Palestine
Khaled Abu Toameh is an Arab journalist for The Jerusalem Post. When he was studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he worked for Al Fajr (The Dawn), a newspaper of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. He left the paper when he realized it would never publish anything but propaganda.
Hoping to become a real journalist able to speak out his mind, he started to report for foreign papers. He wrote for Britain's Sunday Times and other papers. For the last eight years, he is working for The Jerusalem Post as a specialist on Arab affairs.
Mr. Toameh was in Toronto last week, talking to Canadian journalists about Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He says the so-called "peace process," starting with the Oslo Accords of 1993, has been a failure. Over the last 16 years, the peace process has brought war.
The Palestinians are now divided between two camps -- Fatah, which holds fragile power in the West Bank and Hamas, which controls Gaza. In Gaza, Hamas has been slaughtering the supporters of Fatah and Fatah has been killing supporters of Hamas in the West Bank. Their conflict has cost nearly 2,000 Palestinian lives and shows no sign of abating.
Fatah, of course, is considered as the "moderate" Palestinian group, while Hamas as the extremist group. Abu Toameh thinks neither of them could be called moderate by any sensible Arabic speaker. Fatah makes moderate sounds in English but in Arabic sounds as anti-Semite and anti-American as Hamas. Both factions suppress moderate opinions whenever it raises its head.
"This is not a power struggle between good guys and bad guys," he said in a speech. "It is a struggle between bad guys and bad guys."
What is to be done? Mr. Toameh thinks the world should simply wait until the Palestinians stop killing each other and create a credible political entity that can make a deal. Peace will then become possible.
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