The Politics of Peace Prize: Israel and Hannan Ashrawi [View All]

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/1797/?PHPSESSID=da9c584baf2bc30f56a25107ce5fffb4

In the Sydney Morning Herald, dated October 23, 2003, Mr. Peter Wertheim, a past president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, was quite upset about Premier Bob Carr’s decision to present this year’s ‘Sydney Peace Prize’ to the Palestinian activist and founder of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH) - Professor Hannan Ashrawi. (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/22/1066631499913.html?from=storyrhs). He applauds Sydney’s lord Mayor Lucy Turnbull’s decision to withdraw the city’s support for the prize.

Such a disgruntled voice from Mr. Wertheim was not unexpected given the fact that people like him have not been able to rise above their ‘boxes’ and see the world as it is from a neutral point. As far as the Palestinian-Israeli crisis is concerned, his views are arrogantly partisan and myopic. Under ordinary circumstances, such partisan views don’t deserve much deference and would probably have been trashed by most editors. However, since his organization is a powerful one, especially in a country that has been very supportive of Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Sharon’s government, we can guess why his views were published. (And I am sure letters like mine to the SMH editor that differ from his views will simply be discarded.) <1>

For years, the leaders and diehard supporters of the rogue state of Israel have tried everything – from planting the myth - ‘land without a people to a people without a land’ to mass murder - to obliterate the Palestinian identity. To their dismay, however, nothing seemed to have worked. The Palestinians are a bunch of ‘difficult’ and ‘uncompromising’ people: neither would they go away nor would they give up on their rights to statehood on the 20% of historical Palestine! Nearly 80% of their territory was snatched away from them, hundreds of thousands uprooted from their ancestral homes, basic human rights denied, schools, colleges, commercial centers, homes and hospitals demolished, Palestinians killed like ‘vermin’ and ‘cockroaches;’ still they like to hang on to that tiny piece of land – the pre-’67 West Bank and Gaza - truncated by settlements and settler-roads, road-blocks and Apartheid walls that have reduced the territory to ‘Bantustans.’

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