Just two days after Israeli forces killed 15 during an airstrike in Gaza City, columnist and editorial board member for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz Danny Rubinstein spoke out against efforts to solve the current conflict through military action.
"Both sides are moving by emotions," he said to a packed crowd yesterday afternoon for a speech entitled "Is peace still possible? A report from Israel."
Rubinstein went on to criticize attempts to undermine the "infrastructure" of terrorism through bombings of laboratories and the like.
"The infrastructure is here," he said while pointing to his head. "Retaliation doesn't reap any benefits."
Born, raised and educated in Jerusalem, Rubinstein picked up his journalistic philosophy from the advice of a high school teacher who questioned his responses to the authors of poetry and Biblical readings.
"Don't tell us what he tried to say, or what he intended to say -- tell us what he said," Rubinstein recalled.
Rubinstein then applied that idea of strictly examining one's statements and actions to Yasser Arafat's behavior over the years preceding the outbreak of the present Intifada in the fall of 2000.
Specifically, he noted that the Palestinian Authority poured $3 billion into the tourism industry and renewal projects for cities such as Bethleham and Jericho in anticipation of five million visitors in the 2000.
"Nobody puts this kind of money in if they're preparing for war."
Rubinstein stressed that not only had neither party planned the recent violence, but that no single event -- such as now Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's controversial visit to the site known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as the Temple Mount -- instigated the crisis.
He instead traced the primary source of the conflict to economic factors and an imbalance in power between Palestinians and Israelis that led to a peace process that benefited Israel and the Palestinian elite while hurting lower-class Palestinians.
"The peace process for him became a catastrophe," Rubinstein said of the Palestinian peasant or refugee living in the Gaza Strip or West Bank.
After the Israeli government opened up freedom of movement across the borders following 1967, Palestinians entered the Israeli workforce in great numbers, coming to dominate fields such as construction, agriculture, services and industry.
These jobs presented a major improvement in the economic status of many lower-class Palestinians. While the average Palestinian income in 1967 fell at 10 percent of the average Israeli's salary, 20 years later that figure had grown to between 23 and 25 percent.
That trend ended, however, with the onset of the peace process following 1993's Oslo Declaration of Principles, which included the Israeli government's "closure of the territories," thus ending the freedom of movement across borders.
Jobs formerly held by Palestinians went to immigrating Romanians, Russian Jews and persons from China and Thailand. By 1998 and 1999, the average Palestinian's income had fallen back to a mere nine percent of the average Israeli's.
Additionally, Israel made a "huge mistake" in the 1990s by investing abroad in countries such as Jordan rather than increasing Palestinian prosperity by investing in projects in the occupied territories.
Once the spike in violence began, Rubinstein noted that Arafat had little choice but to follow along because "he cannot confront his own people."
As to plausible solutions to the crisis, Rubinstein argued that the only remaining option is the creation of "two states for two people," a process that would require that the Palestinian Authority recognize a Jewish state and Israel return to its borders to those prior to 1967.
Such a partition would, however, require steep concessions for both sides. Palestinians would have to relinquish their "right of return" to properties in Israel lost during Israel's 1948 War of Independence.
For their part, Israelis would have to "dismantle most if not all settlements" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The latter suggestion drew a murmuring among a packed crowd of primarily older community members in Filene Auditorium.
Rubinstein has previously visited campus for lectures on several occasions and was a visiting professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth in 1991.
