June 1997: Volume 19, Number 6

Contents Arafat's Awful Reign Israel, the U.N. and "Torture" A Note from Zola A Modern Christian Love Story An Ugly One-Two Punch Rights Monitor Accuses Palestinian Authority of Torture I was amazed by the following article which, in a way, I have waited for almost all of my life. Here is a totally honest and forthright assessment of Arafat and the PLO by an American Palestinian reporter. I believe his thoughts speak for themselves. — Zola Arafat's Awful Reign by Fawaz Turk           We were wrong. All of us Palestinians were wrong about Yasser Arafat and the "national authority" that he has foisted on the autonomous zones he now controls in the West Bank and Gaza.           Not quite four years ago we watched this man on the White House lawn as he signed the Oslo Agreement and effusively shook hands all around. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians rejoiced at the spectacle. This was to be our first step toward statehood, our chance, at last, to be the determining force in our destiny.           Those activists among us, democrats and patriots all, looked forward to building a community of laws and institutions, governed by a social contract between ruler and ruled, checks and balances, accountability.           We had fought for independence, and lived through unspeakable suffering too long to settle for anything less. To end up creating yet another dreary dawla, or Arab state, known dismissively in Palestinian idiom as istiqlal (a term connoting frivolity, nepotism, coercion and violence) would have been a cruel terminus to our struggle, a fate worse than death.           To be sure, we had no illusions about Yasser Arafat himself, this man of dubious background who had not read a half-dozen decent books in his life, nor grown with his job. We often cringed at his lack of elan, his vaudevillian ways and his penchant for one-man rule, just as we were scandalized by the excesses of his officials in the old glory days of the PLO, who had made a fetish of traveling on the Concorde with Samsonites full of cash.           But we believed that once the institutional machinery for statehood was put in gear, it would be reasonable to suppose that the aggregate complex of popular culture would lead to stability and, finally, meaningful independence.           We were dead wrong. No one could prophesy the true measure of the dissolution of civil society, of civilized norms, of human hope, that was to come.           Yasser Arafat arrived in Gaza in 1994 with a group of men carrying not shovels but guns. He created nine intelligence services and a police force of well over 30,000 men, presumably more policemen per capita than any country in the world.           The Palestinian Authority's first order of business was to pursue those figures regarded by any civilized society as central to the health of the body politic. The heretical editor was silenced, the human rights activist was hounded, the recalcitrant labor unionist was jailed, and the innovative intellectual was harassed and beaten.           Those others, who represented through their literary effusions the adversarial current in the community, individuals whose necessary role in social life is to seek an articulation for the fragile plurality of human nature and conduct, have had their heads hit when they were lifted and their voices silenced when they were raised.           To date, 14 Palestinians have died under torture at the hands of thugs (no other word will do here) from the dreaded intelligence services.           Though the PA has scant respect for the life of the mind or for the value of dissent, its fear of them knows no bounds. There is a perversity in all of this that goes beyond one's repugnance at the use of repression to stifle the public debate. It tells us something about the semiliterate oafs who make up Yasser Arafat's ruling elite. For to silence, incarcerate, or torture to death a man because you disagree with his views is to pay tribute — a sinister tribute, to be exact, but tribute nevertheless — to the value of ideas in human affairs.           With the Oslo Agreement, we were at last to free ourselves, if progressively, from foreign occupation, not because we had represented a military threat to Israel — truth be told, the PLO was as dangerous to Israel's existence as secondary smoke — but because the international community, including the United States, had to come round to that recognition. For Palestinians, expectations of progress, of personal and social enfranchisement, moved closer. Independence took on the urgent drama of concreteness, of a dizzying sense of total possibility. That was four years ago.           The United States, notorious over the years for underwriting the survival of two-bit dictators around the world, has latched on to yet another one of these in the person of Yasser Arafat, whose woeful disregard for the human rights of his own people Washington continues not only to wink at but to urge on him, presumably in the name of stability in the territories.           One thing is plain: Yasser Arafat has unleashed destructive forces, dug up from the depths of the coercive tradition, that are destined to stifle our dream for living as free men and women.           