Post columnist: 'Hope' for Israel

Political commentator and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer addressed an audience of Hopkins students and local residents Tuesday night to discuss what he described as a "Ray of Hope" for the Israeli community in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

During his hour-long lecture at Shriver Hall, the Harvard and Oxford-educated former psychiatrist presented a historical overview supporting Israel's claim to land and also discussed his belief that the current Palestinian leadership was avoiding any possible peace.

He also expressed his outrage at the Hague hearings taking place against Israel's construction of a separation barrier that divides Israel from the West Bank.

The event was a collaborative effort of several groups including the Coalition of Hopkins Activists for Israel (CHAI) and Hopkins Hillel. The event was also co-sponsored by the Foreign Affairs Symposium, the JHU Political Science Department and made possible by a grant from Dean of Student Life Susan Boswell and a large contribution from alumnus Scott Black.

Krauthammer began his speech on a light note by equating his previous job as a doctor to his current role as a political commentator, claiming, "I would say I am a psychiatrist in remission." He told the audience, "It's not that different actually. Both fields involve dealing with people suffering from paranoia and illusions of grandeur, except the fact that in Washington these people have access to nuclear weapons makes it more interesting," he laughed.

Krauthammer eased the audience into the recent developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with an overview of what he called the "Israeli birthright."

"The land of Israel has always been the Jewish homeland," he said, taking the historical claim back thousands of years ago to when the Jews were defeated and exiled by the Romans. With the return of the Jews to Israel, he proudly stated that, "[The Jews] are the only people on the planet who live the same way as they did 3,000 years ago."

Krauthammer summed up the current situation as a debate between new and old rights.

"When the Jews returned, they found a new people living in their house. And despite constant peace efforts on the side of the Israelis, partition and compensation methods, the [Israeli] Arabs continued to fight them and to lose," he said.

"It is a continuous story of offering and rejecting compromise" he said, citing attempted peace offerings in 1947, 1979 and July 2000. Making special reference to the land acquired through the Six Day War in 1967, he defended the Israeli government's actions stating, "Israel ended up with territory it never meant to claim or attempted to seize. But given the circumstances of its being attacked, there was no choice." Krauthammer affirmed that he himself did not believe in a greater Israel and that the evacuation of Gaza and other settlements would have to occur when a Palestinian state would finally be formed.

Addressing his topic, "Finally a Ray of Hope," Krauthammer claimed, "I am more optimistic about the Israeli-Palestinian issue than I have been in the past 10 years." Delving into a bit more recent history, he described his past experiences.

While he was present himself on the White House lawn the day the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Krauthammer admitted, "I was deeply troubled and did not think it would happen, but then I hoped that I would be proven wrong."

He related how his suspicions were confirmed, that shortly after signing the Accords, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat explained in Arabic on Jordanian television that it was simply "Phase 1" in a two-part plan that involved first accepting any piece of territory offered, and secondly, fighting a final war against Israel.

He assessed the Oslo Accords as "a great diplomatic miscalculation," in that the Israeli leadership had assumed the Palestinian Authority was in its last leg. "It turned out to be the greatest disaster in Jewish history, unleashing the rise of a terrorist organization that received 50,000 rifles from Israel alone. It was unlike anything since the Third Reich," the Washington Post columnist said.

According to Krauthammer, the "Oslo illusion" ended when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, whom he described as "the most dovish of Israeli leaders," proposed a plan that would give Palestinians 95 percent of the territories and five percent of Israel itself to compensate. "And not only did Arafat decline, but no counter offer was made. This just goes to prove once again that Arafat will never sign a treaty that allows peace," he said, reiterating his belief that no peace could be achieved under the current Palestinian leadership.

"The issue is that they want to eradicate the Jewish state, and a peace can never be reached if one side is not accepting of the other's claim to exist," he said. He judged that if that had not been a central issue, the crisis would have ended in November 1947 itself when the borders were first being drawn up claiming that the 1947 UN boundary lines actually had called for a Palestinian state that was larger than the Israeli state.

Another topic Krauthammer discussed was the ongoing construction of an Israeli security barrier that has been causing controversy in the international community.

"They are doing what anyone would do, putting up a fence as a barrier to terrorism," Krauthammer said in support of the action, claiming that the reign of terror had gone down 50 percent within the last year. "It is a fact that it is protecting lives, and I feel it is a scandal and disgrace that that action, a response to terrorism that has killed more than 900 Jews in the past three and a half years, and not the terrorism itself is being tried at the Hague. And the fact that it is happening in Europe is twice the disgrace" he said, alluding to the plight the Jews faced during the Holocaust.

In response to protests on behalf of the Palestinians, Krauthammer said, "It is true that the fence disrupts Palestinian lives, but the convenience of the Palestinians simply cannot be equated to saving Jewish lives." He clarified however, that Israelis have always been hesitant to the idea, but that under the circumstances, "As a line of defense, there is no question it is the moral thing to do."

Responding to the hotly debated issue of the barrier's demarcation, Krauthammer gave two reasons why he thought the barrier's deviation from the "Green Line," the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank, which was part of Jordan, was justified. "Having it on the "Green Line' would only encourage the Hamas and distort the strategic situation," he said. "There has to be a price for rejection of peace and for terror."

According to CHAI President Yonina Alexander, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist was a top choice for their new speaker series, which aims at educating the campus on Israeli issues. "Our hope is that he will spark a fire that will fuel debate," Alexander said. "His picture is eloquent and accurate in the way that he describes the unwillingness of the U.S. media and some Israeli media to be accurate. I felt he was very understanding of the issues," said Sol Gerstman, a resident of the community who learned about the speech from the local Jewish Times newspaper.

Others were more critical.

Freshman Stephen Sandford, an active member of the Students for a Free Palestine organization, said, "I think his argument about a historical right justifying current Israeli policies is absurd. It all depends where you decide to start history." While he admitted that Krauthammer's description of the separation barrier sounded like the best strategic way, Sandford contended that Palestinians should also have a right to contest its legitimacy. "I think that this will be a good test case of the where the bounds of national sovereignty and security end," he said, "and international law and human rights begin."