4 - The Michigan Daily - Monday, September 27, 1993 c Je £riiuu n 3OaiI 420 Maynard Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan JOSH DUBOW Editor in Chief ANDREW LEVY Editorial Page Editor 1r'J C IS 1;$NJews ~ ERAM T/ANO t- A 74-S T hoF rA?0 4fV t1' ;c 4~ -I ~ieouli. bJimLse it~~t. Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the majority opinion of the Daily editorial board. All other cartoons, articles and letters do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Daily. ~1 NATIONAL. ( f SERVJ CE FL AN~ 7vD0- x.3 'F ESqDEN T. iu-y MR.'P'Re'o ... °k "U. K V1 0 Insight By KATHERINE METRES "They have healed... my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace." - Jeremiah 6:14 Now that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chair Yasser Arafat have come to terms, a lot of Americans feel relieved that the conflict in the Middle East seems to be drawing to a close. Hopefully, Palestinians will use this tiny opening to organize for their freedom and for a better life. Still, it helps no one to deceive ourselves about the nature of the Rabin-Arafat agreement. Because international law has been shelved in favor of realpolitik, Americans still need to call upon their leaders to work for peace with justice - now, and in the final status negotiations three to five years hence. The principles Arafat accepted surrender the Palestinian position that "autonomy" is only a liberalized form of occupation. Lest anyone forget, U.N. Resolution 242 demands an end to the occupation of not only the Gaza Strip, but also the entire West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Instead of evacuating the Israeli military from the Palestinian territories, the agreement will only pull the troops back from major population centers. The army will wait on the outskirts, ready to rush in again to enforce "order" any time the Israeli government says so. What is the Israeli brand of order in the territories? It consists of extrajudicial executions, massive arrests of political prisoners, administrative detention without trial, expulsions, and torture in custody. Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem have determined that the situation has gotten worse rather than Metres is an LSA senior and a member of the Palestine Solidarity Committee. Regents should have given better notice To the Daily: Once again the Regents have attempted to suppress debate on this campus in their recent attempt to amend Regents' Bylaw 14.06 to add sexual orientation to the list of characteristics against which discrimination will not be permitted. This change has been debated on campus and among the regents for the nine years that I have been on campus, and stirs strong emotions on both sides. But the regents have attempted to pass this change without the benefit of public debate. The amendment appeared on a supplemental agenda to this month's regents' meeting. The official text of the amendment was not publically available until the day of the public comments session. But in order to speak at the public comments session, one must sign ,p by 4 p.m. .z _ ,__ . r _. _. .. __ , , better since the peace process began and Rabin took office. The agreement neither addresses the fate of the 13,000 Palestinian political prisoners, nor does it grant the refugees their right of return. The vast majority of the Palestinian people were forced into exile when their villages were destroyed by Israeli forces in 194849 and 1967. For the Palestinians, there still is no Israeli democracy. The Rabin-Arafat accord allows another provocation of the indigenous people to remain. In violation of the fourth Geneva Convention's prohibition on moving part of an occupier's population into occupied areas, the Israeli government has allowed and even encouraged its citizens to move into the occupied territories. The heavily-armed settlers employ terroristic methods of punishing the nearest Palestinians when a soldier is attacked. The current agreement allows the settlers to stay and to continue receiving army protection when they provoke the Palestinians too far. Furthermore, the agreement allows the continued confiscation of scarce cultivable land and water resources. The result is that the people who were 95 percent of the Holy Land's population a century ago today control only 40 percent of the land and water in the occupied territories. The territories themselves comprise only 20 percent of the pre- 1948 Palestinian homeland. And with no let-up in the restrictions on the movement of Palestinians between the territories and Israel, the economic strangulation of workers promises to continue. All of this is supported by $11.3 billion of U.S. taxpayer money annually, when you count outright grants, loans Congress always forgives, and interest on those loans. Unless the public demands change, the aid will continue unabated. The United States will allocate little to Palestinian recovery. And no amendment by Tuesday morning: a full 48 hours before the official text was released. Had it not been for some extraordinary maneuvering and a little luck, the regents would not have heard any opposition at all. Why are the regents attempting to suppress debate on this issue? I call on the regents to explain their conduct in this matter, and for the Michigan Student Assembly and the Daily to press the regents until satisfactory answers are received. JIM HUGGINS Rackham student Athletic Dept. should open golf course To the Daily: Upon reading your recent article about the status of the golf course, it struck me that there exists at this University two classes of students: athletes and the rest. It is quite one is even talking about compensating the 300,000 people in Lebanon whose villages and refugee@ camps Rabin destroyed this summer -just over a month before his media transformation into a harbinger of peace. Apologists will say that Rabin went as far in making peace as the Israeli public would allow him to. That, unfortunately, is true. Why? Zionist ideologues have revised Palestinian demographic history to hide the truth from the Jewish people - a people who, through their own experiences of persecution, had learned to value justice and oppose racism. Zionism has always played on Jews' fears of annihilation if they remained in Europe. At the height of the Holocaust, Zionist leaders concentrated their efforts not on rescue, but on creating a "Jewish national museum" in Palestine. Since then, they have continued to subordinate human life - Jewish and Arab - to their agenda of militant nationalism. In spite of the propaganda, a rising number (40 percent) of Israeli Jews are willing to contemplate the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. This position, while more generous than either the Israeli or American governments', has always enjoyed broad support around the world. The Israeli public is tired of having its resources and moral credibility spent on patrolling a people longing for freedom. Most Americans still don't realize what's going on. For their part, the Palestinians simply want to exercise fully their right to national self-determination in all of the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem. Only when Israel is finally persuaded to accept Palestinian independence and let the refugees come home will there be real peace in the Middle East. Until that day, the Zionist dream continues to be built on a Palestinian nightmare. If Chaddock had the benevolence to open up the course for the remaining few weeks of the golf season, it might help the Athletic Department's tarnished image: one that give perks, graft, and everything to athletes while disregarding courtesy to the rest of the student body. JEREMY FOWLER LSA sophomore THE DAILY WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOUI SEND US YOUR LETTERS: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR THE MICHIGAN DAILY 420 MAYNARD ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 Carter takes on 'demagogue' Perot Ross Perot, in his inimitable way, teas dominated the airwaves in a mind- rumbing crusade against the North American Free Trade Agreement. Tune into CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC or any of the three major networks and before too long there he'll be: "You see, what you're gonna get is this giant sucking sound of American jobs going down to Mexico," says the ranting one. "They don't pay them workers anything down there, and all our jobs are just going to scoot across the border." Then Perot will take out pictures of Mexican cardboard houses hahind A marirn fwtnriP c nnth nftha Perot foolishly tried to moralize with Carter, a man who has devoted his post-presidential life to improving the lot of those around the world. unabated.It would be unwise for Presi- dent Clinton to get in a hissing match with the Texas bobcat, and Vice Presi- dent Al Gore has the charisma of That Wal Tn Tenn Meadow Tnne nf the Americanpublic," saidformer presi- dent Jimmy Carter at the White House last Tuesday. That said, Perot takes to NBC's "The Today Show," saying "Here's a guy who spends his spare time building houses forpoorpeople, and I'd like to invite him down to see the shacks these Mexican workers live in. . Perot foolishly tried to moralize with Carter, a man who has devoted his post-presidential life to improv- ing the lot of those around the world, especially those in countries in the Western Hemisnhere The notion nf