New York Times’ Friedman gloats as Arafat lies near death
By Bill Van Auken
9 November 2004
The phony premise underlying all of Friedman’s attempts to vilify Arafat is the myth that the PLO leader has systematically sabotaged efforts by the United States and Israel to advance a “peace process” that would secure the interests of the Palestinians while ending the Middle East conflict.
In particular, Friedman charges Arafat with having “walked away” from the 1993 PLO-Israeli agreement brokered in Oslo. The deal represented a renunciation of the Palestinian people’s claim to all but 22 percent of the land of Palestine. It envisioned a PLO-led interim authority taking charge of security in the occupied territories, freeing Israel from the burden of military occupation, while it left the Zionist regime in control of borders, foreign policy and the protection of existing illegal settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.
The reality is that Israel reneged on its one significant pledge under the Oslo accords—the halting of its illegal settlement activity. Instead, settlements doubled in size over the next decade. The Zionist regime likewise refused to negotiate on the key issues left unresolved by the deal—the status of East Jerusalem and the right of Palestinians driven from their homeland in 1948 to return.
It was under these conditions, in which the so-called “peace process” had proven itself to be a noose around the neck of the Palestinian people, that the second Intifada erupted in the fall of 2000, quite independently of Arafat. It was Ariel Sharon and the Zionist regime that deliberately provoked the uprising as a means of scuttling any further negotiations and ending international pressure for Israeli concessions.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/araf-n09.shtml
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