After our costly intifada against those who had occupied our homeland, it now appears that we have to wage another intifada against those who occupy our home. Damn the man. Fawaz Turki is a Palestinian writer living in the United States. © 1997 Washington Post Writers Group Reprinted with permission Originally published May 21, 1997 Return to Index Israel, the U.N. and "Torture"           Last Friday, the United Nations Committee Against Torture, meeting in Geneva, condemned Israel, charging that its treatment of suspected terrorists violates international conventions and demanding that such behavior "cease immediately." The essence of the accusation is that the Shin Bet, Israel's FBI, conducts its interrogations too enthusiastically. Suspects, in other words, are made uncomfortable.           Former detainees claim that Israeli policemen have shaken them vigorously, shackled them for hours at a time or deprived them of sleep and toilet privileges. On the latter point, an Israeli diplomat asserted in Geneva that it was against regulations and promised a probe.           He said this, according to news reports, with a straight face. But let us talk plainly: None of these measures constitute torture. Torture is the beating of a man to a bloody pulp, electric shocks, forcing someone's head underwater, the burning of faces, the crushing of testicles. Such acts are committed routinely in the holding cells of the gangster regimes ruling the countries that Israel counts as neighbors — including, pertinently, the Palestinian Authority.           Those subjected to the kinds of treatments favored by the security services of despotic regimes usually die. If the victims do not perish on their own, they might receive a bullet in the neck "trying to escape." Or else they are left deranged by their ordeal.           Torture is never acceptable. No state deserves any indulgence on this matter. And Israel is doing what any self-respecting democracy should: Encouraging human-rights groups to watch for any official action that crosses the line separating interrogation from torture.           Israeli security services say they have foiled 90 bombings over the past two years as a result of their methods. Unfortunately, they were unable to foil several others, and people were blown away in a Tel Aviv cafe, on buses, at busy intersections.           If policemen hold an individual who they believe knows where a live bomb is placed, should they read him his Miranda rights? Or should they apply "moderate physical pressure" to find out where the bomb is? What is the real ethical, or life-affirming, choice?           Israel submits its police procedures to judicial and parliamentary scrutiny. Ultimately, as the hearings in Geneva show, it submits them to the opinion of mankind. You would think that, for once, it might get in return some consideration for the human rights — including the right to life — of the people of Israel. © 1997 New York Post Holdings Inc. Originally published May 12, 1997 Return to Index A Note From Zola Dear Friends,           Yasser Arafat's mask has slipped a bit, and a few media commentators have taken note. His "Justice" Minister, Abu Medein, has imposed the death penalty for any Arab who sells land to Israel. This makes the Palestinian territories the only place in the world where one can be legally executed for selling his property to the wrong party. This sentence was first carried out on an elderly Arab land dealer, who was found beaten to death in Ramallah, north of Jerusalem. Although there were isolated condemnations of the incident, the primary media reaction was one of deafening silence. Two more such deaths have been reported, but the clueless Arafat still defends this policy.           An editorial from the May 14 Wall Street Journal highlighted this skewed world response by pondering a reversed situation. "Consider for one spellbinding second the following scenario: With mikes turned on to the world, the Israeli Justice Minister announces that `the death penalty will be imposed on any Jew selling a kernel of sand to an Arab.' And quicker than anyone can stuff a knish, a Jewish realtor gets his head caved in. His neighbors are thrilled and the local rabbi refuses the family a proper funeral. Imagine the outcry and front-page headlines across the U.S. and Europe."           So how is it that the Palestinian Authority escapes such scrutiny? The PA agenda has never been hidden: the annihilation of the Jewish state by any means. Jerusalem is the current focus of their efforts to pull the wool over the world's eyes. It never ceases to amaze me the absurdities that the media is willing to swallow. For instance, Arafat's expression "We must prevent the Judaization of Jerusalem " is like saying "We must prevent the Americanization of New York," or "the Hellenization of Athens."           Part of the skewed press coverage of Israel lies in the media's exaggeration of the normal problems of any democracy. Israel has the same ghetto problems that most large American cities do. Unfortunately, the Palestinians are the ghetto dwellers — poor people with little to do and not much internal motivation to change. This is a downside to democracy in general. Under socialism, everyone is more or less on the same level (unless you are among the leaders). A problem with that situation is the total lack of freedom. This is also the problem with a dictatorship, as the Palestinians are discovering under Arafat's crushing rule.           