
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 4, 1994                   TAG: 9404050002
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By FAHIM I. QUBAIN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PALESTINIANS, ISRAELIS AT A CROSSROADS

THE MASSACRE of some 50 Palestinians this past month in Hebron wasn't carried out by a ``crazy'' killer, but a time bomb that was waiting to happen. It's the natural byproduct of an expansionist ideology going back to the early '20s. The killer - Baruch Goldstein, an American from Brooklyn - was a close associate and a disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahani and a leader of the Gush Emunim settlement movement in Kiryat Arba. In one of his numerous tracts, Rabbi Kahani wrote:

``The Jewish people stand or fall on the knowledge that we are not like all other people. We are the chosen people, a godly people, a people chosen by the Almighty to do His Will. There is a chosen people, a chosen land, a chosen state and a chosen destiny. And the conduct of the Jew and his state must be directed toward that destiny. We are not equal to the Gentiles, we are different, we are higher. The normal rules of nationhood and statehood do not apply to us. The normal logic of foreign policy is not ours. We are Chosen.''

The above quotation should ring a bell. Some 60 years earlier, Hitler used almost the identical wording. He wrote in "Mein Kampf": ``We have been chosen. We must cling unflinchingly to our foreign policy aims. That is, to guarantee our nation the soil and territory to which it is entitled on this earth. And this is the only action before God and our posterity that would seem to justify an investment in blood. We have been chosen.''

I abhor the killing of any human being, whether Jewish, Arab or anyone else, and I don't condone attacks by Palestinians on Israeli Jews. However, these attacks must be considered within the environment of oppression that exists. The Palestinians have been demonized and dehumanized by the Israelis; forcibly dispossessed of their lands; homes demolished; their social, cultural and economic institutions have been purposefully destroyed. Three generations of Palestinians now live in refugee camps in the midst of unbelievable and intolerable squalor, while many others are now scattered in the four corners of the Earth. Palestinians today are fighting for their very survival as human beings.

It's commendable for Israel's president to go to Hebron to extend his condolences, and for Rabin to denounce Jewish fanatics. But what the Palestinians yearn for is not sweet nothings but to get the Israeli army and gun-toting settlers off their backs so they can lead normal lives as human beings free of the oppression of Jews who hate them. So far, Rabin's concept of a peace settlement in Gaza and Jericho consists essentially of giving Palestinians the privilege of cleaning their own garbage and assigning the PLO the onerous role of an enforcer killing its own people on behalf of the Israeli army. The settlers and the Israeli army - the two banes of the Palestinians, and the very essence of the problem - remain.

Palestinians and Israelis are at historic crossroads. Either Israel genuinely gives Palestinians the right to control their own destiny and allows them to live in dignity and peace, or Israel will continue to exist as an outpost of Western imperialism, a militarized ghetto, a garrison state at war with all its neighbors and at war within itself.

Fahim I. Qubain of Buena Vista is a retired political scientist.

by CNB