths. For Christianity, it is where Jesus Christ spent His last week on earth. Many sacred sites from His final days are found in Jerusalem, including the Holy Sepulcher and the Via Dolorosa. To Islam, Jerusalem, more commonly called Al-Quds, is the third holiest city in the faith, following Medina and Mecca. It is there that the Dome of the Rock sits prominently over the skyline. To Judaism, both religiously and ethnically, the holy city is an inheritance, promised by God to the Hebrews to be part of their chosen state. Both secular and religious Jews have a strong connection to this city, where the kings of the Old Testament ruled.

Perchance because of these disputes, the city has been violently contested for by many over the millennia. After World War II, with the Israeli War of Independence, Jerusalem was divided between the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan and the nascent Republic of Israel. This arrangement did not last. Eventually Israel would annex the whole of Jerusalem, much to the ire of the international community.

In an Information Brief released by the Palestine Center, Assad lays out the series of events when noting the controversial Absentee Property Law:

“In 1948, Israel ignored the [UN 1947 Partition Plan] and occupied over 80 percent of Jerusalem. In 1967, Israel occupied East Jerusalem along with the rest of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.”²

This is all true; Israel militarily occupied West Jerusalem initially and then eventually took East Jerusalem in 1967. Here is how the problem of Assad’s work first becomes apparent. There is no mention of the Six Day War of 1967, which was the instigator of the seizure of East Jerusalem. This is especially important given that East Jerusalem was under the rule of Jordanian Kingdom, who had in the past been the chief military reason why Jerusalem had not been completely taken years earlier. While Egypt was fighting Israel on the Jewish state’s southern border, Jordan under King Hussein had stayed out of the first day’s fighting, something Israel preferred:

“Through the war’s first morning, Israel was sending Hussein warnings via third parties to keep his army out. Yet while Hussein feared Israel, he also feared the pro-Nasser frenzy in his own population.”³

Former author, columnist, and associate editor at the Jerusalem Report, Gershom Gorenberg, goes into detail about what Jordan did next:

“Jordanian artillery shells fell on Israel’s narrow waist, on an air base near the northern edge of the West Bank, on West Jerusalem. In early afternoon, the ground assault began, as Jordanian troops took the U.N. headquarters on a hilltop in the no-man’s-land between East and West Jerusalem.”⁴

Most certainly this military action would justify a military response, which is of course what Israel would deliver and deliver so soundly that in many Arab schools even within Israel Proper this war is referred to as “the catastrophe.” The important point here is that Assad does not mentioned the actions of the Jordanians during the Six Day War; their tactics being acknowledged gives validity to Israel’s effort not just in 1967 but also in 1948. The partition plan cited by Assad was broken by Jordan as well, who as mentioned above also occupied a part of the holy city. Their presence, especially in what was tactically a weak sport for Israel, more than justifies a counter presence by Israel in the same way the military Soviet presence in East Germany justified a military presence by the Western Powers in West Germany.

Assad speaks negatively of the measures Israel has taken upon the non-Jewish portion of the holy city:

“East Jerusalem landowners are kept outside the illegally expanded Jerusalem municipal boundaries due to a series of Israeli measures. Those measures include: revoking or denying Palestinians Jerusalem residency permits, denying Palestinians housing permits and access to public housing in the city…and most recently the separation wall.”⁵

She is not alone. Scholar Karen Armstrong detailed the extensive actions of a questionable nature performed by the Israeli army upon entering East Jerusalem after the end of the Six Day War:

“On the night of Saturday, 10 June, after the armistice had been signed, the 619 inhabitants of the Maghribi Quarter were given three hours to evacuate their homes. Then the bulldozers came in and reduced this historic district—one of the earliest of the Jerusalem awqaf—to rubble.”⁶

There are no good governments, as one wise man once said. Human beings are sinful, our very nature being prone to malevolence. As a result, man-made institutions are as their creators, sinful and prone to malevolence. The potency of the arguments of Assad and Armstrong are such because these events are oftentimes a matter of undisputed record, a rare occurrence in such hot-button issues. Measures taken upon the Arab population of Jerusalem are often ultra-strict, if not discriminatory. There may not be any good governments, but there are governments that are morally superior to others; Israel is one such example, especially when compared to the faction that now controls the Gaza Strip and is freed from Assad’s scrutiny: Hamas.

An Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas rules Gaza with a blood-soaked iron fist. The chaos that has been found there has been more than distressing for the Palestinian Arabs living in East Jerusalem: it has been disillusioning, as recently reported by Larry Derfner and Khaled Abu Toameh of U.S. News and World Report:

“…the relative security of life in Arab Jerusalem has deflated their nationalist spirit. Only 15 percent of them voted in [2006’s] PA elections—compared with 78 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank…”⁷

As one Arab attorney puts it, “The saying you hear [from Arabs] in the city now is ‘Give me hell in Jerusalem over paradise in the PA.”⁸ Even the more critical Armstrong will concede that moral supremacy of Israel over its neighbors, in this case the Jordanians who once illegally occupied Jerusalem:

“Moshe Dayan made it clear that Israel would respect the rights of Christians and Muslims to run their own shrines. Israelis would proudly compare their behavior with that of the Jordanians, who had denied Jews access to the Western Wall.”⁹

Much is made of the restrictions that the Israeli government places on Arabs in Jerusalem, but Jews get restrictions as well, going all the way back to when they first seized East Jerusalem. “Jews were forbidden by the Israeli government to pray or hold services on the Haram, since it was now a Muslim holy place. The Israeli government has never retreated from this policy, which shows that the Zionist conquerors were not entirely without respect for the sacred rights of their predecessors in Jerusalem.”¹⁰

If much is made about the taking of East Jerusalem, little is made by Assad as to the reasons and even less on how Arab residents prefer Israeli rule over the Palestinian Authority. Assad does not mention in her work the activities of the Jordanian army, their illegal occupation and willful refusal to acknowledge the UN Partition Plan. Neither does she note Jordan’s violent efforts in the holy city during the Six Day War. Otherwise, that might make Israel a sympathetic character in this tragic play.

II. Settlements

If one prevailing irony exists about the Middle East Conflict, it has to be the amount of land that is disputed. Combined Israel and Palestine barely equal a percentage point of territory in the Middle East (if one is to include North Africa under that geographical classification). The State of Florida alone is larger in area than the State of Israel. Yet so much news coverage and so much political instability emanates from that miniscule region. With so little territory and with no real solid border, Israelis through the decades have looked to expanding eastward.

This has been the very founding mindset of Israel and the ideology that brought it to modern reality, Zionism. Israel began as a small collection of settlements scattered in the Levant, established on legally purchased stretches of mostly barren land. So from the beginning there has always been a settlement mentality, perchance comparable to the continental expansionism of the United States of America during the nineteenth century. It was not until the twentieth century, with the fall of Western Imperialism, that settlements truly gained a negative reputation. Assad shares this negative feeling for settlements, as evidenced by her writings: “There is no such thing as an ‘authorized’ settlement. All settlements are illegal under international law.”¹¹ Within the framework, she has taken issue with the failure on the part of Israel to fully remove their settlements from the West Bank and Gaza Strip:

“The settlement blocs house 80 percent of the West Bank settler population. In exchange for the evacuation of the 7,600 settlers from the Gaza Strip and the dismantling of a few ‘unauthorized’ and strategically expendable outposts, Israel intends to annex the majority of the settlers and the remaining illegal yet ‘authorized’ settlements.”¹²

Once again, why Israel has taken upon the decision to keep as many settlements as possible is almost completely ignored by Assad, only briefly being mentioned when she writes of “strategically expendable outposts”. This passing reference underplays a very important reason that, left unresolved, will only exacerbate the conflict now found in the Levant.

The West Bank and Gaza Strip were occupied in 1967, following the Six Day War in which Israel fought off multiple Arab armies coming from three directions. Egypt placed regiments in the Sinai, Jordan attacked through the West Bank, and Syria bombarded communities via the Golan Heights. In other words, every region Israel occupied illegally according to Assad and likeminded intellectuals were sources of an attempt to push the Jews into the Sea. Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami put it best on the 40th anniversary of the conflict: “At the heart of the war lay the willful Arab refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy and statehood.”¹³

So what do the settlements found in the occupied territories and the Six-Day War have in common? Cause and effect. The territories to which settlements have since been established were territories that in Arab hands had left Israel vulnerable to invasion and violent subjugation. Defense, not genocide or colonialism, has been the paramount intention. An example of this was seen in the initial battle plan for the West Bank front, as General Moshe Dayan of Israel wanted “to move the Jordanians out of artillery range.”¹⁴

Simply put, had Arab states had not attempted to wipe Israel out there would be no outposts placed in regions where Israel is militarily vulnerable. A government must be allowed to protect its people and by demanding the dismantling of all settlements, even ones key to security, people like Assad are not appreciative of the potential outcome. Or worse, they don’t care. The latter may yet be a reason for another example of cause and effect disregarded by Assad.