On our Spring Tour, David Bar-Illan, media advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Executive Editor of the Jerusalem Post, gave our pilgrims his typically incisive report on the state of the Middle East. He remarked that Israel was "the most news-generating area in the world." He also said, " The war with the Arabs is not new; it is a 100-year war." "It is impossible to have peace with a dictatorship," he said. He pointed out that 30 of the 33 articles in the Palestinian Covenant denigrate Israel. (What a strange government document.)           Bar-Illan pointed out that all Arab schools omit the term "Israel" from their teaching; in showing a map of the area, they designate Tel Aviv — a city of nearly a million people — as a settlement. He noted that in the phone instructions provided by Egyptian hotels, all countries of the world are listed with their area codes except for Israel, which to the Egyptians does not deserve to exist. Or, as Bar-Illan himself put it, "They did not want to dirty the paper."           Our speaker's on-the-ground descriptions of the area where he lives were so different from what we hear in the American media that we can pardonably wonder whether he was even talking about the same situations. He described Syria as dangerous but " backward and starving." He informed us that Yasser Arafat has twenty separate militia groups. He discussed the new Palestinian law that Arabs selling land to Jews would be executed. It was refreshing to hear the unvarnished truth for a change. (For more of David Bar-Illan's keen insight, see the ad on page three for his book, Jerusalem: the Truth.)           Bar-Illan was not trying to sound inflammatory, but the truth about Israel is so dramatic after all of the distortions that we typically hear. When a Palestinian lawyer wrote an article in April praising the Israeli system of justice for investigating its own Prime Minister, Arafat jailed the lawyer for a week. A Palestinian journalist was also jailed. Are these the standard actions of the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize?           When the Pope recently blessed Israel, a Palestinian clergyman stated that the Pontiff evidently did not understand Jesus' message. The Arab omissions of Israel on their maps and in their teaching is reminiscent of the majority of American churches, which also omit references to Israel as if it is not mentioned in Scripture or has no relevance to Jesus.           The Media Prize for Blindly Supporting a Dictatorship must go to the American media for its success in removing the term " PLO" from the American language. This police state is now referred to as the Palestinian Authority (PA). Those who, like me, remember the PLO proudly taking credit for the murders of the Israeli Munich athletes, the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland, and the Achille Lauro hijacking, will have trouble forgetting the letters "PLO."           Instead of dealing with the despotic actions of the " Palestinian Authority," the U.S. media focuses on such Israeli "crimes" as building homes in its own capital city. Regarding the Har Homa situation in Jerusalem, who are we to give advice on integrated housing? We're certainly no good at it. In general, people don't really want integrated neighborhoods; they are more comfortable living in their own ethnic groups. Integration problems are another difficulty in a democracy. You don't hear about them in relation to dictatorships, because dictators aren't worried about fairness and equal representation.           The Palestinians are similar in a lot of ways to American tobacco companies. They know what is really going on, but they are not going to tell the truth about it. Their partners get a good pay-off for taking their side. Just as politicians get the favor of important tobacco interests, news media and advertisers seek the favor of Arab graft. It's no wonder the Palestinians are in tight with the media. And the cancer is advancing: the Palestinians have a foothold in Israel, and soon they will try to claim the entire country.           But for now, Israel is free and open to the world. Our recent Spring Tour had the pleasure of observing Israel's Independence Day. Our pilgrims watched the joyous celebrations of a people to whom freedom is even more precious because the surrounding countries are dictatorships. Concerning touring Israel, Please join us for our next Grand Tour of the Holy Land. For a free tour folder, call 1-800-WONDERS (1-800-966-3377) or drop us a note [by clicking here].           Work continues on our newest series, Champions of Faith. These programs explore the lives of biblical and modern-day examples of faith, using Hebrews 11 — the faith "Hall of Fame." The world tells us to have faith in ourselves and our own abilities, but the Bible points to the only sure answer: faith in God and His redeeming life through Christ. Our walk with God will be strengthened as we study the lives of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and others who lived by faith. It is by faith that we please God (Hebrews 11:6), so it is essential for every follower of God to have an understanding of what faith is. I invite you to join with me in the work of this important project. Your financial support will be greatly appreciated at this time. Thanks. Your messenger, Return to Index A Modern Christian Love Story The letter below was received at this ministry late last year. I wanted to share this special story with you. — Zola Dear Zola,           First I would like to express my appreciation to you for how God has used you and your materials. I was raised in Dallas and can remember as a child that you came to our church and demonstrated the celebration of the Passover feast. Maybe it was around this time that my parents got a copy of A Christian Love Story. I read the booklet as a child and didn't pick it up again until the beginning of 1996. I am now 30 years old and remembered your booklet as I began to see someone seriously and we began to discuss marriage.           In reading the booklet as an adult, I was struck with the beautiful symbolism and depth of the love of the Father for the Bride. I shared the message with my soon-to-be fiance. John was so struck with the booklet that he began lending the booklet to others and bought more. We then decided to model this beautiful love relationship in a practical way.           We were engaged in April 1996 in Florida. The night after he proposed, we shared a glass of wine and entered into a covenant relationship, agreeing to love one another. It was a somber and sincere discussion as we dedicated ourselves to God's plan and to one another.           John went to Zola Levitt Ministries and purchased 250 booklets to give out as gifts at our wedding, which was set to take place on July 13, 1996. The theme of the booklet would be the theme of our wedding ceremony. We wanted to share this picture of us as the bride and groom, being a symbol of the spiritual Bride and Groom.           In keeping with Jewish tradition, we decided to take this demonstration one step further, to our delight. Three weeks before the wedding, John notified me that he was coming for me one night that week and that I should make myself ready and be prepared. My best friend Cathi spent the night, my bags packed and my electric candle burning symbolically in the front window. Then on June 28, at approximately one o'clock in the morning, Cathi and I heard a ram's horn blowing, signifying that the bridegroom had come for me! I was thrilled in the excitement of this wonderful moment! John and his best friend were there in suits riding in a limousine with a wedding bouquet in hand. I quickly got dressed and we were off.           John took me to a small Episcopal Church by my parents' house that is open all night. It is a quaint, lovely place that has been very special to me since high school. There we met a good friend who is an ordained minister, who was thrilled to marry us when he heard of John's plan. So it was that we were married in the presence of God, our two best friends, and the minister at two-thirty in the morning, with a limousine waiting to take us away to our bridal chamber (the Anatole Hotel). That was the most intimate, special night of my life.           On July 13, 1996 we were publicly married as a witness of the Lord's goodness in our lives. We have family members and friends who are not Christians and the ceremony touched many. They each received a copy of your book.           We wanted to share our special secret wedding with you, Zola. Thank you for your availability to the Lord. We are now preparing to move to the Czech Republic to serve as missionaries in a local English-speaking church in Prague. Very Sincerely in Christ, John & Kelsie M. Return to Index An Ugly One-Two Punch by Richard Cohen           The Israeli statesman Abba Eban once said of the Palestinians that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Now, with much of the world in a snit over Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's hard-line policies, the Palestinian leadership has done it again — a one-two punch of thuggish policies and ugly rhetoric.           First the policy — death to any Palestinian who sells land to Israel. The promulgator of that policy is Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, and its first alleged victim was Farid Bashiti, a 70-year-old real estate dealer. He was found May 9 with his hands tied and his skull crushed.           At the moment, no one knows with absolute certainty who killed Bashiti. But he was denied a Muslim burial by the mufti of Jerusalem on the grounds that he sold land "to the enemy. " This seems like a hit.           For the PLO, the killing of collaborators was once routine — and hundreds of people, some of them no doubt guilty of little more than having a beautiful wife, were dispatched in this fashion. Such murders are not to be condoned, but they are understandable. The PLO was fighting a guerrilla war against Israel, and war, as Gen. Sherman once remarked, is hell.           