III. The Assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin

There are some people in the world considered so dangerous or so awful that their very lives are seen as expendable. Far from a recent development, one can see this throughout history, including the killings of presidential assassins John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, both of whom never survived to make it to trial due to those who were overzealously committed to vigilante justice. In an online article examining the prisoner exchanges periodically performed between the Israelis and Palestinians, Assad notes an example of this from recent Middle East history:

There is much that could be debated about the assassination policy of Israel, whether or not one could justify state-sponsored killing from without the legal process. Nevertheless, the implication Assad makes is that Yassin did not deserve such a fate. With this we can agree: he deserved worse. The organization Yassin founded is one of the premiere modern day terrorist factions. Hamas’ charter calls for the destruction of Israel: “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”¹⁷ Fused into this declaration is a strident anti-Semitism, as seen by their endorsement of the infamous forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, “[The Israelis’] scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there.”¹⁸

In June AD 2007 Hamas violently overthrew the Fatah government of the Gaza Strip, advancing their agenda to create a Sharia Muslim state. Since then, their occupation of Gaza has been ripe with atrocity, starting not long after power was consolidated in Gaza according to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights:

“Hamas is conducting wipe sweeps and interrogations to collect information. The interrogations include harsh treatment, and in many cases, torture and beatings.”¹⁹

A member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine contrasted life in Gaza before and after the takeover: “…during Fatah’s rule, we could give our opinions and say anything we wanted about the Fatah leadership. Today, people are afraid of saying anything about Hamas.”²⁰

Granted the violent takeover and subjugation of Gaza took place after the assassination of Yassin, but remember: Hamas is the fruit of his labors, the extension of his worldview. He approved their methods while alive and because of this his hands are covered with civilian blood. Assad does not mention the criminal acts of Yassin, making it almost appear as though he were merely a vibrant opponent of Israeli occupation. Further, giving him the status of mere dissenter makes Israel’s assassination of him look unforeseen, almost sporadic when the reality is this man was not some mere stone-throwing child: he was a terrorist mastermind whose faction now controls the Gaza Strip with a brutal illegal fiat. Once again, Assad describes how Israel dealt with this man but not why they dealt with him so fiercely.

V. Concluding for the time being

More may yet be added to this dissection of the work of an accomplished journalist and reporter whose focus has been the political turmoil of the holy land. It is not as though Assad has fabricated events like some in the Pro-Palestine Movement, the facts from what basic research has shown seems as valid as anything the other side has to offer. However she does not mention all the facts regarding certain hot button issues within the greater controversial issue, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. By not acknowledging the root causes for the actions Israel has taken, she paints an Israel that is imperialist and largely racist, sporadic in its behavior to the point of being collectively neurotic.

There are no good governments, this is true. In her work, Assad has attempted to paint Israel as a brutal reasonless state, headed by a merciless government. However, she can only do this by not referencing the very valid justifications found through the decades for Israeli activities. She may accurately report the occasional dubious action, but this methodology can easily be abused. If all one heard about the Second World War was that America regularly bombed civilian targets, obliterated major metropolises like Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, imprisoned a large part of their population over ethnic paranoia, aided the genocidal Soviet regime, and racially segregated its military one would think that America was a force of evil in that conflict and the Nazis were merely defending their fatherland. With the works referenced in this essay and others similar, Assad is trying to do just that with the Israelis, making it seem as though all groups like Hamas want is peace.

Sources

1. http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/images/pressrelease.php?ID=22 (Accessed 09/21/2007)

2.Assad, Samar, “Reviving the Absentee Property Law: Another Step in Consolidating the Occupation”, The Palestine Center (The Jerusalem Fund, January 27th, AD 2005) Number 115.

3.Gorenberg, Gershom, The Accidental Empire (New York: Times Books, 2006) p.35.

4.Ibid.

5.Assad, “Reviving the Absentee Property Law: Another Step in Consolidating the Occupation”, Number 115.

6.Armstrong, Karen Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) pp.402-403.

7.Derfner, Larry “Jerusalem Undivided”, US News and World Report, June 11th, AD 2007, Vol.142, No.21, p.42.

8.Ibid.

9.Armstrong, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, p.407.

10.Ibid.

11.Assad, Samar, “Settlements, Outposts, and the Law”, The Palestine Center (The Jerusalem Fund, March 11th, AD 2005) Number 117.

12.Ibid.

13.Ajami, Fouad “Israel’s Triumph”, US News and World Report, June 11th, AD 2007, Vol.142, No.21, p.44.

14.Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire, p.37.

15.Assad, Samar, “Political Prisoners and Arbitrary Arrests: A History of Israeli-Palestinian Prisoner Exchanges”, http://www.counterpunch.org/assad07142006.html, (accessed 10-22-07)

16.Mitnick, Joshua, “Hamas fighters overrun Fatah, control territory”, Washington Times, Thursday June 14th, AD 2007 (A13).

17. "Selected Documents Regarding Palestine: Hamas Charter (1988)" http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html, accessed January 11th, AD 2008.

18. Ibid.

19.Levinson, Charles, “Hamas Wields Brutal Control”, Washington Times, August 26th, AD 2007 (A1)

20.Ibid.