But that particular chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict is over. And the PLO is a guerrilla organization no more. It has been transmuted into the Palestinian Authority, complete with a parliament and pretensions to nationhood. Nations ought not act like the Gambino Mafia family. Even if the sale of land to Jews is made a capital crime, a trial would have been nice. Instead, Bashiti was beaten to death — maybe by his own police.           Interestingly enough, one of those who promulgated the new policy was Freih Abu Medein, a loudmouth with the ironic title of justice minister. "Nobody from this moment will accept any traitor who sells his land to the Israelis," he said. "Everybody now realizes the danger of selling land to a Jew."           Lest you think that Medein has inadvertently conflated nationality with religious identity, let me assure you that this is apparently not the case. To him, Dennis Ross, the U.S. special envoy, is something other than a diplomat and Bill Clinton's man in the Middle East. He is also — if not foremost — a Jew.           In fact, Medein has referred to "five Zionist Jews" whom he said are running the Clinton administration's Middle East policy. They are Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, Ross's deputy Aaron Miller, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Ross. Cohen, though, does not identify himself as a Jew (his father was Jewish, his mother not) and Albright, as all the world must know by now, did not know until just recently that she is of Jewish ancestry and thus, as it is now clear, biased in favor of Israel.           The charge is worse than preposterous. It is ugly and dumb, and if it is not retracted — or, worse, if it is repeated — it is likely to do great damage to the Palestinian cause. The fact of the matter is that American Jews, while nearly unanimous in their support of Israel, have been far less unanimous in their antipathy to the Palestinian cause. On the contrary, some American Jews have been in the forefront on insisting that any Middle East settlement recognize Palestinian aspirations.           But if Palestinian rhetoric is going to be polluted with what, to my ears, sounds like anti-Semitism, then a good number of PLO sympathizers will simply retreat to a neutral corner — and relax the considerable pressure on the U.S. government to come up with a fair peace plan. Who cares about fair when one side talks like skinheads?           I, for one, have never had any illusions about either the old PLO, the Palestinian Authority or the envisioned — and all but inevitable — Palestinian state. It will not be a Western-style democracy, as is Israel, but more like the other Islamic countries in the Middle East — a creature of the region. . . .           But summary executions — either by the police or by vigilantes — and ugly rhetoric are bound to deprive the nascent Palestinian entity of the goodwill it has enjoyed here. Given the clumsiness of the Netanyahu government, Arafat and his colleagues had an opportunity to score some PR points and, possibly, increase the pressure on Israel. As it is, they pulled an Eban: They took the opportunity to miss the opportunity. © 1997 Washington Post Writers Group Reprinted with permission Originally published May 20, 1997 Return to Index Rights Monitor Accuses Palestinian Authority of Torture           A Palestinian human rights monitor charged Monday that Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority routinely engages in " illegal behavior and torture on a large scale" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.           The self-rule government makes arbitrary arrests of its political opposition and silences press criticism through intimidation and direct intervention, the independent Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group said.           The Palestinian government has denied the allegations.           The charges, laid out in a 27-page report called "The State of Human Rights in Palestine," come on the heels of allegations of widespread corruption in Palestinian ministries and government institutions.           A report by Mr. Arafat's auditor general released over the weekend found that serious financial and administrative violations were committed by most of the authority's ministries and other institutions, Al-Hayat newspaper reported. It said that $326 million of public funds had been wasted or misused in the last year.           The reports, coupled with the arrest of a Palestinian-American journalist, paint an alarming picture of Mr. Arafat's fledgling government and feed the Palestinian public's concerns about the democratic future of their emerging state.           The human rights report was compiled by Bassam Eid, an activist who made his reputation monitoring Israeli abuses of Palestinians during the military occupation.           Mr. Eid was detained by Mr. Arafat's presidential guard for 25 hours in January 1996, after accusing the leader of using official television to campaign in Palestinian national elections.           The report, released Monday, focused on torture, illegal arrests, poor prison conditions and restrictions on freedom of the press. A Los Angles Times report published May 27, 1997 in The Dallas Morning News Return to Index Return to Levitt Letter Archive Index Return to Home Page